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Chapter 1: Craving
You know hunger; you'd been forced to dig through trash for scraps plenty of times before that fateful night in the pharmacy, where you somehow managed to con Sylus Qin, assassin extraordinaire and pretentious bastard, into becoming your adoptive father. This hunger, however, you never accounted for, nor the guilt which consumes you in turn. Still, you do your best to satisfy your cravings, desperately aware that true satiation lies in the hands of another. Or: You try to relieve your teenage crush on Sylus to middling success. Years and a bitter-sweet reunion later, he recalls that he has a score to settle.
Word Count: 2.8k
Relationships: Sylus x You
Tags: AFAB reader, Masturbation, Tartarus | Praedator Qin Che | Sylus, Savage Overture | Tomorrow's Catch 22, Yearning, Teen Crush, Daddy Kink (if you squint), Pseudo-Incest (kinda), Adoptive Parent Sylus, Pining, Self-Worth Issues, Implied/Referenced Child Sexual Abuse (before Reader meets Sylus), Underage Masturbation (nothing is described explicitly until reader turns 18), Time Skips, Separations, Reunions, Wish Fulfilment, Reunion Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Payback, Guided Masturbation, Dom/sub Undertones, Sylus is not actively involved while Reader is underage
Series: None
A/N: This is a fic of a fic. It started as an original idea that refused to take shape. I was going to abandon it after reading @littlebommetje's father figure series (read it, I demand you!!!), but they encouraged me to write it anyway. I ended up turning it into a sort of character study of how I would expect their MC/Reader to have dealt with realising they are in love with Sylus (who is their adoptive father in that series). Expect my usual brand of horny angst, an exploration into the crippling but addictive nature of first crushes, and a little treat in ch 3, which comes post-reunion and involves Sylus' reaction to what happens in ch 2.
Audio: Acid Rain, by Lorn
Do not repost, translate, or feed to AI any of my works. Likes, reblogs, and comments appreciated 🖤
If anybody had tried to tell you a few years ago that you’d find yourself wishing for space from Sylus Qin, you’d have used one of the uppercuts he taught you to chip a few teeth. Would have picked the jagged pieces off the ground to store in a secret, velvet little pouch you’d tuck into the furthest corners of your bedside drawer.
Yet, here you are: staring at the ceiling, stained piss-yellow by the ancient lightbulbs, stewing in that exact impossibility.
Outside, the endless rain patter-patter-patters in stygian blue, loud enough to drown out any gurgling cries that might arise from anybody unlucky enough to be targeted by the Praedators roaming these streets, anybody unseasoned enough not to know that, in these parts, you strike first, ask later.
The window is still open from earlier in the day, cool moisture clinging to your sensitive skin – he’d scold you for it usually, for leaving a potential point of entry exposed, but you were feeling claustrophobic in this yet-unfamiliar place, with its lack of proper ventilation. Restless. Antsy.
He understands that, though you’ve neglected to tell him why. How his decision to lay low for a while has allowed you to glut yourself on his proximity until you’re almost sick with it. Until you’re almost feverish from it, mind ricocheting between your oil-slick past and soap-soft present like a bullet before shattering into the shards of a hundred fantasy futures, each one sharp enough to cut, each one daring you to wrap your fist around it anyway.
It’s not his fault, of course.
It’s yours.
It’s you.
You and your selfish greed that won’t stay dead and buried, no matter how many times you’ve killed it.
Maybe they broke something in me, when I was little, you think miserably, not for the first time. Back when you were forced to learn exactly how dark desire could be, then forced to learn how to leverage that for food, for shelter, for cheap imitations of care. You knew it wasn’t genuine. You were just a little street rat, knobbly knees and sharp elbows, digging through trash cans for fast food wrappers that still held a trace of nourishment, licking at the residue until the waxy paper was clean.
You let so many disgusting things into your body, anything to try and stifle the awful, gnawing emptiness. And even now, years into your adoption by Sylus Qin, safe and satisfied in almost every way that your younger self could have dreamed of, you can’t help wanting more, more, more.
But such is the way of life: once you know true hunger, your body carries the knowledge of it to its grave.
So, no, it’s not his fault – though he certainly makes things worse. His graceful, clever fingers. His eyes, red as the blood your twisted heart feeds on, glowing with quiet pride and less-quiet amusement. The hard-earned musculature of him that he has no issue with flaunting, and his scent – god, his scent. How his sweat clings to the inside of his leather jackets when the oncoming storm turns the air to soup; sometimes, you’re lucky enough to peel them from his broad shoulders while they’re still wet, wet enough that you can run lines up the fabric and collect the precious, salty droplets on your tongue. When you finally have to actually fulfil your promise of cleaning them, you do so somberly, chest aching with nearly as much mourning as you do when it's his blood pinkening the water that beats against the sink porcelain. You just… You just…
It wasn’t always like this, you know that.
For the first few years, you loved him and were all the purer for it. You were a kid – “a little squirt”, he’d say – curling up in a safe place for sleep and he was your walls, your roof, your floor, and you were ever so grateful.
So, so grateful, until you realised with burgeoning horror that you were in love with him, in love with Sylus Qin, your raison d'être, the man you’d fucking called Daddy when he wasn’t able to hear.
Just fourteen, then. So young and so broken, but time and space had given you room to breathe, to heal a little.
Sylus had begun your homeschooling in earnest and yet, despite the extra investment of time in you, you felt utterly starved of him.
Suddenly, you were newly aware of his position in any given room. You kept track of the little things, obsessing over whatever might draw his attention away from you. Rather than thoughtlessly climb over him, the breadth of him your cherished playground, you started looking for excuses to touch him.
Innocent things, things that could be easily explained away. Reusing his cups to ‘save you from washing dishes’. Picking imaginary lint off his immaculate coats in order to feel the strength of his wide, hard chest beneath your fingers. Leaning around him to reach for a mug so your budding breasts just happened to brush against his arm.
After years of satiation from the mere twitch of his plush mouth, the bump of his regal nose, you were starting to feel hungry again. That ravenous monster inside you, once lazy with digestion, was stirring and now looking at him made you feel empty in all the cavernous spaces in your body.
You’d tried putting things inside you again, an echo of the days that still haunted your nights, desperate in denial.
You ate until you could match him in portion sizes, drank juice and water and the delicious rooibos tea he made until you were constantly running for the bathroom, bought every scented candle that even slightly caught your interest, but to no avail.
And it made sense.
You’d read about them, see, in one of his books that you’d greedily devoured. Read about the hungry ghosts. Èguǐ – or preta – were creatures of folklore, humans who died unhappily, reborn with long thin necks, round bellies, and slavering tongues that couldn’t be satisfied by anything.
Oh, you’d thought at the time, fingers curling around the page’s sharp edges, seeking its bite. Maybe that’s what happened.
Maybe, during one of all the many horrible things you survived, you had actually died.
Died, and came back wrong, and that was why you were so fucked up.
Why your breasts ached – between your thighs, too – sending you to bed early, keeping you up through restless nights until you remembered the manga you’d stuffed beneath your bed out of shame. With shaking hands, you’d opened its pages, glossier than the mythology text, tracing the shapes in your mind, but even that hadn’t helped – you already knew all about the things they were doing to each other in the comic. Things that had only ever filled you with fear, then left you even emptier afterwards. That is, until your traitorous, wretched little mind had replaced contemptuous eyes with glittering red, greasy hair with silky silver, and finally you found relief in your fingers.
It became your guilty ritual, the one secret you could never tell him about. Every couple of nights, when your indulgence in his presence reached the threshold of overwhelming, you’d slip quietly away to whatever served as your bedroom at the time and lock the door.
How silent you were, sneaky. Citing homework, citing poor sleep, citing teenage fatigue and every other thing you could think of because he’d hate you, if he learned your true reason. Call you depraved. Ungrateful for the bond he’s so generously bestowed on you. You were supposed to be his daughter, supposed to be satisfied with that. You weren’t, but you could pretend well enough. Those lacrosse lessons taught you how to lie with your whole being, and you refined your techniques on your peers before turning them on your beloved protector, on the sanctuary he’d unwittingly desecrated by inviting a hungry abomination inside.
And so the years passed. The guilt grew, but so did you, until the weight of it barely bothered you before the late hours, when you were alone.
You are not alone now.
Now, you are eighteen – so freshly eighteen that you still forget sometimes – staring at the ceiling and wishing you had space from Sylus Qin so you can try to relieve your unbearable hunger for him.
But you can’t just ask him to leave, even though he would.
Not when he looks like this, sitting against the headboard of the bed in one of his low-cut sweaters, curled over you where your head rests on his lap. As much as you want privacy, so you can fully sink into the fantasy currently gripping you of just turning into his crotch and inhaling deep, of pulling open his zipper with your teeth and plunging your tongue beneath the band of his briefs, you cannot bring yourself to actually voice the words. To invite separation, when the closeness you will always crave is available, closeness you do not generally have the luxury of, is unthinka—
A calloused finger taps your forehead, causing you to blink. “You’re thinking rather deeply,” he observes, amusement coiling around each phoneme. “How novel.”
You scowl at the teasing, snapping at his finger with your teeth. You’re too slow – you usually are, but on the occasions when you manage to catch him, he lets you chew on his digits until you’re satisfied. A kind of reward, you suppose, for honing your reflexes.
Tragically, right now, there is nothing in your mouth: so much nothing you might as well choke on it.
You deflect. “I was thinking we’ve been here for a while,” you lie.
A few weeks ago, you’d had to move into this particular safe house rather unexpectedly, and it has only the space for a kitchen, bathroom, and a single cramped bedroom. Even the coin-operated laundry is shared between the whole complex, battered and barely functional.
The first night he’d dragged you here, clutching his furiously bleeding arm with his large, gloved hand, he’d still had the presence of mind to wrinkle his nose imperiously. “It’s not much,” he’d explained, his tone dangerously close to apologetic, “I acquired it before you came along. We’ll find something—” He’d ground his teeth against the pain as you grabbed him by the other arm.
“I don’t care if we share the same damned pillow,” you’d told him sharply, “as long as you show me where the bathroom is, so I can stitch up that fucking gash.”
Famous last words.
Because after you’d cleaned his cuts and scrapes – worse for the fact he’d tried to shield you from the brunt of the attack – he’d settled on the ground beside the bed, head resting against the king-single mattress, facing the door, and you’d become so incredibly aware of him.
The way his breathing evened with sleep, meditative, before collapsing into thunderous snores. His body, so warm it radiated out, reaching through space and thin sheets to coax an answering spark inside you. His hair gleaming metallic in the soft darkness, right by your hips, so close you could have reached out and carded your fingers through it. If he turned, if he looked at you… but he would never.
He would never.
You were just a little leech, occasionally useful but not nearly enough to balance the books. The deadweight he’d been so kind to shoulder, to clothe and educate and feed, so why couldn’t you just be satisfied with this? Why did you have to want more than his generosity, want his gaze to sear its brand into your skin, claiming every part of you, the parts that already belong to him, have always belonged to him, if only he was willing to—
The hunger was nearly unbearable.
You’d spent the entire night wanting, hardly daring to shift, to even breathe, in case he woke up and realised how desperate you were. Blamed your sleeplessness on lingering adrenaline the morning after, for which he’d laughed at you over his morning coffee. And you were forced to take his ribbing meekly, with none of your usual sass, face burning with shame, because it was better than him shunning you or, worse, pitying you.
“Mmm,” Sylus agrees thoughtfully, those crimson eyes drifting to the book in his hand – Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, you’d managed to decipher, angling your head till the letters became recognisable – then beyond that to the mug of rooibos tea still faintly steaming on the small bedside table. Beside it, a gun gleams, deadly metal shining in tungsten. “Thirty seven days… Over a month now.”
A whole month of torture, in which you only found temporary reprieve when he left to shower.
“Who’s counting?” you snark, but your heart beats an anxious rhythm in Morse code: sick of me already?
You’d ask, if you weren’t so terribly afraid of the answer. If you weren’t so terribly aware of the ulterior motives that keep you taking advantage of his goodwill.
“We covered basic arithmetic years ago.” He smirks. “Don’t tell me we need to revise.”
Your mouth falls open in offense, but you force a quick recovery.
“I don’t know who told you that you were funny, but they were lying to you,” you sniff righteously, lying yourself. Lying to yourself. And worse, lying to him.
“So tetchy tonight,” he remarks drily, ruffling your hair gently. You hiss at him. “Is my kitten starving for enrichment? If I recall, you still owe me an assignment on the rules of international warfare, as revised after the Evol gene’s proliferation in civilian populations. I was cutting you slack, since we left most of your textbooks behind, but if you insist…”
“How’s your book going?!” you yelp, more exclamation than the question it rightfully should be.
Sylus snorts, head tilting. Those eyes slide to the book in hand, which he is the majority of the way through. “This?”
You’ve thought about that, about the absurdity of a man who is constantly having to abandon homes with barely any forewarning insisting on buying physical copies of his books, but you have to admit that the experience of actually holding paper and ink is incomparable.
“It’s interesting,” he admits. “There’s a remarkable amount of social relevance to it, considering it’s set at the time of the French Revolution. And yet, Dickens doesn’t shy away from the brutality of revolt, and how easily comparatively innocent people can become collateral damage. It’s… surprisingly human, though that’s hardly exceptional in his works. Perhaps, because it focuses on…” something flickers in his gaze, something you can’t quite decipher, as he chooses his next words, “...particular individuals.”
“You like it,” you interpret bluntly.
He snorts again, flicking your cheek. “Yes,” he mimics, “I like it.”
“Tell me more about it,” you demand.
Sylus boops your nose with a corner of the cover. “Read it yourself,” he counters.
You want to roll your eyes, but they’re hungrily fixed on his throat, the way it bobs with his soft laugh. You love his throat, and all it contains. The thyroid cartilage, his laryngeal prominence and hyoid bone, how they shape and border his voice, with its threat and assurance. Protect his laughter, even though that laughter is so often employed in baiting you.
“Fine,” you agree, because that was never in question.
For years, you have shadowed him, carefully pressing your growing soles into the hollow of his every footstep, in the hopes that maybe he will turn back and really, truly look at you.
See that you have made yourself for him, in his image, to devour and desecrate as he pleases…
“That’s my kitten,” he grins, flashing his white teeth. “Ever curious.”
His pet name shivers down your spine and you have to suppress an arch. Your heartbeat is between your thighs, so slick he’d barely need to bully you in order to sink inside your tight, wet heat. And it’s so unfair, how you want him to stay forever, how you want him to get up, to announce he’s taking a shower and leave.
Despite the humble nature of your current dwelling, there are certain luxuries Sylus refuses to give up. Unless he’s on a job, he’s guaranteed to spend at least half an hour in the bathroom – an alien concept to your younger self, who’d learned to be economical in all ways.
Once, years ago, you’d pressed your ear to the door, curious as to what he could possibly be doing that would take him so long, only to hear… singing.
An off-key warble, full of gusto, that had filled you with so much glee and warmth that you resolved never to mention it, lest your taunts cause him to stop.
His shower concerts quickly became one of your favourite pastimes, and you’d attended them religiously, audience of one, positioned carefully so he wouldn’t notice your shadow through the crack of the door.
These wonderful periods – time with Sylus you know nobody else is privy to – are what you now give up in order to shove your fingers into your greedy, despicable cunt.
Because you are a filthy, feral kitten who always bites the hand that feeds it, no matter how well you are groomed.