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Pero's an absolute sweet heart . . . very very very very deeply down! 😆 thank you for reblogging!!
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rating: explicit 18+ pairing: pero tovar x f!reader word count: 6.9K summary: Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –  Her. He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.  OR Pero falls hard for a princess and doesn’t know what to do with himself on your wedding night. warnings: angst, brief classism/xenophobia two very stubborn people, pero experiences one Human Emotion and cannot fully process it, arranged marriage, yearning, smut LIKE WOW, soft!pero that i broke my own heart with a/n: Thank you so much to @perotovar for this request: "congrats on your milestone, my love! so happy for you <33 i'm sending a little astrology 💫 + pero & #6 on the fluffy list OR #1 on the smutty list (whichever is speaking to you), because i wanna see your take on him 👀” – of course I chose the slutty one, just for you 😉 I’m actually pretty proud of this one - please consider reblogging if you like it too!
*the image in the header is for aesthetic purposes only and does not reflect the appearance of the reader*
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Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
Sometimes before battle, the clatter inside Pero’s head goes silent. It listens. It waits. 
Other times, it roars. Memories of family, of dead amigos, of mujeres he fucked – they all buck and scratch for a chance to blaze across his mind like a dust storm kicked up by an unbroken mustang. 
He doesn’t know which one he prefers or which one will win out. They both have their uses, necessary states of mind to survive whatever is barreling towards him – an ax, a monster out of legend, some other drunken mercenary he intentionally pissed off. It’s an unconscious decision, yet one that has served him well so far. He wouldn’t be alive today if some deep, primal part of him knew what he needed to live through another battle. 
And yet, his own trunk knocking against his hips as he climbed the sickly ostentatious stone steps to the top of the parapet, the handles starting to pinch his fingers, the barest – nearly invisible – tremor in his knees, he cannot fathom, for the life of him, why that singular phrase from his abuela played in his head like water swirling around and around a cenote. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
His inner voice, taking on a myriad of forms, of sounds and voices, never quite standing still, the one companion he could always rely on. 
Maybe it was warning him. Dust yourself off, boy, you know exactly how this was going to end. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –
Her.
He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.
He feels sweat escape from the nape of curls at his neck, his cheeks warm and chest hot. Two more flights, he can manage two more flights. 
His abuela also liked to tell him something else: if hell doesn’t get him, his pride certainly will. 
It’s certainly what got him into this ridiculous farce in the first place. Because he can’t alchemize whatever is in his gut into vocalized syllables, he instead has to climb a truly incalculable amount of stairs, while carrying a ragged, torn trunk that weighs as much as his armor. 
Because he can’t form the right words, any words, about what he carries lodged beneath his breastbone for her. What draws him up and up and up and up because it’s lighter than hope, makes him lighter than air, and yet it clogs him up, chokes him out all the same. His pride, his vanity, cuts through it, through her – enough to keep him tongueless and dry but not enough to offer this lightness in his chest to her, for her. He can’t take the light out of him or else he fears what he will truly become.
So, he walks, he goes around and around on unforgiving stone steps until finally there is a door. He thinks about waiting, to catch his breath, but he knows he will just as easily turn around and go back the way he came, trunk still heavy and knocking against his hips, and that pride will be the death of him. So he keeps going, opens the handle, and makes abrupt eye contact with the two guards outside her door. They seem uninterested and unamused in his sweaty, stilted breathing, but by his less-than-royal attire, they easily clock him as one of their own; a man who fights to make his way in the world. The one on the left nods jerkily at him. 
What they see him as, what he will always be, is nearly the reason he kicks that fucking trunk all the way back down. Instead, he nods back, shoulders rounded, eyes down. 
“The princesa - the princess - is requesting the last of her things, to be b-brought up from the stables –,” he clears his throat, “drop this off for her and –,”
“Can’t let you in. King’s orders.” The one on the right sees him as something else – a foreigner first and foremost, their similar stations in life irrelevant. His bright blue eyes rove over Pero’s dark skin, dark hair, jagged scar, distaste and disgust smearing his already ugly features. But he had been dealing with men like these all his life.
“Bueno, you can explain to the King himself why his daughter’s belongings were lost and disregarded. I hear she’s very fond of the Italian prints at the bottom of this . . .”
The guards glance at each other, calculating way above their paygrade. Pero jostles the trunk as if to show he is not above throwing it out the window. 
“Fine.” The second one snaps. “Drop it inside and come back immediately.”
He drops his head, a good little foreign boy. “Gracias, señor.” 
The heavy wooden door opens beneath the iron lock and the instant he is through, he bolts it behind him. Waits to see if the guards notice. They don’t. Perfectamente – all the time in the world. 
All in the time in the world – for what? 
To fail? Again?
He stows the trunk in front of the door, extra time, a few seconds maybe – as if she wouldn’t just tell him to get out the instant she laid eyes on him. Only time will tell. 
Out of the atrium, another door, this one set deep into the wall. A last line of defense. He knocks, once, then twice, then waits. El orgullo chokes him again but fuck it, he’s come this far. He knocks again, knocks something in his chest free and, with it, spill the words:
“Princesa? It’s me. I –,” it throttles him, “princesa, can you open the door?” 
Silence. His heart sits, buried in that trunk. Then –
“It’s unlocked, Pero.” 
His heart in his throat, he opens the door to presumably what will be your marriage bed. And yet, by the state of things, you could have been moving out of it. Trunks and bags stack high against the far wall – those fucking trunks he made such a scene over because the unnecessary weight would slow them all down remain untouched, arranged as they had been when they had been first brought in. He didn’t quite know what to make of that, his thumb absently pressing into the callus of his other hand as he glanced around. It is a beautiful room – tall windows, etched in scarlet drapes, to match the scarlet curtains around the bed. With gold thread and impossibly detailed paintings of the countryside, it is fit for a princess, a some-day queen. This is where someone with royal blood deserved to be, not in the back of a hot carriage for weeks on end, surrounded by dirty, loud, rough men. 
And yet, with your hair down, expansive gown from the ball tonight replaced with a simple cotton dress, you could not have been more out of place. Pero’s heart lurches briefly, moisture seeping from his mouth, as he realizes this is the same dress he bought you when the two of you had been accidentally separated by the caravan and your previous dress had been ruined in the mud. He had no idea you still kept it, much less wore it ever again. 
But if anyone asked him, you look more beautiful in this than any silk or velvet. 
Instead of unpacking, settling into your new home and eventual role as wife, you sit hunched over at the intricately carved mahogany desk, eagle feather quill scratching against parchment. You finish with a flourish and look over your shoulder at him, your eyes annoyingly unreadable. 
“Yes?”
A stupid brute some may call him, but he wasn’t entirely without awareness. Observation of your customs and what you considered inappropriate only encouraged him: if you really didn’t want him here, you would never have let him see you in this state.
But it’s hard to remember that under your icy stare. 
“Y-your things, Princesa. The last from the caravan.”
Your eyes slide over him, to the trunk in the shadows of the atrium. He can tell from a single glance that you know as well as he that trunk is not yours, that no one told him to come here with it, and yet he did it all the same. Something flashes over your eyes but it’s gone by the time you meet his gaze again. 
“Thank you. I am, as always, indebted to you.” 
He hates your words, but warmth spreads in his gut at the way you say it. That’s how it’s always been between you and him – saying one thing but meaning another. He’d never appreciated a sharp mind like yours until he realized you wield it as he wields a sharp sword. 
There are many things he’d never even dreamed of before he met you.
“Then, this means you’re leaving, I suppose.” You draw your sword against him. The metal flashes in your eyes as you stand, one hand against the curved tip of your chair. A bronze halo rims your outline, the fire behind you burning bright and hot. He knows if he touched your shoulder, your neck, your skin would be wonderfully warm. 
He wets his lips. “Si. Our contract with your father is done.” 
You drop his gaze, your lips tightening for a minute, your fingers running through the carvings of wood on the chair. “Even with William in his state? Would it not be better for him to stay and recover? The journey home is –,” you pause, as though someone had thrown a hand over your mouth, “– the journey back east is long.” 
All the longer without you.
“William, he is not an idle man. Two days of bedrest is often all he can take.” 
You grin, in spite of this thing circling you both. “Unless he finds the nun attending to him beautiful.
“He finds them all beautiful.” 
Your smile expands wide across your bright face when you find him smiling at you too. 
This – if this is to be his last memory of you (his heart wrenches at the thought) – this is the you he wants imprinted on his soul: smiling and glowing by firelight. 
But as quickly as it came, that grin that warms him down to his bones, fades. In an instant, your eyes grow soft, your mouth twisted, jaw tight.
“Where will you go?” you ask, in the quietest voice you’d ever addressed him with. 
It pains him, physically aches within him, to hear the distress in your voice. He hasn’t even thought about the next contract, the next royal cabrón who intends to yank him all across God’s green earth to perform a task he can’t be fucked to take on himself. How can he possibly answer you? Nowhere, without you. To rot in a dark hole in the ground? Off a cliff? What answer would provide you or him any sort of satisfaction?
“Wherever the coin goes,” he says and the words scrape his tongue like bile. That ache in his chest spiraling rapidly, deep into his gut – like a poisoned limb he cannot amputate – he does the same thing he always does when he’s hurt: he makes others hurt until they leave him alone. “You do not have to worry, princesa, your new husband will keep you in such comfort you will never wonder where the coin comes from.”
He must be a truly sick man, for the knife-sharp glare you throw at him only knots arousal around the base of his spine. It tugs on something attached directly to his groin which, in turn, yanks the next words out of his mouth.
“He looked especially happy with you in his arms on the dance floor tonight.”
The icy shards in your eyes go brittle and crack. His heart races; he’s overplayed his hand. 
“You watched me dance?”
“All guardsmen were required to –,”
You shake your head, eyes bright and searing through him. “No. It was only the King’s Knights there in attendance.” 
Your hand trailing off the edge of the chair, you take a step forward and he feels his weight shift back onto his heels. But he remains firm. 
Sana, sana.
“Pero, why did you come here tonight?”
“To return the last of your things, princesa. What else is there?”
You flinch, as if he had raised his voice to you. What else is there indeed?
“Not even to . . .  say goodbye? Sixteen weeks on the road is an awfully long time to be around someone, only for them to . . . leave so soon.”
He locks his knees to keep them from shaking. “Do you wish for me to tell you goodbye, princesa?” 
There’s something painfully sad about the way you smile at him. “I wish for whatever would make you happiest.” 
Anger roars within him, hungry and hot, like a burn from a white flame. Why can’t you just admit it? Why do you avoid it time and time again? He knows he hasn’t misread anything you’ve sent his way, so why? Why are you so vested in torturing him this way? 
“Coin makes me happy and, now that I have it, there’s nothing to keep me here.”
There, that hurts you too, just as he meant it.
“Then leave.” They could make ice fortresses out of the strength of your bone-cold stare. “If you have nothing else to say, then take your goddamn trunk and get out of my sight.” 
The flame scorches him, ripping him apart and in his anger, making him cruel.
He bows to you.
“I imagine you will be very happy with your new husband, ranita.”
The term slips from his lips before he can stop it, but his throat and cheeks blister so badly, he physically can’t open his mouth to correct his mistake. Instead, he turns and strides towards the door.
He thinks he hears a gasp from behind him, a sharp sound like breaking glass – small, tinkling, tragic. It spears him through his chest, pierces his heart. 
He gets to the door and pauses.
If you have nothing else to say . . .
Of course he has something to say – words in English and Spanish and broken dialects gathered like poisonous lichen all churning in the boiling cauldron of his mind, but nothing will suffice – nothing reflects or compares to the grief he is already feeling, the despair, the anguish that has settled into all the fleshy joints in his body. Not his pride, but this, saying goodbye to you, this is what actually will kill him.
Every word imaginable crawls up his throat and rages in his mouth, presses up against his teeth, begging for something, anything to be let out, to be free, to tell you that he cannot fucking live without you–
Nothing comes through, but one single word.
“Don’t.” 
The fire crackles in the silence, a wicked god pleased at the display of carnage.
“What did you say?”
A dull thud echoes from where he drops his forehead against the wood of the door, all anger flooding out of his system. Do you have any idea the power you hold over him? One request, one tremor in your voice and his knees all but buckle at your altar. 
Fuck it. 
He always thought he’d go out in a blaze of bloody glory, but he’d never expected to be so exposed, so flayed like this.
“Don’t,” he repeats, his throat as dry as sand. “Do not . . . marry him. Please.” 
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The vision of your great warrior slumped against the door frame, his neck bent, shoulders curled up to his ears has your already pounding heart leaping forward into a gallop. He is defeated, laid low. You watch his guts all but pool out on your hearth. 
He looks about as hopeless and anguished as you feel. 
Your soldier, your man of iron and charcoal, goes blurry in your eyes.
“And what would you have me do, Pero?” Your plea is damp, malleable at the edges. You press your hand flat against your chest, near your throat, as if you could pull the grief lodged there with your fingers. “I have been engaged to this man before I was even born. How can I stop this?” 
“Fight.” The word snarls against his bare teeth. He turns, his eyes liquid ink, and suddenly he has you by the shoulders. His thumbs nervously skitter around the curve of your shoulder, gaze just as unsteady and unfocused as it wavers between your hands, your earlobe, your neck. "Where is my brave girl who fights for what she wants, hm? Fight – for me, please.”
Fight, he asks – but in spite of him or because of him?
You lay your hands on the silver shine of his breastplate, watch as they rise and fall with his steady flow of breath. How many nights had you woken up against that shine, in the crook of his arm for warmth, or protection? You didn’t cherish it at the time because you never knew when it would be your last. 
“Why won’t you fight, princesa?” His voice is low, strained, the groan of a wagon wheel before it breaks. You meet his gaze and the exposed look on his face, softening every line on his mouth and around his eyes, nearly sends you into hysterics. You swallow the tears, swallow the hook in your throat as your fingers curl around the clasps of his cape. 
"Because if I don't fight then I can't lose.” His fingers slip from your shoulders, to your elbows, to your waist. You inhale and the scents of warm leather, oil, and ash flood your mouth. The tip of your nose is inches from the scruff of beard against his cheek, the ruddy brown of his sun-drenched skin. He has curled you into him and this, you do not fight either. His massive palms map your back, against your skin, but without any urgency or control. “If I can’t lose, that means I don’t lose you. You'll just be . . . gone."
That last word is a lie. It hangs in the air like a sweltering humid rain and you both know you’re lying. He has you wrapped up in his arms, you didn’t stop him even for a second, and you are all too aware that it would take some great, insidious alchemy to ever truly tear him out of you. 
You stare at his silver collar, defiant against the waves you had managed to shackle down until this very moment: a wave of hopeless crashes into you, a wave of heartbreak, a wave of helpless that fills your eyes to the point of spilling with that very same salt water.
He touches your cheek delicately, fingers rough with callouses, and the floodgates break open with a sob. 
“Preciosa,” he rumbles softly against your hairline, “hush. You break my heart with your tears.” 
“Do not mock me, Tovar. Not now.” you sniff, trying to turn your face but his wide hands catch you around the cheeks.
“You are beyond mocking. I’d show you my heavy heart but I do not wish that weight on anyone.” The snag of his rough thumbs against your cheek draws your watery gaze to him. His mouth is a flat line, barred against whatever climbs his throat, but his eyes move like mercury across your nose, your eyelashes, the arch of your cheek. Your fingers wrap themselves around his wrists, a grounding agent against the waves that threaten to pull you under. 
“Pero, I –,”
“I have fought you, tooth and nail, for days without end. Every favor, every breath, you have forced them from me. I fight my own mind when I sleep at night. Sueños, always of the same woman.” He smears away the tears with his thumbs, gently, sweetly, before pressing his lips to your wet flesh by his knuckle. He inhales deeply, eyes closed, mouth hovering stationary above the skin of your cheek. “You fight me every step of the way . . . and I am so tired of fighting.” 
For all your struggling, for all your tearing and clawing and snarling against the blooming in your chest, nothing is as easy as it is to turn your head and press your lips to his. 
The brush of his bristled mustache against your upper lip. His warm, rough palms holding you steady. His lips soft and hot. You are overwhelmed by the scent of him.
There is nothing like, and nothing will ever be like, finally kissing Pero Tovar. 
All it takes is the movement of his hands from your cheeks to your lower back, the light trace of his tongue against your lips, and the yearning you’d been smothering for weeks now roars to life. His hands squeeze your hips and you can suddenly barely breathe. 
“Pero–,” the noise in the shape of his name that escapes you is near a whine, begging. He nips at your lips, hand firmly at the cup of your jaw, mouth now rough and insistent, and your fingers claw up his neck, wrapping themselves in his dark curls. You tug, nails scratching his scalp, and he groans into your mouth as if you’d just kneed him in the gut.
A thread-bare gasp of your name from his lips splits you from him, then his hand on your hip and the back of your neck pushing you backwards gives you enough air to breathe – to think.
"Your husband will know you're not a virgin,” Pero warns, breathing hard and fast, his eyes like black flints, “if we go on." 
You curl your fingers around his neck, dragging your mouth near his jaw, the soft skin at the edge of his ear.
"Then he will also know my heart is not his either.” You ask everything of him with this. His armor blocks his warm body from you – you want to sink inside his hard shell. “If you’ll have it.”
He is not himself, half-human with an inhuman want, with the snarl that leaves him. 
“Don’t make such promises, dulzura –,” A threat, a dog forced to expose its underbelly, fear radiating like the pain from a broken bone. Your fingers dig into the buckles of his cape, steadying you against a sudden terrible awareness that bloomed, purple-bruised. 
“Unless you don’t want –,” 
The desk rattles when your hips break against it, the force of his kiss enough to topple over your inkwell, spill rolls of parchment to the floor. The wood groans under your weight when he gathers the thick swell of your thighs in his hands, heaves you onto the flat surface, and spreads your knees around his waist. He is as hard as the iron on his chest. 
“Can you feel how much I want you?”
A frantic sigh of relief, a groan shared between two pairs of lips, seeking skin and warmth and other hungry places. 
He drags you onto his chest, your skirt bunched up around your hips, the rings of his armor digging into the soft flesh of your thighs, his mouth covering yours in wet pulls, and he stands up right, as though you weighed less than his sword. 
A stumble, and he spreads you out on the velvet covers of your marriage bed, his hands imprinting on your hips, your knees, the supple meat of your calves. The touch of him on your bare skin feels like the licks of flames, the smoke of arousal blurring your awareness and dragging your eyelids half-closed. On his heels at the edge of the bed, the flint shards of his eyes drift over the bones of your ankles, the bend of your knee, your heaving chest, hair in snarls around your neck and caught behind your back, and finally to your cunt, hidden by the folds of your dress. 
Velvet hums as you slide your ankles to the curve of your ass, widening your legs, parting your knees. His lips part open, dark want etching every line of his face. You feel the wet linen of your dress cling to your achy cunt. He swallows, unbuckling his cape one latch at a time, his eyes nowhere else. The metal clatters as it falls to the floor.
Piece by piece, the chinks in his armor fall away. Piece by piece, he is revealed to you. Your hands rise up, up your thighs to your knees, your thumbs rubbing soft circles. He watches, never tears his gaze away from your sticky hole, his nimble fingers working away the buckles and knots with practiced precision. You can see it in his eyes – memories of bedrolls by firelight, of such a deep painful, yearning ache, separated only by thin tarp, they are a physical weight beside you in this marriage bed. 
You see them because they’re there for you too. You see them because you've been here a dozen times, on your back, legs spread wide, your hands circling but never dipping, waiting. Wanting. For him. 
His bare chest is warm, the wings of his ribs expanding around short, half-drawn breaths, as he crawls up into your pliant mouth. The kisses are slow, like before, with a crackle of heat just beyond them, his hips slipping into the cradle of your thighs, the wet warmth of you separated by the thin linen of your dress. He sucks the tendon below your ear, a whine slipping out of your mouth, fingers spreading over the harsh planes of his back, and his cock bobs against your thigh. 
Pero is bare and warm and entirely yours. All man beneath the sweltering armor. 
“Amorcita,” he drips into your ear, kisses smeared against your collarbone, your mouth, your earlobe, “amorcita, amorcita . . . ranita, let me take you.” 
He starts to use teeth, a harder nip behind his kisses, when he dips down to your chest. A wide palm with stocky fingers grasps at your breast and it’s a startling sensation for you both. 
“Soft,” he moans before licking up under the supple curve of your breast, mouthing at what his tongue missed. He slips your erect nipple into his mouth and twists it between his teeth. “Sweet,” he murmurs with your nipple firmly between his lips. 
This is unlike anything you’ve felt before. You deliriously thank the gods that he hadn’t touched you like this on the road; you would have kept him, your own wild animal, in bed without rest for days on end.
Pero plucks just as aggressively at your other breast, the spit-wet nipple that preoccupied his mouth verging on purple and aching. He cups you from the outside this time, squeezing and massaging, ringing your nipple with his tongue until your back bows and you let out a whine that has his eyes flickering up to you, the scent of wounded prey filling his nostrils. 
That whine of pleasure elongates into a whimper: “please.”
“Tranquila, ranita.” His touch is softer around your bruised tits, but he keeps one hand bagging the weight of your breast while the other slips beneath your skirt.
The pads of his fingers brush your creamy cunt and with a yelp, you grab him by the wrist, your eyes open with a familiar emotion he draws out of you: rage.
“Pero Tovar, if you value your life you will take me under the covers and put your —,”
He chuckles, his cheek against yours, nose rimming the velvet hairs on the ridges of your ear. The vibrations liquify the tension in your bones, loosening your grip. Your eyes flutter, slick obviously running down his fingers. “Ranita, I don’t think you know how you want to end that sentence..”
His words roll like honey over the heat of your skin. It makes your skin tremble. Your grip tightens on his wrist and you roll your hips, your swollen clit finally relieved by the pressure of his palm. 
“Oh, oh, Pero—,” 
With a grunt, he shuffled closer, elbow by your shoulder and he cups your entire wet cunt in his hand, pushing the heel of his palm flatter against you. You cry out, a sparkling kind of pleasure radiating out from where his hand rests. You buck your hips faster, complete release flickering through your outstretched hand. 
“Can you come like this?” You nod, eyes squeezed shut as you barrel towards escape, and you feel him shudder next to you. You are intimately aware that he’s rubbing his cock on the crease of your hip bone but that only drags you faster towards the light. “Then come, ranita, come and I’ll fuck you.” 
The wet, curling heat growing between your legs descends, then in a bright snap, explodes across your body. 
“Fuck!” You tear open your eyes to find them damp, Pero’s massive hand cupping your cheek towards him, his stallion eyes dark as his fingers drag on the soaked material of your dress, your hips slowing. 
“Amorcita, breathe.” The words are torn from his chest, all cock-suredness gone from his frantic gaze. You gulp in air, the weight of his body over yours grounding and smothering you all at once. He pulls his hand away from you, rides it up your thigh to your waist, looking for something to hold onto. He strokes his thumb once against your overheated skin and you’re wriggling up out of your dress. 
“Help,” you hiss and his fingers nearly tear the fabric off you.
With a few undone buttons, you shiver out of your dress, the slick-drenched spots catching on your warm skin. He flings it behind him, near the fireplace. 
He takes you barely beneath the thick covers before you welcome him back to the heat of your open legs. 
But instead of reeling back and plunging his aching cock into you, he takes the time to kiss you. To praise you in all the ways he fears his mouth will end up short. He kisses you, grateful, reverent – wonderful to be swallowed by but also a distraction.
When he lifts your knees by his waist, your hips automatically tilt towards him and for the first time, you feel his red, sore cock between your tacky lips. The dual sensation nearly drags you over the rack of delectably delicious pleasure, as does his worn, broken groan in your ear. 
“More, please, don’t stop.” You cry against the bristles of his beard, his hand dropping between your sweat-slick bodies, finding yours already there to guide him. The press of him spreads you open, filling you one sinking notch at a time. The sensation of your pink, dripping walls moving to take more of him in has you arching up into his chest, nails dragging into his back. His dry lips stifle the moans escaping from your mouth. 
Pero takes both of your hands in his, dragging them above your head, his fingers locking your palms together as his hips roll forward. “Cálmate, amorcita, cálmate,” he murmurs between distracted presses of his mouth against your chin, your cheek, his breathing heavy and stunted. You writhe, pinned open by his hips and his hands, his cock filling you all too slowly and not fast enough. 
With the last few inches, you take him completely, your cunt throbbing, heart pounding, intoxicated by the sensation of being so maddeningly full. Pero drapes over you, his head tucked into your neck, forearms straining with the tension of gripping your hands tightly. 
“Santa madre . . .” He is not a warrior right now. He is but a man, cunt-drunk and heaving. 
His name is pushed out of the bottom of your lungs with the first swing of his hips. You cling to him, knees at his ribs, unwilling to let even an inch of space between your bodies. But this becomes increasingly difficult as his thrusts gain speed. His flushed lips stain a sticky line against your jaw, down to your throat, and he releases your hands, the oak of the bed creaking beneath the force of him drilling down into you, he props himself up on his palms, his shoulders bent and curled over you, biceps straining, hairline damp, eyelids fluttering. The scar on his cheek is flushed pink.
“Look, amorcita, look how well you take me.”
His words tear you from your nebulous high, the grit of them forcing your head down to the obscene squelch beneath the sheets. The thatch of rough curls over his groin is drenched in slick, his thick cock soaked to the point of shine as it drives into you again and again. The heavy draft of breath the sight steals from him, the tap of his cock against a place so deep you didn’t know your body possessed, draws the spooling bliss as tight as a wire. 
Your trembling thighs squeeze him tighter, that hot pressure rendering you speechless, except for the most pathetic whine. Please, Pero, please, you think, you mutter, you whisper, your body rocking damp against the sheets. 
With a sudden snarl, he takes the chunk of your hair at the base of your head flat in his fists and tugs. A shoot of bright pain sparks bliss down to your tight and bruised nipples, and you cry out again. 
“Stop fighting, puedo sentir cuanto la quieres. Let me have it.” It is the following word that splits you open like lighting carving apart a tree. “Please.”
The wail that you release is the rush of gooseflesh over your skin alchemized into audible sound. Heat radiates through you, sucking the air from your lungs, your vision going blurry, then black as you clamp your eyes shut against the rush, the final release, that curls you into his arms. His warm, flushed arms, shaking with strain. A final wobbly thrust or two and his elbows are buckling, sweat-drenched chest pressing into your own.
Distantly, you are aware of the warm, slick drip down your thighs, his cock pulsing the last drops into your cum-flecked cunt, and the dangers this sort of intimacy poses. You can’t gather enough breath, enough sense to settle the spinning room, to worry or even care. 
Your his, and he is yours. That is all that will ever matter. 
The crackle of wood burning is the only other sound than your ragged breaths, the silent roll of sweat from sticky hot skins into the bedsheets. The stone walls of the castle’s room entomb you together for a brief stretch of infinity.
Pero moves and you think he’s going to back out of you, but instead, he merely adjusts, his head fully on your chest, thick fingers clutching your bruised waist, the shift of his cock pushing more of his release out of your oversensitive cunt. But you’ll take overstimulation over his absence every time. You run your fingers through his damp curls and he hums. 
“I’m sorry,” he huffs into your humid skin. “I’m sorry I let my pride keep us apart for so long.” 
You grin lazily to the ceiling, your breath settling as affection takes its place in your chest. 
“You were not the only one blinded by vanity.” 
“But I’m not blind. Not anymore.” He lifts his head, eyes as dark as your spilled inkwell. “I am never letting you go.” 
You smile at him, fingers soft against the back of his neck. “I don’t plan on wandering away.” 
His oil-black gaze drops to your lips and he leans forward to take your mouth against his. Gentle, but with the promise of more. 
“Mi ranita,” he purrs to break the kiss. 
“You call me that all the time, Pero. What does it mean?”
At that, a nearly shy expression crosses his face. He shakes his head, shifting onto his elbows to lift off you. “I can’t tell you. It will ruin your good mood.” 
You gasp, offended, and you grab him by the ear and twist. He chuckles through a grimace. “You will tell me what that means, Pero Tovar, if you value your appendages.” 
“Órale, princesa, retract your claws and I will tell you.” 
You release your grip and settle against your pillow. Grinning bashfully, he kisses your neck briefly.
“Remember that I love you after I tell you this.” 
Your heart nearly stops, the absence of a steady beat nearly drawing tears to your eyes but you hold firm. You breathe deeply against the fluttering in your stomach and pin him with your glare. Of course, this is how he would profess his love to you – when he’s trying to get out of trouble. 
“Tell me, Tovar!”
He chuckles again and preemptively picks up your hands. He kisses the inside of your palms, settling himself between your thighs. 
“It means little frog.” Your mouth falls open in a gasp and you struggle to yank your hands back from him, hissing like a tea kettle, but he uses his weight to press down on you. He nips at your nose. “I call you that because when you’re upset with me, much like you are now, you puff up like a bullfrog, your cheeks like this–,”
He rounds his cheeks full of air, crossing his eyes, and you simply cannot take the slight anymore. You push roughly against his gut, the breath trapped in his mouth escaping in a hot puff, and you twist him onto his back. He lets you, of course, his bold, full laughter rendering him defenseless. His body shakes beneath you, his beautiful eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open wide as he laughs and laughs and laughs. You take him by the wrists and push his limp hands over his head, pinning him as he had you. You pinch his chin with your teeth, your messy cunt over his stomach, as his laughter subsides. 
“Have you had your fun yet?” 
“Barely,” he chuckles, turning his big nose against your cheek and inhaling. He hums.
“Is that all I am to you? A joke?”
Pero opens his eyes, sober as death rattle. He takes you in, not in a hungry, all-consuming way, but in a look that speaks of awe and rapture.
“You are everything to me.”
You sigh, releasing his hands and curling into his chest. He kisses the top of your head, your eyes on the roaring fire. His thumbs rub your shoulder blades, trace the lines of your spine.
“You’re so very lucky I love you too.” 
His wandering against the expanse of your back stills, just for a moment, before his fingers slide into your hair, around the nape of your neck, holding you to him with the intention of keeping you there forever.
“I know, ranita, I know.” 
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He watches you sleep as the sky lightens beyond the tall windows on the opposite side of the bedroom. The dying fire traces your edges in gold, settling heat in the curve of your lips. 
His heart lurches with the wanting of you.
There’s more terrible things to come, he knows that. The plan the two of you concocted in the early morning hours will be dangerous, deadly even. But dying together instead of living apart would be much more tolerable, you told him earlier that night, your hand on his chest. 
He would kill if you asked. He would kill, even if you didn’t, to keep you safe and by his side. You’ve proven yourself capable of living a life away from this spectacular opulence, but it pains him to know he will never be able to give you anything nearly as lovely as the velvet dresses in the closet, the gold jewelry in your trunks. 
Instead, all he has to offer is himself. His strength, his hands, his heart. It’s his own fear that tells him that’s not enough, because you remind him again and again that’s more than you ever wanted. 
He traces the curve of your cheek with the hovering pad of his finger, brushing your hair away from your face. How he ended up so lucky with your love, he’ll never know, but he will spend the rest of his days proving that he’s earned it. 
You stir in your sleep, sensing him above you, and he hates to steal even a few minutes of blissful sleep from you, knowing the endless nights that are coming. When he steals you away from all that you’ve ever known. 
The sleepy grumble in your throat resembles his name as he curls around you, but your eyes remain gently closed. He pulls you against him, the air that leaves your mouth and sits between your chest and his something he covets with his whole heart. 
I love you and I’m disgustingly lucky and I love you. 
He is a man made of dust, serving men made of silver. He is a man of dust, loving a woman made of gold.
El orgullo? No, Abuela, his ranita will get him first, last, and every time.
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Translations:
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. - This rhyme is typically said to children when they have just hurt themselves. The parent (or grandparent) usually rubs the part that is sore and sings this little tune. Literally translates to: "heal, heal, little frog’s tail. If you don’t heal today, you will heal tomorrow."
el orgullo - pride
dulzura - sweetness, romantic connotation
amorcita - little love, romantic connotation
Tranquila - quiet, as in "be quiet" or "relax"
Cálmate - take it easy, or take it slow
puedo sentir cuanto la quieres - I can feel how much you want it/love it
Órale - okay, or an exclamation expressing approval or encouragement.
ranita - little frog, but you knew that already ;)
the rest are cognates (or familiar words) which you can probably guess the meaning of, but feel free to message me if you don't know!
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chronically-ghosted · 2 hours
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“I was going to be his friend, and I was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.”
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chronically-ghosted · 3 hours
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PEDRO PASCAL AS DAVE YORK IN THE EQUALIZER 2 (2018)
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chronically-ghosted · 4 hours
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javier peña in every episode of narcos
1x04 the palace in flames
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chronically-ghosted · 5 hours
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Pedro Pascal as Billy in the short film “Iris”, 2009.
*I made those gifs myself, so if reposting, please credit! 💜
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chronically-ghosted · 8 hours
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@gracie7209 , @onmysluttyknees , @suzdin , @ravensmadreads , @spookyxsam ,
@runningmom94 , @sp00kymulderr , @beefrobeefcal , @the-widow-miller , @harriedandharassed ,
@bitchwitch1981 , @yoursoulsunbreakable , @evanscaprio , @meanderingcaptainswanmusings , @joelslegalwhre ,
@jupiter-soups , @theredvelvetbitch , @northernbluess , @butiknewyoudlinger , @tvversionperson , @nastiasnow . @missladym1981 ,
@la-vie-est-une-fleur29 , @jupiterreads , @pedrostories @survivingandenduring @bizarrelove-triangle @bbyanarchist @lover-of-books-and-tea  @Bunnigirl0015
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vivarium
rating: explicit 18+ pairing: ezra x f!reader word count: 8K summary: you request a vacation for your birthday. With the rain and a few drinks, you get a lot more than you asked for.  warnings: alcohol drinking, minor age gap (less than 10 years), oral (f!receiving), fingering, smut, possessive!Ezra, dom!Ezra, one booty smack, dirty talk for real, smut, pining, a bit of angst, referenced/implied orphanhood, made a religious sex pun and i'm so proud of myself a/n: so @morallyinept requested this and it turns out when I write for a boy for the first time, it can’t be less than 7K – whoops. i've gotten ezra requests from some moots before, so i hope this lives up to your expectations! **massive thanks to @toomanytookas for editing and providing the initial validation so i don't post in a mouth-frothy haze. I've never had a beta like you before and I genuinely feel like I've turned over a new chapter in my fic writing. thank you!
🤍Masterlist 🤍 Ezra Masterlist
💜come see what else we've done to celebrate 1K followers
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Your feet in the clear blue water, the humidity like a wet tongue on your skin, you scratch a nail under the tab of a mustard yellow can, crack it open, and drink. The bite of alcohol dulled by the carbonation, you take several pulls, drawing out the mid-afternoon buzz from two other cans and whetting your mouth in the heat of the jungle day. You lean back on your elbows into the sponge-soft grass, and let out a massive sigh. 
A few feet ahead of you, on a repurposed inflatable reentry tube, your long-time privateer partner chuckles, the sound deep in the back of his throat as he floats by. Thick fingers and exposed heels dragging along in the crystal water, he greets the yellow sun like an old friend – arms wide, chest out, a lazy smile on his face. A damp rag – supposedly clean – sits over what you know to be dark-earth eyes, every other inch of him relishing in the inevitable sun tan. 
“I see your aaahhh, pet, and I raise you a mhmm.” The rubber squeaks as he adjusts, tips his scarred chin up to the cloudless sky and rests his head back. “Kevva said there’d be days like this, but I think the old hag mighta left out a thing or two.” 
You grin, the wet heat of Banu 8’s lowlands drawing sweat droplets onto your hairline at the back of your neck, settling thick behind your ears where it co-mingles with the drunk haze loping around in your brain. You watch Ezra with his bare arms, hairy legs, and prominent nose turned towards the divinity he’s so fond of invoking and the thought crosses your mind – again:
Shit, he’s so fucking hot. 
Oh, bad thought.
You drop your gaze, pressing the cold aluminum lip of the can to your mouth, drinking quicker than you probably should, anything to distract you from your partner as he obliviously floats by. 
For our sake, you silently beg the hungry little creature that whines and snaps at the image of a shirtless Ezra, please fuck off. 
While Ezra whistles a vaguely familiar tune, terribly off-key, you scoop up the cool lagoon water and dribble it over your hot knees, then your thighs, dampening the rims of your make-shift shorts just enough to cool them without leaving them vulnerable to a permanent state of moisture due to the high humidity. You flick the last drops of the water onto your chest, your white cotton bra choked to your skin. A final effect, you press the cool can to the thrumming pulse on your neck, closing your eyes with a relieved grunt, taking the time to enjoy the sensation of the cold metal against the rapid beat in your throat. 
From the water, you hear an unsettled grunt and you open your eyes to find that same shirtless Ezra staring at you, the rag now curled in one hand against the rubber float. He swallows, looks at something past your ear, and again tries to adjust in the sticky rubber float without flipping himself over, his hands falling into his lap. 
“Neptune, dear, would you do us the favor of tossing over one of those cans? I’m parched. I think my lovely skin is drying out.”
Neptune. His favorite nickname for you. You never got any real explanation from him as to why you got that name, other than after you’d officially joined his crew, you told him you came from a blue planet in a far off system. But that was often the way of things: Ezra did something and you didn’t question why. From that simple truth, you learned about how to repair and rebuild the entire electrical system from a drop pod. You learned, in excruciating detail, the parts and mechanics of a thrower, so much so that you could almost identify the model number at a glance. You learned about which corporate dig sites to avoid, which made for easy marks, and which would draw the eye and ire of entities hardly worth the trouble. 
Being out on your own since you aged up out of the orphanage had not gone the way you hoped and life had not been so kind as to teach you any other way to survive. Ezra had found you in the back of a red spice market, cornered and slurping down the last few of your credits from a muck bowl that you had vastly overpaid for.
For whatever reason, he offered you a job on the spot, despite you having nothing to offer him. and no experience in anything except cleaning prophylaxiams and staying out of the way.
And yet, he has been far kinder than life, or anyone else, had ever been to you. 
As a result, loyalty was only a fraction of what you felt for him. What had begun as overwhelming adoration had grown hot to the touch, slippery between your fingers at night, and perhaps – what you feared most of all – obvious. 
Yet when Ezra looked at you with a smile on his face, it was only comradery he wished to share with you, certainly not his bed. He shared it with practically every other bi-pedal humanoid you came across, but not you. And this you had to accept. And you did. 
But being a little drunk made it that much harder to remember where to keep your hands to avoid being burned.
“Sure, Ez.” You tuck your legs out from the cool water and dig around in the canvas bag at the base of the white nut tree. Most of the ice had melted into the bright green grass around the lagoon, but a few of the cans were still cold. You’d probably tease Ezra later for skimping on the insulation bucket the provisions store the port offered, but he had been so eager to get to the camp ground after spending an “exceedingly exorbitant amount of time stacked up against human drivel on public transportation”. One lopsided grin, and you’d give him the world. 
“Ez–,”
He lifts the rag, glancing at you over his shoulder, hands cupped as the can flies through the air. The cold metal presses against the overheated skin on his chest and he hisses. Eyeing the can ruefully, he cracks it open and drinks deep. You busy yourself with sliding to the edge of the pool again to keep from watching his throat move. 
Ezra finally pulls back, smacking his lips, with a pleased groan. He wets the rag again and dramatically flops it over his eyes. Hidden from his view, you watch the roll of water down his temples, his neck, his chest. 
“Name anything better than this, Neptune, I beg you. Free from obligation or assignment on commission. Where my only moral imperative is to drink as many of these as I can and remind you how beautiful you are. Which . . .” he tilts the bottom of the can towards you, head still tilted back on the raft and dripping rag covering his vision, “fantastic, by the way.” 
Having stifled your blush while under his watchful gaze about three or four other times today, without him looking, you flush so hard and fast you go lightheaded. Beautiful, he said. You drink more carbonated alcohol to choke back your rising heart, your eyes skim over the curve of his nose, a drop of sweat as it peaks on his forehead. You can’t linger over him too long; he has a six-sense about you – unable to know what you’re thinking but that you’re overthinking all the same. 
“Was this worth the trip on public transportation, Ez?” Your ankles stir the water again. 
“I could do this all day,” he sighs contently, bringing a warm smile to your face. “And definitely all night.”
Maybe you’ll both be so sun-drunk later tonight, you’ll fall asleep together on the pallet on the floor. Of course, by nightfall, someone will have to come to their senses and you’ll be tucked back into your separate sleeping bags, but maybe, as a present you couldn’t possibly ask for, you can just nap together.
With the bottom plush of your lip stuck between your teeth, you rim the metallic edge of your can with your nail, ankles spinning slow circles in the water. 
“Thank you, Ezra,” you say quietly, “for the best birthday I’ve ever had.” 
It began as a sort of joke one night on the volcanic hotspring moon of Wulkan after a twelve hour shift hunting through the black ash in search of fire pearls. The job was rather rushed, and Ezra had his reservations going into it, but fire pearls were a near certainty and you both needed a boost after a jump exchange had gone a little cockeyed. Sweat dripping from his temples, the provided water packs in the harvest suits doing just enough to keep him from passing out from heat exhaustion, he extended the skein of hydro-electric towards you across the narrow lane between your cots and asked you if you could be anywhere right now, any system, where would you be.
“Somewhere so cold I freeze my tits clean off,” you said with a sigh and wiped your own sweat-drenched forehead. You could smell yourself after two days of sweating profusely, but your stench in comparison to the rest of the crew, including Ezra, barely registered any more. You took a sip as Ezra laughed.
“A grievous crime against humanity and all its luscious gifts, but I get your meaning. Anywhere else?”
“Water.” This was said with more conviction, so much so it turned Ezra’s head towards you. “The few memories I have of my home planet and my parents, we were always near or in water. An ocean, maybe. I’m not sure. But I remember being really, really happy and I think being near water . . . it would make me happy again.”
You handed the skein back to Ezra, something unreadable in his gaze. He took it back from you, his fingers dark from the ash that clings to everything. On the other side of the tent, the rest of your crew and other teams mill about, yelling, with cutlery clattering as the camp gets ready to slow for the night, a graveyard shift picking up in just a few hours. 
Ezra’s eyes are as dark as the ash you’ve been shifting through the past two days.
“Then you shall have it, Neptune.” He said, quietly. “I’d give you the fucking galaxy if I could.” 
Those words often came to you in the crevice between sleep and wakefulness, when your mind was idle and the reins that tightly bound your affection for him loosened without a conscious grip. When you thought you weren’t being watched. 
The flat of his foot hooking behind your ankle breaks you from your reverie. Cast into shadow by the wide, rubbery palm leaves above your head, he looks at you curiously. 
“That look of deep consternation is giving me a headache. Spill.” 
With a faint smile, you gently bump his knee with your own. “Nothing, Ez. I’m just glad we get to take a break from it all. I can’t remember the last time I . . . the last time we’ve just had nothing to do.” 
He cocks his head as his gaze crawls up your ankle, your shin, to your knee. You think it might linger on your thigh before it bounces to your face. You tighten your grip on the hot, expansive feeling behind your ribs and stare back at him.
“Then that’s a black mark against me, as the leader of this clan.” His mouth curls, eyebrow arching as he talks, knowing that statement has been a point of playful contention between you two for years. “A good overseer knows when to crack the bullwhip and when to let it rest.”
“Well, a better overseer knows when to demand that her team rests, because sometimes they have no idea what’s good for them.” 
His foot rotates behind your ankle, his toes brushing against your calf, bringing your attention to your own body part in the water. Your legs are hairy, nearly as much as Ezra’s, and you haven’t shaved your pits in possibly a decade. Ezra once brought home a professional nightwalker, one from the Upper City, to the derelict flat you’d been sharing for two weeks as you offloaded your haul to the under markets. You never forgot how smooth her skin had been, shaved clean and smelling of moon lilies. That scent permeated the small space for weeks afterward. Even now, just the sight of moon lilies makes you nauseous. 
His aversion to you runs much deeper than physical aesthetics, even if you can’t help but wonder sometimes if becoming as smooth and hairless as the nightwalker might change his mind.
Ezra’s aversion to you runs much deeper than physical aesthetics, even if you can’t help but wonder sometimes if becoming as smooth and hairless as the nightwalker might change his mind.
“Observational to a fault as always, Neptune.” The ball of his foot rests briefly between your legs before he pushes off from the spongy lip of the lagoon’s edge. He floats back into the sun, his head shaking slightly, a smile drained of amusement on his lips. He inhales as the sun crests over his forehead and he glances up at the blue sky. “I have no idea what’s good for me.”
Something about his tone, the way he turns away from you, scratches a very raw place inside of you – a place that fears and obsesses over abandonment. You wouldn’t survive it if he abandoned you, if he left you to fend for yourself one day. Logically, you know he would never do that – he has sworn up and down to your face that that notion is fundamentally ludicrous to him – but the anguish of him silently rejecting you from his bed again and again and again makes that fragile place inside you bleed red. 
You stand up, swipe another can from the bag, and move towards the waterfall. 
“I’m taking a hike.”
You feel his eyes on the backs of your thighs as you march towards the gentle incline.
“Be safe, Neptune,” he calls softly.
For a fleeting second, you wish he had made you stay.
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The first fat raindrop splashes against your cheek and wakes you from a humid, irritated nap. You’re scowling by the time you open your eyes to several more wet droplets as they splatter against your neck, your forehead and you sit up, even more frustrated than when you fell asleep. The last sticky tendrils of dreams snap and pop as you pull yourself onto your feet, back hunched and arm held high against the steamy sprinkle. A crack of lightning, then a growl of thunder, and the sky splits open, drenching you in seconds. With a snarl of your own, you snatch up the empty can from the grass next to you and make for your camp down the hill. As you crest the top, you see a figure standing outside the tent, back tense and hand raised as if searching through the twilight gray downpour. 
Normally, the thought of warming up beside Ezra in your yellow tent fills you with something inexplicable, the grime and load of the day melting from your shoulders, but your buzz from earlier has thickened, made worse by the heat, the emotions in your heart all gummed up and smashed together. The sight of him cranks up your irritation high in your ears. With a huff, you concentrate on a smooth slide down the hill without breaking your ankles and not the fire rising in your gut. 
But the rain and the distance apart has only stoked his own outrage.
“Where the hell were you?” He snaps as you yank back the velcroed tent flap. He is dripping from head to toe in jungle rain as he follows closely behind you into your small space. You ring the water from your hair into a corner and scowl up at him. 
“I fell asleep. The rain woke me up. I came back as soon as I could.” 
His eyes narrow, water rolling off his bare shoulders as if he still stood out in the downpour. The droplets pat pat pat against the tarp floor as he snatches up a fiber towel and dries himself off, scowling all the while. 
“I searched for you, calling your name up and down this fuckin’ jungle and I didn’t hear a peep. What if something had gone wrong? What if you’d been hurt?”
“Then I would have fucking dealt with it, Ezra.” You stomp to your feet, neck hot from his patronizing gaze. Hands on his hips, you feel like you’re being scolded. “I can take care of myself.” 
One dark eyebrow arches mockingly, the scar on his cheek twisting in his scowl.
“And you expect me to lay about, twiddling my thumbs, while I wait for you to return or until you deem it appropriate for me to fret over your corpse?” 
That patch of blonde hair is a shade darker, drenched and pressed flat against his forehead. His bare chest is littered with scars and divots where chunks of flesh had been torn away. His skin is a reflection of the hard life he lives. You doubt you’d look any different if you’d seen yourself in a mirror. 
“We are partners, Ez,” you grind out between locked teeth. “Equals, alright? I am not your little sister for you to fuss over and you are not my keeper.” 
At that, the indignant swell of his chest deflates and the anger in his eyes flickers before fading out. 
“You are beyond capture,” he mutters, eyebrows down but gaze distant. “I’d never dream of keeping you, Neptune.” 
Again, it’s his phrasing that hurts most of all. You glance away, the backs of your eyes growing hot and tight, drying out despite the sticky moisture warming the inside of the tent. But then his hand around your elbow startles away the tears forming in the corners of your eyes. 
“You are the most important thing to me in the entirety of this world and the next,” he says softly, earth eyes searching your face. “I came on too strong, I know that, but the idea that you’d ever be gone from my side for any amount of permanence . . . well, it’s been a lifetime since I’ve felt fear like that.” 
His frown goes belly-up, a hopeless smile on his face. “I wasn’t aware I even still could.” His calloused thumb brushes your skin, skin that nearly catches fire from the rough drag of scar tissue, before he lets his hand drop. Your own curls into a fist at your side, a tremor rattling the bones of your wrist in an effort to keep from reaching up and touching that moon-shaped scar you dream about at night.
“I’m not going anywhere, Ez. You taught me enough to survive in a world like this. But you’re going to have to trust me.”
That smile goes wan, sickly. “That’s the problem, dear heart, I trust you with my life.” 
He swallows, as if suddenly bashful to make direct eye contact with you. He clears his throat before rummaging around in his canvas bag for dry clothes. He yanks a black, sleeveless shirt on over his head before setting up the materials for a flameless pocket fire. 
“Since my dreams of showing you something called a barbeque have been quite literally rained out, we’ll finish off the rest of the dredge pack tonight. But come first light, I’ll fix you breakfast so succulent, the smell alone’ll make your mouth water. How does that sound, Neptune?”
He barely slows to breathe as he seamlessly switches topics from breakfast to another meal made at camp without looking up or stalling in his prep for dinner, hands almost disconnected from the humming of his mouth – one so methodical, the other like a channel rat on fire. 
“– and the thing was no one was really sure enough what a squatter egg looked like when it goes bad. But being out in a cramped hold-out for two weeks where it was so dark, your own ass and someone else’s had no demarcation, well, there wasn’t a single peep of dissimilitude . . .”
Words strung together so quick and so melodic, it was always incredibly easy to fall into a sort of easy trance around Ezra. Sounds and syllables just sounded right coming out of his mouth and after a while, that trance became a state of repose, Ezra’s own sense of calm filtered to whoever was also in the room. But not to you, not right now.
After spending immeasurable time with less than half a space between you in cramped tents and in claustrophobic dig sites, you could read the tension on the lines of his body as well as the lines on the palm of your hand. 
“Neptune? You with me?”
Ezra glances up at you, always aware of you and your movements like the twinge on a spider’s web, a signature smile that has always seemed to shine a bit brighter for you plastered over his face. The anger was the only thing holding you up and with it gone, you can feel your bruised heart twinge as it folds over itself. 
“Yeah, that sounds good. I’m gonna switch out of these wet clothes before we eat, okay?”
He hums, nodding, eyes fixating on the steadily boiling water in front of him as you turn away to the other side of the tent, by your pallet and traveler’s pack. As further evidence that he feels nothing but companionship for you, you feel his eyes remain nowhere near you as you strip off your shorts and bra for a sun-warm suit. Then again, you’d like to think it’s kind of scandalous to be changing in front of him, but you’d both seen each other naked more times than you could count – there is no modesty in foxholes. The space between your hips and your thighs feel sticky from sweat and the slick rain, the curve of your spine warm and flushed. The zipper is loud in the silence. 
You’re braiding your damp hair away from your face when he sighs and the noise makes you look back at him.
“Answer me honestly, if you’ve ever cared for me a tick. Do you regret it?”
His eyes are sorrowful, worried, brow fixed down. Ezra is not, and never has been, a man prone to melancholy. His wrists rest loosely over his knees, gaze deep in the bubbling bone broth. The rain outside taps insistently at the tarp. 
“Regret what?” 
“Coming with me and taking on this life. It’s not an easy one,” he says quietly. “I should have offered you another choice, that day in the market. But one look at you and I . . . I was willing to trust you with my life, Neptune – far, far too soon. Even at my best, you make me irrational.”
You watch him, his broad shoulders moving, as he scoops up the hot, dark liquid into two bowls, and joins you by the entrance to the tent. You pin back the flap as he settles, the scent of humid rain immediately flooding your mouth, the pattering sound now twice as loud. Wordlessly, he hands you a spoon before digging into his own bowl. 
The heat of the soup burns away all the silly, impossible things sitting on your tongue. You sit in silence, his presence never rushing you to answer before you are ready. As you eat, you stare out at the dark lagoon, where you had both been only hours ago, the clear water murky beneath the downpour. 
“No, Ezra, I don’t regret it.” He stills, as if surprised you’re answering him now, mid-meal. He lowers the bowl to his lap, eyes trained on you. “You saved my life, more times than I can count.” 
Your words loosen the rigid lock of his shoulders. He grins. “As you’ve said, you would have been just fine without me.”
Your vision goes blurry. You pin him with such a stare, you watch the blood rush from his face.
“But it would have been only half a life.”
“Don’t kid about that, Neptune, it’s not –,”
“I’m serious.” You put your bowl down and rub your eyes with your sleeves. Of all the ways he hasd seen you bare and naked, he’sd never seen you this vulnerable. “I don’t wanna do any of this without you. I want you, Ezra.”
“You have me, dear heart, you have me.”
“Not like that and you know it.” You watch as understanding rolls across his face. His lips part, eyes wider. He swallows and you stare at the ceiling, cheeks suddenly wet and hot. He said he’d never leave you, but what if this is the thing that finally does it? Could he work with you, knowing just how deeply you love him, and not feel an ounce of disgust? “You told me once sex is just a way to pass the time, but never, not once, have you ever even tried to pass the time with me.” 
He swallows, deeper this time, jaw locked, his eyes fluttering with the force of it. He brings his knees to his chest.
“Because it wouldn’t just be passing time with you.” 
In that moment, you’re grateful for the rain, for the sound of something to fill the silence. 
You stare at him, cross-legged in front of the open corner of this yellow tent, abandoned bowls growing colder, but he sits with his leg up, knee to his chest, as if to ward you off. Ward off whatever is growing in your gaze, under the flat bone over your heart in your chest. But whatever is stifling the air in your lungs, is warming his eyes past the point of comfort, barrelling towards expletives and the crass, the lewd and depraved. You cannot go back to having him look at you any other way. 
That look loosens every line in his face when you crawl into his lap, your knees around his hips. The backs of your thighs go damp, even through the suit, pressing down onto his still-damp shorts, and you think his breathing has quickened.
His massive palm hovers near your cheek, unwilling or unable to pull you forward or push you back, his oak eyes searching your face for signs of discomfort as if he had somehow dragged you across the tarp floor. 
“Neptune,” he mumbles as he focuses on the curve of your bottom lip, “this is unwise. You don’t know what you’re asking for.” 
You can feel the hard curve of his shoulders as you follow the lines of his arms and settle them on his collarbone. Nothing has happened that can’t be undone – not yet. Your perfect, vicious Ezra hasn’t pressed you flat on your back like you thought he would at the hint of sex. You could return with your dignity tomorrow morning, this moment never spoken of again, and he’d let you have that. The shake of his elbow with his palm against the tarp is the only indication that something might be unsettling to him. 
But it is your birthday after all. Maybe he’d let you have this one thing. He doesn’t know you’ll die without it.
“If you don’t want this . . . if you don’t want m-me, then say something. Push me away and I’ll never bring it up again.” You cup the sides of his neck as your hips shift forward, closer to him. The air in your lungs tightens, breath coming in shallow pants. Only then does he drop your gaze and fixate on your encroaching heat. “At least then I’ll know.” 
There. Out loud. It’s been said, heard above the deluge of rain against the tent and the jungle outside. 
His palm finally settles on your cheek. It brings a sense of wholeness to you like you’ve never known. Your eyes flutter shut at the sensation, a breathy exhale pours out of your mouth. His thumb catches the plush curve of your bottom lip and he draws it towards your chin, his own mouth open, enraptured. 
“Sweet thing, how have you not always known?” 
His mouth is humid against yours, as if he swallowed the jungle while looking for you, his thumb releasing your lip to capture with his own. The tip of his pointer finger massages the hinge of your jaw, just below your ear, and he manipulates your head until your mouth parts like he wants.
His tongue skims your upper lip, a tentative exploration into the unknown rewarded with a low groan that is warmed by the heat coiling low in your hips. You taste his tongue, a hot glide inside your mouth, and you feel his arms slip around your lower back, his inhale of breath sharp across your face as he brings you closer. He bites your lips roughly, the spark of pain and pleasure crackling across your face as if you’d brushed a live wire. 
His fingers wrap around your wrist, prying you from the back of his neck, just for a moment, his eyes heat-soaked. You suck your teeth, mouth open and seeking, and the hand around your jaw drops to your collarbone, the breadth of his palm nearly suffocating your throat.
The briefest pressure – the slightest touch – at the pulse at the bottom of your neck and your hips rock forward into him as he flattens his other palm to your ass, clutching you to him and pinning you to the pallet in the center of the tent. 
His teeth scrape against the curve of your ear, pinching the cartilage between his incisors, while his hands frantically search up and down your waist. His weight smothers you, his stomach breathing into yours, the flat plane of his chest rubbing your nipples raw against your suit, an unfocused lurch to his hips every time you tug on his hair. With every breath, every time you try to savor his touch, the taste of his mouth is like a wave, dragging you forward, wrapping a dizzy chain around your throat and squeezing.
Ezra’s greatest weapon has always been his mouth, that silver string spinning faster the longer he captivates you, spell-bound. Now he uses to decimate you in entirely new ways. 
The suck of his lips against the moist flesh below your ear distantly distracts from the afterburn of his unkempt beard against your jaw, your cheek. His lips alternate patterns of reward with a plush kiss and punishment with a stern nip when you try and stifle a moan. The edge of his shirt is damp from resting against his shorts when you slip your fingers underneath to palm the small of his back. He stills when you run your fingers around to the front of his trunks. 
His hand curls around a clump of hair at the base of your skull, his eyes darker than volcanic ash. The steady heat of his groin against your thigh is a sensation you’ll chase for the rest of your life.
“You know what happens when you touch a man there, Neptune?” He’s breathing hard, you both are, and the way he snags your hair in his fist has your head twisted at an odd angle, but you’d be damned to a Kevva-forgotten corner of the cosmos before you drop his gaze. You nod and that moon-shaped scar on his cheek twitches. “I know I didn’t teach you that.”
“L-learned it – somewhere else – Ezra.” Your mouth isn’t working properly, your lips swollen from his kisses, the slight pain in your scalp making it difficult to focus, while and your cunt tightens hungrily. “Had to.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“Because you wouldn’t give it to me.” 
He leans back, his forearm tense and corded where he has you by the hair, a seemingly disinterested scowl on his face. But by the throbbing length pressed up against you, so far from where you need him the most, he is anything but. 
“So you’re saying this is my fault?” Without breaking eye contact, his chest raised inches above yours, his fingers snag on the blue zipper by your collar and your breathing nearly stops. He hums to himself, eyes following the path of the zipper as the material separates, click by click by click. When it reaches your belly button, he stops. 
“Ezra –,” it’s a whine and you can’t even chastise yourself for it. And neither, it seems, can he. 
Head tilted as if curious about the label of a box beneath colorful wrapping, he dips his wide hand beneath the edge of your suit. The heat that radiates from his palm against the curve of your stomach has you writhing underneath him, your knees drawing up to his hips, trying to catch any relief. 
But he takes his self-satisfied time. Callouses of a hard-won life snag and drag over the soft paper-thin skin that covers your ribs as he maps you in one hand. When he cups your right breast in his palm, the noise you make is a sob of gratitude. 
“You let another man besides me do this to you?” 
The snarling pit of your own thoughts slows as some awareness realizes he’s speaking to you. 
You swallow, clutching his bicep, begging for forgiveness before even opening your mouth to answer. 
“It didn’t mean anything, Ez, it wasn’t you – it meant nothing to me–,”
“But you let someone else touch what’s mine, hm?” That lazy, slightly irritated look on his face, he rotates his hand, squeezing the cup of your tit again, before sharply pinching your nipple. 
“Ezra–,” you choke out and his thigh shifts between your legs, just close enough to feel the heat but nowhere near close enough to grind against. His thumb rotates the raised flesh slow enough to capture and catalog every sigh it draws from you, his eyes catching between his hand and your relaxed face. 
He wears the same expression he does when sitting in the backs of blackmarket tea shops and smoky alebins. When the prospect of striking gold becomes all he can think about.
“Strip.” He suddenly commands. He lifts off you just enough for you to wrench your arm through the armhole, all the while keeping a rough palm on one breast, and then the other. You watch him massage your flesh and your ribs tremble with an unsteady breath. Only when a slightly cool breeze meanders over your bare shoulders and chest do you realize that the tent flap is still open, your head inches from the edge. A perfect and unimpeded view to anyone who wants to watch him hungrily grope your tits. Embarrassment peaks sharply, despite his hand pressing you into the tarp, you wrench your neck back and look over your shoulder through the window of the open tent as if you need to confirm that you are giving the jungle a floor show.
“Ez– shit, the flap–,” 
He finds that the skin beneath your breast had grown sticky and slick from sweat, the humidity still oppressive even with a breeze. He bends his head and licks that same sweaty path and your attention snaps back to him, nails curling against his scalp, his warm breath a high-intensity balm to your roughly-played-with nipples. 
“Not a soul in sight, Neptune,” he murmurs lazily into your ribcage, his nose running up and down the valley between your tits. “And if there were, let them learn a thing or two.” 
His teeth nip the swell of your stomach as he crawls down your half-naked body. Without his heat and hands, the tenderness from his attention on your breasts ratchets up to an ache, a minor preoccupation before he hooks his fingers around the rest of the jumpsuit and tugs. 
You are naked beneath him, swollen chest rising and falling, your knuckles scraping against the pallet as you search for something to grip with all your might. You smell of lagoon water and hot jungle air, of muggy photosynthesis and algae. The smoky scent of the black ash of that distant planet never really left Ezra and the dampness of the rain seems to stir it up. He towers over you, dark and breathing heavy. Smoke and brimstone.
He gropes your ankles, then your calves, hands gliding over the thick hair there – now grown soft in length – as he slowly spreads your legs, with a light you’d never seen before in his eyes. 
“Neptune, I revolve around you.” 
A wave of anxiety lurches up your throat when he brings his mouth to your cunt, the cloying, imagined scent of moon lilies threatening to tear you out of the moment – he won’t want you wild like this – but it’s forcefully yanked back down with a single stripe of his tongue. His previously casual, authoritative persona cracks when he buries his face into your unkempt curls and lets out a deep, overly pleased moan.
Your back bends and he’s gathering up your limbs in his arms to pin them down, nearly resting his forehead on your pubic bone. A few more licks, some deeper than others into where you drip for him, and your thighs start to shake. His fingers around your thighs squeeze roughly against your flesh and pull you further apart. 
Between the flush of slick seeping from you at an embarrassing rate and the wiry hair kept natural out of a certainty no one would see it, he must be drowning or choking, his tongue flicking and sliding, nose prodding your clit just enough to spread the sparks of arousal up through your spine. Feeling as though you’re losing your grip on reality, you sink your hands into his hair, thumb rubbing back that blonde patch, and tug. The moan he shoots into your cunt as he rocks forward into your touch has you whining helplessly. The tarp squeaks where he rubs his hips into it. 
His arms curled around your thighs, your hips shake with restraint against every lap of his tongue until he flicks your clit and your hips grind up against his obliging mouth, a sunspot of pleasure flaring brightly. But all too soon, Ezra lifts up onto his elbows, his hands smoothing across your stomach and he pops his mouth up from your wet folds. With an irate gasp, the swell of bliss fading, your gaze snaps down to plead with him, but he shakes his head.
Wordlessly, he takes one hand from your thigh and wipes his mouth clean with a swipe of his fingers. Then, with his eyes wide, the skin around his mouth loose, he crooks two fingers at the top of your mound before sliding them down where his mouth was seconds ago and presses them inside of you. That simmering in your low belly roars back to life and you toss your head against the unforgiving pallet, eyes slamming shut. He growls at the obscene sucking noise your cunt makes as he plucks at you, in and out. 
“Oleaginous,” he hums, so quietly, it might have been for him. He tongues your clit lightly, pushing his fingers as deep as they can go, watching you thrash. “Mine. Understand?” You remember that tone of voice from when he had you dissecting throwers on a workbench in front of him. You nod, eyes fluttering open, balancing on the precarious edge of release. 
You want to obey his every word. 
His thumb twists up, opening your clit to him and within a whispered breath of “good girl” he sucks your bundle of nerves and launches you into orbit. 
Your entire body goes stiff from the force of it, only to crash back down into his waiting hands, your voice wavering on a high-pitched, girlish wail that shrieks above the sound of rain. Waves of bliss lap at every nerve ending and your vision goes fuzzy for a minute, the only sound you can register is the pounding of your blood in your ears.
And then you register the steady, wet plunge of his fingers still dragging in and out of your pussy.
“Was that mine?” 
Your clit tingles from overstimulation, but you’d rather die than have him stop – you want to answer, if only you could pick up the pieces of your voice. You can only nod, whining. He presses a wet kiss to your inner thigh, the skin there smeared with your release.
“You did a bad thing, letting someone else touch what’s mine.” He scolds, rubs that spot inside you that makes your eyes roll back in your head, holds his finger to it until it burns. You cry, his punishment evident. “Now you have to apologize, Neptune.” 
You nod again, mouth wrenched open as he drags you back and forth across pleasure and pain. 
“Y-y-yes, Ezra,” the words are bone dry, cracked between your teeth. “I’m sorry.” 
Pure wickedness strikes those earth eyes and scorches them a singed black. 
“Unfortunately, atonement is a fickle thing,” Ezra tuts, dragging his lips across your thigh in a mockery of a kiss, “and I’m not quite ready to offer absolution. Despite your offerings,” he wipes his mouth with a stroke of his palm, “this godhead remains rigid.” 
You whimper. He grins with a mouthful of teeth.
Ezra pulls back onto his knees and shuts your thighs, his hand palming your ass as he indicates that you should turn. Your entire lower half still feels like jelly – no one has ever made you come that hard with just their mouth before – but you obey. You stagger onto your hands and knees in front of him. 
His wide palm appears beneath your chin.
“Spit.”
You do.
That spit-wet hand cups your still wet cunt, middle finger rubbing briefly against your clit, before it disappears. You feel him move closer, hear his slick hand pump himself a few times with a grunt. Hot lips drag up your spine, interspersed with the nip of teeth, and when he lays across your back, his hands overtaking yours and threading your fingers together, his bare chest presses up against the skin of your back and you shudder. 
He noses your temple, his throbbing cock coated between your folds. He bites at your jaw and follows your line of sight through the open tent flap. 
“Breathtaking, isn’t it? All that moisture, dripping and running over smooth rock and fern. All that heat coagulating in spaces it shouldn’t fit. All that . . . open field, for anyone to just wander into. Take a look around and smell the air. Could they smell you like I can, Neptune? The way you leak for this cock?”
As he hums filth in your ear, his hand settles again at the base of your throat, thick fingers squeezing just enough to threaten, before sliding down to your swinging breasts, rough palms catching your swollen nipples, then arching down your stomach and between your legs. 
He plays slowly with your clit; barely enough stimulation and he knows it.
“Ask for forgiveness.” He croons in your ear. The breeze returns for a moment, and between the heat of him mounting you like a feral animal and the hesitant touch of outside air against your sweaty chest, you shudder with a groan. 
“I’m sorry, Ezra. I’m so–,” his middle finger increases its pressure slightly and the words shatter in your mouth, “sor-ry.” 
“And for what?”
He continues to rub between your folds and the minute hitch in his breath is more intoxicating than anything he’s done so far. This is affecting him just as much as it does you. He kisses your jaw then tugs on the skin with his teeth. 
“For letting a-anyone but you t-touch me.”
Ezra presses his damp forehead into your shoulder, panting, your correct answers soaking the neurons in his brain. Your reward is the faster stroke of his finger. 
“And why was that a reprehensible thing to do?” His hips rut into yours, the scrape and rub of his cock between your slick lips and thighs almost enough to set you off. 
“Because it’s yours – I’m yours – f-fuck, Ezra, I’m yours, I only wanna be yours,” you sob. 
He’s suddenly gone from above you and the loud crack of his hand against your ass cheek deafens you for a minute, the sting skittering up your back and down your thigh. 
“Good fuckin’ girl.”
Your elbows shudder, the weight of his tone, his hand nearly forcing you onto your chest with your ass still in the air. You wanna be so good for him. 
He’s breathing hard and his skin is warm and damp where you feel his thigh press against the back of yours. There’s a measure of restraint he’s showing and it makes your heart pound in anticipation. You swing your hips back at him, as if you could catch yourself on his cock. 
“I wanna show you I’m yours,” you cry, nails curling into the pallet. “Please, Ezra, please!”
His broad hand settling on your spine draws a hiccup out of you, a sob. 
“Breathe . . . Good girls get what they need.” 
On an exhale, his blunt tip spreads you apart and he shuffles closer as he thickens inside you. His loud, unabashed moan overwhelms yours, when you think you might just be devoured by him. His hand, the one at your hip, squeezes you, silent reassurance. You can feel the knuckles on his other hand against your slick lips as he feeds himself into you.
“Neptune, talk to me. How,” your cunt tightens around his girth at the sound of his voice coaching you along and he grunts, as if suddenly dizzy, “h-how do you feel?”
“Amazing, Ez. Please keep going don’t stop I can take it–,” 
He obliges; something’s reconnected the wires in his brain enough to tell him to move. He huffs before sinking deeper and your eyes roll back in your head. He bottoms out and waits again, letting you both catch your breath. 
“Spent a hundred moons thinking about this.” The puff of breath against your shoulder is the only warning you have before he presses his mouth to your skin. His hand free of your clutch, his thumb softly rubs the muscle of your neck. He kisses you and kisses you and kisses you, wherever he finds bare flesh. “Would wake up in the night, with you a few feet from me, looking like divinity made sin, made real, but I wasn’t worthy to touch you. You got me all tongue-tied, Neptune, all mucked up in the head. A silly boy,” he purrs.
You glance over your shoulder, unsure which Ezra is going to meet your eyes, but wanting all of them. The man you feel most safe with in this world and the next greets you and you reach back and squeeze his hand. He chuckles softly, and with it, comes a gentle roll of his hips. You gasp, airily, your gaze slipping from his face to his chest, to the steady breathing in his stomach, and then to the growth of hair that fades as it reaches up his low belly. How many times did you sit across the room from him with your fists in tight balls, watching as he regaled exploits of riches and wonder, all the while thinking about how thick his cock is outlined in his suit – you’re so blinded by breathy dreams of what the musky scent of his cock must taste like that you miss that he’s pulled out farther, halfway now, and you are completely knocked senseless when he thrusts back in, a beat faster. 
“Later, Neptune. I’ll let you suck my cock later, but right now I’ve gotta ride this pussy to oblivion.” 
Your thighs quake at his promise, cunt squeezing him, and he huffs, picking up speed.
“I felt that. You really like sucking cock that much?” 
All you can answer him with is a whine. Your knees are starting to ache from the barest cushion the tarp provides, the palms of your hands sore, but you can’t find it in you to remotely care. With every stroke, he fills you up to a breaking point before riding you back out. Moaning gratefully, you finally drop onto your elbows, your cheek scraping against the pallet with every forceful thrust behind you. He tilts your hips up higher, on one knee to fuck down into you; he’s searching with his cock for that spot that made your brain numb. 
Like a flood, you feel bliss roll down your spine, his hands on your lower back pulling you up another peak, and you gasp, at the edge of a very, very long drop, the sounds in the tent as sticky and wet as the rain outside.
But Ezra’s sounds are loudest of them all. Grunting. Hissing. Moaning like he’s fucking the best pussy of his life. You open one eye, glancing over your shoulder and the sight drops open your mouth. Hips pumping forward, skin dewy with sweat, he breathes like a freshly broken-in stallion, relieved that something finally bested him. Chest full and tight with muscle, flushed pink with roaring blood. Stomach torqued with tension. His rhythm is caught between his hands pulling you onto him and his cock thrusting into you. A frantic beat that bounces wet and hot, mouth agape and eyes rolling shut, his head drops back between his shoulders. You push back slightly and he stutters, the hand on your hip tightening. 
“Not gonna last, Neptune–” he grits, his jaw locked tight. The image of him actively staving off an orgasm for you to finish first has been imprinted on your brain for the rest of your life. 
“J-just a little harder, Ez.” 
He obeys, submitting as you had for him, sweat curling around his neck and down his chest. 
As release barrels down on you, those mahogany eyes catch and hold yours in a second that lasts through infinity. They promise you things that you didn’t know you asked for, those eyes, made vows only your soul could hear. You see, in that instant before you are swallowed whole, that he’d die at your feet, if you asked him to. He’d give up every worldly treasure he won through grit and his teeth if you needed it or wanted it. If it made you happy.
His Neptune – in the crushing grip of your gravity. Willingly caught in the trail of your comet as you fill up his night sky.    
“Yeah, that’s it, right there – Ez-ra!” 
His face blown out in near ecclesial bliss is the last thing you see before your vision goes white. Your heart pounds in your ears so loudly, it's the only thing that exists for an instant. And then you shatter with a perfectly soft cry, bliss breaking across you like a heavy wave, and you succumb to exhaustion. 
Behind you, he groans, fucking you faster through it, snarling something entirely incomprehensible. 
You think you might say his name, you don’t know what your mouth is doing, but whatever you say, it breaks him and you are dragged through another low shock, the flood of cum deep into your achy cunt enough to contract your walls again, his harsh groan stuffing your ears just as full. 
The rain is barely louder than your desperate attempts to breathe. 
The tarp crackles as you slump forward onto your stomach, Ezra dropping to his side with half his body over yours. Panting raggedly, his hand curls up to the base of your neck, a reassurance of his presence and commitment when words have failed him. 
You lay like that for a long time.
And then, when feeling starts to return to your limbs, you turn your head, your nose rubbing against his. When you breathe hotly across his face, he grins a satisfied grin that splits into a chuckle. You laugh with him too, curling up into his chest, his forearm is sticky across your spine, and he kisses your forehead.
Staring up at the tarp, together you listen to the rain. 
In the long drawn out, buzzy silence, his nails scratch the base of your skull. And then, like he remembered something vital, he picks his head up and looks at you.
“Do you want this to change things for us?” 
“Yes.” You cup the muscles of his thick neck. “Yes, Ezra. I want this to change everything between us. Please.” 
He smiles, unguarded and open. 
“Wild horses never stood a chance . . . especially against these tits.” He nips at the swell of your breast and you laugh. “I had no plans of letting you go in any case . . . but we are bound from this day forward. You know that, don’t you?”
You nod. A stroke of heat passes over his eyes and  Ezra leans forward to kiss you, his hand on your cheek pulling you in close, as close as you can be, two sticky bodies, cum-dried and tingling.
“And if we’re going to spend every year of our lives together, I have a question for you.” he pushes away a stray strand of hair stuck to your face, nose tip to nose tip, “did you have a good birthday, Neptune? Are you satisfied?”
With a giggle that has his eyebrow arching playfully, you kiss his cheek.
“I already told you. This was the best birthday I’ve ever had.” 
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chronically-ghosted · 8 hours
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I am aware I have died on this hill before but people who really strenuously argue that fanfic isn't "real writing" drive me insane. what do you meeeaaaaannn. besides the fact that any attempt to define "real art" vs "fake art" is inherently reactionary, it just doesn't make any sense. it's Writing. people Write it. what the fuck are you talking about.
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chronically-ghosted · 9 hours
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listen . . .
*holds your cheeks with my hands* li s te n
i need, like, five more of these lil guys? just to hold me over so i don't launch my head through a concrete wall
gideon oh my godplease
just a touch
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Dieter Bravo (x afab!reader)
980 words
warnings: m masturbation, afab!reader mentioned, writer Dieter being horny af, unedited.
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Does anyone else ever spend all their day thinking about...
Dieter Bravo jerking off.
About how he draws it out for hours because he loves to be teased, even if he's teasing himself. He'll watch something filthy (he's got a great selection of porn, some homemade) or look at those nudes you sent him. But he refuses to touch himself the whole time, as he gets harder and more desperate for it.
He likes the luxury of getting off in bed, on his expensive soft sheets, or in the shower with the warm water running all over his body. He gets really sensitive the longer he holds off, so he'll give it as long as he possibly can. If he really wants to drive himself crazy, he'll force himself to go do something else after getting all turned on from whatever he chose to watch - something super mundane like read his many emails, or tidy up whatever mess was left out last night.
Usually though, he'll go to the big full length mirror in his bedroom, slowly take his clothes off, appreciate his own body. He spent a long time struggling with his body image, but nowadays he loves what he sees. His broad chest, the softness of his tummy, and then the bulge in his pants before he slowly peels them off. He's never been anything but proud of his dick. As far as cocks go he's got a pretty one, everyone always says it. He's still not touching it, not now as he appreciates the view of it in the mirror. His hands might come close, as his fingers softly feel their way around his own body, mapping paths you've taken as you've explored him yourself. He'll play with his nipples, pinch at the sensitive parts of his torso and grasp his stomach, appreciate the soft feel of it. He wishes you were there right now, but he'll make do with what he's got. Himself.
Finally...oh finally he makes his way on to his bed, sat with his back against the headboard with his legs spread wide. The mirror is angled just right, so he has a good view of himself from there. He's a little flushed, cheeks reddened. He's leaking precum, made himself so fucking desperate for his own hand. He looks really good, and he knows it.
He'll use whatever is closest, spit or lube or lotion. He isn't picky. Sometimes he'll use a toy too, depending on what he wants to feel and how quick he wants to get off. He loves playing with things that vibrate but they tend to make him come quicker than he likes so he doesn't use them too often - better when you're trying to overstimulate him to tears. Usually he'll use a butt plug when he's on his own, he likes his ass nice and full as often as it can be.
Now he takes himself in his hand, and the moan he makes at that first touch is sinful. He starts off painfully slow, teeth gritted in concentration as he tries to zone in on every single thing he's feeling as his fists glides up and down his cock. He'll think of you now the most, of the drag of your cunt up his dick. Or the warmth of your mouth on him. He'll bring up every memory he has of you and him together, the way you look when he's in you. The way you cry out as he thrusts into you for the first time. God, he can't take it this slow anymore.
As he quickens his pace, the noises he makes would make anyone blush. Dieter is never quiet like this. He loves to be heard, even if it's only him who can hear it right now. More, and more, and more. His free hand is playing with his balls, gentle tugs and squeeze that makes him tense dangerously and groan in pleasure.
Will he slow down now, calm himself down before he starts up again? Well, he'll try but at this point he's possessed by the need to come. He tries to be good, he really does. The way you like it, every last drop teased out of him but holding off for as long as he possibly can You tell him to be good, but you're not here right now and he can't quite bring himself to be that good.
He'll confess later, you can punish him if you want.
He's gasping out, a needy thing, beautiful noises of absolute heady pleasure. Eyes zoning back in just enough to watch as he brings himself to the edge. His favourite part to watch, as his movements falter and his balls tighten and with a loud cry he's spilling ropes of his cum onto his lower belly, onto his fingers, wherever it goes. Messy, he loves it that way. He pulls out every last drop he can, until its too much.
His head falls back against the headboard, eyes squeezing shut as he heaves out heavy breaths while his body trembles slightly from the climax. After a moment or two, he'll bring his hand up to his mouth and lick it clean. Dip his fingers into the mess he made and taste himself. It makes him groan, he tastes so fucking good. You always tell him the same, and he knows you're not lying.
In the time it takes him to regain his thoughts, he's laid himself down on the bed properly, sprawled out and a little dozy. He gets sleepy after he's come, but not enough to actually fall asleep. He just likes to bask in the feeling for a little while while he recovers. He bury his face in the pillow that still smells of you, and close his eyes and just enjoy the moment.
And if he really needs it today...he'll make it all happen again in a couple hours.
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chronically-ghosted · 10 hours
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*SIGHS*
Another AO3 app that's pretending to be official when it's not (or at least isn't making it clear its unofficial.) They're using AO3's name and logo, and embedding ads.
There is no official AO3 app
Someone else is gathering your data, potentially your log in information etc and making use of it how they please. (They say they're not but their privacy policy says otherwise)
They are making money from the ads without the fic writer's consent.
They've also rated it Pegi 3 (which is ludicrous)
Please, even if you care about nothing else, for the safety of your data, please don't use this app. Certainly don't give it your AO3 log in details.
I've told AO3 that it's infringing on its copyright. I will be requesting they remove access of my work as I do not consent to my creative content being used to generate ad revenue for them.
I will be reporting it as incorrectly rated.
The only email address I can find is [email protected] which is included in their privacy policy, and [email protected] as their developer.
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chronically-ghosted · 10 hours
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i am a loser in ways you can’t even wrap your head around
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chronically-ghosted · 10 hours
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Joel Miller
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chronically-ghosted · 10 hours
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people always talk about leaving comments on ao3 like it's a nice thing to do, or the best way to encourage writers to keep writing, or overall like it's how you Do Your Part in fandom
and yeah, all those things are true, but having spent the past few months leaving enthusiastic comments on as many things as i can, i have a different perspective
you should leave comments on fics because it's fun
taking the time to stop and focus on what i like about a story has made me way more aware of what's going on in stories and what i like about them. there's bit more actual comprehension and appreciation and not just beaming content into my eyes to fill time
i like noticing cool little things in fics, or riffing on funny events. i've never been very good at speculating or picking apart characters, but sometimes something clicks and it rocks.
and of course it's pretty nice when you get a response and it's clear you've made another person happy
so yeah, you should leave comments for your own sake, too. it makes reading better!
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chronically-ghosted · 10 hours
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hm so I'm seeing a Pero Tovar x reader fic where you're the princess of a small kingdom far west of the Great Wall and Pero is your Sworn Protector in this time of war but you fall in love with him despite his gruffness and your father's wishes and he slowly warms up to you until he finds himself Irrevocably Devoted To You
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chronically-ghosted · 11 hours
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^ live feed of me reading your comment
thank you so much! this is the kind of comment i'm going to print out and hang on my walls, or put in my wallet or SOMETHING because wow, this made me feel THINGS! i'm so glad you feel I did him justice!
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iron and charcoal
rating: explicit 18+ pairing: pero tovar x f!reader word count: 6.9K summary: Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –  Her. He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.  OR Pero falls hard for a princess and doesn’t know what to do with himself on your wedding night. warnings: angst, brief classism/xenophobia two very stubborn people, pero experiences one Human Emotion and cannot fully process it, arranged marriage, yearning, smut LIKE WOW, soft!pero that i broke my own heart with a/n: Thank you so much to @perotovar for this request: "congrats on your milestone, my love! so happy for you <33 i'm sending a little astrology 💫 + pero & #6 on the fluffy list OR #1 on the smutty list (whichever is speaking to you), because i wanna see your take on him 👀” – of course I chose the slutty one, just for you 😉 I’m actually pretty proud of this one - please consider reblogging if you like it too!
*the image in the header is for aesthetic purposes only and does not reflect the appearance of the reader*
🤍Masterlist 🤍Pero Tovar Masterlist
💜come see what else we've done to celebrate 1K followers
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Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
Sometimes before battle, the clatter inside Pero’s head goes silent. It listens. It waits. 
Other times, it roars. Memories of family, of dead amigos, of mujeres he fucked – they all buck and scratch for a chance to blaze across his mind like a dust storm kicked up by an unbroken mustang. 
He doesn’t know which one he prefers or which one will win out. They both have their uses, necessary states of mind to survive whatever is barreling towards him – an ax, a monster out of legend, some other drunken mercenary he intentionally pissed off. It’s an unconscious decision, yet one that has served him well so far. He wouldn’t be alive today if some deep, primal part of him knew what he needed to live through another battle. 
And yet, his own trunk knocking against his hips as he climbed the sickly ostentatious stone steps to the top of the parapet, the handles starting to pinch his fingers, the barest – nearly invisible – tremor in his knees, he cannot fathom, for the life of him, why that singular phrase from his abuela played in his head like water swirling around and around a cenote. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
His inner voice, taking on a myriad of forms, of sounds and voices, never quite standing still, the one companion he could always rely on. 
Maybe it was warning him. Dust yourself off, boy, you know exactly how this was going to end. 
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 
But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –
Her.
He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.
He feels sweat escape from the nape of curls at his neck, his cheeks warm and chest hot. Two more flights, he can manage two more flights. 
His abuela also liked to tell him something else: if hell doesn’t get him, his pride certainly will. 
It’s certainly what got him into this ridiculous farce in the first place. Because he can’t alchemize whatever is in his gut into vocalized syllables, he instead has to climb a truly incalculable amount of stairs, while carrying a ragged, torn trunk that weighs as much as his armor. 
Because he can’t form the right words, any words, about what he carries lodged beneath his breastbone for her. What draws him up and up and up and up because it’s lighter than hope, makes him lighter than air, and yet it clogs him up, chokes him out all the same. His pride, his vanity, cuts through it, through her – enough to keep him tongueless and dry but not enough to offer this lightness in his chest to her, for her. He can’t take the light out of him or else he fears what he will truly become.
So, he walks, he goes around and around on unforgiving stone steps until finally there is a door. He thinks about waiting, to catch his breath, but he knows he will just as easily turn around and go back the way he came, trunk still heavy and knocking against his hips, and that pride will be the death of him. So he keeps going, opens the handle, and makes abrupt eye contact with the two guards outside her door. They seem uninterested and unamused in his sweaty, stilted breathing, but by his less-than-royal attire, they easily clock him as one of their own; a man who fights to make his way in the world. The one on the left nods jerkily at him. 
What they see him as, what he will always be, is nearly the reason he kicks that fucking trunk all the way back down. Instead, he nods back, shoulders rounded, eyes down. 
“The princesa - the princess - is requesting the last of her things, to be b-brought up from the stables –,” he clears his throat, “drop this off for her and –,”
“Can’t let you in. King’s orders.” The one on the right sees him as something else – a foreigner first and foremost, their similar stations in life irrelevant. His bright blue eyes rove over Pero’s dark skin, dark hair, jagged scar, distaste and disgust smearing his already ugly features. But he had been dealing with men like these all his life.
“Bueno, you can explain to the King himself why his daughter’s belongings were lost and disregarded. I hear she’s very fond of the Italian prints at the bottom of this . . .”
The guards glance at each other, calculating way above their paygrade. Pero jostles the trunk as if to show he is not above throwing it out the window. 
“Fine.” The second one snaps. “Drop it inside and come back immediately.”
He drops his head, a good little foreign boy. “Gracias, señor.” 
The heavy wooden door opens beneath the iron lock and the instant he is through, he bolts it behind him. Waits to see if the guards notice. They don’t. Perfectamente – all the time in the world. 
All in the time in the world – for what? 
To fail? Again?
He stows the trunk in front of the door, extra time, a few seconds maybe – as if she wouldn’t just tell him to get out the instant she laid eyes on him. Only time will tell. 
Out of the atrium, another door, this one set deep into the wall. A last line of defense. He knocks, once, then twice, then waits. El orgullo chokes him again but fuck it, he’s come this far. He knocks again, knocks something in his chest free and, with it, spill the words:
“Princesa? It’s me. I –,” it throttles him, “princesa, can you open the door?” 
Silence. His heart sits, buried in that trunk. Then –
“It’s unlocked, Pero.” 
His heart in his throat, he opens the door to presumably what will be your marriage bed. And yet, by the state of things, you could have been moving out of it. Trunks and bags stack high against the far wall – those fucking trunks he made such a scene over because the unnecessary weight would slow them all down remain untouched, arranged as they had been when they had been first brought in. He didn’t quite know what to make of that, his thumb absently pressing into the callus of his other hand as he glanced around. It is a beautiful room – tall windows, etched in scarlet drapes, to match the scarlet curtains around the bed. With gold thread and impossibly detailed paintings of the countryside, it is fit for a princess, a some-day queen. This is where someone with royal blood deserved to be, not in the back of a hot carriage for weeks on end, surrounded by dirty, loud, rough men. 
And yet, with your hair down, expansive gown from the ball tonight replaced with a simple cotton dress, you could not have been more out of place. Pero’s heart lurches briefly, moisture seeping from his mouth, as he realizes this is the same dress he bought you when the two of you had been accidentally separated by the caravan and your previous dress had been ruined in the mud. He had no idea you still kept it, much less wore it ever again. 
But if anyone asked him, you look more beautiful in this than any silk or velvet. 
Instead of unpacking, settling into your new home and eventual role as wife, you sit hunched over at the intricately carved mahogany desk, eagle feather quill scratching against parchment. You finish with a flourish and look over your shoulder at him, your eyes annoyingly unreadable. 
“Yes?”
A stupid brute some may call him, but he wasn’t entirely without awareness. Observation of your customs and what you considered inappropriate only encouraged him: if you really didn’t want him here, you would never have let him see you in this state.
But it’s hard to remember that under your icy stare. 
“Y-your things, Princesa. The last from the caravan.”
Your eyes slide over him, to the trunk in the shadows of the atrium. He can tell from a single glance that you know as well as he that trunk is not yours, that no one told him to come here with it, and yet he did it all the same. Something flashes over your eyes but it’s gone by the time you meet his gaze again. 
“Thank you. I am, as always, indebted to you.” 
He hates your words, but warmth spreads in his gut at the way you say it. That’s how it’s always been between you and him – saying one thing but meaning another. He’d never appreciated a sharp mind like yours until he realized you wield it as he wields a sharp sword. 
There are many things he’d never even dreamed of before he met you.
“Then, this means you’re leaving, I suppose.” You draw your sword against him. The metal flashes in your eyes as you stand, one hand against the curved tip of your chair. A bronze halo rims your outline, the fire behind you burning bright and hot. He knows if he touched your shoulder, your neck, your skin would be wonderfully warm. 
He wets his lips. “Si. Our contract with your father is done.” 
You drop his gaze, your lips tightening for a minute, your fingers running through the carvings of wood on the chair. “Even with William in his state? Would it not be better for him to stay and recover? The journey home is –,” you pause, as though someone had thrown a hand over your mouth, “– the journey back east is long.” 
All the longer without you.
“William, he is not an idle man. Two days of bedrest is often all he can take.” 
You grin, in spite of this thing circling you both. “Unless he finds the nun attending to him beautiful.
“He finds them all beautiful.” 
Your smile expands wide across your bright face when you find him smiling at you too. 
This – if this is to be his last memory of you (his heart wrenches at the thought) – this is the you he wants imprinted on his soul: smiling and glowing by firelight. 
But as quickly as it came, that grin that warms him down to his bones, fades. In an instant, your eyes grow soft, your mouth twisted, jaw tight.
“Where will you go?” you ask, in the quietest voice you’d ever addressed him with. 
It pains him, physically aches within him, to hear the distress in your voice. He hasn’t even thought about the next contract, the next royal cabrón who intends to yank him all across God’s green earth to perform a task he can’t be fucked to take on himself. How can he possibly answer you? Nowhere, without you. To rot in a dark hole in the ground? Off a cliff? What answer would provide you or him any sort of satisfaction?
“Wherever the coin goes,” he says and the words scrape his tongue like bile. That ache in his chest spiraling rapidly, deep into his gut – like a poisoned limb he cannot amputate – he does the same thing he always does when he’s hurt: he makes others hurt until they leave him alone. “You do not have to worry, princesa, your new husband will keep you in such comfort you will never wonder where the coin comes from.”
He must be a truly sick man, for the knife-sharp glare you throw at him only knots arousal around the base of his spine. It tugs on something attached directly to his groin which, in turn, yanks the next words out of his mouth.
“He looked especially happy with you in his arms on the dance floor tonight.”
The icy shards in your eyes go brittle and crack. His heart races; he’s overplayed his hand. 
“You watched me dance?”
“All guardsmen were required to –,”
You shake your head, eyes bright and searing through him. “No. It was only the King’s Knights there in attendance.” 
Your hand trailing off the edge of the chair, you take a step forward and he feels his weight shift back onto his heels. But he remains firm. 
Sana, sana.
“Pero, why did you come here tonight?”
“To return the last of your things, princesa. What else is there?”
You flinch, as if he had raised his voice to you. What else is there indeed?
“Not even to . . .  say goodbye? Sixteen weeks on the road is an awfully long time to be around someone, only for them to . . . leave so soon.”
He locks his knees to keep them from shaking. “Do you wish for me to tell you goodbye, princesa?” 
There’s something painfully sad about the way you smile at him. “I wish for whatever would make you happiest.” 
Anger roars within him, hungry and hot, like a burn from a white flame. Why can’t you just admit it? Why do you avoid it time and time again? He knows he hasn’t misread anything you’ve sent his way, so why? Why are you so vested in torturing him this way? 
“Coin makes me happy and, now that I have it, there’s nothing to keep me here.”
There, that hurts you too, just as he meant it.
“Then leave.” They could make ice fortresses out of the strength of your bone-cold stare. “If you have nothing else to say, then take your goddamn trunk and get out of my sight.” 
The flame scorches him, ripping him apart and in his anger, making him cruel.
He bows to you.
“I imagine you will be very happy with your new husband, ranita.”
The term slips from his lips before he can stop it, but his throat and cheeks blister so badly, he physically can’t open his mouth to correct his mistake. Instead, he turns and strides towards the door.
He thinks he hears a gasp from behind him, a sharp sound like breaking glass – small, tinkling, tragic. It spears him through his chest, pierces his heart. 
He gets to the door and pauses.
If you have nothing else to say . . .
Of course he has something to say – words in English and Spanish and broken dialects gathered like poisonous lichen all churning in the boiling cauldron of his mind, but nothing will suffice – nothing reflects or compares to the grief he is already feeling, the despair, the anguish that has settled into all the fleshy joints in his body. Not his pride, but this, saying goodbye to you, this is what actually will kill him.
Every word imaginable crawls up his throat and rages in his mouth, presses up against his teeth, begging for something, anything to be let out, to be free, to tell you that he cannot fucking live without you–
Nothing comes through, but one single word.
“Don’t.” 
The fire crackles in the silence, a wicked god pleased at the display of carnage.
“What did you say?”
A dull thud echoes from where he drops his forehead against the wood of the door, all anger flooding out of his system. Do you have any idea the power you hold over him? One request, one tremor in your voice and his knees all but buckle at your altar. 
Fuck it. 
He always thought he’d go out in a blaze of bloody glory, but he’d never expected to be so exposed, so flayed like this.
“Don’t,” he repeats, his throat as dry as sand. “Do not . . . marry him. Please.” 
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The vision of your great warrior slumped against the door frame, his neck bent, shoulders curled up to his ears has your already pounding heart leaping forward into a gallop. He is defeated, laid low. You watch his guts all but pool out on your hearth. 
He looks about as hopeless and anguished as you feel. 
Your soldier, your man of iron and charcoal, goes blurry in your eyes.
“And what would you have me do, Pero?” Your plea is damp, malleable at the edges. You press your hand flat against your chest, near your throat, as if you could pull the grief lodged there with your fingers. “I have been engaged to this man before I was even born. How can I stop this?” 
“Fight.” The word snarls against his bare teeth. He turns, his eyes liquid ink, and suddenly he has you by the shoulders. His thumbs nervously skitter around the curve of your shoulder, gaze just as unsteady and unfocused as it wavers between your hands, your earlobe, your neck. "Where is my brave girl who fights for what she wants, hm? Fight – for me, please.”
Fight, he asks – but in spite of him or because of him?
You lay your hands on the silver shine of his breastplate, watch as they rise and fall with his steady flow of breath. How many nights had you woken up against that shine, in the crook of his arm for warmth, or protection? You didn’t cherish it at the time because you never knew when it would be your last. 
“Why won’t you fight, princesa?” His voice is low, strained, the groan of a wagon wheel before it breaks. You meet his gaze and the exposed look on his face, softening every line on his mouth and around his eyes, nearly sends you into hysterics. You swallow the tears, swallow the hook in your throat as your fingers curl around the clasps of his cape. 
"Because if I don't fight then I can't lose.” His fingers slip from your shoulders, to your elbows, to your waist. You inhale and the scents of warm leather, oil, and ash flood your mouth. The tip of your nose is inches from the scruff of beard against his cheek, the ruddy brown of his sun-drenched skin. He has curled you into him and this, you do not fight either. His massive palms map your back, against your skin, but without any urgency or control. “If I can’t lose, that means I don’t lose you. You'll just be . . . gone."
That last word is a lie. It hangs in the air like a sweltering humid rain and you both know you’re lying. He has you wrapped up in his arms, you didn’t stop him even for a second, and you are all too aware that it would take some great, insidious alchemy to ever truly tear him out of you. 
You stare at his silver collar, defiant against the waves you had managed to shackle down until this very moment: a wave of hopeless crashes into you, a wave of heartbreak, a wave of helpless that fills your eyes to the point of spilling with that very same salt water.
He touches your cheek delicately, fingers rough with callouses, and the floodgates break open with a sob. 
“Preciosa,” he rumbles softly against your hairline, “hush. You break my heart with your tears.” 
“Do not mock me, Tovar. Not now.” you sniff, trying to turn your face but his wide hands catch you around the cheeks.
“You are beyond mocking. I’d show you my heavy heart but I do not wish that weight on anyone.” The snag of his rough thumbs against your cheek draws your watery gaze to him. His mouth is a flat line, barred against whatever climbs his throat, but his eyes move like mercury across your nose, your eyelashes, the arch of your cheek. Your fingers wrap themselves around his wrists, a grounding agent against the waves that threaten to pull you under. 
“Pero, I –,”
“I have fought you, tooth and nail, for days without end. Every favor, every breath, you have forced them from me. I fight my own mind when I sleep at night. Sueños, always of the same woman.” He smears away the tears with his thumbs, gently, sweetly, before pressing his lips to your wet flesh by his knuckle. He inhales deeply, eyes closed, mouth hovering stationary above the skin of your cheek. “You fight me every step of the way . . . and I am so tired of fighting.” 
For all your struggling, for all your tearing and clawing and snarling against the blooming in your chest, nothing is as easy as it is to turn your head and press your lips to his. 
The brush of his bristled mustache against your upper lip. His warm, rough palms holding you steady. His lips soft and hot. You are overwhelmed by the scent of him.
There is nothing like, and nothing will ever be like, finally kissing Pero Tovar. 
All it takes is the movement of his hands from your cheeks to your lower back, the light trace of his tongue against your lips, and the yearning you’d been smothering for weeks now roars to life. His hands squeeze your hips and you can suddenly barely breathe. 
“Pero–,” the noise in the shape of his name that escapes you is near a whine, begging. He nips at your lips, hand firmly at the cup of your jaw, mouth now rough and insistent, and your fingers claw up his neck, wrapping themselves in his dark curls. You tug, nails scratching his scalp, and he groans into your mouth as if you’d just kneed him in the gut.
A thread-bare gasp of your name from his lips splits you from him, then his hand on your hip and the back of your neck pushing you backwards gives you enough air to breathe – to think.
"Your husband will know you're not a virgin,” Pero warns, breathing hard and fast, his eyes like black flints, “if we go on." 
You curl your fingers around his neck, dragging your mouth near his jaw, the soft skin at the edge of his ear.
"Then he will also know my heart is not his either.” You ask everything of him with this. His armor blocks his warm body from you – you want to sink inside his hard shell. “If you’ll have it.”
He is not himself, half-human with an inhuman want, with the snarl that leaves him. 
“Don’t make such promises, dulzura –,” A threat, a dog forced to expose its underbelly, fear radiating like the pain from a broken bone. Your fingers dig into the buckles of his cape, steadying you against a sudden terrible awareness that bloomed, purple-bruised. 
“Unless you don’t want –,” 
The desk rattles when your hips break against it, the force of his kiss enough to topple over your inkwell, spill rolls of parchment to the floor. The wood groans under your weight when he gathers the thick swell of your thighs in his hands, heaves you onto the flat surface, and spreads your knees around his waist. He is as hard as the iron on his chest. 
“Can you feel how much I want you?”
A frantic sigh of relief, a groan shared between two pairs of lips, seeking skin and warmth and other hungry places. 
He drags you onto his chest, your skirt bunched up around your hips, the rings of his armor digging into the soft flesh of your thighs, his mouth covering yours in wet pulls, and he stands up right, as though you weighed less than his sword. 
A stumble, and he spreads you out on the velvet covers of your marriage bed, his hands imprinting on your hips, your knees, the supple meat of your calves. The touch of him on your bare skin feels like the licks of flames, the smoke of arousal blurring your awareness and dragging your eyelids half-closed. On his heels at the edge of the bed, the flint shards of his eyes drift over the bones of your ankles, the bend of your knee, your heaving chest, hair in snarls around your neck and caught behind your back, and finally to your cunt, hidden by the folds of your dress. 
Velvet hums as you slide your ankles to the curve of your ass, widening your legs, parting your knees. His lips part open, dark want etching every line of his face. You feel the wet linen of your dress cling to your achy cunt. He swallows, unbuckling his cape one latch at a time, his eyes nowhere else. The metal clatters as it falls to the floor.
Piece by piece, the chinks in his armor fall away. Piece by piece, he is revealed to you. Your hands rise up, up your thighs to your knees, your thumbs rubbing soft circles. He watches, never tears his gaze away from your sticky hole, his nimble fingers working away the buckles and knots with practiced precision. You can see it in his eyes – memories of bedrolls by firelight, of such a deep painful, yearning ache, separated only by thin tarp, they are a physical weight beside you in this marriage bed. 
You see them because they’re there for you too. You see them because you've been here a dozen times, on your back, legs spread wide, your hands circling but never dipping, waiting. Wanting. For him. 
His bare chest is warm, the wings of his ribs expanding around short, half-drawn breaths, as he crawls up into your pliant mouth. The kisses are slow, like before, with a crackle of heat just beyond them, his hips slipping into the cradle of your thighs, the wet warmth of you separated by the thin linen of your dress. He sucks the tendon below your ear, a whine slipping out of your mouth, fingers spreading over the harsh planes of his back, and his cock bobs against your thigh. 
Pero is bare and warm and entirely yours. All man beneath the sweltering armor. 
“Amorcita,” he drips into your ear, kisses smeared against your collarbone, your mouth, your earlobe, “amorcita, amorcita . . . ranita, let me take you.” 
He starts to use teeth, a harder nip behind his kisses, when he dips down to your chest. A wide palm with stocky fingers grasps at your breast and it’s a startling sensation for you both. 
“Soft,” he moans before licking up under the supple curve of your breast, mouthing at what his tongue missed. He slips your erect nipple into his mouth and twists it between his teeth. “Sweet,” he murmurs with your nipple firmly between his lips. 
This is unlike anything you’ve felt before. You deliriously thank the gods that he hadn’t touched you like this on the road; you would have kept him, your own wild animal, in bed without rest for days on end.
Pero plucks just as aggressively at your other breast, the spit-wet nipple that preoccupied his mouth verging on purple and aching. He cups you from the outside this time, squeezing and massaging, ringing your nipple with his tongue until your back bows and you let out a whine that has his eyes flickering up to you, the scent of wounded prey filling his nostrils. 
That whine of pleasure elongates into a whimper: “please.”
“Tranquila, ranita.” His touch is softer around your bruised tits, but he keeps one hand bagging the weight of your breast while the other slips beneath your skirt.
The pads of his fingers brush your creamy cunt and with a yelp, you grab him by the wrist, your eyes open with a familiar emotion he draws out of you: rage.
“Pero Tovar, if you value your life you will take me under the covers and put your —,”
He chuckles, his cheek against yours, nose rimming the velvet hairs on the ridges of your ear. The vibrations liquify the tension in your bones, loosening your grip. Your eyes flutter, slick obviously running down his fingers. “Ranita, I don’t think you know how you want to end that sentence..”
His words roll like honey over the heat of your skin. It makes your skin tremble. Your grip tightens on his wrist and you roll your hips, your swollen clit finally relieved by the pressure of his palm. 
“Oh, oh, Pero—,” 
With a grunt, he shuffled closer, elbow by your shoulder and he cups your entire wet cunt in his hand, pushing the heel of his palm flatter against you. You cry out, a sparkling kind of pleasure radiating out from where his hand rests. You buck your hips faster, complete release flickering through your outstretched hand. 
“Can you come like this?” You nod, eyes squeezed shut as you barrel towards escape, and you feel him shudder next to you. You are intimately aware that he’s rubbing his cock on the crease of your hip bone but that only drags you faster towards the light. “Then come, ranita, come and I’ll fuck you.” 
The wet, curling heat growing between your legs descends, then in a bright snap, explodes across your body. 
“Fuck!” You tear open your eyes to find them damp, Pero’s massive hand cupping your cheek towards him, his stallion eyes dark as his fingers drag on the soaked material of your dress, your hips slowing. 
“Amorcita, breathe.” The words are torn from his chest, all cock-suredness gone from his frantic gaze. You gulp in air, the weight of his body over yours grounding and smothering you all at once. He pulls his hand away from you, rides it up your thigh to your waist, looking for something to hold onto. He strokes his thumb once against your overheated skin and you’re wriggling up out of your dress. 
“Help,” you hiss and his fingers nearly tear the fabric off you.
With a few undone buttons, you shiver out of your dress, the slick-drenched spots catching on your warm skin. He flings it behind him, near the fireplace. 
He takes you barely beneath the thick covers before you welcome him back to the heat of your open legs. 
But instead of reeling back and plunging his aching cock into you, he takes the time to kiss you. To praise you in all the ways he fears his mouth will end up short. He kisses you, grateful, reverent – wonderful to be swallowed by but also a distraction.
When he lifts your knees by his waist, your hips automatically tilt towards him and for the first time, you feel his red, sore cock between your tacky lips. The dual sensation nearly drags you over the rack of delectably delicious pleasure, as does his worn, broken groan in your ear. 
“More, please, don’t stop.” You cry against the bristles of his beard, his hand dropping between your sweat-slick bodies, finding yours already there to guide him. The press of him spreads you open, filling you one sinking notch at a time. The sensation of your pink, dripping walls moving to take more of him in has you arching up into his chest, nails dragging into his back. His dry lips stifle the moans escaping from your mouth. 
Pero takes both of your hands in his, dragging them above your head, his fingers locking your palms together as his hips roll forward. “Cálmate, amorcita, cálmate,” he murmurs between distracted presses of his mouth against your chin, your cheek, his breathing heavy and stunted. You writhe, pinned open by his hips and his hands, his cock filling you all too slowly and not fast enough. 
With the last few inches, you take him completely, your cunt throbbing, heart pounding, intoxicated by the sensation of being so maddeningly full. Pero drapes over you, his head tucked into your neck, forearms straining with the tension of gripping your hands tightly. 
“Santa madre . . .” He is not a warrior right now. He is but a man, cunt-drunk and heaving. 
His name is pushed out of the bottom of your lungs with the first swing of his hips. You cling to him, knees at his ribs, unwilling to let even an inch of space between your bodies. But this becomes increasingly difficult as his thrusts gain speed. His flushed lips stain a sticky line against your jaw, down to your throat, and he releases your hands, the oak of the bed creaking beneath the force of him drilling down into you, he props himself up on his palms, his shoulders bent and curled over you, biceps straining, hairline damp, eyelids fluttering. The scar on his cheek is flushed pink.
“Look, amorcita, look how well you take me.”
His words tear you from your nebulous high, the grit of them forcing your head down to the obscene squelch beneath the sheets. The thatch of rough curls over his groin is drenched in slick, his thick cock soaked to the point of shine as it drives into you again and again. The heavy draft of breath the sight steals from him, the tap of his cock against a place so deep you didn’t know your body possessed, draws the spooling bliss as tight as a wire. 
Your trembling thighs squeeze him tighter, that hot pressure rendering you speechless, except for the most pathetic whine. Please, Pero, please, you think, you mutter, you whisper, your body rocking damp against the sheets. 
With a sudden snarl, he takes the chunk of your hair at the base of your head flat in his fists and tugs. A shoot of bright pain sparks bliss down to your tight and bruised nipples, and you cry out again. 
“Stop fighting, puedo sentir cuanto la quieres. Let me have it.” It is the following word that splits you open like lighting carving apart a tree. “Please.”
The wail that you release is the rush of gooseflesh over your skin alchemized into audible sound. Heat radiates through you, sucking the air from your lungs, your vision going blurry, then black as you clamp your eyes shut against the rush, the final release, that curls you into his arms. His warm, flushed arms, shaking with strain. A final wobbly thrust or two and his elbows are buckling, sweat-drenched chest pressing into your own.
Distantly, you are aware of the warm, slick drip down your thighs, his cock pulsing the last drops into your cum-flecked cunt, and the dangers this sort of intimacy poses. You can’t gather enough breath, enough sense to settle the spinning room, to worry or even care. 
Your his, and he is yours. That is all that will ever matter. 
The crackle of wood burning is the only other sound than your ragged breaths, the silent roll of sweat from sticky hot skins into the bedsheets. The stone walls of the castle’s room entomb you together for a brief stretch of infinity.
Pero moves and you think he’s going to back out of you, but instead, he merely adjusts, his head fully on your chest, thick fingers clutching your bruised waist, the shift of his cock pushing more of his release out of your oversensitive cunt. But you’ll take overstimulation over his absence every time. You run your fingers through his damp curls and he hums. 
“I’m sorry,” he huffs into your humid skin. “I’m sorry I let my pride keep us apart for so long.” 
You grin lazily to the ceiling, your breath settling as affection takes its place in your chest. 
“You were not the only one blinded by vanity.” 
“But I’m not blind. Not anymore.” He lifts his head, eyes as dark as your spilled inkwell. “I am never letting you go.” 
You smile at him, fingers soft against the back of his neck. “I don’t plan on wandering away.” 
His oil-black gaze drops to your lips and he leans forward to take your mouth against his. Gentle, but with the promise of more. 
“Mi ranita,” he purrs to break the kiss. 
“You call me that all the time, Pero. What does it mean?”
At that, a nearly shy expression crosses his face. He shakes his head, shifting onto his elbows to lift off you. “I can’t tell you. It will ruin your good mood.” 
You gasp, offended, and you grab him by the ear and twist. He chuckles through a grimace. “You will tell me what that means, Pero Tovar, if you value your appendages.” 
“Órale, princesa, retract your claws and I will tell you.” 
You release your grip and settle against your pillow. Grinning bashfully, he kisses your neck briefly.
“Remember that I love you after I tell you this.” 
Your heart nearly stops, the absence of a steady beat nearly drawing tears to your eyes but you hold firm. You breathe deeply against the fluttering in your stomach and pin him with your glare. Of course, this is how he would profess his love to you – when he’s trying to get out of trouble. 
“Tell me, Tovar!”
He chuckles again and preemptively picks up your hands. He kisses the inside of your palms, settling himself between your thighs. 
“It means little frog.” Your mouth falls open in a gasp and you struggle to yank your hands back from him, hissing like a tea kettle, but he uses his weight to press down on you. He nips at your nose. “I call you that because when you’re upset with me, much like you are now, you puff up like a bullfrog, your cheeks like this–,”
He rounds his cheeks full of air, crossing his eyes, and you simply cannot take the slight anymore. You push roughly against his gut, the breath trapped in his mouth escaping in a hot puff, and you twist him onto his back. He lets you, of course, his bold, full laughter rendering him defenseless. His body shakes beneath you, his beautiful eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open wide as he laughs and laughs and laughs. You take him by the wrists and push his limp hands over his head, pinning him as he had you. You pinch his chin with your teeth, your messy cunt over his stomach, as his laughter subsides. 
“Have you had your fun yet?” 
“Barely,” he chuckles, turning his big nose against your cheek and inhaling. He hums.
“Is that all I am to you? A joke?”
Pero opens his eyes, sober as death rattle. He takes you in, not in a hungry, all-consuming way, but in a look that speaks of awe and rapture.
“You are everything to me.”
You sigh, releasing his hands and curling into his chest. He kisses the top of your head, your eyes on the roaring fire. His thumbs rub your shoulder blades, trace the lines of your spine.
“You’re so very lucky I love you too.” 
His wandering against the expanse of your back stills, just for a moment, before his fingers slide into your hair, around the nape of your neck, holding you to him with the intention of keeping you there forever.
“I know, ranita, I know.” 
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He watches you sleep as the sky lightens beyond the tall windows on the opposite side of the bedroom. The dying fire traces your edges in gold, settling heat in the curve of your lips. 
His heart lurches with the wanting of you.
There’s more terrible things to come, he knows that. The plan the two of you concocted in the early morning hours will be dangerous, deadly even. But dying together instead of living apart would be much more tolerable, you told him earlier that night, your hand on his chest. 
He would kill if you asked. He would kill, even if you didn’t, to keep you safe and by his side. You’ve proven yourself capable of living a life away from this spectacular opulence, but it pains him to know he will never be able to give you anything nearly as lovely as the velvet dresses in the closet, the gold jewelry in your trunks. 
Instead, all he has to offer is himself. His strength, his hands, his heart. It’s his own fear that tells him that’s not enough, because you remind him again and again that’s more than you ever wanted. 
He traces the curve of your cheek with the hovering pad of his finger, brushing your hair away from your face. How he ended up so lucky with your love, he’ll never know, but he will spend the rest of his days proving that he’s earned it. 
You stir in your sleep, sensing him above you, and he hates to steal even a few minutes of blissful sleep from you, knowing the endless nights that are coming. When he steals you away from all that you’ve ever known. 
The sleepy grumble in your throat resembles his name as he curls around you, but your eyes remain gently closed. He pulls you against him, the air that leaves your mouth and sits between your chest and his something he covets with his whole heart. 
I love you and I’m disgustingly lucky and I love you. 
He is a man made of dust, serving men made of silver. He is a man of dust, loving a woman made of gold.
El orgullo? No, Abuela, his ranita will get him first, last, and every time.
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Translations:
Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. - This rhyme is typically said to children when they have just hurt themselves. The parent (or grandparent) usually rubs the part that is sore and sings this little tune. Literally translates to: "heal, heal, little frog’s tail. If you don’t heal today, you will heal tomorrow."
el orgullo - pride
dulzura - sweetness, romantic connotation
amorcita - little love, romantic connotation
Tranquila - quiet, as in "be quiet" or "relax"
Cálmate - take it easy, or take it slow
puedo sentir cuanto la quieres - I can feel how much you want it/love it
Órale - okay, or an exclamation expressing approval or encouragement.
ranita - little frog, but you knew that already ;)
the rest are cognates (or familiar words) which you can probably guess the meaning of, but feel free to message me if you don't know!
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chronically-ghosted · 12 hours
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Taylor! 🎉🎉🎉Congrats on your milestone, lovely! 🎉🎉🎉 How wonderful! You amazing human, you! 🖤
To celebrate, I'd like to request 💫 with Ezra and prompt 14 from the smutty list please if I may - excited to see what you'll conjure up with him! 🤗
Congrats again! Love you millions! 🖤
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Thaaank you Jett! It's so wonderful to share this weird little corner of the internet with you!
And, for you, request and ye shall receive!
Vivarium summary: you request a vacation for your birthday. With the rain and a few drinks, you get a lot more than you asked for. 
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chronically-ghosted · 12 hours
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PEDRO PASCAL - Drive-Away Dolls (2024), dir. Ethan Coen
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chronically-ghosted · 12 hours
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do you ever just remember how for so long, it was just joel and tess. just the two of them, depending on each other, through thick and thin, at the end of the world. tommy was gone, joel had lost sarah, tess had lost everything. they only had each other to rely on, and they did. they trusted each other, they were partners- in a sense, they were all the other had in the entire world. and joel had to walk away from tess, the woman he'd spent nearly two decades standing shoulder to shoulder with, taking orders from, putting his faith in, with only a teenaged girl she believed in in his clutches. do you ever just think about it!
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