Summary: with wrath beyond human limits, Leon takes matters in his own hands to take down anything left of the Umbrella just to save and finally have you at his side.
Tags: No use of Y/N. Male reader. Dark Leon S Kennedy: dangerous, lethal and charming. Flirting. Possessive behavior. Obsessive behavior. Overprotectiveness. Gore. Protective Leon Kennedy. Kissing. Intimate moments. Gore. Minor character deaths. Some bloody kisses. Happy ending.
This was meant to be the last part but it ended up too long oops
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - gif - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 10k
Once threatening hulking monster with massive, bone-crushing claws and exposed muscles, now lying on the ground in a large lake of it’s own blood all leaking profoundly from that massively enlarged, pulsating heart Leon had too much joy in striking down repeatedly with his hatchet.
The perfect way to unleash all the wrath that had built up in him at witness that matrix-clone man dressed in all white steal you from him along with Grace’s unconscious body.
The Tyrant’s knee had buckled from a clean shot of Leon’s Requiem and the chest cavity yawned out into the dim air, that grotesque, surgically-stitched opening where the Umbrella technicians had welded the ribs apart and reinforced the ventricles with some black cabling that pulsed wetly along with the beat.
The heart sat there fully exposed, swollen to roughly the size of a man’s skull, slick with a film of mucus-thick fluid. Each beat made it lurch forward against its own webbing of veins, fat arteries throbbing and visibly distending with every contraction, surface twitching with smaller spasms beneath.
The hatchet in Leon’s hand came up from his hip in a drawing arc, blade still wet from earlier kills and catching light and the first swing
landed dead center of the heart.
Blade sinking past the outer wall and into the dense, thickened myocardium beneath and a fat jet of arterial red geysered up out of the split, slapping across Leon’s forearm, his chest, the underside of his jaw. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink. He just twisted the haft, ripped the blade free with a thick suctioning pop that dragged a long ribbon of clotted tissue out with it, and brought it down again.
The second swing took out a chunk of heart wall the size of a fist and it slapped onto the floor beside the Tyrant’s knee.
Blood spurted out of the new crater in long, pulsing waves timed to the failing beat below and Leon stepped right into the spray as it hit him across the face.
The Tyrant tried to lift its arm and Leon shifted his weight, pivoted half a step left without ever taking the hatchet off the chest and brought the blade down a third time at an angle that split the upper chamber wide open.
A great fat bubble of blood bulged up from the wound that rose rapidly, dome of it stretching the ruptured pericardium outward as the failing pump shoved everything it had through holes that couldn’t hold pressure anymore.
The membrane stretched and then it burst with a wet pat that drenched Leon from collarbone to belt buckle in a sheet of copper-stinking fluid.
Yet he didn’t stop, rapid strikes of his hatchet that rose and fell with a metronome cruelty, each impact carving deeper as the blade kept hitting saturated muscle.
He chopped at the heart, knuckles going white through the leather of his gloves.
A coronary artery, ruptured by the third hit, hosed a thin pressurized thread of blood up across his cheek.
The Tyrant’s body jerked hard and whatever pseudo-life kept the thing animate started to flicker out behind the eyes, filmy gray-white globes losing focus.
By the tenth there was nothing left to call a heart, more a churned-up slurry of fibrous strands and hardened myocardial tissue mashed in with blood clots and stripped vein casings.
A final swing, harder than the rest, drove the hatchet head straight through what pulp remained and cracked into the spinal cord behind it.
That was when the Tyrant finally went all the way down, impact pressing what was left of the heart out the front of the cavity in a thick, paste-like extrusion that oozed across the floor.
Blood spread in a lake that widened out from under the body, finding and filling the low spots in the tile. The hulking thing that ten minutes ago stalked Leon through the ruined RPD station was now no longer moving again.
Leon stood over it, chest heaving and blood dripping from the hatchet head in heavy, syrup-thick drops.
His shoulders rose and fell, jaw working as the corner of his mouth had pulled up at some point during the assault.
It dropped just as fast because you were gone and that was the only thought that made him lower the hatchet.
All the rage hadn’t cleaned anything out of him, it just made a hole big enough to see clearly through and what he saw on the other side was the empty space where you had been pressed up against the wall with Zeno’s hand on your throat.
He turned and ran.
Raccoon City was still a corpse the explosion hadn’t buried but almost finished decomposing.
The streets here were worse than where you had ridden in, blast punching whole blocks down into themselves as he cut across the courtyard of the RPD without slowing, vaulted a chunk of fallen façade, hit the cracked street running.
He keyed the comm without breaking stride.
"Sherry."
A click. "Leon, where—"
"Zeno took Grace. He's headed underground, has to be, there's nothing else this far in."
A pause on her end as he could hear her typing on her keyboard.
"The blast site exposed sublevels, an old Umbrella infrastructure. There's a lab on the schematic I pulled, I can route it to your HUD—"
"Send it, Sherry."
She sent it along with also saying something else and he didn't answer, boots carrying him toward the exposed crater two blocks east where the road had collapsed into a ragged mouth in the earth.
Get him back.
That was the only sentence in his head and it kept saying itself in different voices,
Don't think about Grace, you'll get to her, get him back first. Don't think about how long it's been, don't think about Zeno's hand on his throat.
Get him back.
He reached the lip of the crater and didn't slow, drop of sixty feet at least, vertical.
There was a rope left by someone, BSAA probably, who had bolted an anchor into a slab of standing concrete and let a thick fibrous line trail down into the dark.
He went down hand over hand fast enough that the friction burned through the leather in his palms before he was halfway.
The drop swallowed the daylight in stages, pale yellow at the top, gray a third of the way down, then nothing but darkness.
The thought he didn't want crawled up through him on the run.
Whatever they had been doing to you in that care center, whatever they had been growing in your blood, was the entire reason a man like Zeno had moved at superhuman speed across a room to put a hand on your throat.
Gideon had to hunt you across half a city for it because of Spencer's research.
You were carrying something but he didn't know what Elpis was, just that Umbrella wanted it and he knew what the protocol was, on paper, for a confirmed bioweapon vector.
The thought made him grind his teeth so hard a muscle in his jaw spasmed.
No, if you were a weapon you'd have used it anytime he had lowered his attention like when his arms locked around you or in the back of the bike with your face pressed between his shoulder blades and your hands flat on his abdomen.
Could have used it in the kiss when instead you leaned in, breath shaking, lips chapped as the whole of you tilted toward him.
Failed experiment.
The phrase formed and he winced visibly, alone in the dark, jaw clenched.
Failed implied you were a prototype they'd thrown out and that had survived in the trash.
He hated the word the second it touched the inside of his skull and take the hatchet to his own neck for thinking it if he wasn't the only set of hands you had left in the world right now.
So he kept running.
The vines started about a hundred yards in, hanging in thick black-green ropes that swayed slightly in air, whole growth alive in the wrong way and he could see the long fibrous bodies of the vines pulse the way a throat pulses when it swallows.
One of them moved and he brought the hatchet up to drive it through the base of the strand where it joined the ceiling and the cut released a hiss of pressurized sap, dark green that splattered across the floor in a hot puddle.
The vine dropped, twitched, curled in on itself like a worm.
The next two snapped at him and he cut through both in a single sweep.
As the corridor narrowed and the vines thickened, he stopped using the hatchet for individual strands and started using it like a machete, blade rising and falling in rough, economical arcs that cleared a path two feet wide and left the floor behind him slicked with sap and severed lengths of twitching plant matter.
The thing at the heart of the growth was huge, flower-mouth the size of his bulky body, so many vines-tentacles everywhere as he unloaded everything he had on the plant and behind it, a row of red barrels were stacked inside a canister.
Leon drew the Requiem and lifted it two-handed, settled the front sight in the soft pulpy dead-center of the bloom and started firing.
The third ammo he put square in the stamen, which split lengthwise, made the floor under his boots slick with green liquid.
The smell was somewhere between rotting fruit and ammonia and it crawled into his sinuses and refused to leave.
Ninth shoots in, the flower tried, one last time, to lash a vine at him and a great wet bolus of green bursts out of its mouth, fully exposed now red barrels now.
He swapped the magnum for his sidearm without taking his eyes off them and fired one round and the world went orange.
The blast climbed the wall, found the vine system and went up everything at once. Fire raced up the strands of plant matter in fast bright capillary lines, every vine that had been hanging from the ceiling becoming a fuse, the whole organism igniting in a chain reaction that swept along the corridor.
Leon stood there for half a beat in the heat of it and watched until the plant collapsed and he stepped through.
Fluorescent emergency lights glowing past the large door of the lab located underneath Raccon City, the Ark.
Cold and sterile air rolled up out of it.
The first thing that came back was the cold.
Your fingers were the first to register it because they were the furthest from your heart and the closest to the metal of whatever you were lying on and, the second your nerves bothered to acknowledge them they reported back that the table beneath you was the same temperature as the air.
Eyes opening in pieces from the light overhead particular flat white that meant fluorescents. It needled into your retinas through lashes that felt glued together and for a long moment all you could do was lie there blinking up at a ceiling made of perforated white panels, every one of them identical.
Then you tried to move your hand but your wrist was held.
A wide cuff of dark, padded restraint had been buckled across the joint, attached by a short tether to a ring welded into the side of the gurney.
You tilted your head slowly, both wrists and ankles along a wider strap across your hips, one thinner across your sternum under the collarbones.
The clothes Leon had thrown you outside the gas station were gone, now in something thin and pale gray, hospital-issue, paper-fragile, slit down one side to give the cannulas access.
Two thick translucent tubes, one in the crook of each elbow, taped down with that yellowish surgical adhesive that always left a sting when it came off. The tubes ran from your veins to a pair of small upright machines on either side of the gurney, both humming faintly and with a glass collection chamber on the front that was already three-quarters full of blood.
The chambers were still filling.
You watched, for a second, as a fresh thread of red eased down the tube on your right side, traveled the loop and dropped with a small wet pat into the collection vessel.
A headache had taken up residence behind your eyes.
The room was empty, no lab coats pr guards.
Whatever had been done to put you under had been considered sufficient so they had sedated you.
You weren't supposed to be awake at all but something in your blood disagreed.
You worked your right hand first because it was the better hand at the moment, cuff padded but the buckle was on the outside, near the edge of the table and if you turned your wrist hard against the strap, twisted the meat of your forearm until the skin burned and the cannula tugged sharply at the vein, you could just barely angle your thumb enough to reach the prong of the buckle.
It took three tries before your thumb caught the metal lip and shoved, strap slackening with a quiet leather sigh.
The machines were still humming and an headache was still drumming as you pulled your hand free.
The first thing it did was go to the cannula in your other arm. You didn't trust yourself to pull the needle out of your own vein with the elegance the situation deserved, so you didn't try for elegance.
You braced two fingers above the insertion point, pinched the skin to hold the vein in place and drew the cannula out in one slow, queasy motion. The needle came clear with a small sucking pop and a fresh bead of red welled up out of the puncture as you clamped your thumb over it immediately and held pressure.
The pump on that side kept trying to draw for another second before it registered the loss of fluid and gave a small mechanical chirp of confusion, the indicator light blinking yellow.
You found the power switch on its housing and slapped it off before working the strap on your other wrist with the freed hand, then the chest strap and hip strap before finally freeing both ankles.
Your fingers kept fumbling and losing instructions halfway through, you had to keep stopping to breathe, slow and deep, against the rising static in your head.
The second cannula came out the same way as the first and the room went quiet without the pumps.
You sat up and that was when the headache became a real thing instead of a background noise. Sitting up sent it surging forward into the front of your skull in a sloshing wave and you had to brace both hands flat on the gurney and just exist for a moment while the world reassembled itself around you.
Your stomach turned over once and decided, generously, not to do anything about it.
Easing your legs over the side of the gurney, the floor was the same nothing-temperature as the table.
You kept one palm pressed against the inside of your elbow, holding pressure over the puncture there and you used the other hand to push yourself upright onto your feet.
The first step almost put you on the floor as you caught the edge of the gurney with your free hand at the last second, knees buckling and stood there shaking until your legs remembered what they were for.
The hospital gown swayed around and the slit down one side let a draft of the cold air touch your hip in a way that made you very suddenly aware of how little of you was being protected from anything.
The room was big, white walls and floor, every surface either tile or polished metal.
There were three other gurneys in the room.
Two were empty, one was not.
But before you let your eyes go to that one, your eyes went down, because your foot had landed in something.
Up close, you could see the long dark smears along the tile leading from somewhere out of sight, curving past the foot of your own gurney, disappearing under the third bed.
Some of the smears were almost black, dried in tacky films that had cracked at the edges while others were fresher, sitting in shallow round pools that hadn't lost their gloss yet, surface tension still intact as a faint reflection of the overhead fluorescents trembled.
Blood in the wrong volume.
Someone had bled here recently and at length.
You raised your eyes slowly and made yourself look at the double doors at the far end of the room. White metal, taller than they needed to be, set with rectangular green panels at chest height that pulsed faintly.
An exit.
You took a step toward it and your free hand stayed clamped over your inner elbow because the puncture there kept thinking about leaking and you didn't have the resources to spare.
You made it three steps before you saw the figure on the third gurney and stopped.
The frame was small, child-like and curled slightly on their side in sleep.
Gray-white hair, longer than you remembered, fell across the pillow in tangled waves that had clearly not been brushed in a while.
"Emily?"
The word came out of you before you'd checked it. Soft, cracked at the edges from a throat that hadn't spoken in hours and you moved toward the gurney faster than your legs really wanted to, headache swinging behind your eyes.
It wasn't Emily, the realization came in pieces the further you looked.
Face the right shape but the proportions were wrong, face sharper in the cheekbones and very pale, the blue tracery of veins visible at the temple and at the inside of the wrist.
You stared at her jaw because her skin sat slightly loose at the hinge, in the faint pucker of scar tissue along the line of the lower mandible, as if the mouth had been stretched to a width that the muscle remembered even after the bone had retreated.
The proportions had pulled themselves back from something with teeth too wide and the soft architecture of a child's face had been reassembled on top of the damage with the visible seams of the repair still showing.
Her arms lay long at her sides, forearms longer than they should have been on a frame that small and the fingers were tipped with dark nails.
Silvery scars running in fine parallel lines across the side of her neck, fanning out over the collarbones and climbing the inside of the forearms.
A monitor at the head of her bed traced a steady green sawtooth across its screen. The number above it reads 64, a child's heart should beat faster than that.
She was healing.
"Marie," you whispered her name and she didn't wake.
You moved fast as you could with your blood three-quarters of where it belonged and the headache pulsing in time with your steps.
The cannulas in her arms were smaller than the ones that had been in yours, child-sized and more careful, tubes running to a smaller version of the same machine that had been bleeding.
You went to the right side first, pinched her skin the way you'd pinched your own and eased the needle out.
The pump chirped its little confused chirp and you shut it off before doing the same to the left.
The straps you couldn't do because they had been pulled tighter, with the extra holes in the leather worn dark from frequent use along a small steel padlock through the buckle on each wrist.
Someone had decided that whatever she had been was bad enough to warrant the lock even after she'd stopped being it.
You couldn't get her out and the realization sat in your stomach.
Crouching down beside her bed there were notes scattered, several pages of them had clearly been clipped to a board and dropped when the board was set down too quickly, white sheets fanned across the tile under the gurney, some of them face down, some of them face up, a few of them spotted with rust-colored droplets at the corners.
You gathered them with your free hand, careful to keep your other hand pressed to your elbow as you sat back on your heels and the fluorescents overhead buzzed while laying the pages out on the floor.
ARK RESEARCH COMPLEX
DIVISION OF ADVANCED BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
INTERNAL RESEARCH MEMORANDUM
FILE ID: ARK-ØØ-77A
SUBJECT: Experiment ØØ / Elpis Expression Event
AUTHOR: Dr. Adrian Gideon
CLASSIFICATION: DIRECTOR ACCESS ONLY
The activation event observed in Experiment ØØ following exposure to Subject 170 has fundamentally altered our understanding of the entity designated ELPIS.
For decades, recovered Spencer archives suggested ELPIS represented a biological weapon system. All available documentation implied it was designed to interact with Progenitor-derived organisms in a manner significant enough to warrant extreme secrecy.
We now believe this assumption was incorrect.
Current evidence suggests ELPIS is not a weapon.
At least, not in the conventional sense.
The original Elpis Host Program was built around a simple hypothesis: If ELPIS was biological in nature, then Experiment ØØ’s blood would eventually become its production source.
This appears to be exactly what occurred.
Analysis performed before the Subject 170 exposure event showed only dormant genetic structures embedded within Experiment ØØ’s hematopoietic stem cells.
These cells reside primarily within bone marrow and function as the source of all blood cell production.
Following infection exposure, those dormant structures activated.
Since activation, every blood sample collected from Experiment ØØ has demonstrated continuous production of previously unidentified proteins not naturally occurring in humans nor do they resemble any known viral structures.
Instead, they appear to function as biological regulators.
They identify abnormal cellular activity and selectively target infected tissue while leaving healthy cells largely unharmed.
This process is extraordinarily complex and appears to involve several mechanisms acting simultaneously.
Because of this, blood extraction became the primary focus of Ark personnel.
SUBJECT 170
UNEXPECTED RESPONSE
The greatest surprise occurred during testing on Subject 170.
Prior assumptions predicted one of two outcomes.
Either:
ELPIS would destroy infected tissue entirely.
Or:
ELPIS would accelerate mutation.
Neither occurred.
Instead, Subject 170 began recovering.
Repeated exposure to proteins extracted from Experiment ØØ’s blood produced measurable changes.
Aggressive cellular growth slowed, abnormal viral replication decreased and damaged tissue began reorganizing itself.
Most importantly, healthy human cells started outcompeting infected cells.
The process resembles guided healing rather than eradication.
This finding forced a complete reevaluation of ELPIS.
CURRENT THEORY
We believe ELPIS appears to function as a biological correction system.
ELPIS identifies what a cell was originally supposed to be.
It then encourages damaged tissue to return toward that state.
Normal antiviral drugs attempt to destroy pathogens.
ELPIS appears to restore biological stability.
Subject 170’s recovery strongly suggests ELPIS was never intended to create stronger monsters.
It was likely designed to prevent biological collapse after infection.
If this interpretation is correct, Spencer may have hidden the greatest antiviral technology ever developed inside a human host, ready to set anarchy.
CHANGES OBSERVED IN EXPERIMENT ØØ
Activation has not occurred without consequences.
Experiment ØØ no longer presents entirely baseline human physiology.
The following alterations have been consistently documented.
Increased Cellular Repair
Minor injuries heal noticeably faster than expected.
Cuts close sooner.
Bruising fades more rapidly.
Inflammatory responses resolve in reduced time.
This effect remains limited.
The subject is not immortal.
Severe trauma remains dangerous.
However, recovery rates exceed normal human averages.
Elevated Metabolic Demand
The continuous production of ELPIS requires substantial biological resources and subject now consumes significantly more energy than before activation.
Expected symptoms include:
frequent hunger
increased thirst
fatigue
accelerated exhaustion during periods of stress
Laboratory personnel have compared the effect to running a small factory inside the body twenty-four hours a day.
Chronic Low-Grade Fever
The immune system remains in a partially activated state.
As a result, body temperature trends slightly above standard human averages.
Most individuals would interpret this as a mild persistent fever.
The subject may experience:
feelings of warmth
occasional sweating
increased sensitivity to dehydration
These effects are expected to persist indefinitely.
Neurological Adaptation Period
The activation event appears to have placed extraordinary stress on the nervous system.
Weeks or months of adjustment may follow.
Reported symptoms include:
dizziness
headaches
temporary confusion
sensory overload in crowded environments
disrupted sleep cycles
Fortunately, these symptoms appear to lessen over time.
POSSIBLE LONG-TERM RISKS
Several concerns remain unresolved.
Autoimmune Activity
Because ELPIS actively monitors cellular abnormalities, there is concern that the system may occasionally misidentify healthy tissue.
If this occurs, autoimmune complications could develop.
Current evidence remains inconclusive.
Bone Marrow Exhaustion
Experiment ØØ’s bone marrow is operating at activity levels never observed in an ordinary human.
Decades of continuous production could potentially result in cellular degradation.
Whether ELPIS can compensate for this damage remains unknown.
END OF FILE
ARCHIVE STATUS: LOCKED
LAST ACCESSED: 03:17 AM
You read them twice, the second time slower, mouthing some of the words to yourself because your brain kept wanting to refuse what you were seeing. By the time you reached the bottom of the last page the headache had spread from behind your eyes into the base of your skull and your hands had started to tremble.
You folded the pages and slid them inside the front of the hospital gown, against your skin where the strap of nothing held them in place but the press of fabric against your chest. You stood and had to brace yourself on Marie's gurney to do it from headache and dizziness.
You reached down and took her cold hand, smaller than yours.
"I'll be back," you said quietly. "I'll bring help, I promise."
For a long moment she didn't move until her fingers, slow and weak as your own, closed around yours.
Something hot pushed up the back of your throat and you forced it down because it was the only option available.
Turning away from the gurney before the turning got harder.
There was a stainless steel tray on the cart beside her bed, the kind labs use to hold instruments mid-procedure. On it, in a foam holder, were two small glass tubes.
Each one was capped with a small clear plastic housing that held a thin retractable needle, the kind that was meant for fast field injection. Inside each tube, dark and slow, was a finger's-width of your blood, drawn off and prepped for testing.
The logic came to you in stages.
They had been draining you in volume for a reason. Whatever was in your blood was, apparently, the thing keeping the small girl on the table from being a monster anymore.
Whatever was in your blood, then, was a weapon you were already carrying, whether or not you understood the shape of it, whether or not you understood the cost of using it.
If something with the wrong biology came at you in the next hour, the tubes would be the difference between dying and not, hence why you took them.
One went into the small pocket sewn into the side of the gown while the other you held in your right hand, cap clicking shut and the needle retracted.
You started for the doors and doors registered your presence when you got within a meter of them.
The green panels brightened from standby to full and the doors slid open with a soft pneumatic huff.
You walked through and stopped as the corridor held many incubator tanks very tall, each one lit from inside by a steady, sullen red glow and inside each one, suspended in a pale, viscous fluid that was somewhere between water and oil, floated a thing.
A brain was fully exposed at head level, its grey-pink folds visible through the red-tinted fluid.
Beneath the exposed brain, a mouth wide and hinged too far back along the jaw, lined with rows of thin, glassy fangs.
Lickers that felt alive to you as you walked and kept your eyes forward.
Some of the things in the tanks shifted as you passed and made you increase your movement speed as much as possible.
Past the elevator, the corridor continued through another set of double doors and, as you closed the distance you could see the green panels at chest height on those doors brighten from standby to full.
The doors slid open and two men stepped through, black tactical gear and gas masks on.
The lenses of the masks were dark and turned their faces into smooth, expressionless ovals. Rifles slung loose at their fronts, held in the relaxed grip of two men in the middle of a conversation.
They saw you and the change was instant.
Hand that had been gesturing came down, two rifles coming up in unison and the red dots of two laser sights bloomed against the front of your hospital gown.
"Hey—"
"What the fuck are you doing out of containment?"
"Get on the ground, now!"
The shouting hit you like harshly and you broke sideways on instinct and whatever scrap of adrenaline your bloodstream had been hoarding for an emergency, putting the nearest incubator between yourself and the rifles before either of them had finished the second word of the next command.
The first burst of rifle fire cracked through the chamber and chewed a line of impacts along the wall behind where you had been standing as you ran.
More a staggering, lurching forward motion that approximated running closely enough to count and you kept the bulk of the incubators between you and the soldiers, threading the gaps where you could, the red light from the tanks washing over you in pulses as you passed each one.
The shouting kept pace behind you, two voices now, splitting up, one moving along your left to flank, one staying on your right and firing in disciplined controlled bursts whenever he had even half a sight picture.
A bullet hit the glass of the tank to your immediate left and didn't punch through, glass thicker than civilian glass.
The thing inside the tank jerked, its long tongue snapped tight inside its mouth.
The elevator was thirty meters away but you couldn’t keep up.
Your eyes scanned and they caught on a panel mounted to the side of the incubator three to your right.
DRAIN / RELEASE.
You hit the green button as you passed it and ducked behind the next incubator, pressed your back against its base and listened.
The tank behind you began to drain in a loud, mechanical gurgle, suspension fluid being sucked out of the bottom of the cylinder fast, red light inside the tank flickering as the level dropped and the thing inside crouched at the bottom of the glass on its haunches, brain dripping, lipless mouth working, eyeless face turning in slow blind sweeps.
The glass at the front of the tank hissed and split along a seam and the Licker came out of the gap before the seam had even finished opening.
Its head whipped toward the soldier on the right because he had just opened fire on it, muzzle flash strobing across the wet exposed brain.
Long tongue whipping out and around the man's neck on the way in and the impact took both of them down into the gap between two tanks in a tangle that made noises you did not stop to identify.
The second soldier swung his rifle to cover and the wild burst went high to the side and stitched across the front of the next incubator down the line.
That glass cracked and broke apart in a sheet of red-tinted fluid, what tumbled out of it was a pale-skinned humanoid shapes covered in clusters of swollen white pustules that ruptured wetly on impact with the floor, spraying milky pus across the tile.
A genocide started as more capsules broke down and revealed many more creatures.
The elevator door was right there and you slapped your free hand against the call panel, doors opening immediately, already on this floor.
You stumbled inside and hit the first button you saw on the panel without reading the label and you watched through the closing gap of the elevator doors as one of the soldiers came staggering backward into your line of sight with his rifle gone and his sidearm half-drawn and a ring of the pustuled humanoids closing on him.
The other soldier came briefly into view as well, except he was missing most of his right arm at the shoulder, limb torn off and lying several feet from his body.
The elevator doors finished closing and the screaming cut out.
You stood there in the small bright box of the elevator, alone, hands shaking, blood beading slowly at your inner elbow where the gauze you didn't have wasn't doing its job, leaning your back against the wall and slid down it a few inches before catching yourself and forcing yourself upright again.
The headache had a fever now, feeling the heat building behind your eyes.
Elevator stopped suddenly and the doors opened.
You stepped out and almost went to your knees.
The room beyond was vast, ceiling high, vaulted and lit by a single huge pulsing orange light at its apex.
The walls curved outward into a roughly circular shape and set into those walls, dozens of them, hundreds maybe, were dark glass orbs, each one inset flush with the wall.
In the center of the room, raised on a low circular dais, was a device with Zeno standing beside it.
White suit, untouched by the violence of the city. His head was tilted slightly downward toward the device on the dais, gloved hands at his side and yellow glow behind his lenses visible from across the room.
You took a step backward without meaning to, elevator doors already sliding shut behind you as you tried to bring the syringe-tube up in your hand into something resembling a defensive posture.
A hand clapped over your mouth from behind hard.
Tactical glove with fingers that spread wide and pressed your jaw closed before you could draw enough breath to make a sound.
At the same time something cold and sharp settled in against the side of your throat just under the angle of your jaw.
A grey hatchet, not Leon's.
"Got Experiment ØØ. Alive. Holding position, awaiting orders." The voice that spoke beside your ear came muffled through a gas mask, electronic at the edges, calm in the middle.
The radio crackled against the side of the masked man's helmet and a second voice came through.
"—negative on neutralization. Subject is needed intact. Bring him back to harvest. Repeat, bring it back to harvest. Sedate if it gets aggressive."
The man behind you made a single low grunt of confirmation in the back of his throat and then his mouth came close enough to your ear that you could feel the warmth of his breath escaping the mask's exhaust port against the rim of your skin.
"You heard," he said. "On your feet. You walk where I walk and if you so much as twitch in a direction I don't like I take a leg off at the knee. Are we clear."
He didn't wait for an answer as the hand on your mouth slid down to clamp across the front of your throat instead, fingers spread wide enough to circle the column of muscle there and the hatchet came off your jaw, ready against your back.
He turned you with a small twist of his hips and made you face the hallway.
Another set of two doors that opened and revealed a long white corridor on the other side of the room with the windowed wall stretching down its length.
What was directly in front of you was Leon standing maybe ten meters down the corridor.
His face, always closed and flat, had his mouth softening the second his blues eyes spotted you, brow knit forward.
Pure hatred while looking at the man holding you.
"Let him go," Leon said. "And we can talk about your pension."
The man behind you laughed drily, processed by the mask's electronics into something flat and unpleasant.
The hatchet in his off hand slid back up from your back and he raised it slowly until the flat of the blade was pressed against the side of your neck again.
You felt the skin part as a thin warmth slid down your throat, traced the line of your collarbone and disappeared into the slit of the hospital gown.
"I'm going to neutralize the target," the man said into his radio, eyes locked on Leon over the curve of your shoulder. "Send the second team to recover the asset. Out."
He didn't wait for a response, his hand snapped up to the back of your neck instead, fingers digging into the muscle there, finding the knot of nerves at the base of your skull and pressing on them with practiced precision.
He used the leverage to walk you, one stumbling half-step at a time, directly down the corridor toward Leon with his hatchet staying against your neck. He kept his body angled behind yours, head tucked down behind the curve of your shoulder, chest plate flush against your back.
Using you like a meat shield all the way down the corridor, Leon's gun wavered because he didn’t have a clear shot on the way.
The man behind you reached the last few meters in a sudden burst and shoved you forward brutally.
Leon caught you, arm coming across your middle in a single clean sweep, bicep underneath the leather of his jacket bunching tight against your stomach, flat of his forearm settling under your ribs in the place a man's forearm settles when he's scooped someone out of a fall a hundred times before and the rest of him met the rest of you.
He was warm through the layers of his clothing and through the thin paper of your hospital gown, chest a wall, plates of his pectorals hard under his shirt as they met the side of your face for a single second as he yanked you in tight against him
and you could feel the slow heavy thud of his heart beating against your cheekbone.
His other arm, the one with the gun, locked around your shoulders to keep you from rebounding off him.
It lasted a second or maybe less as his head jerked up over your shoulder and his entire body went rigid against yours, he made a small noise in his throat and his arm uncoiled from around your back, hand on your shoulder shoving you hard sideways into the wall to your right.
You hit the wall with your shoulder too hard with the way he put more strength into the throw than he'd meant to and the impact slammed the breath out of your lungs.
The commander had taken the distraction you caused by trying to slice Leon's neck with his hatchet and the blonde caught the descending haft of the weapon against the slide of the pistol with a metallic crack.
You watched a fight occur from the floor.
The man in the mask was younger and faster, but most importantly not carrying a deadly virus in his system.
Hatchets swung in tight arcs that didn't waste motion and every arc had to be parried by something on Leon.
The third exchange ended with the hatchet's haft slammed across Leon's collarbone and the pistol jarred halfway out of his grip with Leon's back against the windowed wall and the glass exploded outward in a sheet of fragments.
The two bodies vanished through the gap and some of the glass came down with them.
You tried to move, hand finding the floor and your legs accepted the request of getting up as you slumped sideways against the corridor wall.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened and two men came in, same gears as the others
"Show me your hands!"
Raising both of them as high as your shoulder would let you, palms out and fingers spread and you stayed on the floor because standing was no longer something your body would do.
"Don't move," the closer one said.
He approached slowly, rifle steady while the other one held his line at the door and covered the angles.
When he was close enough he reversed his grip on the rifle and brought the stock around in a short, professional arc and it cracked into the side of your head above the ear.
Awareness came back in layers.
Someone was carrying you from the way you were swaying up and down repeatedly and a hard ridge of bone was digging into the soft pit of your stomach.
Boot steps on concrete, dry electronic chatter of a radio on someone's hip.
The smell you registered was so bad that it dragged the rest of you up out of unconsciousness whether you were ready or not.
Old and new blood, the particular sweet-rotten reek of something dead, burnt cordite under all of it.
You stirred.
"Subject's awake." The man carrying you said, voice flat through the mask filter.
The other man, walking a few paces ahead, half-turned without breaking stride. You saw the rifle in his hands, muzzle pointed politely at the floor and over the top of his mask his eyes found yours where you hung limp over his partner's shoulder.
"Already?" he said. "It's been, what, six minutes." He stepped closer, peered at your forehead. The barrel of his rifle drifted up enough to flick your hair away from your temple with the front sight. "Cut's already gone. Look at it… fucking freak."
He turned back around and kept walking while you let your head loll from lack of strength.
The vast warehouse alley with the shipping containers stacked into walls on either side, was wrecked.
Containers split open, some of them caved in from the outside and the floor was a slick of dark fluid pooled in the low places of the concrete.
Three Lickers lying flat with their long red bodies opened up by gunfire and their tongues lolling slack across the floor in pale wet ropes.
Zombies, more than you could count, sprawled in heaps where they'd fallen, some still twitching in the small involuntary way bodies twitched when their nervous systems hadn't gotten the news.
The man carrying you stopped in front of a heavy double door and went down on one knee with practiced care, your bare feet found the cold concrete underneath and you swayed when he let go.
There was a split somewhere on the inside of your cheek where the rifle stock had driven your teeth into the soft tissue and iron sat heavy on your tongue.
"Move," the one with the bored eyes said and gestured with the rifle. "Don't get clever."
The doors hissed open at your approach and you walked through them with the small shuffling steps of a person whose balance had not entirely returned.
Your eyes went to Marie before they went to anything else.
She was still on the gurney exactly the way you had left her.
"On the bed," the man behind you said. "The one with the restraints."
He gestured with the rifle and as he did, the small red dot of his laser sight flickered across the wall in front of you.
Then it vanished between your shoulder blades.
You took a step toward the bed before a sound came from behind you.
A slicing followed by a dry crack of bone giving way along a yell that got cut off halfway through by the mask filter and came out muffled and gurgling.
You spun and found Leon standing between them.
He was standing between the two soldiers and the arm of the soldier who had been pointing his rifle at you was very wrong due to Leon’s hatchet that had come down at the shoulder, splitting through the joint at an angle that had taken the limb most of the way off the torso and now it was hanging by a rope of muscle.
Blood was coming out of the wound in a continuous pour from the severed artery.
The other soldier had started to raise his rifle and gotten it halfway up before Leon moved his hatchet free from the first man's shoulder in a fast clean yank that opened the wound wider and sent a second arterial spray fanning sideways across Leon's chest as his wrist rotated to take the soldier’s throat at the level of the larynx.
The mask filter on the front of his helmet caught the spray and redirected it sideways out the exhaust ports.
Leon let the hatchet drop as he drew the pistol from his hip in the same motion and put two rounds into the back of the first soldier's head.
Both soldiers flopping across the floor, one growing lake of blood.
The shock kept you still for about three seconds before you crossed the floor and both arms came around his ribs, face into the front of his jacket, side of your head jammed up under his collarbone.
He huffed and underneath the leather you felt his ribs flex against the press of your forearms.
The arms that came up around your shoulders to hug you back were strong.
"That's, uh. That's a hell of a lot better than the last greeting I got from you." He murmured into the top of your head and you laughed into the side of his throat.
"I thought you were dead," you said into his shirt.
"I get that a lot."
You pulled back, wanting to look at him but he was already turning, taking your hand in his gloved and large one that engulfed yours completely.
He did not tell you what had happened to the commander like the moment that he had pinned the masked man to the catwalk grating with one knee on his sternum and worked methodically.
First the joint, wrist coming out of his body right after and the blade had to be brought down twice to get all the way through the radius.
The second joint, elbow and the shoulder followed after.
Leon had not stopped working until there was nothing left attached to the torso except the head and he had taken it off last, kicking it through the railing.
What he told you, as he pulled you along by the hand, was the operational picture.
"We don't have time," he said. "Zero's got Grace at the console. He's going to walk her through inserting the password into Elpis. We have to break it before he gets there."
"How does she know the password?"
"She doesn't." A small huff of breath that was almost a laugh, almost. "That gentleman and Gideon have convinced themselves she does. They think she's the key. They'll get a code into the system one way or another and once it's in, Elpis is loose."
He kept walking as you kept up, hand around yours tightening a fraction when you stumbled on the edge of a tile and loosened again the moment you found your footing and the small unspoken attention of it, did something to the part of your chest that was still burning from thinking he was dead.
You reached the elevator and Leon hit the call button with the side of his fist as he pulled you in.
It began to ascend.
In the close quiet of the small mirrored box, with the floor numbers ticking up and the soft hum of the cable above you, you looked up at him and said, "Leon. What if everything we know about Elpis is wrong."
His eyes came down to you.
"Define wrong."
"What if it's not a weapon? There is this little girl I know, Marie, that was turned into a monster but Elpis—"
He was listening and opened his mouth to say something but coughed instead.
Small one at first, throat-clearing, before it doubled and his shoulders hunched in around it, he turned his face away from you in a sharp instinctive motion and when brought his free hand up to cover his mouth, you saw the blood come through his fingers before he could stop it.
Bright red, so arterial.
A lot of it.
His knee went out from under him, the hand that had been bracing on the wall now bracing on the wall lower down and his shoulders shook with the next cough, more blood came through his fingers and a thin runner of it escaped his palm and tracked down his wrist before disappearing into the cuff of his glove.
You went down with him, both of your hands on his shoulders and the leather was fever-hot under your palms.
"Leon, breathe, slow—"
He spat, a red wad of it onto the floor of the elevator.
His head came up, eyes finding yours, whites of them had gone a faint yellow around the iris in the last few minutes, you could see it now in the elevator light and the veins at his temples stood out darker than they should have.
"M'fine," he rasped.
"You are not fucking fine."
"Noted."
The elevator dinged, doors opening on the orange light.
Zeno was standing at the console with a cigarette held loose between two fingers, an orange tip glowing in counterpoint to the orange of the column and Leon fully collapsed.
He went forward out of the elevator and his left knee folded all the way under him and he went down onto both knees and then onto his palms.
You stayed with him, getting an arm under his shoulder and trying to lift but you couldn't on your own.
Grace was already moving the second she entered the place as well and when she got to him she dropped to her knees on his other side without a single second of hesitation.
"Leon. Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh, get up, get up, come on—"
He grunted while placing one palm against the floor and braced the other around Grace's shoulders. He pushed and got one foot under himself followed by the other.
Between you and Grace, with most of his weight distributed across both of your shoulders and almost none of it on his own legs, you got him standing.
Together you walked him, head bowed between his shoulders and his breath rattling wet in his chest, toes of his boots dragging at the polished floor with every step.
Zeno watched without moving or putting down the cigarette, taking a quick drag of it and letting the smoke out through his nose in two thin streams and his eyes behind the dark glasses followed your progress.
“Any wrong code will do. It’ll destroy Elpis.”
“Let’s try.” Grace mumbled to Leon as you all got closer.
“I can buy you some time.” Leon breathed before coughing once into the side of your hair and you felt the heat of his breath along a small spray of something against your scalp but you didn't flinch.
“Are we sure of what you have in mind to do?” You tried to call out despite how you yourself had no clear clue of what Elpis was fully capable of.
Zeno was eyeing you in particular as you all approached the center and Grace reluctantly let go once she saw you had full grip on Leon.
You sank together with him down on one knee on the ground, his body half-cradled against the front of yours, head dropping forward to land in the curve of your shoulder. He weighed so much more than you had been ready for, muscles still on his frame even with the virus eating him from the inside, settled against you and your arms came around his shoulders to keep him from going further as he stayed there, breathing.
“I-I know the password.” Grace mastered all the courage she could hold as she told Zeno those words and his face, even while wearing sunglasses, lit up.
“Fulfill your destiny, and all will be forgiven.” Zero mumbled while eying the computer.
You held Leon as another hard set of coughing hit him. One hand cradling the back of his skull, other arm locked across his upper back and felt him slowly lean further in, tension going out of his neck, head settling against the curve of your throat.
He liked it.
Small and almost imperceptible nuzzle of his jaw against your collarbone, an unconscious turn of his face deeper into the place between your shoulder and your neck, the wet of his bloody mouth caught against the line of your jaw and dragged when he turned.
A man at the end of his strength taking, for the first time in years, the comfort of being held and not caring anymore who saw him take it.
His stubble was rough as it scratched your throat with every small shift of his head, blood on his lips smearing a sticky warm line from the hinge of your jaw down to your collarbone and his breath came in small wet bursts against your skin.
He was so fever-warm, the heat of him soaking through your gown and through your skin and into your chest where it sat behind your ribs like a stone.
“O-only if you let Leon live.” Grace mustered again all bravery she could.
“Very well.” Zero only spared Leon and you a quick glance before turning to the computer.
He took a final drag of the cigarette and crushed it out on the edge of the console.
"Better be quick, he has little minutes left" Zeno said, eyes moving over you in a single flat sweep. "And the experiment—" the corner of his mouth lifted again, the small private smile, "—is a failed prototype anyway. Aren't you? The connection had hopes for you but your output is unstable, concentration is below threshold. We were going to harvest you to dry and discard the husk."
He gestured at the column of orange light pulsing beside him.
"But now we won't need to. Once Grace inserts the key, we'll have access to the direct font. Elpis itself. The pure article. You—" the smile widened a fraction, "—were a stepping stone we don't need anymore."
Leon's head moved in a slow effortful lift of his chin off the curve of your shoulder and when his face came up into the light his eyes were half-lidded, entire lower half of his face was painted red.
"You put a hand," Leon said, voice rasp as each word came out individually.
"You put a hand on him, I’ll cut every finger off your fucking hand."
He coughed and sprayed a fine red mist across the front of your gown and across his own chin as he hung in your arms with the cough's weight, his shoulders convulsing and when it passed he was heavier than before as his head sagged back down into the crook of your neck of its own accord.
"Leon," you breathed, both of your hands coming up to his face and cradling it, stubble of his jaw scraping your palms, rough warm drag of two days of unshaved beard against the skin of your fingers.
"Leon, save your strength, please."
He breathed a laugh and it lifted one side of his bloody mouth into a crooked sideways grin, white of his teeth filmed with red and his lower lip was split somewhere on the inside and there was a stripe of blood drying into the line of his jaw under your right hand and he looked at you with a half-lidded heavy gaze.
"You're cute," he murmured, "when you worry."
His eyes traveled down your face and settled on your mouth.
"Shame," he said, softer, almost to himself, "I won't get to see it again."
He was telling you, with the matter-of-fact resignation of a man who had done his own math and didn't like the answer, that he was about to die in your arms and he was sorry he wasn't going to get more time to look at your face.
Something inside your chest broke and then, in the broken place, the notes from the room with Marie for Elpis.
The principle had been a cure and you had two ampules stored in the pocket of your gown.
You thought you knew what to do now with Leon's weight collapsing further into your arms by the second and his eyes already starting to drift unfocused on yours.
"Leon," you said and his eyes tracked back to yours with half a second of lag.
"Hmm."
"Can I try something?"
His mouth moved, crooked grin coming back as his pupils were blown widen, eyes on your mouth again and he wasn't tracking the conversation anymore.
"Sweetheart," he murmured. "You can do whatever you want to me."
You leaned in closer, forehead pressed lightly against his and the heat of his skin against yours was alarming. "I want to thank you for getting me out of that Care Center and letting me see all of those new things in my life, even the bad parts. Especially the bad parts. I never—" your voice caught, "—I never had any of that and you gave me a whole day of it."
He made a small contented sound, low in his throat and you felt his hand one curled into the fabric at your hip tighten.
"Best day," he murmured. "Of my whole goddamn life. You believe that?"
You kissed him, mouth finding his and the blood on his mouth transferred immediately onto yours, slick and metallic but you did not care.
His mouth was so warm and so soft and you felt him try to kiss back with how little he had left.
The small fluttering effort of his lips against yours with a half-second of pressure before his strength gave out and he just rested his mouth against yours and breathed.
Your right hand stayed cradling his face while the left hand slid down across his shoulder to your own hip, into the pocket of the gown, fingers closing around the cool slim glass of the first injector.
You worked the safety cap off against the heel of your own palm without interrupting the kiss, finding the line of his carotid by touch, warm pulse of it still beating under his stubbled skin and you set the tip of the injector against the muscle of his shoulder where it met his neck before pressing.
The red dark amber went into him in a single fast pulse and he jerked, a startled flinch against your mouth and for a second nothing happened.
His hand on your hip tightened hard and his other hand came up off the floor and found your shoulder.
A change happened over the span of three seconds as his lips pressed more firmly, opened and his head tilted before he kissed you back more passionately.
The other hand let go of your hip and came up to your face, leather of the glove rough against your cheekbone and he cradled your jaw in his palm to angle your face the way he wanted it and kissed you like.
You felt his weight come off you without noticing how much of it you'd been holding until it was gone and he shifted on his knee, planted his foot, straightened and the weight that had been sagging into your shoulders pulled back as he kissed you harder.
His mouth opened against yours and his tongue traced your lower lip and you opened for him as his tongue slid in.
It tasted like copper and the small surprised noise he made into your mouth as the kiss deepened was the most alive sound you had ever heard out of him. The hand on your face had moved to the back of your skull, fingers spread wide in your hair, holding you to him and the other had found your waist and was gathering the fabric of your gown into his fist as if he didn't know he was doing it.
He pulled back fast, eyes snapping open, breath coming in one sharp clean inhale.
You looked down and his glove came off by your hand, there were once dark spider-web of necrotic veining climbing up from the back of his hand toward his elbow, black branching pattern of the infection spreading through the tissue.
It was gone.
You watched the last of it whiten as you stared, dark lines retreating up his arm in real time, fading from black to gray to a faint shadow to nothing at all, skin beneath them returning to its ordinary color.
He looked down at you and the expression on his face was something you would remember.
Summary: You and Wally West have spent six months loving each other in secret, built on years of quiet pining, stolen glances, and almosts. But as the world keeps pulling you apart in public, the strain of hiding something so real begins to crack… until one late-night confession changes everything.
CW: Making out, use of y/n, swearing, hidden relationships, I'm sourcing like a million different timelines so it may be confusing but it's just to show the progression of hero life (young justice, as well as Titans okay), Bruce being a good dad and tryna set his daughter up
WC: 2.6k
⤷ Part of my 4K event <3
"Baby, can you call me
back? I miss you,
It's so lonely in my mansion"
🎧 -> Agora Hills by Doja Cat
Wally West doesn’t fall in love all at once.
He slips into it slowly, like something he doesn’t realise he’s already drowning in.
It starts when you’re younger, two kids orbiting the same world, always in the same rooms, always laughing a little too easily around each other. You were never hard to be around.
That was the problem. You made everything feel lighter, easier, like the weight of being who you were didn’t matter as much when he was standing next to you.
At first, you’re just his friend.
His favourite person to spar with, to joke with, to sit beside at Mount Justice at ridiculous hours of the night when neither of you can sleep. He memorises your habits without meaning to—the way you tilt your head when you’re listening, the way you smile when you’re trying not to laugh.
Then one day, after several years, something shifts.
At the Titans Tower, over pizza and crappy movies, you laugh at something he says, and it lingers a second too long. Your hand brushes his, and instead of pulling away, you stay. He notices everything all at once—the way you look in your suit, the talent and skill you possess, your virtues, the way people gravitate toward you, the way he himself does. (ik it's mad cringe but stay w me now)
And suddenly, being around you isn’t just easy. He never really clocked that you both had gotten older. He never internalised the feelings he had for you, and how they matured into something greater now that you've both aged.
It’s dangerous.
Because now he wants more.
He doesn’t say anything. He can’t.
You’re you—Bruce Wayne’s daughter, little sister of his closest friends, and said friends who would literally smite him if they knew of his crush on you, you're the girl everyone watches, the girl who belongs to a world far more complicated than his.
So he does what he’s always done best (not really, but alas).
He waits, and he watches, and he flops.
Hard.
Dick notices first. Of course he does. One look at Wally across the room, staring at you like you’ve hung the stars yourself, and he’s already smirking. Jason catches on next, less amused, more suspicious. Roy takes one look and immediately decides it’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen.
None of them say anything to you. But Wally knows they know.
It doesn’t matter.
Because you don’t.
Until you do.
It happens late one night at the Watchtower, when everything is quiet and the world feels far away. You’re sitting close, closer than usual, talking about nothing, about everything. He doesn’t plan it. He doesn’t think. His hand brushes yours, and this time, he doesn’t pull away. You don’t either.
Your fingers curl into his like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He looks at you, breath caught somewhere in his chest, and for a second, he thinks he imagined it.
But then you smile, soft and certain, and just like that—
Everything changes.
After a good conversation about what you two are now, and six months later, Wally is absolutely gone for you.
And it’s becoming a problem. Not because you don’t feel the same. Oh no, you reciprocate just as much
But because no one else knows.
The training facility at the WatchTower is loud with energy, filled with younger heroes running drills, sparring, testing limits. It’s the kind of session where everyone’s watching everyone else, measuring, learning, competing.
You’re in the centre of it.
And you’re destroying everyone.
Not in a showy way—nothing flashy or over-the-top—but precise, controlled, efficient. Every movement is deliberate. Every strike lands exactly where it should. You move like you’ve done this your entire life, like it’s second nature.
Because it is.
Wally isn’t supposed to be staring. He’s supposed to be focusing on his own training, running laps, helping where needed. Instead, he’s leaning against the wall, completely locked in on you.
Kon notices first, following Wally’s line of sight. Then Cassie. Then Bart, who grins immediately, elbowing Kon like he’s just discovered something hilarious.
“Dude,” Bart mutters, not even trying to be subtle. “He’s gone.”
Kon smirks. “That’s not a crush, that’s a full-blown situation.”
Cassie folds her arms, watching the way Wally doesn’t even blink as you take someone down and offer them a hand up right after. “Does she know?”
“Probably not,” Bart says. “But she probably will.”
Wally doesn’t hear them. He just sees you.
The way you push your hair back, the way you laugh with someone after a match, the way you carry yourself like you don’t even realise how incredible you are.
And Goodness—
He wants to tell everyone.
Later, at the Watchtower, the feeling only gets worse.
You’re leaning against the console, talking, relaxed, comfortable. Roy’s standing too close, smirking in that way he always does when he’s messing around.
“C’mon,” Roy says, nudging your shoulder lightly. “You’re telling me no one’s locked that down yet? That’s crazy.”
You roll your eyes, amused. “Maybe I’m just selective.”
“Ouch,” he grins. “Guess I didn’t make the cut.”
“You never had a chance.” (reference to my future 4k fic heheheheh)
Wally watches the whole thing from across the room, jaw tightening.
He knows Roy isn’t serious. He knows it’s just how he is—flirting for the sake of it, pushing buttons, having fun. It still bothers him more than it should.
Because Roy gets to do this. Stand close to you. Joke with you. Exist next to you without it being a secret.
Wally looks away, running a hand through his hair, frustrated in a way he can’t quite shake.
He wants that, he wants you.
It doesn’t help when he sees you on TV.
You’re sitting beside Vicki Vale, composed, elegant, every bit the Wayne the world expects you to be. The interview is light at first—charity work, appearances, your role in the public eye.
Then it shifts.
Vicki smiles, tilting her head slightly. “So, Miss Wayne, anyone special with you tonight?”
Wally’s heart stops, just for a second. You don’t hesitate, instead you smile, effortless.
“It’s just me,” you say. “That’s special enough.”
The moment passes.
But Wally doesn’t move, because he knows why you said it, doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt. But it's not like you don't feel it too, you feel it more than you let on.
At dinner that night, the manor is full, everyone scattered around the table, conversation flowing easily.
Bruce brings it up casually, like it’s just another topic.
“So, sweetheart,” he says, setting his glass down, “the boy you met last week at the gala in Municiberg—Tony. What did you think of him?”
You pause, already knowing where this conversation was heading.
“…he seems nice, Daddy. Why?”
Tim doesn’t even look up. “He’s asking because you’re a Wayne and still a single bitch.”
You kick him under the table.
“Language,” Bruce says mildly, though there’s no real bite to it. Then he looks back at you, softer. “You know I just want the best for you darling. I’d hate for you to be lonely. The rest of your siblings all have someone.”
Jason adds in "Ugh even Damian, how'd he find a girlfriend before you?"
"Nika is not my girlfriend"
"Sure buddy"
You force a small smile.
“Yeah. I know, Dad.”
But your chest feels tight, because you’re not lonely.
Not really. You just can’t say why.
You find Dinah later. Ironically, you told her before your own father.
She’s leaning against the counter in the Queen Penthouse kitchen, arms crossed, watching you with that knowing look she always has.
“You’re thinking too loud,” she says.
You huff a quiet laugh. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only if you know what to look for.”
You lean beside her, staring at nothing in particular.
“…I love him.” It slips out before you can stop it.
Dinah doesn’t react, doesn’t make a big deal out of it. Just nods.
“I figured.”
“I just—” you exhale, frustrated. “I don’t want to hide him. I hate it. But I also don’t want everything to blow up the second we go public.”
“You’re waiting for perfect timing,” she says.
“…yeah.”
Dinah smiles slightly. “That doesn’t exist baby.”
"I don't want to hurt Dick, and I hate lying to my dad and my family about him. But people talk Dinah."
"They always have, you can't stop it." She reminds you
"S'not fair" You mumble.
Wally finds Barry. Of course he does.
Barry’s halfway through something when Wally shows up, pacing slightly, energy restless.
“Okay,” Barry says, already clocking it. “What’s wrong.”
Wally runs a hand through his hair. “I’m tired.”
“Of?”
“Not being able to say she’s mine.”
Barry softens immediately.
“…that bad, huh?”
Wally laughs quietly. “Yeah. That bad.”
He looks down, shaking his head.
“I’ve wanted her for so long, Barry. And now I have her—and I still can’t… have her.”
Barry nods slowly.
“Sounds like you already know what you want to do.”
“…yeah.”
Wally exhales.
“I just don’t know if she’s ready.”
That night—
You call him.
Or try to.
He doesn’t pick up the first time.
So you leave a message, voice soft, tired, honest in a way you only are with him.
“Baby, can you call me back? I miss you… I'm lonely.”
It’s quiet after that.
Too quiet.
And somewhere down the hall—
Alfred hears everything.
-
It starts before you even walk into the room.
Which, in hindsight, is already a bad sign.
The Batcave is quieter than usual, but not empty, Dick’s leaning against one of the consoles, Jason’s sprawled in a chair like he owns the place, Tim’s typing away with that focused intensity that means he’s absolutely listening to everything, and Steph is perched nearby, scrolling through something on her phone.
Duke’s there too, arms folded, watching the others like he’s waiting for something to happen.
“…I’m telling you,” Steph says, lowering her phone slightly. “She’s been weird lately.”
Jason huffs. “She’s always weird.”
“Not like this,” Steph insists. “Like—smiling at her phone weird.”
Tim doesn’t look up. “Technically, that indicates external stimulation.”
“…she has a life, Tim,” Dick says.
“Not one we know about,” Tim replies.
That gets a pause.
Jason leans forward slightly. “…you think she’s got a guy?”
Steph gasps like this is the most exciting thing she’s heard all week. “Oh my god, she does.”
Duke raises a brow. “You’re jumping.”
“I’m not jumping, I’m connecting dots,” Steph says. “She’s been leaving the room to take calls, she’s been dodging questions, and she literally ignored Roy flirting with her last week.”
Jason narrows his eyes. “She ignored Roy?”
“Exactly.”
“That’s suspicious.”
Dick exhales, rubbing his face. “…or she just didn’t feel like entertaining him.”
“No,” Steph says firmly. “No, something’s up.”
Tim finally pauses his typing, looking up slowly.
“…if she is hiding something,” he says, “it would have to be significant enough to warrant concealment from all of us.”
Jason leans back. “So… a relationship.”
Silence.
They all think about it.
Then—
“…no way,” Dick mutters.
Steph grins. “Oh, there is absolutely a way.”
By the time you walk into the manor dining room the next morning, the energy is already off.
You feel it immediately.
The way conversations pause for just a second too long. The way Steph is smiling like she knows something. The way Jason is watching you like you’re about to confess to a crime. You narrow your eyes as you take your seat.
“…why are you all looking at me like that.”
“No reason,” Dick says too quickly.
“Just observing,” Tim adds.
“Admiring,” Steph corrects.
Jason smirks. “Waiting.”
You blink.
“…for what.”
“No idea,” Duke says, though he doesn’t look convinced.
You reach for your coffee slowly. “You’re all being weird.”
“Are we?” Steph hums.
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
You stare at her. “I hate you.”
“Love you too.”
Your father hasn’t said anything yet. That’s what really sets you on edge.
He’s at the head of the table, composed as ever, reading something on his tablet like none of this concerns him—but you know better.
He’s listening.
And then—
Alfred clears his throat.
It’s soft and polite, but it cuts through the room like a blade.
“I do hope,” he begins, setting down a plate in front of you, “that your late-night phone conversations are not interfering with your rest, Miss.”
Everything stops.
Your hand freezes halfway to your cup.
“…I’m sorry?”
Steph’s eyes go wide.
Tim’s head snaps up.
Dick goes completely still.
Alfred smiles pleasantly, like he hasn’t just detonated a bomb in the middle of breakfast.
“I happened to overhear a rather… affectionate exchange last evening.” (alfred in his snitching era)
Your heart drops.
Straight to the floor.
“No,” you say immediately. “No, you didn’t—”
“‘Baby, can you call me back? I'm so loneyl’” Jason recites, grinning like he’s just been handed the best material of his life.
You whip your head toward him. “YOU WERE LISTENING?”
Summary: A spoiled marksman with a smart mouth that has spent months getting under everyone’s skin, especially Paddy Mayne’s for attention from the colonel. But once he finally decides to take what’s been offered, you discover that some men are far more dangerous than the enemy.
Tags: No use of Y/N. Male reader. Bratty M!reader. Manhandling. Power Dynamics. Cocky Bastard Energy. Dirty Talk. Degradation. Semi-public sex. Rough Sex. Possessive behavior. Overstimulation multiple sex scenes. Size kink. Anal sex. Overstimulation.
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - gif
Words count: 4500
Vast desert had a way of stripping men down to their bones, sand crawling into every crevice, sun burning every patch of exposed skin and the only thing more relentless than the heat was the silence between gunshots.
Cairo, '41.
The Long Range Desert Group hauled in another batch of recruits for this mad bastard outfit Stirling and Mayne were calling the SAS.
Amongst the dust-coated, sun-cracked faces of those new boys, you stood pressed linen and polished boots, cigarette held between two fingers.
"You've got to be takin' the piss," somebody muttered down the line.
You hadn't even given them the courtesy of looking up, too busy inspecting the desert, mouth set in that bored little curl.
The nick of ‘spoiler prince’ started over the tea since you’d refused the brew due to the water tasted of canvas, followed by the springs which were bent and you'd not sleep on a thing fit for a dog.
There was also the rations aspect, the bloody sand in your boots, the way someone had folded your kit, quality of hygiene…
Within a week, half the lads were threatening to strangle you in your sleep.
Eventually they'd given up making threats and simply started covering their ears whenever your voice rose above the wind.
‘If he's no good in the field, I'll shoot him myself and save the Germans the bother.’
But then came the first raid, a Luftwaffe airstrip in the middle of nowhere you took advantage of and went silent, melting off the lorry with that long rifle of yours strapped across your back.
The lads cursed, thinking you'd bolted out of cowardice right before the sentries started dropping, each one a quiet pop muffled to the consistency of the suppressor you'd insisted on bringing and had been mocked for.
By the time the explosives were set on the parked Stukas, you'd accounted for seven men, all clean head shots from positions no one could quite work out, even after walking the ground later.
When you climbed back into the lorry that night, cigarette already lit between your lips, you'd looked at the men who'd been ready to leave you to die in the sand and given a lazy, infuriating smile.
"Anyone got a proper drink? Think I've earned one."
After that, no one argued if you wanted the last cigarette in the tin or a particular bottle of wine pinched off an Italian convoy.
The mathematics had become very simple: you killed Germans like it was breathing and in exchange, you’ll get what you wanted.
More than anything else in the world right now, the target in your sight was Robert Blair Mayne.
Paddy bloody Mayne.
You could not, for the life of you, recall the precise moment you'd begun to want him.
Perhaps it was the first time you'd seen him drunk, sleeves rolled, knuckles split with a Webley sat on the table beside his glass.
Perhaps it was the time you'd watched him take down a German patrol with a captured MP40 and a mouthful of poetry from Yeats he'd been muttering while emptying the magazine.
He was also the only man in the entire desert who looked at you and didn't see a snobbish bastard.
Plus, he was a real sight to look at.
Heavy in the shoulders, quite large mountains of biceps with the way they would shine any time he’d wear nothing but a tank top…
So you set yourself the task of earning him.
Your kill count climbed as you went out on operations no one had asked you to volunteer for, spending three days on a ridge above Benghazi watching a German colonel's daily routine until you could put a round through his eye at six hundred yards.
It had become the joke of the regiment, your reputation as a marksman had bought you a kind of respectful distance but everyone deep down knew you were mad for Paddy Mayne.
He wasn't immune to it but you couldn't have known.
He'd watched you from the very first day when you’d complain about anything and a thought had taken root behind his eyes that he hadn't shared with another living soul.
‘That mouth could be put to better use.’
He'd watched you in the mess that first night, leaning on one elbow, wrist limp along your collar undone one button further than regulation and he'd had to drink himself sideways to kill the picture in his head of dragging you into the back room by the hair.
He'd said nothing while you hooked yourself slowly and gloriously, you'd done it all by your own hand and he waited.
The waiting was its own pleasure for him unspooling himself in front of him, day by day, week by week, getting more reckless and obvious, more raw.
Three months in, you'd begun to do things you'd never have done before like starting to leave your tent flap open at night when you knew he might pass, bathing in the canvas tub to let him see your bare ass.
That night you'd lain awake in your cot, fists clenched at your sides, dick achingly hard against your stomach before ultimately giving up and realizing how he was going to drive you into the ground.
You’ve killed nine men that day and set a new personal record, coming back with blood on your sleeve along a cigarette already lit and Paddy passed you on the way to debrief, hand brushing your lower back in a single warm pressure of palm ad he whispered “Good lad."
You thought you might come in your trousers right there in the dust while he simply kept walking without looking back.
Waiting until the camp had quieted, desert very cold now with the stars that had come up so thick and white you could read by them, you slipped out of your tent with your boots in your hand and you walked the long way round the perimeter so you wouldn't pass any sentries who knew you.
Perhaps the stars had aligned that night because, the second you rounded the corner from your tent, a hand came up and closed around your jaw, warm callused weight of Paddy’s palm under your chin as his fingers pressed into the hinge of your jawbone, transmitting positive and electric feedback down your spine straight into your prick.
He tilted your face up and made you look at him, night so dark yet the moonlight allowed you to see every small fleck of grey in his stubble along the beauty of his blue eyes.
"Lookin' for me, are ye?"
He was in nothing but a white tank top, collar brownish from sweat and hair damp while those pale, watery eyes were on you.
"I—" you started.
"Hush." One thick finger went up to your lips.
"Do ye know what I've been thinkin' on every time ye open that pretty mouth of yours and start whingein' bout anythin’?"
You shook your head, you could not have spoken if your life depended on it.
"I've been thinkin'," Paddy said, his voice dropping to a rough, low purr, "if I just shoved me cock down yer throat ye'd shut the fuck up for once." He nodded slow, like he was agreeing with himself.
"Look Paddy—"
"On yer knees." He was ‘smiling’ now, not even interested in hearing your words as you went down.
The order arrived and your body answered, hard-packed sand meeting your knees through the wool of your trousers as you leveled up your head to the same level of the heavy cut of his thighs and his heavy hand came down and cupped the back of your skull, fingers spreading wide and digging into your hair as he held you there.
"Look at the Spoiled Prince on his knees in me room. The lads'd never believe it."
His other hand went to his belt and the buckle clinked, leather hissing through the loops.
He let it fall to the floor and he popped the brass button on his trousers, dragging the fly down by inches before pulling himself out.
You made a small, broken sound in your throat at how big he was while his cock hung out of his open trousers, heavy and already half-hard, foreskin drawn back to show a wet flushed head, shaft veined and ruddy.
The sight alone filled your mouth with water.
"Aye," Paddy breathed, watching your face. "that's the look I've been waitin' for. Open up."
He didn't ease in, taking the back of your skull in that wide hand of his and he fed himself between your lips in one unhurried push and the thick blunt head of him stretched your jaw wide.
"There ye are," he murmured. "Open up for me, good lad."
He pushed deeper and your throat resisted, gagging hard, eyes flooding with tears while he made a low sound of approval in his chest and held you there a moment, head of him jammed up against the soft seal of your throat.
"Easy, breathe through yer nose. Spoiled Prince with me cock down his fuckin' gullet and his eyes streamin'.”
He pulled back and you sucked a great desperate breath through your nose, a long thread of spit followed his cock out of your mouth and broke against your chin, before you could do anything about it he pushed back in, deeper this time and the head of him pressed into the muscle of your throat and breached it, heavy length of him sliding into the place and your hands came up to grab at his thighs.
He was looking down at himself where his clothed abs met your nose. "Quiet now, aren't ye? Where's all that whingein' gone, eh?“
He pulled out a half inch and pushed back just to feel you choke around him.
"Can't say much?" His thumb stroked your temple, almost tender. "It suits ye. Should've stuffed yer gob the moment ye opened it."
He fucked your face slowly, holding your head in both his hands now, fingers tangling deep in your hair and he rolled his hips into your face in a grinding rhythm and the heavy weight of his bollocks slapped wet against your chin on every stroke while your jaw ached.
Your own cock was a hot iron bar in your trousers, leaking through the wool and throbbing every time he used your mouth as a toy, proper pace of a man fucking a mouth he'd been thinking about for months by now applying long greedy strokes that pulled almost all the way out of you, leaving you gasping a single ragged breath, before driving back to the root and choking that breath off again.
Those little hitching grunts he was making in the back of his throat further amplified the amount of pleasure you were getting, all straight to your leaking and abandoned cock.
His pace ratcheted up, careful patient cruelty of him slipping and you saw it the moment his thighs started to tense under your hands.
"Fuck, don't ye dare spit—" he shoved in to the hilt and held himself there, hands on your skull as his cock kicked hard against your tongue and the first thick scalding pulse of him hit the back of your throat.
You couldn't have spat if you'd wanted to with how deep he was buried, it went straight down, pulse after pulse, flooding a quantity that seemed impossible for any man to produce.
He grunted with each spurt, low animal sounds in his chest and his thighs trembled against your shoulders, taste of him spreading through your mouth on the long thick aftertrickle as he slowly drew himself out of your throat.
He let the last inch rest on your tongue.
"Show me." And you opened your mouth, tongue a pool of him.
"Good lad, now swallow."
He watched your throat work, mouth pulling into a smirk as he pulled you closer and you ran your tongue over the softening head of him, gathered the last drops of his spend, sucked the slickness off his shaft.
"Up," he said suddenly once satisfied with the work, hauling you up by the arms with how strong he was.
In that moment you remembered watching him crack a man's jaw with a single short punch and feeling that strength applied to your own body was a different revelation.
"Now, we’ve got a wee tour to make fer me place, ye and I."
“Though ye were already done by.” The small tease back was all you could muster despite being already drastically turned on by the man who could do anything he wanted to you and you wouldn’t have minded the slightest.
“Oh ye still wanna talk?" Paddy asked and suddenly he spun and bent you, face-down, over the curved iron belly of a fuel drum, metal cold and gritty against your cheek and his big hands hooked into the waistband of your trousers dragging them down to your knees in one fast yank that left your bare arse open to the desert air.
He pressed his mouth to your ear.
"Quiet now, the lads are about. They're never quite asleep so ye keep that mouth of yours shut. Hear me?"
"Spit," he said.
"What?"
"Spit. Hand."
He'd thrust his palm in front of your face and you spat into it. He gathered the slick of your saliva and you heard him spit again himself, his hand was between your cheeks suddenly and two blunt fingers were pushing into you with no warning at all.
You bit your fist, eyes watering as he worked you open with quick brutal pumps of his fingers and no more than that before his fingers were gone and the head of his already hard again cock pressed against your hole.
"Ye'll have to take it as ye are," he murmured, almost apologetic, before he fed himself in and the stretch was brutal.
He'd been buried in your throat ten minutes ago and now he was making his way into a hole that hadn't been opened properly, with nothing but spit to slick him.
You bit the cold curve of the fuel drum, clawing at it with both hands as you made a noise like a dying animal and he clamped his palm over your mouth from behind, chest pressed flat to your back as he shushed you mockingly against the back of your neck.
"Come on, ye can take it. Ye wanted me cock s’much ‘fter all, aye?" His hips kept feeding forward and the impossible thickness of him kept disappearing into you.
Finally his hips met your arse and his bollocks settled against your own as he seated himself to the root in you, panting against your shoulder, palm hot over your mouth.
"Christ above. Yer so tight.”
He started fucking you in long fast brutal strokes that drove the air out of your lungs in puffs and rang the fuel drum. Your bare prick rubbed against the cold gritty iron with every thrust and the friction was hot.
You could hear voices somewhere off in the dark from two of the men on the late watch, smoking and laughing about something a corporal had said but it came in stutters through Paddy's hand and made him fuck you harder.
"They're thirty bloody yards away round the corner of the ammo dump. They'd see yer arse in the air with me cock in ye if they took one wrong turn. Ye'd be the talk of the camp by breakfast." He punctuated it with a thrust so deep it lifted you onto your toes. "Spoiled Prince bent over a fuel drum gettin' it, they'd never let ye live it down."
Your dick was throbbing from the way he was pounding your prostate on every single stroke, a relentless drilling into the same spot at the core of you that caused you to shake so hard the drum was rattling and he laughed against your neck.
His hand slid down off your mouth to your throat and squeezed gently just when your prick, who wasn't even being touched but just dragged against cold metal while his cock was a hot hammering bar in your guts, your whole body seized and your toes curled in your boots as you came in long thick spurts that arced out into the dark and pattered against the sand below the drum.
The pleasure tore through you so hard you saw white and your knees buckled, only Paddy's hand on your throat and his hips locked against your arse held you up.
"Aye," he breathed. "There's a good lad." He didn't stop, kept fucking you straight through the helpless twitching of your spent prick and the gasping aftershocks.
When he'd ground a few more long strokes into your shuddering body he pulled out of you with a obscene sound that made you whimper and he hauled your trousers up to your thighs but no further, turning and shoving you forward with a hand at your back.
"Walk. Don't tuck in, we're not done."
Your trousers held loose round your hips by his fist in your waistband while you ‘walked’ (more like got dragged by him) with your hole open and aching, already beginning to throb with the use he'd put it to.
He steered you between two storage tents and round the back of the cook's lean-to, past a row of crated tins.
There was the spare medical tent, used only in emergencies, currently empty, its flaps tied off and Paddy walked you straight at the back wall of it.
"Up," he said. "Arms round me neck."
"Paddy— I can't— "
"Ye can, up." He repeated the order almost like a purr while he nuzzled his face into the crook of your flushed neck and took a chunk of flesh between his teeth as both hands found the backs of your thighs and he hoisted you, back hitting the canvas wall of the tent and the whole structure swayed faintly.
Your legs went round his waist on instinct and his hips pinned you there.
His cock was already lined up and, with a shift of his hips, the thick wet head of him kissed your aching hole before he dropped you down onto it.
You sobbed out loud and clapped his hand over your mouth so fast you tasted his palm.
"What did I tell ye? Quiet. There's lads sleepin' three feet that side of this canvas. He'd come round and find ye stuck to me cock against the back of his bed. D'ye want that? Hm?"
You shook your head, frantic, his palm still over your mouth.
"Then quiet. Like a good wee whore fer me."
He started fucking up into you while holding you up entirely on his cock and his arms, one bicep braced under your arse to take your weight, the other forearm pressed across your chest to pin you to the canvas and every thrust came from below, driving up and you dropping down, angle putting his cock somewhere even deeper than before, colliding with your prostate.
His grunts were soft and hot in the crook of your neck, faint slap of his hips meeting your arse muffled by the give of the canvas at your back with the way the whole tent shook gently from each upward drive of him.
You whimpered against his palm and he kept fucking you.
"Aye, yer doin’ good. Quiet wee thing when ye've a cock in ye. That's the trick, eh? Ye were missin' it all this time."
He bit your neck hard, right where your collar would just barely cover it in the morning. You gasped into his palm while his teeth held a moment before releasing, lips closing over the spot and sucking.
A dark plum of a mark would bloom there for everyone in the regiment to see.
"Mine," he murmured against the bruise while fucking you faster and your spent, twitching, oversensitive dick was caught between your bellies, dragging against the rough cotton of his tank top while filling and hardening again, every stroke into your prostate winding the heat back up in your gut.
His teeth scraped your neck and you could feel him swelling in you, the size of him stretching you wider and the pressure on your prostate grew unbearable until he bit down on your shoulder and slammed up into you to the hilt, holding there and coming.
The heat of it flooded you at the feel of him pulsing inside you, wet of his spend painting your insides.
You came hard with him, though the target of your jet was his tank top while his own was flooding white your insides.
He held you there a long time, chest heaving and cock softening only a fraction. His mouth released your shoulder and dragged warm along the line of your throat all the way up to your ear.
"Good lad," he breathed while hitching you higher in his arms and kept his cock in you, walking the two of you back through the dark camp with your trousers somewhere round your knees, bare arse in his hands and cock plugging the spend inside you, face buried in the salt-damp crook of his neck.
"Tell me ye love it," he murmured.
"I love it… I love it. Paddy—" he squeezed your arse hard in his palm.
"Of course ye do, made for it and me cock, aren't ye?" His teeth grazed your earlobe.
Finally, the last fifty yards back to his quarters the door shut behind you as he kicked it close and the latch turned.
He dropped you on his bed as you lay there panting, trousers somewhere on the dirt floor and your shirt half off while your arse was a slick open ruined thing with his spend leaking out of you onto his blanket.
You looked up at him from the bed as he stood there in the lamplight, peeling his shirt over his head and tossing it.
He climbed onto the bed, his thighs spread wide and he reached down, gripping your hips as he hauled you up his body till you were straddling him.
"Up," he said. "Ride me, Prince."
"Paddy I— fucking can't do it…"
"Ye’re disobeying yer captain? Up on yer knees and hand on me chest."
Your hands shook so badly you fumbled it twice while trying to follow the orders.
He was still mostly hard and the third try you got the head of him lined up to sink down and he watched your face the whole way.
The slow stretching slide of him reopening you punched a thin broken sound out of your throat.
You bottomed out on him and his thighs flexed under your arse while his hands settled lazy on your hips, encouraging but not directing.
"Now go, show me how bad ye wanted me.”
You started moving, slow at first with how much your thighs were trembling, bracing both palms flat against his hot heaving chest as you lifted yourself over that thick prick of his before dropping back down and the slick fullness of him impaled you on every drop.
Finding the most optimal rhythm for your tired and cock-drunk body, he was in deep on every drop and the angle let his cock kiss your prostate every single time and your own prick was bobbing helplessly between you, leaking a thin clear leak onto his stomach.
"Faster," he said. Soft, encouraging. "Come on, Prince. Faster. Bounce on me— Ah… that's it. Look at me wee slut. Tell me ye're a slut, Prince. Say it for me."
"I'm— I'm a slut—"
"Whose."
"Yours— your slut, Paddy!"
"Good lad. Faster now. Come on, earn it."
You rode him faster, thighs burning and hole a slick well of spit and his spend.
He was emanating low pleased grunts and his hands had tightened on your hips.
A knock at the door, three sharp raps officer-style that made you freeze.
Your whole body locked and Paddy's eyes flicked to the door before smiling wickedly.
He sat up under you in one smooth motion, thick soldier's arms winding round your back and pulling you flush against his chest.
His cock stayed seated to the root in you. You could feel his heart hammering against yours.
"Yes?" he called toward the door.
"Mayne — Sadler. Sorry to wake ye. Stirling wants confirmation on the morning patrol roster before he turns in. Just a yes or no."
Paddy's mouth came up to your ear. His breath was hot.
"Answer him for me, Prince."
"Wh—what?"
"Tell him tha’ the patrol's confirmed. Don't make him knock again."
He started moving, holding you tight against his chest with both of those iron arms and he started rolling his hips up in short fast brutal thrusts, every one of them slamming his cockhead square into your prostate and punching the breath out of your lungs.
His mouth dropped to the side of your throat and his teeth fastened on the meat of your neck, biting down and sucking while he kept fucking up into you and his arms held you so tight to him you couldn't have moved an inch.
"Sadler… the— the patrol—"
You gasped because he’d shifted his angle and the next thrust hit even deeper as a ragged broken noise climbed up your throat and you bit it back into a strangled cough.
"Yes—yes, the patrol's confirmed—"
You barely got it out with Paddy that bit harder, teeth locked on your neck and hips, a piston driving up into you in fast and short thrusts knocking another piece of word out of your mouth in a broken stutter.
"You're sure?" Sadler said, voice with a strange flat of carefulness to it now.
"He's sure," Paddy purred against your throat, before barking. "He's sure! Roster's confirmed, Mike. Patrol at oh-five-hundred, all hands. Now bugger off, we're busy."
"…Right. Right. Goodnight."
Fast footsteps receding.
The moment they were gone Paddy laughed and his mouth came up to your jaw to kiss it almost sweetly unlike his hips that kept up that same brutal pace.
"Oh ye did well. He knew I was balls-deep in ye. He'll have it round the camp by sun-up and there won't be a man in the regiment by breakfast. Doesn't know me Prince spent the night impaled on me lap."
"Shut up…"
"Nah, He hush. Don't talk an’ just take it."
He couldn't keep talking either, his breath had gone ragged, at this point just slamming up into you in short greedy bursts while holding you tight to his sturdy chest, face buried in your neck and you could feel him swelling thicker inside you.
The building of a third wave was traveling up your spine until you came dry, your cock spent past its stores, just a thin clear weak dribble between your bellies, but the orgasm itself was savage and making your hole clamp down round him in helpless rhythmic pulses.
He grunted into your shoulder and bit down again before shoving up into you to the hilt and coming, hot pulse of him pumping into you on top of everything he'd already left.
Locked to his chest with no strength to go anywhere beside staying in his shaking veined biceps, his mouth opened against your own to devour it.
Soon he became your only supply of oxygen for your tired muscles while his tongue shamelessly explored your mouth messily, saliva traveling down your chin the more he enjoyed the feast.
When he let go of your mouth, the only sounds left in the room were the two of you breathing and the faint creak of the bed under you as Paddy slowly relaxed his arms and pulled out of you.
You whimpered and he lifted you off his lap like you were dead weight, setting you down on the edge of the bed and you toppled.
The dirt-floor rug under your cheek and your legs splayed limp, arse open and leaking.
Your neck a ruin of teeth-marks and bruises, eyes half-shut enough to make up Paddy’s frame standing over you, face into your wavering vision.
His hand came down, thumb dragging slow along the line of your jaw.
"Wrecked ye proper, eh?"
You made a thin broken sound that might have been a yes.
He leaned closer, mouth an inch from your ear as his voice dropped to a soft, intimate purr.
"Dunno tell me yer tired. We've only just begun, I waited three bloody months wi’ me hand on me cock at night thinkin' about what I'd do when I finally got ye. I made a very long poem and we've barely scratched the top of it." His thumb stroked your cheek.
CW — cheesy and corny (basic love plot, possible OOC, and I’m not a doctor.)
Word count — 1.8k
Summary — you take care of Chris after he was injured during a mission that went south. He chats with you during his recovery period.
“Have you gone into town yet?” one of your co-workers said, leaning against the counter with her head propped up on her hand. The other doctors and nurses replied with yeses and nays, chatting about the different bars or food vendors—commenting about the unique cuisine they get to try for the first time.
“I had this one pastry yesterday that was so good—I forgot the name though. I’m gonna head back there.”
“The alcohol is good,” one nurse said.
“Should you be drinking during the mission?” another nurse chimed in. It wasn’t allowed, but Chris was somewhat relaxed with his crew.
You had the pleasure of being stationed in Europe’s most dysfunctional family: The Balkans. You listened to their conversations, making no contributions as you read through the reports and the mission given by the BSAA—it was classified information. Redfield said it was best to have you informed and prepared for any emergencies. He only seemed to do this with you and not the others—you chalked it up to you relaying the information to the others.
Not many can say they love their job, but you could. With the good benefits, perks of traveling the world, and you get to secretly oogle the men in uniform. One certainly caught your eye: Captain Redfield. The man was an absolute tank. Taller and more imposing than some of his men and built like an impenetrable brick wall—his broad chest and shoulders, and heavily corded arms strained by the tight-forming tactical uniform that revealed every nook and cranny.
And you caught his eye. When Chris first signed you on to be a part of his team, he didn’t think much of it until he saw you in person. He instantly felt something, like something was dragging him into your orbit. It was unprofessional, but he couldn't care. He lingered closer, sharing some classified information, and treating you with special services. He even allowed you to call him by his first name when no one was around—telling you that you’re important and special to him.
The words on the document began to fade and blur. Your eyes half-lidded and relaxed as your mind entered a daydream—conjuring thoughts of Chris and the things you wanted to do with him. From cute and domestic couple things to straight, raunchy sex—feeling his massive body pressed against yours as he pounds you into the mattress during your off days.
“What about you? You haven’t placed your dime.” A male co-worker commented, directing his attention to you. You perked up from your hunched position as the other began bombarding you with their questions and comments.
“Um, haven’t been out yet. Are the locals aware of our presence? You know Captain is gonna dig into—” you wanted to shut down their blabbering, but it only served to your downfall and embarrassment.
“The Captain is definitely gonna fuck your ass. I’m surprised he hasn’t yet.” One nurse said, elbowing the other with a quiet giggle.
“Yeah, seems like he’s edging.” Now their conversation shifted to you and Chris—laughing and commenting about how he hasn’t made the first move or gotten you into bed with him. Everyone was aware of the relationship between you and Chris, some even betting on who would make the first move. A flurry of searing heat filled your cheeks. You leaned back into your chair and groaned—muffled by your hands that latched onto your mouth.
“On a serious note, the locals remain unaware of our presence. They possibly see us as tourists—no wonder they're charging more,” the last part was said under his breath. The conversation and chatter died down as everyone lounged about, waiting for the team to return. You returned to your original position, your cheeks still burning, but it made you wonder if you could be the one.
“It's quiet.” One doctor, Jessica, said. This earned displeased groans and grunts from the other doctors and nurses. “You just jinxed us,” cut through the bellowing groans. You trusted Chris to keep his men in check—although some may be lost, as this mission was of high importance. You assumed there would be tons of security to guard the bioweapons. A pinch in your gut was telling you something was arising.
Speak of the devil, as several men rushed in, informing the medical staff that several men were injured—critical injuries. They require immediate medical attention and will be arriving shortly. The doctors and nurses stood there for a moment before scrambling to prepare for the incoming wave of injured men. Everybody was running around to gather the necessary equipment and put on their unique uniform—it was to protect them from any biohazards that lingered on their persons.
The first wave of injured came through, with each doctor and nurse taking one—an emphasis on those who were critically injured. The ward was filled with men groaning in excruciating pain and the voices of the medical staff dashing around to assess the conditions and the action needed. The beds were soaked with blood gushing from the wounds—one of them was Captain Redfield. He was one of those who needed immediate attention.
Per protocol, he was assigned to your handling and care.
Xxx
You handled Chris with accurate precision and care—solely focused on making sure this man would survive. Everybody left you alone with the captain; they didn’t want to interrupt your careful work. Your calculating eyes rapidly examined every sheet and scan—the gunshot wounds almost punctured vital organs and there was increasing blood loss.
Chris was groaning, gritting his teeth as he tried to resist the painful sensations flooding his body—attempting to ignore the feeling of being stabbed and the knife twisting in the wound. His breathing was labored as you tended to him, his eyes pinching together—gripping the nearest surface with all his strength.
The procedure was simple, albeit frustrating. Chris was lucky the bullets missed any vital organs or nerves. You managed to stop the constant bleeding and remove the tiny metal capsules, cleaning and patching the wounds—some stitches were needed. You supplied the man with antibiotics to prevent infections from blooming and making the situation worse. Chris looked exhausted. He wanted to say something, opening his mouth to speak, but you shushed him.
The other soldiers were taken care of, and that’s when you were informed about what happened during the mission. All combatants were dealt with and neutralized, and the bioweapon was secure—easy and clean. What the team didn’t expect was an ambush as the enemy exploited a blind spot. Another firefight ensued, and this time the enemy was permanently neutralized. Sadly, some didn’t make it and others were severely injured—Chris being one of them.
A soldier said Redfield was a beast. He jumped on the front lines and took out multiple hostiles while saving some of his mates before continuing. During one of the rescues, he was caught lacking and the attacker emptied some bullets into him. You nodded intently, walking side by side with the soldier back to the medical area to check up on Chris and administer medication. You didn’t say anything, trapped in your thoughts. You commended the older man for his heroism and action, but he almost died.
You were aware that Chris harboured feelings towards you—so did he. You never indulged in your caged thoughts, but Chris did, ignoring professionalism and blatantly flirting with you during work. You basked in it, sometimes reciprocating. It was just the line of work. You were scared of the immense heartbreak if you received news that he was killed in action.
Now, you’re shaken. As the soldier continued to give details, your chest felt tight and your breathing was unstable. Flashes of Chris’s bloodied body filled your mind. His hitched breathing and exhaustion were written across his face. Maybe it was time to confess.
Xxx
“Was wondering when you’ll pay me a visit, doc,” Chris spoke in a low, gravelly voice—grunting softly as he tried to sit up. He wore a smile, giving up and resting against the bed. The beeping of the monitor filled the room as you tried to formulate a response, but Chris’s shirtless body drew your attention. His meaty pectorals dusted with some hair and your eyes trailed down the older man’s body to his abdomen.
“At least ask me out when I’m not bedridden,” Chris said, breaking you out of your trance and thirsting over his body.
“Uh, yeah… I’m here to check up.” You laughed it off, but you were screaming internally at being caught. The burning sensation filled your cheeks as you did the manual checkup—Chris let out a deep, hearty chuckle.
“They’re just flesh wounds, doc. A minor inconvenience.” Chris waved off his wounds as if they were an insect.
“Just flesh wounds and a minor inconvenience, my ass! You could’ve died! I could’ve lost you…” You screamed, but your voice wavered and softened towards the end. You paused your examination to look at the older man like you were gonna say something, but the words didn’t want to leave.
“It's gonna take a lot more to kill me.” It was true that it’ll take more to kill Chris Redfield. The older man has suffered extreme amounts of trauma—both physical and psychological. Not to mention he’s been through areas inflicted with powerful bioweapons that would kill anyone else, yet Chris emerged uninfected. Despite these events having negative side effects on his overall health, the older man was still kicking.
You can tell Chris was trying to reassure you that it was fine, but it wasn’t working until he said the special words. Words that you wanted to say for a long time, but didn’t. Guess Jessica is gonna win a hefty amount of money. Chris sat up, ignoring the searing pain just for you.
“It shouldn’t be a surprise that you’re special to me.” His calloused hands intertwined with yours. “During that altercation, you were on my mind. I was telling myself to make it and push through so I could come back and see you again. Cheesy, I know, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“I… I’ve been wanting to say that you’re special to me too. It's just, your line of work is dangerous and… and I didn’t want to bear the emotions of your death. After seeing you like that, it made me realize that I should enjoy my time with you.” You said, squeezing Chris’s hand—a smile and tears prickling your eyes. You leaned forward and pressed your lips to the older man's.
Chris returned it and pulled you closer, but the railing stopped you. “So, maybe after I recover and we return home—would you like to go out with me? Any place you wanna go.”
“I’d love that.”
The End
Author’s note: Hello, my strawberries! I don’t know how to feel about this since I’m hotwired to writing raunchy, gay sex. Fluff is kinda hard. Well, I hope y’all like this! This is the only fluff request.
Special thanks to my proofreader — @sagethegaywitch
ℭ𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔞𝔫𝔦𝔬𝔫 𝔬𝔣 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔪𝔬𝔩𝔡𝔶 𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔡
Ethan Winters x male reader
Summary: Saved, infected and hidden away in the estate of a man who hasn’t had company in years, now you sleep beneath the same roof as a lonely lord whose mold lives under your skin and whose obsession grows deeper the more he observes you.
Tags: Male Reader. No Use of Y/N. Lord Ethan Winters AU. Canon Divergence. Dark Ethan Winters. Gothic Horror. Possessive Ethan Winters. Obsessive behavior. Protective Ethan Winters. Corruption. Infected Reader. Mold Infection. Body Horror. Touch-Starved Characters. Emotional Dependency. Unhealthy Attachment. Fluff. Smut. Handjob. Hive mind smut. Dubious consent.
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 10000
Lifting your hand before your mind could make the decision by itself, cold and stiff fingers attached to a palm streaked with the dry residue of your own blood, made contact with Ethan's palm and his fingers closed around yours immediately, very gently pulling and lifting you off your knees with strength.
Your boots scraped on the flagstone and your knees buckled once as he drew you up to your full height in front of him.
Five-foot-eleven of broad shoulders and dirty-blond hair sticking up in tired uneven tufts, gold of his jacket scuffed at the cuffs, dark blue hoodie underneath patched at the collar.
Eyes leveled on yours from a hand's breadth away.
Pale blue-grey, ringed with exhaustion but glowing for a single heartbeat, same faint moonlight glow you'd glimpsed in the meeting hall, blue light flickering deep behind the iris and then guttering out before you could be sure you'd seen it.
He held your eyes a beat longer than he needed to before turning and walking.
You followed at a distance of three paces towards the door in the far corner of the meeting room set into a wall of black stone.
Ethan pushed it open with the flat of one hand and a rectangle of grey-white light fell in across the flagstones, so bright after the candlelit dark that your eyes screwed shut on reflex.
When you blinked them open again the world had become a wash of overcast sky and pale snow, light ricocheting off every surface, a sky packed flat with clouds mildly grey.
Crows clustered on a heap to the left of the doorstep, four or five of them shoulder to shoulder, beaks dipped into the open ribcage of something that had once been a goat. They jumped sideways and lifted with a dry papery rattle of wings the moment Ethan crossed the threshold.
He walked on without slowing, hem of his golden jacket flicked snow into small puffs.
You followed for ten or twelve steps, hands tucked under your armpits because you'd lost your gloves somewhere in the swamp and your fingers were already cold again.
Letting your head turn slowly to check your surroundings, trees were dead.
A great black thicket of them off the far side of the path, naked branches braided into each other.
Your eyes went to Ethan's back and he was a good twelve paces ahead now, head lowered and hand in his pocket, the other one swinging loose at his side.
You turned sideways and ran for three strides or maybe four. Your boots punched down through the crust of old snow and the cold was a knife in your lungs as you pulled in a great whooping breath and threw yourself toward the tree line.
The ground in front of your right boot ruptured, a wet thick suck of something pulling itself loose from beneath and then the snow itself bulged in a low dome, cracked as a long black rope of mold burst out of the earth in a single fluid lash, fibrous all along its length with thousands of tiny moving filaments that pulsed in waves up and down its body.
The end of it was bulbed, splitting open into a four-petaled blossom that closed around your ankle.
In pure surprise you gasped, the breath punched out of you in a sharp white cloud.
There was an absolute lack of pain from the firm grip, but the pressure was even and patient.
Through the leather of your boot you could feel a faint slow throb of something that might have been a heartbeat contracting and releasing.
Your foot was bolted to the ground even as you yanked, dropping your weight to try and wrench the ankle sideways but the mold-thing simply moved with you, refusing to release.
A small panicked noise climbed your throat and you swallowed it.
Ethan's bootsteps stopped at all somewhere off to your right, snow creaking under his weight as he half-turned.
You couldn't look at him head-on, too busy hauling at your trapped leg, but in the corner of your sight you caught his profile.
Clean line of his jaw, stubble catching the cold light, breath pluming white past his nose.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," he said, voice easy and without anger or annoyance.
"If I let you go," he said, still not looking, "would you do me a favor and not run?"
Snow ticked down from a high branch somewhere and landed in a small soft slap.
You could feel your own pulse in your throat, a slow ebb of cold creeping up your trapped calf where the mold pulsed warm against the boot.
"Okay." You nodded once, word thin and you hated how it sounded.
The tendril held a second longer as it contracted, a slow firm squeeze around your ankle before it unspooled and the long black rope of it folded back into the snow with a wet retracting sound, fibers pulsing as it went, vanishing through the slot in the crust it had punched on its way up.
You went down on one knee, both numb hands at your ankle, fingers fumbling at the leather of the boot, peeling the trouser-leg up to look.
The skin above the boot top was streaked with a long dark smear, black and glossy, it gave a little under your fingertip when you touched it, leaving a smudge on your thumb.
No bruise or cuts thankfully, just a faint prickling warmth where the grip had been.
You looked up. He'd turned the rest of the way now, gold jacket bright against the dead trees behind him, hands folded back into his pockets. He didn't answer right away.
"What did you do to me?" Your fingers were already moving, shoving your shirt up and letting cold hit your abdomen to take a better look at the bandages there, a long clean spiral of pale linen wrapped around your middle from the bottom of your ribs down past your hipbone, neat overlapping turns of it.
No blood or a thread of dirt at the edges.
You looked up at him with the shirt still bunched at your sternum and a rattling cough came out of the trees behind you.
Turning your head over your shoulder there was a hunched shape, one shoulder higher than the other.
The coat it was wearing was Stoica's, you could see the brass of the third button gleaming dully where the snow hadn't covered it, but his face was a pad of black moss bristling with fibers and split vertically up the middle into a vertical mouth full of sharp fangs.
His arms were completely fungus and black, now long far past his knees now, hands fused into great curving talons, four to a side while moving towards you in a lopsided shuffling trot.
Scrambling backward and letting out a curse as your eyes pinged off everything in arm's reach for anything to protect yourself with.
An arm came around your chest from behind, bicep settling above your sternum and it pulled. A short steady draw that brought your back flat against a wall of warmth.
You hit his chest and the breath went out of your lungs.
He was lean but packed dense underneath the gold canvas of the coat, dark hoodie below it thinner than you'd thought and through the knit you could feel the long flat shelf of his pectoral pressed against your shoulder blades, slow lift and fall of his ribs at your back along tight cord of muscle that ran along the inside of his forearm where it lay across your chest.
His right hand was the one wrapped around you and through the cuff of his sleeve where the wrist met your jacket you felt the difference of him, a smooth waxy coolness where skin should have been warm, fingers a little too stiff but the rest of him radiated heat.
His chin came down past the side of your head, stubble at his jaw catching the shell of your ear.
In front of you the moss-faced thing that had been Stoica contracted on itself with a wet crumpling sound and it went down to its knees in the snow, dissolving from the bottom up.
The body within it puddled into a thick black slurry that drained down through the snow in seconds.
Your hand was on his forearm without even thinking.
"I'm sorry about that," he murmured.
His mouth was right at your ear, warm breath puffing on your face and tickling the small hairs at your hairline, breath fogging the side of your jaw before it dissipated.
"I haven't had anyone with me in a long time."
You felt your own throat work.
"I'll keep them off you," he said, softer still. "I promise. They won't even look at you."
His arm flexed across your chest, pec at your back tightening as you felt the line of his hipbone settle against your back and felt, behind the cloth of his trousers, the thigh he'd braced behind your own to keep you both upright in the snow.
Nodding at his words, head moved before you could stop it. The tip of your ear brushed the corner of his mouth as you nodded and you felt the warmth of his lower lip catch the rim of it for an instant.
A small sound left him.
Somewhere in the muscle of your chest, was a feeling you couldn't name but that had grown a half-step stronger when his hand had taken yours. Now, with his arm wrapped around your chest and his breath on your ear, it pulsed warm in time with the deep crawling itch under the bandage at your side.
The itch climbed and spread up under your sternum till it reached the side of your neck and behind your ear toward the place where his mouth was.
Trust him.
Lean.
Don't move.
A third quiet thing speaking up out of your own pulse.
Your shoulders settled deeper into the shelf of his chest and he held you for another long count before, gradually, his arm loosened.
He drew his hand down across your sternum, heel of his palm sliding from your collarbone down past the buttons of your coat before he let you have your weight back.
The cold rushed in where he had been and you realized, with a small hot pang you didn't want to admit to, that you missed his warmth already.
He stepped around to your side, hand brushing the back of your elbow as he came past.
"Duke's waiting up the road," he said in a lighter voice now. "He gave me a lift down here, helped me with the bandages too, all the supplies for that came out of his cart. I owe him about six favors already." A short tired laugh. "I was running late for the meeting and he had the day free. Said he'd take us back to my place once we were done."
He was looking up the path ahead when talking, head tilted with a small careful smile at the corner of his mouth while you followed behind.
The two of you fell into a slow even pace and he kept himself at your shoulder rather than ahead of it this time, close enough that your sleeve brushed his every third step.
At the bottom of the bank, on a flat patch of churned snow, the cart was waiting.
The man on the box was the size of a small barn, sitting enormous and patient under the small rooftop of he cart, a cigar clamped at the corner of his vast mouth.
His face was humanly pale and pleasant.
"Ahhh, Lord Winters," he said and inclined his head a degree. "You return and in good time, I see."
"Duke." Ethan dipped his chin back. "Thanks for waiting."
"For you, always." The Duke's small clever eyes slid sideways and settled on you. They warmed. "Ah, our little stray is up and walking. How splendid." He took the cigar out of his mouth while looking down at you. "I confess, when our good Lord went into that hall I was uncertain we would see you, young man, come out at his side. He feared it greatly, you know. That and the worries of what Mother Miranda might have planed for one so freshly mended."
A small wince ran across Ethan's face and didn't exactly meet your eye.
"Duke," he said, in the tone of a man who has been needled by a friend and embarrassed.
"What?" The Duke spread one enormous hand, the pipe dangling from two fingers. "Am I not to be honest? You spent the whole carriage ride pacing, you wore a furrow in my floorboards."
He looked back at you and his mouth twitched in a big grin. "He paced and asked me three separate times if the meds I offered him were enough for you. I told him, of course they were, and here you are." The smile broadened. "Splendid. Splendid."
"Meeting went all right," Ethan said firmly, redirecting. "Heisenberg ran his mouth. Dimitrescu wanted him for the cellars. Donna stayed silent as usual. Miranda decided he'd stay with me."
"Mmm, as she should." The Duke's eyes had not quite left you. "And how delightful for you, by extension. Some company at last in these long gray afternoons of ours, eh? A new face." A pause. The mustaches twitched again. "Do see, however, to keep your moldy fellows out of my pantry, Lord Winters. One of them got some scratches on my the size of my own head last month and I am still owed."
"Duke, those things don't even attack unless I tell them to."
"No, they do not and yet the damage is there. What am I to conclude?" The Duke chuckled, a warm rumble while waving the cigar. "Joking, joking. Mostly. In, in, the both of you. The road back is long and the light goes early."
Ethan stepped up onto the running board and the cart creaked. He turned in the open door of the cabin and held a hand down to you, palm up.
Up close in the grey light you could see, faintly, that the lines on the palm were too pale.
Slowly, you accepted his hand and fingers closed as you went up the step on the pull of him, his other arm coming around your back as you came up over the threshold to keep you from cracking your knee on the doorframe.
The cabin was quite small and there was a single bench seat upholstered in dark red pillows, a hanging lantern swung gently as the cart shifted under your weight.
You sat and his thigh was already against yours, shoulder pressed to your own, hip wedged into the curve of his hip and there was nowhere else to put yourself.
The door clapped shut, outside the Duke moved his cart began to move with a long low creak, runners grinding on snow, clop of hooves muffled by the drifts.
Cabin rocking you both gently.
"I'm Ethan, by the way," he said while half-turning to face you in the cramped space and his knee bumped yours as he did. "Ethan Winters. I should've said that before. Listen, you don't have to address me with any of the Lord stuff with me." He made a small dismissive gesture, "I never asked for it. Half of those other lords scare me as much as they scare you, all right? Probably more, because I have to see them at meetings."
He laughed, short embarrassed sound.
"Anyway. I'm sorry about all of this. Those people from the village who took you up there and all the rest. I've been trying for months to get these stupid rituals stopped. I was up at the rock because I'd heard the next victim had been chosen and I wanted to—" His jaw worked. "I wanted to be there so no one else had to die for nothing. I got there as fast as I could, I'm sorry I wasn't faster."
Letting him finish as the cart rocked you sideways into his shoulder
Then you said, quietly, "Why did you lie to her?"
He blinked.
"Sorry?"
"Mother Miranda. About how you saved me." Your voice came out steadier than you'd thought it would. "You told her you patched me up."
The look on his face was, for one small unguarded moment, that of a man caught flat-footed. His mouth opened and closed, brows drew together in a small troubled crease. He glanced once toward the front of the cabin where the Duke's head was visible.
"Well," he said, "that's basically what it was. There was a lot of blood and I had to work fast. The Duke had supplies on him, came up the path right after, helped me get you wrapped so I could carry you down—"
"Indeed I did," the Duke called amiably from the box, without turning around, focused on the road ahead. "A great deal of linen and brandy, also, but only for myself, you understand."
You waited a heartbeat.
"I remember what happened on the rock. I didn't, when I woke up, but I do now."
The cabin was quiet except for the crunch of snow under the wheels.
"I remember the men turning into those monsters like the one I saw before."
Ethan's face had gone very still.
"And I remember you standing over me with your hand on my wound. And I remember—" you swallowed, "—I remember the veins on my skin going black for a second because whatever's in those men, you put it in me."
You hadn't meant for the last part to come out as steady as it did, proud of yourself for it. There was fright underneath due to sitting hip-to-hip with one of Mother Miranda's lords in a moving cabin, but you kept the fright tucked low under your collarbone where he wouldn't have to see it.
He looked at you for a long moment, lantern light catching his eyes and that blue bloomed up from behind the iris.
Your heart kicked hard against your ribs.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Okay."
He let out a breath and turned a fraction more toward you.
"You'd have died," he said. "If I hadn't done what I did. That knife went in deep, your liver was nicked and there was so much blood under you on that rock the moss was drinking it up faster than you could lose it and I still had maybe a minute. There wasn't time for anything that wasn't what I did."
"Tasty Lord business, this is," the Duke remarked from the box, around his pipe. "I do try not to listen, of course. There’s a hole up there, however."
"Duke, please."
"Listening intently."
A short sigh from Ethan and looked at you with apology.
"He's a friend," he said quietly. "The only person on this whole damn mountain who's been a friend to me and he hears most things eventually anyway."
"Am I going to turn into one of those monsters?"
Snow under the runners, lantern above swinging.
"No," he said.
"How do you know?"
"Because every other time I've tried to save someone and share it on purpose, they turned. Every single time." His jaw worked, very bright eyes lifting.
"You didn't." The smile that came onto his face was small but the realest thing his face had done since the meeting hall.
"You're the first one," he said. "It's not making you into one of them and listens to me a little." He let out a small breath that was almost a laugh. "I didn't know it could also go like this. I had hoped, but I didn't know."
His left hand came up and settled, broad and warm, on your other shoulder, mirroring where his right hand had rested in the meeting hall. The thumb pressed gently at the hollow above your collarbone, fingers curling around the back of your shoulder, heat of his palm soaking through the wool of your coat.
"You must be tired," he said and his voice had dropped again, the intimate shape of it. "After everything that happened. The road back is long, couple hours at least. You should rest, you've earned it."
His blue eyes glowed.
It was not a flicker this time but a steady deepening, pale ring of color around each pupil filling in with a soft underlit blue.
In time you realized vaguely, with the deep crawling itch under the bandage at your side, the slow throb that had been climbing your sternum for the last hour.
A weight came down behind your eyes, starting at your eyelids and pulling them down a fraction as your eyelashes brushed and you blinked. Your shoulders settled lower, breath in your chest went deeper and slower.
You tried to track Ethan's face, it was easier to look at than anything else and your eyes wanted to stay on it.
The blue glow softened.
"That's it," he said gently. "There you go. Shhh." His hand on your shoulder slid, palm going up the side of your neck, thumb tracing along the line of your jaw.
The itch under your bandage purred.
You did not remember closing your eyes, only that a moment came when it was easier to keep them shut than to lift them again.
There was something solid at the side and your cheek was on it, broad shoulder of the dirty blonde man, scratch of a hoodie collar at the corner of your jaw.
Above your head, very softly, his voice murmured something maybe to himself or the Duke, you couldn't tell. The words bent and warped as if you were underwater listening to people speak on the surface.
A hand settled in your hair, fingers carding once through it and then resting at the back of your skull, cradling the weight of your head against him.
"I've got you," he said, very low, somewhere far above you, somewhere very close.
Sleep is not really sleep when somebody else has put it in you.
The dark behind your eyelids was warm and you floated just below the surface with your cheek against his broad shoulder.
There was a clean note over the top of him, plain soap under a sweetness that gathered at the throat where a man's pulse sat.
Under the canvas of the gold jacket there was an earth-sweet smell of a fir forest in autumn after snow when the duff under the needles has gone soft and the white lacework of mycelium has started to bloom under bark.
A clean dampness with a faint sugary edge of decay underneath, almost fruity.
It almost smelled of decay but not unwell.
You drifted with that smell in your sinuses for a long time as the cabin rocked until it stopped abruptly.
The Duke clucked sharply and the whole cabin gave a hard short jolt as the carriage settled on its springs.
Your head, balanced on the slope of his shoulder, slid forward with the inertia and your chin dropped toward your chest.
His hand was on your wrist before your head had finished falling and that small tug ran up your arm.
You stirred, eyelids fluttering as the world came back in pieces like the faint blue glow still alive somewhere in the bottom of his eyes but it had guttered as you focused on him and it dimmed back to a normal blue-grey.
"Oh— oh, I'm sorry, I— sorry, I didn't mean to—" you jerked back, straightening off him fast enough that the side of your head felt a small cold rush where it had been warm against his collar a heartbeat before and you blinked twice.
He smiled, corner of his mouth pulled up only on one side and his eyes softened as he let his hand drop off your wrist.
"You're fine," he said.
"Ah-ha. Awake at last." The Duke's voice rolled back from the front, fat and amused. The back of his huge head was just barely visible through the small slot set high in the cabin's forward wall, the plume on the band trembling as he laughed his velvety laugh. "You see, my Lord, I told you he would not cross. Good evening to the both of you, then. We have arrived."
"Thanks, Duke." Ethan reached past you for the door handle and his arm brushed the front of your coat as he did. "I owe you. Really. For everything."
"Pish." A wide pale hand waved itself through the slot. "Take care of him. That is payment in full."
"Goodnight, Duke."
The door swung open and a wash of evening air poured into the cabin, making your nose sting on the first inhale.
Light outside had gone deep flat grey, sky overhead bruised purple at one edge and pewter at the other.
Ethan stepped down first and the runner of the cart creaked. He turned in the snow half-pivoting and lifted his hand back up to your palm-open.
Your fingers were stiff from the long ride as you accepted it and let him guide you down the step.
His other hand came to your elbow as your boot found the snow and stayed there a second longer than balance required.
Behind you the Duke's voice rose in a soft burr to the creaky wheels as the cart shifted and eventually the trees covered it’s shape.
You stood in the snow with him, the clearing he had brought you to was wide and ringed with trees and full of the bones of houses.
There were maybe a dozen of them leaned at angles of long abandonment, some half-collapsed with their roof beams gone and snow gathered in their open ribs, others still mostly standing with their windows blown black and their front doors hanging crooked off bent hinges.
The clapboards had gone grey with weather and lichen, snow laying deep across all of it.
Whatever city this had once been, it was a ruin.
What lived here now was black mold, thicker ropes across the ceiling and inside them, slow contraction-and-release of fibers along their length.
He was walking toward the largest of the houses, the only one that still looked truly intact.
"Welcome home," he said over his shoulder, light and dry with a small laugh in his throat. He glanced back at you and the corner of his mouth pulled in a crooked way and he shook his head slightly at his own joke.
He stopped at the foot of the porch without putting a hand on the door.
Three ropy threads of mold slid out with a faint wet whisper, met at the seam where the door butted into the jamb, hooked their bulbed ends under the top rail and pulled.
The latch lifted with a small clean click and the door swung open inward on a slow hinge. The black retracted and tucked itself away into the wood until you could only just see the thin dark seams where it slept.
He went up the steps, very casual to him with the way he moved while you followed up the steps and across the threshold into the warm dim of his house.
He took his jacket off and dropped it across the back of a chair.
There was a long couch where he plopped on, a low table in front of it of dark wood and many ring-marks.
It was, in its way, beautiful.
But the black was everywhere as your eyes adjusted.
A thin dark vein crawling up the corner of the wall behind the sideboard pulsing faintly when you held your gaze on it.
Small ropy tendril coiling around the ceiling along a flat black stain that spread across one upper corner of the room.
Around the legs of the sideboard the black had grown up out of the floorboards into a small lacy fringe, pulled tight and dense.
He had not said anything for a while, settled into into with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, elbow on the armrest and cheek propped on the knuckles of his left hand.
His pale hair caught the light and went a deeper gold as he observed you, eyes following as you took in the place and they did not move away when yours found them.
He had been watching you for a while and there was nothing tense in him, steady focus of a man who had nothing better to look at and didn't intend to.
When your gaze caught his, he smiled and his left hand came down off his cheek and patted, twice the cushion next to him.
You hesitated, feet did wanting to cross the rug.
There was the sleep he'd put in you in the cart still sitting low in your bones, the smell of fungus rising warm from every corner of the room along with also the memory of the moss-faced thing dissolving in the snow… add to that the glow of his eyes.
Crossing the rug anyway because you still had in front of you a fricking Lord, someone you deeply venerated together with the others.
You sat down on the couch one cushion from him and you did not let yourself sit deep, hands flat on your thighs.
He looked at you for a moment, a small soft hurt, almost too quick to catch. The corners of his mouth pulled in fractionally, line between his brows deepened a hair and those eyes glowed, briefly, brighter than they had since the meeting hall, a clean cold blue that lit the underside of his lashes for the space of a single long blink, and then dimmed.
He didn't reach for you.
"Want a glass of wine?" he asked.
The question hit you sideways. You'd been braced for any number of things and you had not been braced for that. Your mouth opened. Closed. He'd already turned away from you and was leaning forward over the low table to lift a dark green bottle off it by the neck.
The bottle was old. glass hand-blown, slightly wavy in its profile, the label across its belly a square of foxed paper with Romanian printing in faded black.
He turned it in his hand, looked at the table, made a small low grumble in the back of his throat and reached his other hand across the boards in a half-blind grope.
It was, you thought without meaning to, very attractive. The frown made him look five years younger along with ten years more human and your chest did a small hot thing it had no business doing.
He stared off into the dark of the arched doorway that led to the kitchen with his head slightly tilted as if listening.
In the kitchen doorway, a black mass uncoiled out of nowhere along the floor, long and ropy, head of it lifted off the planks and it came in fast across the rug. It carried two stemware glasses, one in each of two bulbed clusters at the front of its main body, crystal balanced absolutely level as the long stems caged in fine pulsing fibers that held them like a hand holds the stem of a glass.
The thing flowed across the room without sound and reached the table, first cluster opening and setting the first glass down on the table by Ethan's hand.
He closed his fingers around its stem without taking his eyes off you as the second cluster lifted.
It rose off the floor on a long slow curve of its own body and the glass came up with it, climbing the air and turned in the cabin lamplight, sliding across the small distance between the couch and you.
The bulbed end paused in front of your chest, stem of the glass held out as the fibers pulsed once around it in a small offering motion.
Your breath stopped while your hand approached it very slowly, thumb and first two fingers closing on the stem of the glass through the cage of fibers.
They weren't slimy, you realized that with a strange small lurch in your chest, instead something almost pleasant, a soft-textured warmth.
The mold let go and the glass was yours, bulbed cluster retracting as the long body of the tendril folded back across the floor and as it went the whole of it began to disassemble.
It thinned along its length, split into runners and filaments that sank into the gaps between the floorboards and were gone, wood closing over them with a soft small dry tick.
A flinch ran from your shoulders down through your whole back the second it retracted and he laughed, shacking his head a fraction and reaching for the bottle and worked the cork out with the heel of one hand.
The wine ran into his glass dark and glossy as it got poured, almost black with a thin line of red glow.
He scooted along the couch toward you, thigh sliding closer along the leather until his knee was a hand's breadth from yours.
He leaned across you with the bottle and tilted it, pouring a small splash into your glass, no more than a swallow and a half, dark wine pooling at the bottom of the bowl.
"Probably not the smartest thing for someone who just got patched up," he said quietly. "I know, but come on. Just a little won't kill you." A small laugh while set the bottle on the table. "Felt like doing something special. Y'know? It's not every night I come home with company."
He sat back and raised his glass, waiting.
You stared at the small dark pool in the bottom of your own glass.
In a different version of this evening, you thought, you were dead.
If Lady Dimitrescu had won the argument in the meeting hall, you would have been on a hook in her stone cellar somewhere west of here and the daughters would be drifting into the room in slow swarms of black insects.
Had Moreau won, you would have been in a shed while getting conducted experiments on.
Heisenberg would have let the lycans have their meal to make a show for everyone else to enjoy you.
Instead there was now a glass of wine in your hand and a man on the couch watching you over the rim of his own, face tired and quietly pleased to be have you here with him.
Maybe luck had finally turned a corner with you.
"Thanks," you said very quietly and the corner of his mouth pulled up, tilting his glass toward yours and letting the crystals touch.
The wine was sweet as you took a sip, not a cheap artificial one but a deep red ripeness that opened on your tongue.
Black cherry first, then a deeper plum that was almost cooked, edges of it touching with vanilla from the oak it had slept in. There was a thin warm ribbon of honey running underneath.
You let your eyes close for a second on the swallow and when you opened them he was watching you with that same quiet focus.
"You like it?" he asked.
Nodding because you didn’t trust your voice yet, you drew the glass in close to your chest and held it against your sternum.
He picked the bottle up off the table and turned it in his hand and squinted at the label.
"Tămâioasă Românească," he tried.
The name fell out of his American mouth in a long disaster, vowels collapsing into each other and the diacritical syllable came out somewhere between three different sounds, none of them right.
It was so bad you laughed, a small startled thing high in your throat and his head came up at the sound of it, looking at you in real surprise and pleasure as his free hand spread in a small helpless gesture.
"That's not it?" he said. "That's not even close, is it. That was bad."
"Tă-mâ-ioa-să," you said slowly, laugh still in your voice. "Ro-mâ-neas-că. The â is a back vowel, you put it back here." You tapped the back of your tongue without thinking. "Tămâioasă."
"Ta-mai—"
"Tămâioasă."
"Tămâioasă."
"Better."
"Românească." He nodded once, satisfied with himself while setting the bottle down. "Thanks. I've been mangling that label for a year." He huffed, a small quiet self-deprecating noise. "If I ever meet the man who made it I'd have owed him an apology. Now I owe him a slightly smaller one."
You laughed again and his face when you laughed was a thing to look at, corners of his eyes creasing deep, mouth opening just slightly, small white line of his lower teeth showing.
There was warmth in it along a small level of hunger borderline of obsession.
Be it either for joy in chasing away the loneliness he must have felt… or something else entirely.
The blue glow rose under his iris and stayed for a long slow second before it dimmed.
You took another small sip of wine to have something to do with your face.
"So." He shifted on the couch, tucking one leg up under him so that he was half-turned toward you. "Tell me. New Lord and all this stuff up at the rock. What does the village say about me?"
"What?"
"Stories… i dunno, myths? Whatever they tell the kids." A small wry pull of his mouth. "I know they say something, nobody's been brave enough to come up here and tell me and I'm curious. What do they say?"
You took a breath.
"I don't think anyone really knows why the rituals started," you said. "People argue about it. Somebody says Mother Miranda asked for them, somebody else says no, the priest started doing it on his own to please her, someone else says the elders did it— like there’s this crazy hag telling things no one's sure." You looked into your wine. "But yes, there are stories about what… you are."
"Okay." His curiosity amplified.
"Some of them think you eat people."
He made a small amused sound. "Mm-hm. Eat them how?"
"That you're slowly draining people. That if someone goes to the new Lord's land they come back tired, weaker and you've taken something from them." You let yourself half-smile. "One old woman down by the reservoir says you drink spirits the way Lady D. drinks blood… like breathe their life out of them or something."
He laughed, bright and surprised, tilting his head back against the couch and letting the laugh out at the ceiling, almost losing the grip on his glass of wine. “What else?"
"Some say you eat the dead. I— I don't think that one's the worst though. I've heard worse."
"Tell me the worst."
You hesitated.
“Please?” He set his now empty glass on the small table ahead of him and fully turned his attention entirely on you, blue in his irises taking a very bright color while his face held a big smile of curiosity.
"They say you can put pictures in a person's head," you said. "Whoever walks too far into your land, you make them see things that aren't there. The old ones say a hunter went up your way looking for lost cows two summers ago and came back and walked into the reservoir on his own, said the river was a road and his dead wife was waiting on the far bank. They say you can make people mad just by sitting near them long enough."
You looked up and the joy had died out of his face.
His mouth was still set in something like a smile but his eyes had gone a little more still and less mobile.
"Wow." A small, almost airy smile back at you, the kind you put on a face when a face needs one. "I was just thinking, It's funny the things people come up with." He set the glass down carefully on the low table. "I wonder if anyone's making lambs of these stories at midnight to scare their kids."
"Probably."
"Yeah."
He was leaning toward you, having been doing that the entire conversation, you realized, angle of his shoulder rotating an inch every few minutes, cushion under him compressed slightly more on your side than the other and his arm along the back of the couch was literally right behind where you were sitting while you now looked down at the glass in your hand.
The quiet had begun to come down but he broke it before it could settle.
"Hey," he said.
His voice was very quiet, a different register from the laugh.
You looked up and his face was closer than it had been, moved while you were looking down, only a few inches, but a few inches at this distance was not a small thing. You could see the faint stubble along his jaw along with the dry cracks at the center of his lower lip where the cold had worked at him on the trip up.
His pupils were huge.
"I'm really glad," he said, "that I got there in time. I keep thinking about it," he went on, soft. "On the way down, I kept thinking about what could have happened if I didn’t get there fast enough." A small breath, shape of a smile on his face.
"I'd have been really upset about that. Instead you're here in my house drinking some wine with me. That's actually pretty good."
His hand had come down off the back of the couch and the tip of his middle finger was a hand's breadth from your thigh.
"You're safe here," he said. "You should know that nothing in this house is gonna hurt you. The lycans don't come up here. Anything that walks in off the path, I know about it before its second step hits the dirt."
He paused.
"I'm gonna take care of you," he said, voice in that sentence very quiet. The half-smile was still there but the blue at the back of his eyes had risen up bright, burning steady.
“I promise you that." He didn't move his hand or his face, staying exactly that close to you, eyes on your own without looking away.
Your throat had gone tight, hands closing harder around the bowl of your wineglass and the knuckles had gone a paler color.
You sat there and looked at him, lips parting a fraction and closing again as the slow black vein on the wall pulsed.
There was no flicker at the corner of his mouth or small shift of the eyebrow, his face just held and the blue glow stayed steady. pupils wide.
Your heart was very loud in your ears and you had the uncomfortable thought that he was timing your heart.
Then his face moved, smile softening and pupils contracting by a hair. The blue glow at the bottom of his eyes dimmed until it was almost gone and his shoulder lowered.
"Sorry," he breathed out, audibly. "That got a little heavy. I didn't mean to lay all that on you ten minutes after we got in the door."
His hand came up off the cushion and brought it to your shoulder, settling there with the same firm weight it had settled with before, palm down across the slope of you, the heat of it seeping through the wool, the thumb tucking itself into the small soft hollow above your collarbone where his thumb had rested earlier.
It rested there a moment and he squeezed before patting you twice.
He pushed up off the couch with a small grunt low in his chest, soft involuntary noise while stretching a little, free hand going to his back.
The hoodie rode half an inch above his belt again and you saw, very briefly before he settled, the fine dark line of one of the veins running up his spine that pulsed under his skin.
He bent and picked up his empty glass from the low table and set it back down a few inches further in toward the center of the table.
"C'mon," he said. He smiled down at you. Tired. Real. "Let me show you the spare room. Trip was long, you gotta be wiped."
You opened your mouth to state how you slept the whole way, the wine had loosened a small warmth in your belly and your body, for the first time in a long time, felt almost rested.
Opposing the idea of staying more with him you just closed your mouth, nodding instead.
"Yeah," he said, soft, almost to himself. "Come on up."
He turned and the heat of his palm slid off your shoulder as he led you to the stairs.
The wine had gone to your knees a little as you stood, floorboards giving back a hollow low note under the heel of your boot and you had to put your hand briefly to the arm of the couch to steady yourself before you came after him.
He was already at the foot of the stairs when you heard, very small from somewhere deeper in the house, maybe in the kitchen, two small pair of lungs working a small mouth to emanate a high wavering hiccupy cry of a very small baby.
Fussy hitching cry of a baby that had been left in a room to sleep and woken up and could not find what it had been looking for, the small wet ’hah— hah— ha-aaaaah’ of a child too young to know words.
Hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and you stopped, turning your head a half-inch to the left and you listened.
A shape went through the dark, hunched a lot and the silhouette of it made your stomach clench at the sight of those molded monsters inside the house.
You took a step toward it unconsciously before a high thin ringing started out of nowhere, rising at the back of your skull.
It started low in pitch and it climbed steadily through the bones behind your ears, getting into the hinges of your jaw and small bones in front of your ears.
The cry started to muffle but, when you pressed your hand to your right ear, the ringing cut all at once and the corridor was quiet, cry of a possibly existing baby now gone.
"Hey."
His voice came from above as you looked up.
He was four steps up the staircase, back on you and never turning, broad shoulders perfectly square to the top of the stairs.
There was no rise and fall on his shoulders, waiting with his face away from you because he did not, at this exact moment, want you to see his face.
"Everything okay?" he asked, same warm tired voice he had used on the couch, nothing in the voice that matched the stillness of the back.
You wet your lips and looked once down the corridor past the stairs.
There was nothing in it, no shape or movement. Neither a foreign cry you swore you had heard.
"Yes, Lord Winters," you mumbled.
The words came out small and faint, word ‘Lord’ rolling out of you on the old habit of the village, the way you'd been taught to say it of any of the four since you'd been a child.
He nodded and he started up the stairs again and, as he turned to take the next riser the side of his face came briefly into view and you saw for a fraction of a second before he angled his chin the other way, that the fine pale lashes on the near side of his face were lit blue,.
Then he was past it, angle gone and back of his head gone before he was climbing.
"It's Ethan," he said, easy, over his shoulder. "By the way. You don't have to do the Lord thing, I never got used to it. It feels weird coming at me. Just Ethan's good."
You did not answer, moving after him with your hand on the banister as the stairs made small confidential creaks.
He stopped at the door present at the very end of the hallway on the left of the stairs.
"Here you go," he said.
He turned the knob and pushed the door inward, stepping half aside to let you in.
It had been a study, you thought, or a storage room.
Maybe both.
There was a narrow bed against the far wall and a small window at the left, linen pulled tight and the dark wool blanket folded down at the foot of it in a careful triangle.
There was a small wash stand with a chipped enamel basin, a writing desk at the right of the door and there were boxes scattered a bit everywhere.
He stepped past you into it and looked around with a small reflexive wince.
"Ah," he said. "Yeah. I'm sorry. God, I had no idea I was gonna have somebody. I haven't been here in months. I'd have cleaned it up, I would've gotten all this out," He bent and lifted the brass lamp off the top of the nearest crate, set it down on the desk. "I'll get all of these out first thing tomorrow. You'll have a real space from now on."
A simple yet possessive curl on the ‘now,’ half-smile at the corner of his mouth went deeper and you ducked your face.
"Thanks," you said. Soft. "It's not a problem, really. My house wasn't that clean either, back home there were always things on the floor. My mother used to leave her sewing across the chair, you'd sit down on a needle if you weren't paying attention." You let out a small breath that wanted to be a laugh and wasn't quite. "It's fine. Really. It's a kind room."
He chuckled and his face crinkled at the corners of his eyes and he set his hand on the door frame, leaning a little on it.
"Yeah?" he said. "You miss it already?"
"They didn't lift a finger," you said.
It came out flat and small, looking at the leather trunk at the foot of the bed and not at his face.
"For the ritual," you said. "When the men came for me, nobody said anything. They let them tie my hands and take me up the path. Probably ate dinner that night with no much problem and the priest was going to come in the morning to tell them something about how my sacrifice was needed for the village to—" Your throat tightened and you swallowed it down.
The room held quiet and you did not look up at him.
He did not say anything for a long moment while you felt him looking, steady weight of his attention coming down across the side of your face.
"Hey," he said softly and you looked up.
Half-smile still there but it had gone narrow and tender at the edges, his blue eyes were no longer glowing.
"They didn't deserve you, okay?" he said quietly. "Get some sleep, the bed's pretty good. Bathroom's two doors down on the left and, if you need anything, my room's at the left end of the hall, you knock, I'll be up. I'm a light sleeper."
"Goodnight," he said after a beat. "I'm really glad you're here."
He stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut.
You stood for a moment in the middle of the small floor, listening for his footsteps going down the runner before taking a seat down on the bed.
The mattress took your weight with a small obliging compression and the wool blanket scratched at the back of your hand where it fell on it.
Putting your elbows on your thighs and leaning forward while putting both hands over your face, heels of them pressed into your eye sockets.
He'd seemed kind.
That was the small careful thought your head kept circling.
The glowing blue eyes and the times where he’d just stare off while observing you were the things influencing a ten out of ten for this place.
And the black mold everywhere.
How could you forget that with a small branch right inside the wall of your own room.
Looking around the room carefully, the window looked out over the back garden, although the black past the glass showed nothing.
The drop on the other side was a long drop if the window was on the second story above bare ground, plus glass.
Regarding the door, it had no inner lock and there was no second exit beside the window.
The little window at the end of the hall, beyond your door, looked out over the front. If you could get to that at some hour deep in the night, you could put your boots in your hand and walk on stockinged feet down the runner to the end of the hall to try the latch on the small window and you could—
Your eyelids dropped, they went heavy at once all in a rush and the room blurred at the edges.
The pillow was firm and good under your cheek as you laid on it and the room smelled faintly of cedar and wet moss.
You came back into yourself slowly many hours later and the first piece that came into focus was your currently hot skin all over, pillow under your cheek damp where your breath had been going on it and the collar of your shirt clung at the back of your neck.
There was a fine sheen of sweat at your hairline while you were lying on your side, curled a little and with one leg drawn up.
The next piece that came up into focus with the heat was the heavy ache of your cock that had been hard for a while without being touched, fly of your trousers strained at the laces and shape of you pressed up into the rough cloth, lining already wet at the spot, a small dark warm circle of damp where your slit had been leaking quietly for some time.
The pleasure was already there in all of your muscles, a long slow heat at the base of your dick.
Big and wide palms were on your sides, heat of them siping through your shirt and they moved on you in long slow strokes, up from your hip to the bottom of your ribs and down again to waist-level.
"Hey." The voice was at your ear so quiet and close yet it felt whispered from insanely far away, mouth at your temple and the voice of a man very familiar.
"Hey. You're okay. It's just me."
Ethan's voice.
"You're so warm," he said right against the shell of your ear. “That's a lot, huh? You've been like that for a while."
A small breath, almost-laugh, warm puff of air moving on the side of your face.
"Can I help?"
You tried to answer, mouth opening and tongue moving as your breath came out in a small high shape neither a word or a no.
The hands on your sides did not stop, went up and down, thumbs on the upstroke pressed in just under the edge of your ribs and the pressure was perfect as those hands took the sound as a yes.
"Yeah," he murmured. "Lemme."
A hand left your side to come around to the front of you and sliding down, careful as the heel of it pressed for a long second against the hard hot shape of you in your trousers while your breath came out of you as a low broken “hh-hhh—“
His hand worked at your belt and it came loose soon, front of your trousers parting to let his hand dive inside.
The skin of his palm on the bare skin of your cock was hot and his fingers wrapped on it, long thumb laying itself flat down the underside of you and the four fingers closing around your shaft.
Your hips bucked into the grip and it gave back a slow sweet stroke, down to the root, knuckles of his pinky finger brushing your sack at the bottom and then all the way up, ring of his fingers tightening as it went over the head, thumb pressing flat across the wet slit and smearing the leak across the crown so that the next downstroke was wet and slick.
You bit your lip hard trying to catch the noise that wanted to come up out of you but some of it got past and your face turned into the pillow.
Your eyes were open, you thought, you could not be sure, the dark inside the room and the dark inside your head looked like the same dark.
His breath was on your cheek, so warm up close and it smelled faintly of the wine you shared.
"Yeah," he said, low, into the side of your face. "There you go."
His hand worked you in a long slow patient rhythm, up and down, grip pulsing at the top, fingers tightening as they came over the head, then easing as they slid back down.
He gave you all of that like he would have given it to himself and your hips moved under it without your permission, pushing up into his fist on every upstroke.
"Mm," he hummed. "Look at you. You're being so good for me."
His weight shifted, you felt it through the mattress as the bed dipped and he was over you, chest pressed against your shoulder blades, hips fitting against the curve of your ass and the work of the hand on your cock not pausing, long slow stroke continuing through the readjustment while his face tucked itself into the crook of your neck.
Fine dark stubble at his jaw scraping soft against the side of your throat and the underside of your jaw, a clean small bright pleasant friction and he turned his face into you and pressed his open mouth there, a small wet warm kiss landed there, followed by many more up the line of your jaw to the corner of your mouth, stubble dragging between each kiss while the soft of his lips landed wet.
Your hand came up and found the back of his head and his hair was soft as your fingers slid up into it before his mouth crashed down to yours.
It was a long slow open kiss, lips parting yours, tongue coming forward between your teeth warm and exploratory, sliding along the surface of yours with a careful unhurried thoroughness and you opened to him, you opened your mouth to him because your mouth was already open because you had been making small soft hurt noises into the pillow and your jaw had gone slack with them.
"My Lord," you breathed into his mouth and you had not meant to say it.
His hips jerked, a long heavy line of his against your ass jerking involuntarily and you felt him through the layer of his jeans and the layer of your trousers, long thick hot ridge of his big bulge pressing against the curve of your backside.
Shape of it laying along the cleft of you and the head of it was up against the small of your back.
When his hips jerked the line dragged across you and a low ragged breath came out of his nose into your cheek.
"Now I like that name," he muttered, into your mouth.
The rhythm of his hand on your cock and the rhythm of his hips at your ass came in together, long hot shape of him grinding gently against the curve of you and a small needy whimper came up out of him into your mouth.
His hand sped up, strokes shortened and wet sound of his fist on your slick cock got louder in the small dark room, thumb working the head on every pass and your body answered, hips fucking up into his fist in small fast jerks.
"You're close," he breathed into your mouth, almost amazed. "I can feel it in you. Can you feel that?"
You could feel his hand on you and you could feel it through your skin.
He was in you, that was the thought.
His tongue stroked yours patiently
"Come on," he breathed, into your mouth. "Let me have it. Come on, baby."
His fist tightened, hips grounding into you harder to let the long thick shape of him dragging hot and heavy, breath quickening in your mouth as his moan came up into the kiss.
Your last small thread of holding snapped and you came, cock kicking in his fist and the first stripe shot hot across the back of his fingers, second over his thumb and the third pulsed warm down the side onto the inside of his wrist.
You cried into the mouth engulfing your own as his fist worked you slow and patiently through every long shuddering throb, milking each pulse out of the head of you, thumb collecting the spend off the slit and sliding it down the shaft to make the next stroke wetter until there was nothing left to give and you were shaking against him with a fine low tremor.
He pulled back enough to look at you, face coming into focus above yours.
The blue of his eyes was glowing, steady and bright, pupils huge and round in the middle of the cold blue and the light from his eyes washed faint across your cheek, his face so flushed the high color was up across his cheekbones in two warm uneven bands and down the side of his neck, hair a little damp at the temples and he looked so handsome.
He looked down at you with his glowing eyes and his flushed face.
"I love you," he breathed into your mouth. "I love you, I love you, I love you—"
You woke up hard, body snapping up out of the dark and your eyes opened, ceiling of the spare room over you, place very dark and empty.
Your chest was heaving, hair stuck to your temple and shirt wet at the collar, trousers and everything still.
The front of them was wet together with the small sour-sweet smell of spend rising up out of the cloth.
You sat up slowly and careful, face going hot at the wet dream you had gotten.
A very strong one at that.
A knock on his door would not be necessary, the small wet sounds of you cleaning yourself in the basin would not carry through the wall.
You did not see what was on the floor at the foot of the bed, now small low dark on the boards in the corner of the room near the leather trunk, last fine traces of a black thing that had been there.
A network of vein-fine black lines spread out across the boards, all radiating from a point on the floor near the foot of the bed where, perhaps, the toe of boots might have stood, lines fading and dissolving back into the wood.
By the time you had stood up off the bed with your hand at the wet front of your trousers and your face hot with embarrassment, there was nothing left on the floor.
You're a ghost, so what? You can still suck haunt the hottie in your house! <3
nerd x ghost! reader
patreon oneshot (maybe series???) here
preview below (MDNI)-
"It's okay," he hears softly, feeling the bed sink down just a bit, his heart hammering in his chest.
"Fuck, I can hear you..." He mumbles, the flushed, pink cockhead dripping even more pre, you're damn near drooling at the sight. "Hah sorry, really I j-just... mngh..."
You can't help but lean over him, hair brushing his skin - it's as if he feels it, making him jerk just a bit as it brushes across his hips, one of his hands tangling in your hair -making him halt.
"Is that you?" His voice is breathy, you can feel him tugging, your eyes flutter shut, nodding just a bit, he laughs softly, cock pulsing in his other hand. "I'm touching you?"
Your answer is to put a hand on the back of his, letting him shove your head - guiding him, really.
"Are you sure?" He's whining out when you not again, cursing under his breath. "I've never had..."
"Your first blow job and it's a ghost," he can't hear you of course, but you can't stop your giggle, your tongue swirling - fuck, you can taste it after hardly tasting anything at all these years, the salty precum. You lap it up greedily as his hold on you gets more tangible, and he can faintly see the little outline of your body.
"Oh my fuck..." he's gasping out and shoving his cock in your mouth, your hair is glimmering in his hold, your body clear and transparent but he can see it, he can feel your mouth on him. "How is it s-so hot... if physically you... does it all work like-"
"Shut up and let me suck you," you mumble, and gasp when he pouts. "You hear me?"
"Yeah, you're kinda mean," he grins then. "It's hot."
a bit nervous, considering i’ve never sent an ask here before…if you’re comfortable with it, can you do a popular gyaruo reader x an emo loser who tutors the reader? theyre good friends, they’ve been friends for years. and like, theyre studying in the emo’s bedroom, when he leaves to go to the bathroom and m/n somehow comes across the emo’s notes on how much he’s obsessed with the reader and wants to feminize and dumbify him and freak shit like that. then emo comes back and gets mad at him for snooping thru his shit, and then they have sex!!
but if you don’t want to do it, just ignore this ask lol!! no need to do it if you don’t want to!!
ఌ 𝐄𝐌𝐎
w.c › 6.7k
warnings › bottom male reader. OC.
kinks › lite feminization, manhandling, dumbification, degradation, dubcon
ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-
“You and Matsuda-San are friends?”
That was how everyone, no matter their age, would react when you brought up Matsuda Kota casually in conversation. You were quite the persona since middle school. Going against the dress code to fit your gyaruo style. Kota, however, was quiet.
Some labeled him an ‘emo’ but he just had long black hair and mostly wore black clothing. At least that’s what he would say. His hair was so long that his bangs regularly covered his face.
You wore black clothing too—but they were often paired with bold pieces. You wore black eyeliner to make your eyes pop. It was only in university when you were able to go full out in being a gyaruo—a male version of a gyaru. Though you were on the more simple side of the aesthetic.
The full makeup and outfit took so much effort that you only did it on rare occasions. Or whenever you were in the mood to sit in front of a mirror for over an hour.
Your parents were lacking in the usual strictness that older Japanese people were known for. So you basically wild out—a stark contract to Kota whose parents were so overly strict it was concerning.
That’s probably why he spent most of his time over at your house. The two of you met in middle school. By pure accident.
You were sent to your homeroom teacher’s office for being caught with eyeliner. After a stern talking to and being shoved outside of the room with some wet wipes—you were too busy wiping your eyes to notice Kota standing in front of you.
It was only in middle school that you were taller than him. You bumped right into him, causing him to crash to the ground. His bento box spilling all over the floor.
“Woah! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.” You kneeled down and carelessly began scooping up the food with your bare hands, dumping them into the bento box. “Five second—”
“I’m not eating that.” Kota rudely interrupted you.
You blinked, finally glancing up to look at him. He had an ugly bowl cut and thick rimmed glasses that looked too big for his face.
“Pfft—!”
Your lips clamped shut as you quickly covered your mouth. Eyes wide while Kota’s narrowed.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing. You look ridiculous too.”
Kota huffed. He roughly grabbed his bento box from your hand and walked away. You stood up and looked to your left, seeing your reflection in the window.
He was right.
The makeup was all smudge—giving you perfect raccoon eyes. A laugh left your lips. It was honestly a look. You rushed after Kota and wrapped your arm around his neck. He grunted and tried to push you off but you used your height to rest your chin on his head.
“Since we both look ridiculous, we should hang out!”
Kota groaned. “What are you—?”
“My name is Togami (Name). But you can call me (Name), no one calls me Togami.”
“We just met, why—”
“Because it’s sooo boring. My name is so much better than Togami. Don’t you agree?”
“Well—”
“Anyway, what’s your name?”
“Matsuda Kota, why—”
“Can I call you Kota?”
“Are you going to keep interrupting me??” Kota yelled out, stopping you both in your tracks. You stared down at him before grinning slyly.
“Sorry, Kota-kun~ keep talking, keep talking. I think I really like you!”
“I didn’t give you permission—”
“Lunch’s almost over! Hurry, we don’t want to be late for class!”
“I said stop interrupting me!”
The rest was history. Which led to where you are now. University. You were able to dress up more and didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble with teachers for a little bit of eyeliner.
You and Kota decided to rent an apartment together. With your parents' help mostly. They were retired and had a decent amount of savings. Kota paid for everything else that your parents didn’t cover. You were just there to decorate the apartment.
Kota really didn’t care about that type of stuff. His bedroom was bare. Really bare. It looked exactly how it looked before you both moved in. The decoration he had in there was from you. Though he rarely allowed you in his room.
The apartment was covered in a lot of furry furniture. Black, brown, and gold. Leopard print… it was a mess but also somehow worked for the chaotic vibe you were going for. Your bedroom was the only real mess.
In any case, you and Kota lived together fairly well. Despite everyone being shocked that the two of you were even friends. You were outgoing and nice–Kota was quiet and a little bit rude. Everyone called you by your first name… no one but you could call Kota by his first name.
It actually got you into hot water once with Kota.
“You can call me (Name), I don’t mind!” You proudly said, grinning at your clubmate. You and Kota joined the photography club to kill some time. The club was meeting at a restaurant as a way to get to know everyone.
Everyone said their introduction. Kota’s was as bland as ever while you were practically bursting with excitement. You were sitting beside some guy–you couldn’t remember his name–and was telling him that he didn’t have to be formal with you.
A loud clink of glass hitting the table startled everyone even with the bustling sounds of people excitedly chatting. Eyes were all on Kota. His beer glass had a small crack on the bottom, the yellow beer slowly seeping free all over the table. He calmly grabbed some napkins and dabbed at the liquid.
“Uh, waiter!” The club leader waved someone down and pointed to the pointed glass.
You only watched Kota, blinking as he seemed to not even react to anything. Not when the waiter carefully took away the glass. Not as a few other clubmates wiped away the mess. Not when a new beer glass was placed in front of Kota.
Kota only grabbed a skewer of meat from the shared plate in the center of the table. He took a small bite, his gaze not even flickering over to you. It took a minute before everyone began to talk like normally, as if nothing happened.
As soon as the club leader had mentioned that everyone should start heading home–you were roughly grabbed by the arm and tugged to stand up. Everyone watched in silence as Kota grabbed your coat and backpack without a word.
He draped your coat around your body, buttoning it without allowing you to properly put it on. Your arms were restricted but he didn’t seem to care. Kota nodded his head at everyone, wrapping an arm around your waist and guided you outside.
“Kota. Kota, I can’t move my arms,” you tried to push your arms through the sleeves but Kota kept pulling you forward. His hand tightening his grip on the curve of your hip. “Kota!”
He hummed. “Does everyone need to call you by your first name?” His words suddenly stop you in your tracks. It was only now that he actually stopped as well. You both were far from the restaurant by now.
“I let everyone do that.” You muttered, eyebrows furrowing in confusion.
“Maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Where… is this coming from?”
Kota looked you in the eye. There looked to be something there… the need to say something. Something that could possibly change things. But he only shook his head.
“Forget it.” He removed his hand from your waist, finally allowing you to properly wear your coat. You follow behind him as you slip the coat into place. His words swirled around in your head but you didn’t say anything.
You still allowed people to call you by your first name. At least the people you had already allowed to but for some reason, anyone new had to call you by your last name.
Nothing was said. It just happened.
But you couldn’t forget the one time Kota had overheard you introducing yourself to a new member of the photography club.
“Hi, I’m Togami (Name). You can call me Togami or Toga!” You said, smiling wide as you excitedly shook their hand. Your gaze flickered to Kota who was standing right beside you and his expression was pure smug.
A small smirk tugged on his lips. Big enough that even another member noticed and asked Kota what he was thinking about to smile like that.
Kota only hummed. “Nothing.”
That was really the only time Kota had ever been mean towards you. Or at least angry. Afterwards he didn’t use any force on you again. Which really made you wonder what upset him that badly.
But you never brought it up again.
“If you want at least a B, you’ll need to get an 80% on the final exam, Togami-San.”
You groaned, rubbing at your face. Your grades in college were decent. Could be better but decent. Your parents were just happy you weren’t flunking. The fact you even went to college surprised them and your entire family.
It wasn’t like you didn’t care but you didn’t go above and beyond like others. You studied like twice a week. Each time before an exam you studied a bit and somehow that allowed you to continuously get Bs and A minuses.
Good enough. Some would kill for that.
However your studying method was proving to be useless for one class. The one class where you had your first ever D.
Organic chemistry.
Now why are you taking organic chemistry?
Well because you’re dumb.
Dumb enough to not realize that you signed up for the wrong class until it was too late and you had to continue taking it. You were a literature major! Why would you ever need organic chemistry?
“It’s okay, (Name)-Chan~” Hinata, your classmate, gave you a wide grin. “Maybe you should do tutoring.”
“Tutoring?” Another one of your classmates chirped in, Genki. He was a fellow gyaruo who put more effort into everyday makeup in comparison to you. A true legend. “What (Name) needs is a miracle.”
Hinata rolled her eyes. “Don’t make it worse. You’ll stress him out. I know someone who took organic chemistry as a freshman and actually passed with a 99%!”
“99%? Woah,” Genki’s mouth dropped while you perked up at her claim. “How—? That professor is strict. How'd that kid pass?”
“Don’t know but he was even the teacher assistant last year. He’s good, really good. But he doesn’t just tutor anyone.” Hinata turned her gaze over to you. “You might have to really beg for it.”
You frowned, “beg…? Ah, it can’t be helped. I’m not failing that final exam!” There was no way you’d let this class ruin your semi perfect record of As and Bs. “Where can I find him?”
“He’s an engineering major! My friend said he’s currently a teacher assistant for engineering 101, class should be ending right now. Go stop him before he leaves!”
The thought of having to beg some stranger to hopefully pass your class was a little stressful. Technically your whole life was up to this one dude.
And judging by how Hinata had described him—he wasn’t exactly the helping type.
He already reminded you of Kota.
Ah, Kota.
A giddy smile pulled on your lips at the thought of him. It’s already been three years of living with him and you had begun to realize you had a crush on him. Nothing serious at the moment but it certainly was something.
You found yourself doing more things for him. Making him lunch or dinner. He wasn’t a breakfast person so you never forced that. Two days ago you even bought him a leather jacket that reminded you of him. Though you still haven’t given it to him yet.
You’ve given him things before. Especially not an expensive leather jacket. It was around ¥291,500. Nothing cheap at all. But it was real leather with fluffy fur around the collar.
Perfect for winter that was right around the corner.
Thinking about Kota, you began wondering what you should make him for dinner. You stood outside the classroom door just as students began to walk out.
“(Name).”
“Kota?” You blinked, looking over to see Kota standing right beside you. Your head tilted as you blinked. “You’re taking this class as a junior?”
Kota fixed the strap of his bag as he raised an eyebrow. “I’m the teaching assistant.”
“Ah!”
Well looks like luck was on your side after all.
You grinned and rushed to his side, grasping his arm with your hands. “Kotaaaa~”
Kota only hummed and looked down at you. The height difference wasn’t by much. Your head was the perfect height to rest on his shoulders—which you constantly took advantage of.
“Can you tutor me? In organic chemistry? I heard you passed the class and I need to get an 80% on the final exam to even pass the class. Please, please, please—”
“Sure.” He interrupted you.
You blinked.
That was really easy.
Well, getting him to tutor you was easy but he wasn’t an easy tutor at all.
“If you can’t even memorize this then don’t even bother showing up to take the exam.”
“Kotaaaa.”
“Try again.”
It had only been a week and you were pooped. Kota didn’t let up. Each day after dinner, you’d spend almost two hours sitting at the dining table as he tutored you. No breaks, no days off.
And yes you were certainly learning and retaining information… but you were also tired.
“67%,” he said, placing the mock final exam he made you take on the table after grading it. Despite his rough tone—you knew he was semi happy about your progress in just one week. “I’ll test you again next week.”
You sighed. Better than nothing. You used to get 20-30% on the exams. This was an improvement.
Kota cleaned up the dining table while you placed your head on the table. You were only going to close your eyes for a second. But soon you found yourself in bed. Hands tugging up your shirt.
“Kota?” You groggily whined, placing your hand over his. His hand was larger than yours. He stopped what he was doing and leaned away a bit.
“You’re awake?” He asked. You felt his hand slipping away but you quickly tightened your grip. With sluggish movements, you tugged his hand up, making him gently cup your face.
He didn’t stop you nor did he say anything. If you weren’t struggling to even stay awake, you would’ve noticed his thumb gently rubbing circles on your cheek.
“I got something for you.” You whispered.
“Like what? Is it a thanks for tutoring you?”
You weakly shook your head. “No. It’s…” your voice trailed off, eyes struggling to stay open. “It’s just for you. Because I like you. It’s underneath my bed.”
“Don’t fall asleep.” He gently tapped your cheek. “You still have makeup on.”
“I like you… didn’t you hear me?”
“Mhm.” Was all he said in response.
The rest of that moment was a blur. You remembered feeling makeup remover wipes on your face. Kota grabbed the box from underneath your bed but he didn’t open it in front of you. Your eyes were basically closed by then.
He whispered something and then you were fast asleep.
Another two weeks passed. It was uneventful. Kota continued tutoring you and you made significant progress. Your little puppy crush was beginning to grow by the minute. Especially now that you two were spending most nights together.
You didn’t have to ask about the jacket because not even a day later you saw him wearing it. It made you so giddy that you almost laughed right in front of Kota. Luckily you managed to hold it in.
Despite organic chemistry being the worst class you’ve ever taken—you certainly had to thank it for allowing you the opportunity to be near Kota for such long hours.
However there was something you began to notice.
Kota didn’t allow you in his bedroom.
At first you didn’t notice because well it’s not like he comes into yours. You both were close but still wanted the bedrooms to be your own personal space. But now that you two were studying together for a long period of time… you and Kota would sometimes study in your bedroom.
It was a mess, obviously, but Kota didn’t seem to mind.
But it was like his room was off limits before you could ever ask.
Nothing was wrong with that per se… at least at first. Until you finally realize it when Kota always keeps his door locked. The door was always closed and even locked sometimes.
That’s strange, right?
Was he hiding something?
What would someone like Kota have to hide? He’s such a normal guy at the end of the day. You were the one that had more to hide but your day was basically left wide open at all times. Even when you were changing.
Like right now.
You slipped on your boxers, yawning. The thought of looking for some pajamas felt like a hassle. Your body was tired and even struggling to stand up straight.
“Where did I put it…” you whispered mostly to yourself, rubbing your shirtless chest. It was certainly a sight to behold. Your makeup was only semi cleaned off, your eyeliner was being stubborn and your lips were stained from left over lipstick. It’s kind of why you never wear lipstick that often.
It always stained your lips.
Just like your clothes, your pajamas were also heavily influenced by gyaruo clothing. You even dabbled a bit in more feminine pajamas. Simply only because male pajamas were boring half the time.
You knelt down and grabbed your silk shirt. It was plain black but felt nice to sleep in. “Pants… where’s my pants?” You spun around, now facing the doorway when you finally noticed that you weren’t alone.
Kota was watching.
He looked like he had just finished taking a shower. Hair still damped while the towel laid around his neck. An old beaten up white t-shirt and black sweatpants. His bangs covered his right eye entirely.
You gulped. Your own semi nudity was the last thing on your mind. Just the fact of seeing Kota in clothes that didn’t cover his body entirely. Nothing baggy that hid his muscles. You were allowed to see everything.
Almost everything.
Your bottom lip caught between your teeth. You didn’t even realize just how bad you were ogling him. Though it seemed to be mutual when you glanced up at his face.
Kota was staring at you. Really staring at you. His gaze flickering from your thighs to your chest. You still hadn’t slipped the shirt on yet.
Feeling yourself heat up from his strong gaze, you slipped the silk shirt on. That finally broke the spell as Kota quickly looked away. He began quickly drying his hair.
You finally found your pants, right near your dirty hamper. They were actually shorts. A matching pair to the shirt. You stepped into them and it was basically the same length as your tight boxers. These were one of your more feminine pajamas.
“Well,” you spoke, blinking slightly as you glanced over at Kota. “Uhh,” your lips pursed together. Hands wringing together. “Can I ask you something, Kota?”
He hummed. His eyes still focusing on anything but you.
“Can we… maybe study in your room one day?”
That caught his attention. His eyes snapping over to you. “Why?”
You froze. This was probably one of the first times Kota ever pushed back against a request of yours. Usually you could just say one word and he’d do it without hesitation. Not even asking why you want to do a certain thing.
It wasn’t always like that—that behavior didn’t start until high school.
“Oh well…” your voice trailed off. There was technically no reason. Or really any good reason. “Uhm, I just… want to change the environment.”
“We can study at the library.”
“Kota.” A pout on your lips. “I don’t wanna. I like being at home.”
“Then we can study on the balcony.”
That did sound nice.
You sighed. “Then… if I pass with an 89% can I celebrate in your bedroom?”
Kota raised an eyebrow. His face was neutral but you could tell he was getting agitated. The slight twitch in his upper lip, the way his grip tightened on the towel. “89%? That’s high.”
“Yeah, so if I do that good, then you have to grant my wish.”
“Why do you want to do that? Be in my room so badly?”
You were nosy, that was certainly the main reason.
But instead of saying that…
You said, “because I want to be in your scent.”
Which, in hindsight, was one of the stupidest things you had ever said.
I want to be in your scent? What did that even mean?
It was one of the strangest things you’ve ever said. And you were known for being weird to Kota.
Oh well—you couldn’t dwell on it too much because to your shock, you did it.
“How??” Hinata and Genki stared at the final exam paper in shock. There, written in bright red ink, was the percentage 90. You had done better than you had even thought was possible.
You simply smirked. “I managed to get that tutor you told me about.” Was all you said before heading straight home.
Kota was home, luckily enough. You had bought some take out and a case of beer. A smug smile on your lips as you walked over to where he was sitting on the couch.
He closed his book as soon as he saw you. His gaze solely focused on you. Your cheeks felt a little hot from his gaze but you straightened your posture. You placed the food and drinks on the center table.
“I took the exam.” You reached into your bag, excitedly pulling the exam paper out. The paper was folded as you handed it over to him. He took it, you excitedly sat down beside him and inched close, wanting to see his exact expression once he saw your score.
Kota opened the paper and despite the fact his face didn’t move an inch, you could tell he was proud. “Amazing.” He simply said, placing the paper on the center table. “How do you want to celebrate?”
You pursed your lips, eyes looking to where Kota’s bedroom was located. There was nothing else that needed to be said. Kota got the hint immediately.
Kota’s bedroom was the exact same as you remembered. The last time you had seen it in its full glory was maybe a month after you both moved in. To say it had no personality was an understatement.
It didn’t feel lived in if it weren’t for his studying material all over his desk. You plopped down on his bed as he sat at his desk, placing the items you brought on the surface. He glanced over at you with an unamused expression.
“This is all you wanted to see?”
You eagerly nodded your head. “Well yes.”
“You’re weird.” He opened a bottle of beer with a bottle opener. “Enjoy my scent.”
Your cheeks felt hot.
Kota’s room really was uneventful. He didn’t even have a tv. You stuck to watching something on your phone. About an hour or two passed when Kota excused himself to the bathroom.
You only huffed and moved to rest more comfortably on the bed when you felt something poke your back. It felt like a notebook. Underneath his pillow was a small little notebook—a diary was your first thought.
Now, did you originally plan to snoop around Kota’s room? No, you did not.
But now that you had the opportunity to possibly read his diary were you going to miss it?
No.
While you might be able to understand Kota’s expressions after spending so many years with him—it was too tempting to be able to read about his thoughts.
Who was he talking about? Jealousy bubbled deep within you. Who was lucky enough to be the object of Kota’s affection? It wasn’t like he talked to many people that weren’t you.
You gasped as the diary was roughly ripped from your hands. It was there you came face to face with an overly pissed Kota. A first. The last time you ever saw Kota this angry, his face actually showing the full emotion, was back in middle school.
Your stomach began to twist into knots. The idea of angering Kota this much hadn’t even crushed your mind. Sure you were pushy sometimes but you never wanted to ever make him feel this way.
It was silent. Your mind raced a mile a minute. But nothing left your lips.
Kota let out a humorless laugh. Another first. He stared down at you. “Are you weirded out?”
“Huh?” A soft gasp left your lips. Your eyes flickering up to stare at him. He towered over you. You sat on your knees on the bed.
He waved the diary. “You read what was in this.” His voice sharp. “You’re weirded out, right? You want me to leave don’t you?”
“Why—? Why would I want that?” You quickly moved to stand up but Kota grabbed your shoulder and shoved you back down. It should’ve upset you that he put his hands on you but you felt your cock twitch in your pants.
“Stop acting dumb.” He carelessly tossed the diary behind him. His eyes never left you. The intensity in his eyes scared you but also made you incredibly horny. Who knew he could act like this? “You read it, you saw what I wanted to do. Degrade, feminize, and dumbify—you saw it, didn’t you? Don’t spare my feelings.”
You quickly shook your head. “I wouldn’t… I wouldn't judge what you… do in your free time.”
Kota froze. He raised an eyebrow before leaning further down. You leaned back until your back bumped into the wall, effectively caging you in.
Your heart was beating so fast you were sure he could hear it. You clamped your legs together. Why was this actually doing something for you?
“How did you get that 90% on the exam?” He finally spoke.
“Huh?”
“You. I want to degrade you.” His hands pressed on either side of the wall, gaze harsh. “I want to make you pretty, only to ruin you for anyone else. Who else would I ever want to see naked beneath me?”
“…huh…? Kota…?”
Kota sighed. “I’ll move out as soon as possible.” Was all he said as he began to pull away.
“Wait—!” You grabbed his shirt and tugged him back towards you. The force causing him to accidentally bump his nose against yours. “Ow,” a whine left your lips but you quickly pushed through the pain. “Why… why are you going to leave me?”
“Did you not understand a word that I said?” Kota responded, his tone exasperated.
“I did. I did and I don’t mind. I like you! Didn’t you know that? I told you…”
Kota tilted his head. His gaze focused solely on you. “You always tell me that you like me. Was I supposed to believe that one time was different?”
You frowned. “Well I did mean it differently. I meant that I like like you.”
“You like like me?”
“Mhm.”
Kota laughed. You were seeing a whole new side to him. “Do you like me enough to let me do whatever I want to you?” He asked, his voice deep. There were simple words but somehow they felt heavy in your chest. It didn’t feel like it was a simple easy thing to agree to.
He seemed mad but not that mad that you thought he would’ve been. It felt different. A scary different. But not scary enough that you didn’t nod your head in agreement to his words.
“I need to hear a yes.” He said.
“…Yes.” You whispered. “I really like you.”
For the first time ever, Kota’s lips pulled into a wide smirk.
Your cock twitched at the sight.
You would’ve never expected that Kota would be the kinky type. Honestly you ever really expected that he’d be into sex… or anyone really. He didn’t seem like the type. It’s why you didn’t expect anything to happen from your feelings.
But here you were, hands tied together above your head with Kota’s belt. Undressed—your boxers being the only clothes you were allowed left.
Kota didn’t say anything at first. He had silently tied your wrists together, manhandling you to rest on the bed. His hands gripped your skin. It felt harsh and rough but it didn’t scare you.
“Kota…” You whispered.
He was silently taking in your body. His hand slowly tracing up and down. As his hand reached your inner thigh—you let out a gasp. Your legs clamped together as your cheeks heat up and feel hot to the touch.
“Kota… are you mad?”
“No,” he answered. His hand squeezed your thigh before he reached his other hand and grasped your other leg. He easily parted your legs open, it happened so fast you didn’t even register it until your legs touched the bed.
Kota sighed. His gaze flickered up to look you in the eye. “I’m not going to do everything I ever wanted.” He said. That somehow disappointed you. “I don’t want to rush this… not now.”
“Rush?”
“(Name),” he whispered your name as if he was worshipping you like a God. So soft and tender though his eyes held a certain hunger that made your stomach clench. “I’ve always wanted you to cry on my cock—letting your makeup mess up your face.”
“Really?” You couldn’t help but grin. “Is that why whenever you saw me with my makeup a mess, you’d get quiet?”
Kota didn’t respond. He moved to sit between your legs. “When we moved in together, I thought I’d have to deal with you bringing in random people to have sex… or maybe even get a boyfriend. How lucky am I that you aren’t able to date anyone?”
“Hey, I was single on purpose!”
“Sure.”
You frowned but before you could say anything else Kota pushed your legs forward. A strained grunt left your lips. The stretch was a little unnatural—not a position you’ve ever done before.
“Since it’s our first time, I’ll be nice. Okay?”
“You’re a virgin?” You muttered, blinking slightly.
“Aren’t you?”
“Ah,” you quickly looked away, biting your bottom lip. “Not… exactly.”
It was silent.
Too silent.
“Kota…?”
The sound of fabric tearing caused you to cry out in shock. You looked over to see Kota focused solely on your legs. Your boxers were torn open, the cool air teasing your hole. Embarrassment shot through your body when you realized Kota would have a perfect view of a certain something in your ass.
Finally, your little secret was revealed.
“(Name)…” Kota chuckled, his voice deep. His index finger circled around your sensitive rim. Your body shook from the touch. “Is this a butt plug?”
So, it wasn’t as if you expected sex today. You had just wanted to be a little… adventurous today. After your exam you had actually come home first before going back out to buy the food and beer. Just for fun.
It was a small plug. Only stretched you a little bit to where you could feel it if you shifted just right. But other than that it didn’t feel like anything was inside you.
Really the only thing you expected tonight was using your dildo late at night as you imagined Kota fucking you instead. Luck was really on your side today.
“Did you wear this all day? Even when you took your exam?” Kota grasped the edge of the plug, slowly tugging it out. You gasped—tugging at the restraints around your wrists. “Did you masturbate like a pervert, hoping no one would notice you rocking in the chair, trying to focus on the exam while making sure the plug hit your prostate?”
With a simple shift, the tip of the plug pressed directly on your prostate. A loud moan left your throat. You wanted to tell him that he was wrong. That he was making stuff up. Degrading you.
But the continuous, slow rub against your prostate took over your thoughts. All you could focus on was gasping and moaning in response. Nothing else could escape your lips. Your cock twitched. It was still covered inside your tight boxers.
“Kota,” you mewled.
“Such a slut. Is that why you’re so flashy?” He asked, pressing down on your prostate. “You want everyone’s attention on you. Not just your looks but also from your sex appeal? So perverted, Togami (Name).”
You sniffled. Your wrists tried to break free from the belt but somehow it was wrapped tightly. You could only bring your hands down to try and cover your face from Kota’s intense stare.
“Am I not enough?” Kota moved up, his body now towering over you. His free hand grasped your wrists and tugged your arms to rest above your head once more. “Do you need everyone else’s attention? I’m not enough for you?”
You quickly shook your head. The words escaped you—only broken wet moans leaving your parted lips.
“Fine.” An almost pained laugh left Kota. “They can look…” he leaned down, his breath teasing your face. “But you’ll always be mine. Only I can see you, touch you, and ruin you, do you understand?”
Kota pulled back when you didn’t respond. His glare sharp as he roughly pulled the butt plug out. He tossed it behind himself. “Answer me with words.”
“Mhm, ngh,” you nodded your head. It was hard to speak, your throat was already dry. You haven’t even been fucked yet and you already felt tired. “Yes.”
“Good girl.”
You let out a shuddered moan. Your legs wrapping around Kota’s waist. It felt so sinful for you to be practically nude while Kota was still dressed. He was wearing a black sweater and black pants—his usual winter clothing.
“You’re perfect for me, (Name)… I don’t even need to prepare you.” Kota unbuttoned his pants. His gaze focused solely on you. “I won’t be nice. I’m going to fuck you and if you manage to cum, good. If not…” his voice trailed off.
The thought that he wasn’t even going to try and make sure you would come too. To just use you for his own pleasure… made your whole body shiver.
Shit, you were really learning new things about yourself.
Kota was never known for being particularly nice. Sure he did nice things for you but that never meant he wasn’t a little rude to you still. Even if you were his favorite person. He had no issue degrading you. And it was shocking to yourself that you didn’t mind it at all.
He didn’t fuck you nice and slow. He didn’t slowly ease inside you or anything like that. Your hole was still dripping from the lube and allowed for a semi easy entrance. Though his cock was bigger than your small butt plug.
Your eyes rolled to the back of your head. The stretch felt otherworldly. Kota grasped your face, pushing your head down into the pillow as he began thrusting in an easy rhythm.
The slap of skin filled the room. Your gasps and moans came out in rough staccato. Toes curling as you bite your bottom lip hard enough to draw blood.
“K-Kota…” you cried out.
Kota pushed your head further into the pillow as his thrusts began to pick up speed. He was unforgiving—obviously chasing his own orgasm. True to his words he didn’t aim for your prostate nor did he touch your cock.
He was fucking you got his own pleasure.
“Mhm?” He grunted out. His thumb brushing against your lips, pushing them apart. “Does it feel good? Are you enjoying yourself?”
Each thrust sent a shock throughout your body. The sound of skin slapping, bed creaking from each thrust into your tight heat. It was sending you into a frenzy. You could’ve sworn that he was purposely avoiding your prostate. Just barely teasing it to cause a shiver in your body before ignoring it once more.
It was degrading. He was treating you like a toy.
You smiled slightly, eyes glancing up at Kota. He was a sight to behold. His eyes almost fully covered from his long bangs. He was sweating but still hadn’t made the effort to take off his sweater.
The jeans rubbed against your ass, chafing the skin. You’d certainly cry about it later but now it only served to make you moan. Every little thing he did that only served to please himself and not you… made your toes curl.
“Hey,” Kota cut in. “I asked if you’re enjoying it?” His voice deep and held an air of dominance.
A strained laugh left you, punched out in tandem with a particularly harsh thrust that almost sent you hitting the headboard. Your bottom lip was cut. A little bit of blood coated both lips and some on your teeth.
“Yeah,” you breathed out. Your eyes struggled to stay open, fingers curling to grip the pillow beneath you for a sense of purchase. “Love it so much.” An almost exasperated laugh left you.
Kota’s thrusts slowed down. His grip on your face almost loosened. He certainly didn’t expect such an answer from you. The willingness to accept his behavior as if it was a normal thing. A thing that you readily craved and enjoyed.
A perverted smirk pulled on his lips.
It was one of the widest smirks you’ve ever seen from him. With his eyes practically hidden behind his bangs—his smirk was the only thing you could use as a way to see what he was thinking. With that smile alone you knew he was happy.
Proud even.
This… was exactly what he wanted.
And how lucky was he that you wanted it just like him.
The last of his thrusts were almost cruel. He positioned his hips so his cock would tease your prostate. Barely a touch that was enough to even count as anything. You almost cried at the teasing—it was too much.
Your cock was weeping in your boxers. But you didn’t beg for Kota to start pleasuring you as well. No you enjoyed how he was fucking you. This was too fun. Better than anything you could’ve originally imagined.
Kota released his grip on your face, both hands reaching to grab your waist. He held your body still against the bed. Keeping you still as he delivered his last, harsh, heavy hitting thrusts into your ass. Each thrust earning a loud accompanying cry from you.
Hot wet cum released inside you. The fact that he didn’t even ask if he could only made you shivered in delight. A weak gasp left you. Kota spanked your ass as he pulled out. The cum slowly seeping out of your hole.
“You look beautiful like this.” Kota hummed, “next time I want to see you in full makeup when I fuck you.” He said. He grabbed your boxers, tugging them off when he stopped.
A soft humorless laugh left him.
“You actually came?”
Two fingers touched the lower half of your stomach. White cum leaking from your cock. Your cheeks flushed in embarrassment. You didn’t expect that this would lead you to cumming in your boxers.
But here you were.
“Of course a slut like you would come untouched.” Kota leaned over you, gently freeing your wrists from the belt. He captured your lips into a hungry kiss—not allowing you to take any sense of control.
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jacobvanloon
romaincrisis
snowghoul
origamiaround
baratheonpilled
