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hellfire--cult · 10 months

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Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader {Dark}

Part 2: Run, Rabbit, Run {Steddie x Reader}

WC: 13.1 k

⚠️ +18 MDNI, Slightly dark fic due to wickedness of characters, chasing kink, mentions of bones breaking, tendons splitting, dark woods, blood, knife play, explicit sexual scenes, many forms of Paraphilia described inside the story, owning kink, breeding kink, obsession.

Plot: Once a year, the Haunting Ground event takes place, where the prize is a White Rabbit. This year, the head of The Black Dragons decides to finally join the trial, and claim what is rightfully his. No matter who he has to take down for it.

Author's note: Well shit, I just... wanted to write something out of my comfort zone, and well... this happened. If I missed any warnings please say so, but I hope you enjoy this, and if you don't like any of the warnings above, please, don't read. There isn't any gore at all, js. Also, I didn't proofread this. Please SEE THIS ART of how Eddie ACTUALLY looks in this story. Can't thank Corpse enough for it!

You can always support me by hitting the reblog button with tags, and I always enjoy reading your comments!

BUNNY, BUNNY, BUNNY

The rules are simple:

1- You must keep running, only hide when threatened.

2- You can hurt your opponent, make them unable to keep moving, but you cannot kill them.

3- No water and no food will be provided.

4- No weapons except makeshift ones you may create with natural materials you find.

5- The chase ends once everyone has tapped out of it or one person was chosen.

6- Medical care will take out injured opponents, as well as waiting outside every exit in the woods.

He looked all around him in the big wide center of the room, a ball room. There was a big buffet, serving various kinds of foods to fill a whole army, as well as drinks, non alcoholic, were being served around. He scanned all around him, looking at the various masks everyone wore.

A wolf.

A fox.

A blank face.

A goat.

A clown.

There were many varieties, many kinds but mostly were in animal masks. Coming to this kind of event was not something he ever thought of doing, at least not by his own accord. But here he was, in a demon mask, a black skull that covered half of his face, with its black horns going up. He stood out, definitely stood out, and he noticed by all the faces turning towards him.

He was recognizable, his dark hair tied in a bun, his lips under the top sharp teeth of the skull mask, his eyes showing in the holes of the eye sockets, and then, unlike anyone else in the room, he was only wearing a blazer over his torso, leaving his skin exposed. People looked at him as if he were insane for doing this stunt, others thought he was cocky for trying to think he had a chance dressed like that, but others were simply scared of him.

Tonight, his name was Demon.

He glanced around once more to see the many different people he clearly recognized. Sons of rich families, looking for some fun, for some sense of victory that they can just get with daddy’s money. He also recognized the rings of various people that were only hired to enter this competition and win the prize for their boss. And then, there was him. The only Mafia Boss entering the competition, and that’s why everyone was looking at him.

Mafia bosses don’t often do the dirty work unless it’s a very important client, business or victim. In this case, there was a treasure he wanted, something he had been intrigued by ever since it was mentioned to him, and all he had to do was step over everyone else that was standing in this room with him.

There might be forty people, all waiting for the presentation to finally start. He knew the time to go out was coming close, so they should do it any time soon. A man stood next to him, and he immediately recognized his voice. Carver Jr. Son of the CEO of Kirasoft. Inc.

“I am telling you, this year she is getting caught, man.” He hears him say to the other guy next to him, who he didn’t recognize, but probably from the same rich kind of family.

“Can’t believe it’s been the same White Rabbit for three years… How did she manage to do it?”

The lights dimmed and he looked up at the ceiling, knowing there was a specific light that was above him, making him visible even in the dim room. He smirked and looked back down towards the stairs that lead down to the ballroom. He sees the man, the man who hosts this event, the man who gets the money of every single person that pays to participate.

“Welcome to the annual Haunting Ground night.” Claps were heard around Demon, but his hands were kept inside his front pockets as he waited for the man to continue his stupid speech. “Every year we host this marvelous game, in which there is a prize to be won, a marvelous prize.”

The snicker in the man’s face made Demon’s blood boil, as his hands fisted in his pockets. The need to murder him, the need to see his flesh gush out as he talked was increasing, each second it passed. He looked around again, seeing all the women, the men, the people with masks, smiling with confidence towards the stage.

“Hearing the rules for a third time is quite annoying.” Demon hears a woman talk next to him to another contestant. She had a deer mask on, her whole face covered so he didn’t know who she was, but it didn’t matter, none of the people inside the room mattered, the only one that did was the person in all white that was going to appear at the top of the stairs.

And no one, absolutely no one, was getting her except him.

“The rules, you all know about them, but I want to remind you about the emergency beeper you all will have in your pocket. If endangered, if in extreme pain, or you just want to tap out of the contest, you press it, and the emergency team will know your location and come get you.” The man says and Demon only rolled his eyes to the sky, knowing he won’t be using it, but actually making other people use it.

The fact that he couldn’t bring any weapons irked him. He always thought things like this would end in blood baths, but they were being pretty humane about this. Yet, he wanted to murder every single person in this room at the moment, because how dare they even try to steal her away from him? Not that he didn’t kill a few past contestants from the past two years. He heard from the men that participated, that some had grabbed the White Rabbit, just by an inch, but a scratch here and there was done to her skin.

Of course he wasn’t going to let them go unharmed for that.

“If you endanger someone to the point of killing them, you will be disqualified and brought to authorities.” Demon scoffed at that. He has the police wrapped around his finger, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, but he will keep his hands to himself, as much as he can, just so he wouldn’t be disqualified from this.

He could hear the whispers surrounding him, and also knew that they were about him. He was the most dangerous person amongst the people, and if anyone had a gram of brain cells, they would let him get the prize. But of course, he knows many will try to defeat him, try to throw him to the ground, hurt him, because there are also people from families he had destroyed during the years, just like his uncle did in the past.

Being the nephew of one of the biggest Mafia bosses didn’t mean anything, you weren’t automatically feared or respected just for being a direct link, a family member. You were respected when you were entrusted with the men, the organization and the operations at such a young age, and even more so, when you are not merciful at all, except when needed to.

Demon never hurt women or children, and the only time he had to kill a woman was because she had backstabbed his uncle, almost to the point of killing him. She was his right hand, but all this time, even if killing for him, she was planning on taking over him, completely over stepping on Demon. He found her taking out her gun when they were in a transaction between crews, and got her in time before she could actually take it out. His uncle fought that she was protecting him, but Demon saw how she was looking at the back of his uncle’s head, right as she got her hand inside her coat.

She was operating for the other crew they were doing a transaction with.

So of course, Demon immediately took care of it, eliminating her in front of her brother, the other boss that was sitting in front of his uncle, just so that he knows they are not to mess with. And Demon did all that, at the mere age of 17. Now, at 28 years old, he was a man to be feared, respected by many, and to never try to backstab him, in any sort of form or way.

But three years ago, he got fixated on something, on someone, when he visited the house of the Red Flies, the second most known Mafia family in the eastern states. He knew he was obsessed, he knew that he shouldn’t even try to get her, but he was immediately swept by her presence, by her voice, by her eyes, in a way no one had made him feel before. This only happened when he locked eyes with her, a small smile appearing on her face, and he knew, he immediately knew, that she was meant to be his.

She was going to be his, no matter the cost.

“Everyone, I present to you, the White Rabbit.”

And there she was, at the top of the staircase, with a spotlight over her head, the white rabbit mask covering half her face, with the ears going up to the ceiling. She was wearing a white short dress that stuck to the body but was loose at the end. Her lips were drawn into a thin line, as everyone was clapping at her, in awe, with desire in their eyes as well as ambition and greediness.

The reason why everyone wanted the White Rabbit was simple. They were from a high, a very high association, be it a company or a mafia gang, but they wanted out of that. The White Rabbit holds the power of bribery towards bosses, as well as threats and blackmail. More likely daughters and sons that want to destroy their own lineage.

Many people here knew who the White Rabbit was, but just by name, even if three years had passed. She was never caught, and she never gave herself to anyone because that can also be done. The White Rabbit can willingly choose who to go with if they so desire. And that’s why Demon was with a smile to his face, his jacket still open as he looked at the White Rabbit. She was scanning the room, looking at all the contestants and then, her eyes landed on a torso, her eyes hazing over as she kept staring at his chest.

You see, Demon also possessed that knowledge, and of course, he studied her, knowing more than her name. Over the last three years he had sent his own men to participate in the trial, but with no intention of winning but just to see what the participants did and how she moved in the woods.

Demon knew her name, how she looked like, the sound of her voice, who her father was, and also, he knows the things she likes, the things she desires, the things that make her tremble, and that’s why he is exposing his torso, and as she kept her eyes on him, a small grin appearing on her face, her tongue licking her bottom lip even slightly as her eyes clouded with pure lust, her mouth watering just at the pure sight of his tattooed chest and even more when he suddenly takes his tongue out, running his tongue piercing all over his top lip.

Stigmatophilia: Sexual Arousal for body modifications, such as piercings or tattoos.

“Always looking like a diamond in the rough.” He heard Carver say, almost a mumble, and Demon’s blood was boiling already. How dare he look at her? How dare he even think he has a chance? How dare he touch or imagine touching something that was his? How fucking dare he even comment on his prize?

“We all know how this goes. The White Rabbit will have an upper hand of five minutes to infiltrate the woods. Do not, by any means, hurt the White Rabbit. If the White Rabbit is caught, the decision to go with that person for a limited time, or to be completely owned, is up to them.” Demon smirked at those words. There is a contract the White Rabbit has to sign before submitting themselves as the prey. If they decide they want to do a temporary ownership of their body, then the contract is not signed by the captor. But if they do decide for a complete ownership of body and soul, the contract will be signed by both parties, kind of like a marital contract.

This was all in the Mafia organization of course, it’s not legal, but it is something to be respected in between the groups and companies. Demon does not like this idea, because no person should be owned, no person should be held like an animal, no person should be treated like an object. But in the White Rabbit’s eyes, he saw that longing, he saw the need of belonging to someone, of being owned.

And he was more than happy to oblige.

“Do you think this year is the year? Will she get caught?” He heard the woman next to him, and for the first time in the night, he finally talked, with a gruff voice coming out of his lips.

“She will.”

The people around him all turned with widened eyes, shocked faces behind their masks, as whispers erupted all around them. He was still locking eyes with the White Rabbit, whose smile was still on her lips, almost a snicker, a wicked grin, and he couldn’t wait to start running, he couldn’t wait to start chasing, his body was already trembling at the need of wanting to earn his prize.

“No more food, no more water. The trial starts now… Rabbit… Run.” The host finally said and Demon saw how the light over her head turned off, and in two seconds it lit up again, only for her to be gone. “Get ready and line up to the edge of the woods.”

At his queue everyone started heading out of the ballroom, but Demon just walked, calmly, hands still in his blazer pockets, heading towards the big doors and finally being hit with the wind of the night, the sound of the leaves ruffling all around and the trees merging up in front of him, a sea of trunks and bushes that he will have to run through.

He stood next to Carver, who was already in a stance of pounce, waiting for the sound of the gun so they could all start running. Demon slowly took off his blazer, throwing it in the ground, revealing his completely tattooed torso, with many ink designs such as dragons, or skulls, or demons, and they go all over his arms and back as well. There are some patches of untouched skin, but overall, he is completely covered in them.

The many people that stood next to him on each side were looking at him, gulping, except for Carver who simply rolled his eyes at him. Demon looked up at the full moon that was going to help him look through the deep woods, the light that he knew how to follow to keep a steady pace, and the shadows that would help him knock down any person that might come in his way.

After a minute, he saw the man, the host, walking up on the balcony of the building, his silhouette shining with the moonlight as he raised the flare gun up. Demon took a deep breath in from his nose, getting his hair up in a low ponytail, calmly, as his chest rose and fell with his breaths. His eyes gazed back to the woods, a small grin appearing on his face as he fixed the rings that were on his right hand.

BANG.

His fist immediately collided with Carver’s Jaw, sending him backwards, and the only thing that could be heard was the crack of teeth and a gurgled grunt as he fell to the floor. He quickly turned to grab onto the ponytail of the woman that had screamed at the vicious act, the woman with the deer mask on, pulling her back towards his chest. He wrapped his right hand over the woman’s neck and her hands immediately flew to his forearm, trying to break free.

“Let ME GO!” She yelled with a choke and he scoffed with a roll of his eyes when he raised his left hand up, pressing it at the back of her hand to bend it forward and then with his right arm he started pressing onto the sides of her neck to start cutting her blood flow towards her brain.

Her body started to go limp and when he felt her arms fall from him, he instantly let go of her, letting her fall to the ground, completely unconscious. He doesn’t hurt women. It will take more time if he does this trick every single time, but even if they try to go after him, he won’t hurt them. Many had already taken off, but some, a very few, stayed to look at what he’s done.

One by one, they started backing up back into the house as they saw Carver’s mouth going slack as he tried to talk, making Demon turn to throw a wicked grin his way. The blonde man took the beeper out of his pocket and groaned as he pressed the button to finally call assistance. Once Demon heard the beep, he took off running into the woods.

His blood was pumping with adrenaline, his breathing steady as he rushed by the trees, jumping over boulders, hearing some screams and passing by some men injuring one another. When he arrived at a cleared up area, he stopped running at the sound of some bushes rustling, right next to him, the crack of a twig catching his attention.

He instantly jumped forward when he saw the bushes finally moving and a man, a bigger man than he is, jumped out of them and onto him, but missed thanks to Demon's premeditated step. The big man steadied himself, wearing a bear mask as he glared at him, a sly smirk on his lips.

“Well, well, well… Didn’t think the Boss of the Black Dragon would be in a thing like this. Don’t you have many women to choose from?” The Bear chuckled at his words but Demon only grimaced at them. He thinks The White Rabbit can be compared to any woman? To any person?

“If you want all your limbs in the same place, you would close that mouth of yours.” Demon threatens but Bear only belly laughs at him, shaking his head.

“It’s just you. You know, your uncle really fucked me over with my company.” At those words, Demon could only roll his eyes, not wanting to waste another second in this mindless conversation.

“You probably didn’t pay up in time, or, if I remember correctly, didn’t you kill your wife?” He remembers the deal. This man, and his wife, were going to share half and half of the credit The Black Dragon crew was giving them. The wife asked for a divorce, which would have made the contract void, and the money had to be returned in its entirety to the organization. She had her half untouched, he didn’t. She was going to be free, he wasn’t.

So in his anger, he killed her, making it seem like suicide to the legal eye, but to the organizations he was seen as a murderer. Now, seeing him in this trial, wanting to get the White Rabbit, Demon felt his blood burning up in anger, because he wasn’t going to let a man like him get her… He wasn’t going to let a man like him get any other woman or person.

“She killed herself. I made that very clear.” The Bear’s face fell, as he clenched his fists next to his hips. Demon knew what was going to happen, so he fixed the bloody rings on his right hand again, his smile spreading knowing it was Carver’s blood.

“You won’t get her.” Demon says in a dead tone, which the bigger man only chuckled at, unamused, and he took a step forward, and Demon only cracked his neck once.

“We’ll see about that.” And the first fist was thrown by The Bear, only to be dodged easily by Demon, moving aside. He raised his leg up and immediately hit the bigger man at the right shin with his combat boot. The Bear groaned loudly, turning his whole body to tackle Demon into the ground, his upper body slamming with Demon’s torso, sending him to the floor with the big man on top of him.

He cursed under his breath as the air in his lungs got knocked out slightly thanks to the impact, feeling a sharp sting on his shoulder, making his eyes go wide and groan in pain, looking at the side. The Bear cheated, a small swiss knife now was on Demon’s shoulder, pressed by the man that was on top of him.

“I see you’re still playing fucking dirty.” Demon almost but snarls at the man on top of him who only laughed out loud and shook his head at the words.

“You don’t get anything in life if you don’t do it my way. My wife knew that, yet, she decided she wanted to fuck me over.” He was laughing, and Demon’s veins were popping out from the anger, from the rage, from the images of this man’s hands over your body, tracing his knife on your skin until he could bury it into the deepest of your gut if you made a wrong move.

His left hand was free to roam, and he grabbed onto a small boulder that was on the floor, immediately clenching his fingers around it to throw his arm up, swinging it towards the man’s head, making him yell in pain as the rock busted his ear and ripped open the skin on his temple. He fell to the side, holding his side of the head in pain while Demon sat up in one quick movement, taking the swiss knife out of his shoulder and throwing it away. Wasting no time, he lunged himself over the other man’s figure.

He was now on top, having won the wrestling match, or the kid fight he just had, and the man below him yelled for mercy, which made Demon only grin wider and wider, knowing that he was a step closer to his prize. In one swift move he pressed his knee against the man’s thigh, while his hand grabbed onto his calf, pulling it upwards, and he just needed one snap, he can at least make it quick for the guy below him.

SNAP. CRACK.

“MY FUCKING LEG!” The Bear yelled below him, only for Demon to scoff at his cries. He stood up and walked off the wailing man who was already taking out his beeper to call for medical care. Demon grabbed onto the beeper, a glare in his eyes as he looked at the man below him.

“After this, you better hide… Because I will kill you.” He threw the beeper far away from The Bear. He would have to crawl with his broken leg to get it, making that task torturous to say the least.

“P-Please, spare me– This is just a game–” Demon pressed his foot onto the man’s broken leg, and another yell of pain could be heard through the open field.

“No. You should have noticed that this is not a game to me, and you should have known that messing with me today would be a very bad choice.” He let go of the man, stepping away. The Bear’s face was stained from the tears of pain he was induced to, but Demon could care less.

The black haired man immediately took off again, running through the bushes as he heard a few screams and yells of victory. His mentality started spiraling as he felt himself growing impatient by how long this was going to take. If he had to take out every single contestant he was going to end up doing a massacre and that was against the rules.

Because he would kill for The White Rabbit.

He was hearing many beeping sounds around him, some grunts and people that were writhing on the ground in pain as he walked by. So many were with broken bones, some had scratches all over their bodies and that’s when he remembered the wound on his shoulder. He looked at it as he walked, moving his shoulder in circles to see if it caused any damage. He scoffed and chuckled as he noticed he could still move his arm freely even if the wound was open.

The bastard couldn’t even aim a knife right. He didn’t really deserve to live, not if he is going to threaten death right in the face and expect to come out alive from it. That’s what Demon was. Death. Crossing him meant bargaining with life, and backstabbing him with treason meant instant death. He didn’t do most of the dirty work, only when it’s necessary and when he would get pleasure from it, and that man he just fought, he wasn’t going to be killed by a stranger in his organization. Demon was going to cut his head off himself.

He stopped walking when he heard a rustle, but it wasn’t on any of his sides. He turned his body, scanning all over when he heard it again. He smirked as he put his hands in the front of his pockets, his heart beating into his chest from the adrenaline and from the excitement of getting closer and closer to his objective.

“You should come down from the trees.”

A small giggle could be heard from his back as he slowly turned to finally see the person he wanted most climbing down from a tree. Her white dress flowed with some white shorts underneath, but the white was now smudged with some dirt, and some blood as well. Her white ears moved as she tilted her head at him, scanning him all over, her body rocking on the balls of her feet.

“Your ears are very perceptive.”

“You’re just too loud.” He says in a low voice, watching the White Rabbit start moving, circling him, with her hands behind her back, swaying her head from side to side as if humming a song. His head followed her, seeing her bare feet covered in mud as the leaves crunched under them.

“Hmm… Someone got you.” She says, pointing at the wound on his shoulder, in which he simply shrugs as if to show her that he wasn’t fazed by it.

“By playing dirty.” She hummed again as she looked down at the floor, still circling all around him as if inspecting him, scanning him, and her mouth watered at every single patch of skin she saw inked. She was already imagining what his legs looked like, and she was already trembling with the idea of using her nails to give him new scars.

“Are you here to get me?” She asks him, finally stopping right in front of him, just a few feet away, her hands still behind her back with a grin on her face. He took his hands out of his front pockets, letting them hang on his sides.

“To claim you.” She tilted her head at his voice, her smile widening, creepily so, as her eyes glistened with sudden excitement and adrenaline and Demon knew what was coming, because he had studied the White Rabbit after all.

“You’ll have to catch me first.” And she turned on her heel, and sprinted off into the darkness of the woods, and Demon’s teeth showed as his wicked grin grew, and grew.

Autassassinophilia: Sexual arousal when being in a dangerous situation, such as being chased, or wanted for murder.

His feet started working, running forward to where The White Rabbit went, listening to far cries that were deep into the woods, and he wondered just how many other people were left, not that it mattered, because he already won. He knew he already won when he decided to sign up for this trial. He knew he had won the moment he stepped into the ballroom. He knew he had won when she had smiled at him, right at the top of the marbled stairs.

He stopped running when he came into an empty spot, surrounded by trees, looking all around him. His eyes twitched as he tried to listen to the sounds, knowing now that it was just him and her. He was preying on her as much as she was preying on him. He knew she was circling him, his little rabbit, trying to be sneaky, but a twig was heard from his left side and his feet immediately moved to that sound.

Long strides were taken thanks to his long legs, his belt clinking as he ran, going past the trees once again. He ran in between trunks, jumping over the fallen logs, but his eyes sparkled when he heard a giggle from behind him, making him stop in his tracks, turning around rapidly to see her retreating figure, running away from him. A smirk appeared on his lips. She had run past him and he didn’t notice.

He started running after her, deciding to swerve left, going deep into the woods again, no longer following behind her. She kept running, her breathing completely accelerated, her belly turning with anticipation, with adrenaline, with arousal, with desire. Oh, she wanted him. She had waited, and waited. But his footsteps were no longer heard behind her, making the White Rabbit stop, turning around to try to listen to her surroundings.

He wasn’t following her, did she run too fast? Did he lose sight of her? But she was sure she was hearing him behind her, not even five seconds ago. She took one step, then another, passing by a tree but she stopped her movements again, her eyes widening, goosebumps emerging on her skin as she slowly turned her head to see the figure that was just behind the tree, waiting for her.

“Caught you.”

Demon immediately pounced on her, grabbing onto her shoulders and tackling her to the ground, a crazed smile on his face as she struggled to get free, but it was already done. He was on top of her, his calves over her thighs to pin her down while his hands were on her biceps now, digging deeply, pushing her onto the ground. She was panting heavily as she opened her eyes to finally see the man that was on top of her.

“Dirty.” She spats and he scoffs, licking inside his bottom lip as she relaxes under his hold. A small smile appeared on her lips, the moonlight shining through the woods, just enough for him to see her. He took one hand away from her bicep, getting hold of the bottom of her mask, pulling it up to finally reveal that beautiful face he got mesmerized with three years ago, at a simple meeting. That face that told him, we’re equal. That face that told him, I will serve you if given the chance. That face that he wanted to see, everyday, at every hour, for as long as he lives. That face that claimed him that same night, with a smile, with the stares, with the intense stare in the eyes.

You.

“Hello, Bunny.” That was your nickname in your father’s organization. Bunny. Too pure, too innocent, too charming, yet, you were the complete opposite. You were nasty, you were evil, you were vengeful, you were a freak. A complete and utter freak. And he was the same, he was your exact same, and you were expectant of him. You were waiting for him to appear. You were in this trial behind your father’s back for three years, because you wanted him. You wanted the man that had whispered in your ear ‘You’ll be mine.’ three years ago. You wanted the man that’s been said to have killed and destroyed many organizations and the members inside of them. You wanted the man that you knew could own you, yet, wouldn’t cage you.

Your fingertips from your free hand raised up, finally touching the teeth of the black demon mask he was wearing, first grazing it, gently, as if taking in this moment with him, this moment where everything will change, this moment where your life will finally become yours, and his. You gripped onto the mask and finally lifted it up, and he helped by bending down slightly so you could rip it off his face, throwing the plastic far away from you both.

“Munson.” A smile appeared on your face as you saw him, your cheeks flushing at his sight, as if you were a bitch in heat in front of her master, and you weren’t far from it. You knew Eddie owned you that same night you met him, and he also knew you were meant to be his.

“What are those?” He asked, placing a hand on your waist where a stain was on your dress, a shiver running down your spine as a soft moan escaped your throat, knowing his hand was covered in ink and touching you.

“I might have snapped a few tendons here and there… Putting the competition away for you…” Your eyes were already looking up at him with desire, with the need of being alone with him, of him claiming you, completely. He smirked down towards you, leaning down to talk closely onto your face.

“What’s your choice, Bunny?” He softly asks, his eyes hinting of desperation, but also insecurity of some sort, but he didn’t have to worry. He shouldn’t, because you are his, you’ve always been his.

“I’ll stay with you, forever, if you’ll have me.” His eyes widened slightly with emotion, his gut turning at your words and his hand flew to grab onto your jaw, harshly, to pull you towards his lips, into a messy yet wanton kiss. A kiss that he had been craving for far too long. You moaned onto his lips, wrapping your arms around his shoulders as he finally let your thighs go, his calves resting on the floor now.

His teeth caught onto your bottom lip, and you could already feel the iron taste filling your mouth, knowing he was piercing your skin, but that only made your thighs clench with eachother even more, wetness pooled inside your shorts as his actions showed you that he studied you, that he knew you, and he knew what you were into. He pulled away from you, licking his lips from your blood as he looked down, seeing your bottom lip with your red tint, blood coming out from the inside of it.

“You’re mine. I’m going to protect you Bunny, I’m not letting anyone take you away from me, and if they dare come close… I’ll kill them, you say the word… And I’ll kill everyone you tell me to.” A soft smile spread on your face as you looked at him, crazed and wild eyes staring at each other as your grip on his shoulders tightened, and a firework was shot into the sky, but you two didn’t move. Just stared into each other's eyes.

You’re free.

Your hands gripped on your last bag with the remaining clothes you had. A smile on your face the whole time the elevator dinged closer and closer to Eddie’s penthouse, one of the many properties he possesses. You hadn’t changed, still wearing the white stained dress over your body, but the people that organized this trial had already sent your prepared luggage to Eddie’s, meaning that the only thing left to deliver was you.

The ding didn’t even startle you as the doors opened, and a big double door greeted you a few steps away from the metal confinement. You stepped towards it, and grabbed onto the handle, finding the door open. A smile appeared on your face as you opened it, walking in to take in the immense decorated space in modern yet vintage looking furniture. You put your bag down, closing the door behind you as you stepped inside the apartment, seeing that it had stairs going up to a second floor.

You were looking around, knowing that he should be here somewhere. After he had caught you, you were brought into the office to sign off the permanent contract to him, with a smile to your face all the while. The host was simply looking at you as if you were insane, because being owned by the Black Dragon association was not something many desired, much less, being owned by the boss of it.

Eddie was sent home so you could gather your bags, and those bags you saw at the very corner of the living room. You heard something in the kitchen, making you tilt your head slightly at the sound, like a rattle, so you followed it, walking into the dimmed light kitchen, modern, with the cupboards and utilities in black, against the white marble counters, but your eyes centered on the person that was pouring two glasses of wine, in the middle of the room.

“Hello again darling.” He put the wine bottle on the counter and his eyes finally looked up to lock with yours. He was still shirtless, still with the same bloody clothes, the wound in his shoulder already stitched and bandaged, and your mouth salivated with the need of pressing your tongue onto his skin. His hair was down, eyes a deep brown that only made you move by instinct, slowly approaching him with your hands behind your back.

Like a small bunny.

“This house is a little big for you.” You say as you stand next to him, grabbing onto the wine glass and taking a small sip from it, the burning of the alcohol soothing your throat and calming your nerves. Nerves that were there because you waited so long to be with him, alone, like this. Completely owned by him, his property, his partner.

“Glad that you are filling it with me now.” He says in a low tone, which sends shivers down your spine, because for some reason you knew that the night was going to be long, and that by the end of it, you won’t be able to walk. Hopefully.

“So, you’ve been studying me over the last three years, huh.” You say with a smile, not looking at him, still with the glass of wine on your lips, and the alcohol was slightly stinging the wound he provoked on you in the woods.

“And you’ve been waiting for me for three years.” He retorted, his eyes slowly turning black from how his pupils began to dilate the more his eyes roamed your body. He took a large chug from his wine glass, putting the crystal on the counter again while you giggled at his words, making all of his blood go south immediately.

“Took you long enough.” You replied to him and his hand twitched on the counter as he stared down at you. Your giggle stopped but that wicked smile was still on your lips, setting your glass down as you finally turned your head to look at him. “I’ve been studying you too.”

“And how so?” He asks, the need to grab you, the need to get hold of you, pin you down, making you shut up, beginning to gnaw in the deep of his gut. You shrug at him, not even sparing him another word and his eyes twitched, his fire igniting as his right hand rises up, tracing your cheek softly in which you melted at, pressing your face against it.

Your eyes suddenly widened when his hand enveloped your throat, in one swift movement, and pressure was applied, cutting your blood flow and oxygen at the same time. A choked moan escaped your lips as he looked down at you, a smile appearing in his lips, knowing very well that you were drenched by now, clenching onto nothing as he applied more pressure on you.

Asphyxiophilia: Sexual Arousal when being choked, often cutting the oxygen circulation.

“Now, let’s get one thing straight Bunny.” His left hand, which was still on the counter, found the knife he had already prepared for this moment, the knife that would start it all. “I own you. I make the rules and you just follow them. There’s nothing else you have to do.”

You nodded, choking on your voice as your eyes started rolling to the back of your head, your hands gripping his wrist and he finally let go of some of the pressure to let oxygen flow in your body again. You choked a sigh of relief, your breathing already jagged by how much air entered all at once in your lungs again, yet his hand was still on your throat, his tattooed hand.

His left hand raised up, pressing the tip of his blade onto your cheek, the smile still on his face as he looked at you. You smiled through your dizziness at him, and oh you were so beautiful. He guided his knife down, slowly, gliding it over your body, until he reached the hem of your dress. Your eyes widened as you felt the sharp tip of the knife over your shorts, your clit twitching at the sharpness of it. That sent an adrenaline shock through your body that almost made you squirm, but you knew that if you moved he might hurt you there.

He appreciated you staying still, and you were just too perfect for him. He twisted the knife so the blade would be facing upwards, and he slowly punctured the tip of the knife inside your shorts, but not through your soaked underwear. He smirked at you one last time and that’s when you heard the intense ripping sound, a gasp escaping your lips, the blade stretching the dress off your body as it ripped it in half, going all the way to your collarbone.

His eyes scanned your frame, a white bra on your body as well as the matching thong that he could see from the slit of your shorts. The both of you had dirt all over yourselves, but that only enticed him to take you even more. To finally own you completely. He motioned towards your hands with the knife, which were still wrapped around his wrist. You gave a sigh as you dropped your hands to your sides, making the dress finally fall off from your shoulders, as if it were a coat.

He slowly let go of your neck, letting the knife rest on top of the counter again, your breathing heavy and with the imprints of his fingers already on your neck, and tears were threatening to fall down from your eyes as you looked at him, but they weren’t enough. They weren’t enough for him, and he wanted more, he wanted to see you completely ruined by him.

“On your knees.” You shivered at his command, wanting to be a brat, deny him, but this is what you’ve always wanted, to belong to him. For him to use you as he pleases, for him to drag you around like a plaything, but yet, to protect you like a partner, like an equal. You slowly got down on your knees, looking up at him through your lashes and he pressed his fingers under your chin to keep you up. “Will you do everything as I say?”

“Yes, yes, I will.” You were desperate now, not being able to handle anymore teasing from him.

“Open your mouth, stick your tongue out.” He commanded this time, and you did as told, opening your pretty mouth from him, your pink tongue sticking out and he grinned at the view. He gathered his saliva inside his mouth, to then lean in and drop his spit into your mouth and tongue. He immediately closed your mouth with force. “Swallow.”

You didn’t. You closed your eyes at the taste of him in your tongue, just for a second and his eyes widened, lust covering his features as he saw you moaning with his spit in your mouth. You then swallowed, and opened your eyes again, sticking your tongue out for him, as if asking for more. He straightened up, his belt coming undone, the leather slipping off from his pants. You bit your bottom lip in anticipation, knowing exactly what he was going to do with it later on.

“What do you want me to do now?” You ask him and he simply smirks down at you, wicked eyes crossing his features as he unbuttoned his pants, dragging the zipper down.

“You just stay there, look pretty, while I fuck that bratty mouth of yours.” A gasp was heard from you but it was an excited one, your eyes immediately darting towards the bulge that was inside his pants as he finally pulled them down, along with his boxers. His cock springing up to hit against his pelvis, right in between the V shape that you want to trace your tongue on. “Spit.”

He didn’t have to tell you twice, you lunged forward as he grabbed onto his shaft, pulling it down for you to spit on it, and his hand started going up and down on himself, slowly, and your lips turned into a pout as you stared. It wasn’t fair, you wanted to do that. You raised your hand up only to be stopped by a sting, a sharp sting and a smack. His other hand was still holding the folded belt, and he used it to hit your hand away, making your eyes sting with tears as you put your hand back down, rubbing it softly with your other one, looking up at him with a frown in your face.

“Wh–”

“Don’t fucking touch me. I said, STAY THERE.” He almost growls at you, sending another shiver down your spine, but you straightened up, looking up at him, waiting for his instructions as he still stroked himself with your spit, making you gulp with need, seeing how large he was, your body moving forward, wanting to give it at least a small kiss to the head, only for another sharp sting hitting you, this time, it was a slap by his big hand, not that hard, but not gentle either, making you turn your head away with a whimper.

He waited for you to turn back at him, to see your reaction, to see what you are thinking because even if he studied you, he still has some self control and empathy in himself, and much more when it comes to you. He doesn’t want to hurt you in ways that you do not enjoy, but as you slowly turn to look back at him, your cheek stinging, with a smile to your face and hazy looking eyes as if in a trance, he couldn’t help but smile down at you.

“Can I beg?” You ask, and it was an honest question, a question of boundaries, a question to get to know him even more, to know what you can and can’t do, and he was appreciative of that.

“Yes. Beg for my cock, I want to hear how much you want it Bunny, how much you’ve been wanting it for these past three years.” And your breathing hitched at that, an excited smile appearing in your lips as you looked up at him, your brain completely drained from conscious thought as your desire poured out of your lips.

“Please Eddie, I want your big cock in my mouth, please… I want to taste you, have your cum dripping in my throat, been wanting it for so long, please– Don’t keep me waiting baby, please…” Your sultry voice filled his ears, a shiver running down his spine as his dick twitched in his pants, asking for attention, but there was a reason for you wanting to beg, because you studied him too… You know what he likes.

Narratophilia: Sexual arousal to obscene words.

“Then open your fucking mouth, and you’ll take what I give you.” You didn’t waste a second, your nails digging in your knees as you opened your mouth again, sticking your tongue out for him. With one hand he guided his cock, and with the other he pressed it at the back of your head, pulling you forward towards it.

He first taunts you, pulling your head back for you to kitten lick the tip, to then pull you forward again to take it into your mouth only to repeat the motion again. A soft whimper vibrated in your throat, which made Eddie’s hold grow tighter on your scalp, and he finally thrust himself inside of your mouth, halfway in and started going in a slow pace first so your mouth would get coated in your saliva. He knew he would hurt you if he made you deepthroat at once, and he didn’t want to destroy your vocal chords, at least not yet.

You closed your eyes as you hollow your cheeks to finally start sucking on him, letting him bob your head back and forth at his own pace, but you relished in the taste of him, a moan escaping your throat in delight as your spit helped your movements be smoother each thrust he did into you. He was holding back his groans at your sight, finally having you at his mercy, on your knees. His self control slowly slipping away as he tilts his head back, closing his eyes at the feeling of your tongue swirling around his cock, loving the way he could feel you moaning against him.

Your pussy clenched at nothing, and you wanted to touch yourself, relieve some of the tension building inside of you, but you knew better than that, so you kept your hands at your knees, fingernails scratching your skin. His hand finally let go of his cock, guiding it towards the back of your head, finally joining his other one, gripping onto your hair. He stopped you from bobbing your head, only for him to start thrusting himself inside of your mouth, inside and out, still in a slow pace.

Your eyes opened to look up at him and his eyes beamed at how you were looking at him. Pleading for more. So that, he did. He thrusted deeper this time, a gulp being heard from you, a gargle, but not a gag, not quite yet. His pace quickened, a groan finally coming to his throat as your eyes started tearing up the deeper he went in. This is what you wanted, to be used by him, and your wetness sipping through your underwear and shorts even was an indication of that.

“What a fucking slut, not even gagging.” He chuckled only to stop when even if you had a mouth full of him, he could still see the cocky turn up of the corner of your lips while staring up at him. His nose flared and he suddenly slammed himself inside your mouth, the tip of his cock hitting the back of your throat. A tear slid down your cheek and you finally gagged at him, but because it was a surprise to you more than anything. He pulled back only to slam himself back in, your gags and gurgles filling the room as your mascara started running down your face.

He pulled back just for a second for you to take a deep breath through your nose, and he trembled slightly with a moan caught in his throat as he saw your face. His hands gripping your hair even tighter, not being able to contain himself as he started thrusting himself into your mouth, quick, but not deep like before, yet your spit mixed with his precum started slipping from the sides of your mouth.

He couldn’t help but wanting you to keep crying, to keep tearing up, so he slammed himself again against your mouth, hitting your throat again, and you breathed through your nose in order not to gag, but your eyes widened when you realized that he was staying there. You whimpered against him, as more tears slipped through your eyes as you tried to keep your breathing under control, but he was groaning in pleasure at the sight.

You started gagging, your body lurching forward a couple of times and that was Eddie’s queue to finally pull away from you, taking his cock out of your mouth.

“Ung–” You were panting, trying to move your throat a bit to numb the sudden beating it received, but Eddie simply pulled you up from your hair, making you gasp as you stood on your two feet again, your knees screaming in pain from being against the hard floor for too long. His face was inches from yours and your eyes saw what he was looking at. You couldn’t help the smirk that came to your face as you felt his dick twitch against your hip as he inspected your cheeks, your tears.

Dacryphilia: Sexual arousal to seeing the partner crying or shedding tears.

His lips immediately connected to yours, a rough, deep kiss, full of lust and desperation. Your mouth opened for him, once again, and his tongue invaded it in a second. You clenched again when you felt his tongue piercing all around your cavity, on your tongue, clinking against your teeth. He moaned into your mouth when he felt the mix of his taste, your spit, as well as the saltiness of your tears.

He pulled away from you, pulling his boxers and pants up but not buttoning himself up as you stared at him, completely dazed for his next move. He couldn’t help himself and he leaned down to press a kiss to your cheek, in which you sighed dreamily at, knowing you were being a good girl. His good girl.

“Let's go upstairs. I have to ruin you.” You trembled at his words, excited for that to happen, excited to be ruined by him, excited to be yourself with him. He turned you around, and he grabbed his belt from the counter with one hand, the other being pressed against the small of your back, guiding you towards the stairs. You went up, your pussy clenching at each step taken as the adrenaline pumped in your veins. He was right behind you, now finally walking you towards his room.

He opened the door for you, and you walked in to take it all in. Realization hit you. This wasn’t just any of Eddie’s properties, this was his house, the one he considered home, the one that was all him and not something designed by someone else. His guitars were on display on one wall, a few paintings and limited vinyl editions of what you believed were his favorite bands, the big king sized bed in the middle of the room with dark comforters, and the big window on its side, a few feet away with long black draped curtains.

You were now part of his home.

A sudden feeling filled you as you turned around with excitement to wrap your arms around his shoulders, the action completely startling him as he looked down at you. Your lips immediately found his, as you took in the feeling that he owned you, but in the most caring way possible, and like you stated before, you knew he wasn’t going to cage you up, not that you minded if it was done by him.

His lips moved with yours as he slowly guided you towards the bed, his hands going to your back to finally unclasp your bra. The back of your knees hit the edge of his bed, and you pulled away from him, taking your bra off completely. He looked down at your bare breasts, wanting to dive into them, take them into his mouth, but he made a promise to you first. He raised a hand, slapping one of your tits with it, making you gasp with a moan.

“Get on the fucking bed, and raise your hands over your head.” You smiled at him as you sat down on the bed, pushing yourself backwards into the middle of it as he kept his eyes on you, slowly walking towards the side of the bed as you laid down, throwing your arms up, almost touching his black headboard. From the corner of it, he opened a small wooden door, at the very top, and he started pulling a black rope from it, your eyes widening at it, while a small smirk spread on your cheeks.

“The headboard seems new.” You managed to say in a hoarse voice, and he chuckled at that, grabbing onto your right wrist, pulling you towards the bracelet of the rope, wrapping it tightly around your skin.

“Custom made. Received it a couple of days ago.” For some reason, he didn’t want to lie to you about that, nor tease you, because he wanted you to know that he prepared himself for you and just you. This bed was made for you, and that made you moan with need, your thighs rubbing together at his confession. He circled the bed, going to the other top corner of his headboard to pull the same rope out, grabbing your left wrist and pulling you towards him again, and you felt the tug onto your right hand, not letting it move further.

“How thoughtful of you Eds.” You smiled at him when you noticed he wasn’t tightening the bracelets too hard on your skin. You have noticed that he was thoughtful of you, careful to some degree with you, yet, rough. His hand went down again, slapping at your left breast now, your back slightly arching at the feeling, with a moan trapped in your throat.

“Are you going to stop talking?” You giggled and licked your lips, wanting once again to go against him, but you knew better. You liked being dominated, you really did, and you knew that your other side was something you couldn’t do with Eddie. He sighed at your giggling, heading towards his dresser where he left his belt at the top of it. You bit your lip as your eyes glistened with anticipation.

“You’re gonna punish me? Don’t you want to fuck me? Take me? Breed me? Why are you taking so long Eddie?” You lifted your legs up, bending at your knees, spreading them open for him and he almost dropped the belt to the ground at your words, groaning as you used his kink against him. He put his knee on the edge of the bed and you smiled at him, a wicked smile.

“I told you to shut the fuck up.”

SMACK.

You gasped loudly as your body jolted upwards from the mixed sensations that just went through your whole body, like an electric shock. He swung his belt towards your clothed cunt, smacking it, sending a sharp yet burning pain through your whole body, and your clit throbbed with the need of more friction, even if painful, it still felt so good after being neglected for a long while.

Eddie was smirking as he looked at you, squirming under him, his cock wanting to explode out of the confines of his boxers again, the zipper that was already down from his pants digging into the bulge as it twitched on him. He raised his belt again, smacking you on your left inner thigh, making you jolt again and your legs spread even more. You were perfect for him, simply perfect, moaning thanks to what he was doing, tears starting to form in your eyes again… You were his.

Sexual sadism: Sexual arousal on causing pain, non life-threatening.

“Eddie– Eddie please–” You were begging again, but that earned you another bruising smack to your other inner thigh, your back arching at the pain, yet pleasure that shot through your body as the ropes on the headboard clinked at the movement of your arms.

“Are you that desperate for my cock?” He says as he looks down at you, and you nodded desperately, a tear sliding down from the corner of your eye, and honestly, Eddie was too. He waited too long for this, and even though he wanted to do so many more things to you, he knew he had time, that you both had time.

“Yes, please, fill me up– I need your cock inside of me, waited too long for you baby, don’t tease me anymore, don’t tease us any longer…” You begged but this time it was a genuine one, a very truthful one that Eddie couldn’t deny. He put the belt to the side, almost throwing it, and he grabbed the hem of your ripped shorts and underwear, ripping it off from you in one move, helping him with the movement of your legs.

He looked down at your wet pussy, and you already made a complete mess of yourself. The shorts were drenched as well as your tongue, and he couldn’t help but think again that he was blessed with you by some god. You were his equal, completely unhinged, crazy, and you two were desperate for one another.

His cock would have to wait, because he couldn’t help himself as he saw you like this, at his mercy, legs spread and inner thighs red from his ministrations. He held you at the back of your knees, your eyes widening when he bent them forward, towards your chest, and your hips raised up, your cunt facing the ceiling. He smirked at it, leaning down to take a long swipe against your wet folds, making your eyes roll to the back of your head.

You wanted to arch your back, but you couldn’t as his grip was tight on the back of your thighs, making your back arch downwards. A moan escaped your lips as he kept swiping his tongue on you, licking on your wetness, tasting you, and groaning at how sweet you were, relishing in the fact that he could have you like this any time he wants from now on. Your hands made the ropes clink again, as you tried to guide them to his head, to hold onto him, and you whined at the restraints.

“Eddie– Eds–” You moaned his name and his hand raised up to smack your lifted ass as it left your thigh to do so. You gasped at the feeling, keeping your knees to your chest in order not to go against him. He flicked his tongue on your clit, and your moans finally started coming out of your mouth, one after the other. He was almost eating you up, like a starved man.

And he couldn’t get enough. He could do this all day, he could stay buried in your pussy if he could because you just tasted so good, so much better than what he anticipated, than what he had imagined. All these years of waiting paid off, because it tasted as if you were waiting for him, it tasted like you were made for him, to his taste, that someone made his favorite flavor, and it had always been you.

His tongue finally dipped inside you, and he moaned against your cunt as he felt your walls clenching around him, the ropes clinking as you thrashed your arms from the sensation, his nose bumping on your clit as he moved his head up and down, his tongue flicking inside of you, and he really was devouring you.

Thanks to all the edging, the teasing, and how you had been wet from the very moment you saw him in the ballroom, the coil in your belly started to form rapidly. Your moans escalated in sound, and your eyes closed at how good his tongue was flicking at your walls, trying to reach that place that would make you see stars. He took his mouth off you with a gasp, getting air back in his lungs and you almost cried at the loss, only to feel one strong and large finger enter you, and curling in a come hither motion.

“Oh, FUCK!” Your head went back into the pillows as a moan escaped from your lips, loud, the spongy part of yourself being rubbed onto over and over again. He smirked at the sight, his panting from desire being heard along your moans.

“Are you enjoying yourself little Bunny?” He asks and you nod your head desperately, tears prickling in your eyes as you feel the burning at your hip from the position and your wrists tugged onto the ropes again.

“Yes, yes, yes! Please– Please keep going!” And he was going to. He wasn’t going to edge you, not this time, because you’ve been such a good girl, even if a little bratty, you were a good girl for him. He pushed another finger inside of you, your eyes widening as both of them started rubbing you, repeatedly, your belly screaming for release. Your chest was heaving up and down as your panting increased and his movements became fast, the squelching of your cunt being heard across the room.

“Come on, cum for me. Fucking look at me while you cum.” And that you did, staring up at him with your mouth open, moans coming out as your belly finally exploded, your vision going white as you tried to keep your eyes open for him, but you knew the tears were blocking your vision. Your pussy clamped down on his fingers and you heard him curse at the feeling as he tried to keep the fast pace on you. Your legs trembled around him as his name spilled out of your lips.

“Eddie! Oh my god, SHIT!” You kept riding your orgasm against his fingers, your walls clenching and unclenching until it finally stopped, your body jolting once, then twice as Eddie slowed down his fingers on you, and once he saw you relaxing onto the bed again he pulled them out of you.

He was breathing heavily, looking down at you as he made your lower body hit the bed again, a sigh of relief mixing with your panting as you finally felt some of the burning on your hip go away. He looked at his fingers, licking your juices off of them, and through your half lidded eyes you could see him, making your pussy clench again. You wanted to laugh at how needy you were, how desperately you wanted him.

He wasn’t going to last long, not with you having sucked his dick, and he almost busted through his boxers while eating you out. He got off the bed, not even bothering to wipe his mouth from your slick and his spit, wanting to keep your taste on his mouth for a little longer. He walked over to one side to let your left wrist go, and he rubbed the red mark that appeared on your skin. You smiled up at him and nodded, as if telling him it was okay. He then walked to the other side to let go of your other hand, followed by him ripping himself off his pants and underwear.

You wanted to have him in your mouth again, seeing his pink tip leaking precum was enough to make you want to open your mouth and stick out your tongue, buit he had other plans for you. He got on the bed again, but before getting in between your legs, he got his hands underneath your ass and waist, turning you over and onto your stomach, a gasp coming out of your lips.

He positioned himself behind you, lifting your hips with his fingertips digging on the flesh of your skin, marking you up. When you left your upper body on the mattress, he groaned and grabbed onto his belt again that was on the edge of the bed, almost falling over, and made a snapping sound with it before landing it against your right cheek, making you jolt up and almost squirm away from the sting.

“In all fours, or I’ll strap you to this fucking bed without touching you again.” That made your trembling hands press against the mattress to prop yourself up instantly. You stuck your ass at him, wiggling your hips slightly, earning yourself another smack from his belt on your other cheek, a squeal escaping your lips now. Another smack on the same place, and now a moan was heard in the room as the burning increased in that area.

“Eddie…” You whimpered and he put the belt down, grabbing your ass with one hand, and his cock with the other to finally guide it to your waiting entrance. You moaned with need when he pressed the tip against your clit and you knew what you had to do now. “Please, I need your cock, don’t tease me anymore–”

He plunged himself inside of you, a choked gasp trapping itself in your throat at the sudden massive stretch with no mercy, your eyes widening at the feeling as they immediately prickled with tears from the sting. He was halfway in, and started invading your hole, a little slow, but not quite. He groaned with a smile to his face as he felt your tight walls engulfing him.

“Yeah, this pussy was made for me… So perfect.” You whined at that, almost a whimper as he finally bottomed out and you felt him almost at your throat. He was too deep inside of you, the stretch almost painful, but it couldn’t compare to how much pleasure it gave you. You needed him to move despite the burning sensation, because your belly was screaming for him, your mind and sould needed him.

“Eds, move, please move–” You didn’t have to beg anymore. He pulled back and slammed himself back in, making the fat of your ass jiggle at his movement, and a loud moan was out of your mouth in a second. He repeated the motion until he started going at a brutal pace, and the slamming of the headboard filled the room in between your breaths and the moans. Your arms were trembling as your body went back and forth against him, his hands now at your hips, his fingers digging into your skin.

You could hear the squelching of your pussy as he moved, wet from your climax and getting even wetter at finally having him, at finally feeling him inside of you, and the realization that you get to have him from this day on whenever you want. He was moaning, without shame at all because you were too warm, too beautiful, too pretty right now. His hands went towards your asscheeks, spreading them open to see your small hole, and a grin formed in his face between his jagged breaths.

“Next time– I’ll prep you, and I’ll fuck this little hole of yours. Would you like that, my sweet Bunny?” My. My. My. You were cock drunk now, not being able to think about anything else but him, and the way he was claiming you over and over again at every slam of skin against each other.

“Yes! Yes! I’ll take anything from you–Fuck!” He wanted to laugh at that, as he smacked your ass with his hand, against the already bruising mark that was there. You groaned at that and he pressed his hips against you, harshly and deep and you choked on your own sounds at that. You were certain that if you pressed your hand against your belly, you would be able to feel the tip of his cock inside of you.

He reached out to grab hold of the back of your head, running his fingers through your hair to finally clench at your scalp, making you yelp. He pulled you upwards, your back hitting his chest as you ached it for him to keep thrusting in and out of you but he stood still. His mouth was on your ear as he breathed against it, whispering softly.

“You are so fucking perfect for me.” You smiled at that, your bodies sticking against each other's sweat. You licked your lips as you turned your head to look at him.

“I studied you too, you know…” You confessed to him, and he raised an eyebrow at you. You grabbed onto his hand that was in your waist, pulling it up towards your mouth. You put his index and ring fingers inside, sucking on them and you felt his hips start to move inside of you, at the same rhythm of your lips. You pulled them out to graze your tongue towards the belly of his palm where you suddenly bit at the flesh, harshly, marking him. His dick twitched inside of you as he moaned against your ear a smile appearing on your lips as they still latched on his skin, blood filling your mouth.

Odaxelagnia: Sexual arousal to biting or being bitten.

“You fucking slut.” He ripped his hand away from you, and despite the pain, he gripped onto your hips again, setting a brutal pace against you, your back arching against him, ass sticking out as your head rested against his shoulder. His mouth immediately found your shoulder, biting onto your skin until his teeth went through, your eyes widening at the burning and pain, but it sent an electric shock towards your belly which began its tightening again.

“Only for you– God, just for you–!” He licked the blood that oozed out of the inflicted wound, and his other hand went towards your clit as his hips slammed against your ass, his dick hitting that perfect spongy part of yourself that made you moan almost in screams as he hit it repeatedly and without missing. His fingers started circling against your nub and your pussy clenched around him, earning a moan from his part.

“You have to come with me, I’m going to fill you up so fucking good.” He says into your ear and it comes unexpectedly, your eyes widening as his words triggered your orgasm way harsher than before, his fingers flicking on your clit rapidly as your juices gushed around him, making a mess out of your legs and his, and the comforter below you two. He cursed under his breath as his movements started faltering, stuttering.

“Eddie– Fuck, please, PLEASE–” You were still riding your orgasm out when you felt that warmth finally fill your belly, coating all of your walls as he spent his seed inside of you. He moaned loudly against your shoulder, as he kept pumping himself inside of you, your pussy clenching him to milk every single drop until you finally came down from your high and his hips stopped moving completely.

You were both breathing heavily as you tried to get some oxygen in your lungs. The room smelled like sex, your sweat, your juices, his cologne, and it was such an amazing smell to you. He groaned when he finally pulled out of you and his hand raised up to grab onto your chin, turning your head to look at him. His lips found yours again, this time, a tender kiss, a kiss of belonging, a kiss that sealed this bond between you both.

Your new home.

“You really are on the pill then.” Eddie says as he lays in his bed, a new comforter over his legs as his back is pressed against his headboard. You were naked with a towel on your hand as you dried your hair with it, walking towards him after a nice shower you both took together.

“Of course.” He groaned at that with his arms crossed over his chest, looking away. He knew it was too soon to have a kid with you, but he really wanted to claim you in every way possible, and having a family with you, was another way of doing so. You smiled at him, throwing the towel to the floor, as you got inside the bed with him. His arm wrapped around your shoulders, pulling you close to him and you rested your head on his shoulder.

“Why did you decide to enter the trial?” He asks you and you hum at that question.

“My father has been trying to marry me off for the past three years… Sadly, all of my bachelors went missing, or were killed in action.” You say with a smirk to your face, and Eddie’s grin widened at that. He can still remember the screams of the men that tried to marry you, claiming you like he did.

“I wonder what happened.” He says as if he were playing dumb. You giggled at that and nodded.

“Hmm… You didn’t know about my last bachelor, did you?” He blinked at that, and looked at you as you stared forward, a glint in your eyes that were filled with mischief, but also lust. “Right before entering the trial, my father told me I was to be set up with a new bachelor, and to be honest, he is a pretty, a very pretty boy.” You licked your lips at those words, Eddie’s attention already drawn to you as you spoke.

“Who was it sweetheart?” You turned to look at him, a wicked smile on your face.

“Harrington Jr.” Eddie’s eyes sparkled at that. The son of the Harrington Emporium. You licked your lips at him as he hummed at you, his eyes suddenly turning lustful as he looked down at you.

“Mmm… He is a pretty boy.” You turned your body to be closer to his ear as you talked in a sultry tone.

“Can I have him Eddie? Please?” He chuckled at that, but a new obsession was growing in his head, storming his mind. “I’ll share him, I promise…”

“We can plan on him being the next White Rabbit.” He says and your chest was filled with excitement as your hand reached for his cheek to make him turn to you, licking your lips as you talked.

“I’m the hunter next year.”

“He’s all yours.”

Bunny, Bunny, Bunny, you're so funny with your twitching nose.

Second part maybe? Do you guys want Stevie?

REBLOGS MAKE ME REALLY HAPPY YOU KNOW.

A/N: Yeah, kinda came out of my shell with this one, I hope you all like it, and if you don't well, you do you booboo. TO ALL MY FRIENDS THAT WAITED FOR THIS, HERE YOU GO, I LOVE YOU, MWAH.

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ckret2 · 4 months

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please more evil ford please i stare with my puppy eyes for this i am obbsessed

Yeah all right, I've been working on some art. (For context, we're talking about this Evil Ford.)

Evil Ford is Evil as in "cheerfully works with Bill even after learning his full plot" and "is totally ready to conquer and/or destroy the world." But other than the shocking lack of basic ethics and the supervillain objective he's mostly the same guy—which means he still cares about his family. He's hoping to get them to join in on the world conquest plan.

Forty-odd years ago he went off to college promising someday he'd be a big shot scientist who changes the world and he'd make his family a fortune. If taking over reality doesn't qualify he doesn't know what does. The family can join him and his buddy Bill and rule the universe together. Pines Pines Pines Pines!

Unfortunately for him, the rest of the family still has normal moral compasses. And also they've met Bill.

Bill can't currently possess Ford due to Reasons; but even though he can't get in the driver's seat he still has permission to ride shotgun at any time. Ford talks to him pretty regularly. He HAS been caught doing this. Stan thinks he's just gone a little nutty from thirty years of isolation.

Naturally, since he was always on Bill's side, Ford's perception of events during Weirdmageddon is a bit different:

I finally made an official Evil Ford New Costume Character Design, check out his exciting totally different brand new look:

I decided that, since Ford is still basically the same person aside from his terrible life goals, he'd probably have the same fashion sense. And so... nothing changes except two tiny details lmao.

But he DOES have tattoos:

I traced a canon character model and took off its top to get a base to slap tattoos on, and then went dang... they gave him a big head and arms. He looks goofy. Anyway,

His forearms have less incriminating tattoos—just a birch tree and a sunrise. (The sunrise looks like the Journal 3 "The Muse Has Spoken" page.) The red text is the "triangulum entangulum" ritual; if anyone asks he'll go "it's uhh an ancient Sumerian poem about how great science is." It's not until he's topless that it's like "oh so he's a CULTIST cultist." The one exception is an unconcealed Eye of Providence on his right palm—but it's in an ink that's only visible in certain lighting. It's there so at any time he can point his hand at something and go "Bill are you seeing this BS?"

Of course, he still has the "hey now, you're an all star" neck tattoo. I didn't have room to draw it.

As you can see, he's made being Bill's right hand man a core part of his personality. Rather than spending 30 years scrabbling around the multiverse desperately searching for a way to destroy Bill, he spent 30 years chilling in the Quadrangle of Qonfusion as Bill's specialest favoritest Henchmaniac, and only scrabbling around the multiverse occasionally for fun & profit.

Here's a photo Bill & Ford took at a Nightmare Realm house party like fifteen years ago, three minutes before Bill started an argument and set the house on fire.

Most people have their wild party years in college, Ford has his in his 40s.

#stanford pines #grunkle ford #bill cipher #(he's in enough pictures; he's worth tagging too)#gravity falls #gravity falls fanart #evil ford au #my art

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ratsarecute4 · 2 months

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Some Hatchetfield Headcanons

Richie had a Warrior Cats phase in elementary school

Ruth owns a pet chameleon named Yoda

Max thinks that Pizza Pete's is owned by Pete, and that is where he gets the money for his rich kid bowtie

Mayor Lauter pays Steph's allowance in cryptocurrency

There was a month where the Clivesdale Chemists and the Hatchetfield Nighthawks had an even higher amount of hatred for eachother than usual. The Chemists accused the Nighthawks of stealing their mascot (they didn’t, the kid just moved to Hatchetfield)

Because of the mascot stealing allegations, the Chemists decided to steal the Nighthawks mascot for ransom, but they let Richie go after an hour because he wouldn't stop explaining the plot of One Piece

The problematic puppy Steph got in a Twitter fight about was the cop dog from Paw Patrol

Ziggy owns a couple of pet snakes

The Smoke Club has a rule that you must wear at least one weed-patterned item of clothing to meetings or else you're out of the club

Ted is one of those guys whose bedroom has just a mattress on the floor and a TV sitting on a bunch of cardboard boxes

Also Ted gives big lives in his parents' basement vibes

Steph had a creepypasta phase

No one at CCRP ever knows what to get Paul for work holiday parties so now he owns a bunch of gifted mugs and he's starting to run out of cabinet space because he doesn't want to get rid of anything that was gifted to him

The Hatchetfield High theatre department has never payed for the rights to a play. The students don't know about this. Ms Mulberry is fully aware of how illegal that is but continues to do it anyway. Hatchetfield is a small town, they won't get caught. Also the theatre department has like no funding

Grace was a horse girl in elementary school and she used to eat grass

Charlotte sells DoTERRA essential oils on the side. Everyone at the office has tried to tell her its basically a pyramid scheme but she doesn't believe them

Miss Holloway was a famous rockstar in the 80s, but after she made a deal with the Lords in Black, her past existence was wiped from everyone's memories and no one ever listened to her songs again

Grace has OCD, specifically religious scrupulosity

Richie owns so many body pillows that he no longer has room for himself on his bed

Ruth and Sherman Young have beef with eachother from Ruth's middleschool My Little Pony phase

Kyle is autistic and I will die on this hill

Max's mom dissapeared after being crowned Honey Queen. She wanted the prize money to support her family because Max's father was layed off from his job

I just know Brenda and Stacy are super into astrology

Local teens describe Paul's aesthetic as "cardboardcore"

Ted has one of these tattoos. He doesn't remember getting it and it took him forever to notice because it is on his back. It is a miracle that it never got infected

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zagreuses-toast · 7 months

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very intrigued by baru cormorant. what's it about?

The world's most lesbian autistic accountant decides the only way to destroy the eugenicist colonizers that took over her homeland and killed one of her fathers is to gain power within the system and bring it down by its own methods. It's very hard fantasy, with only ambiguous fantastical elements, more focused on social and economic elements of a fictional trade empire. It's got some of the greatest world and character building I've ever read, and having read the third book finally I can safely say that while it's dark and pulls no punches, it isn't relentlessly hopeless or painful. If you liked the locked tomb series you might like the plot structure, although they are very different tone wise

Also it contains some really great exploration of queerness both within cultures that normalize it, within cultures that forbid it, and within cultures that have their own gender and sexuality rules that are restrictive in their own way, not just cis-het supremacy. Also the love of my life Tau Indi Bosoka, federal prince of Oriati Mbo and nonbinary icon

#seriously they are really really good #very heavy tho #if you want a list of content warnings i can give them #baru cormorant #the masqerade series

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ineffable-endearments · 2 months

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Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Wow. There is...there is so much here.

First, a caution about the book itself: there is significant sexually violent narration, and lots of torture as well. This post is going to discuss these topics only in general terms - I don't think I need to go into detail to discuss what they mean for the story - but take care of yourself when you're deciding whether to read it. If you have any questions, always feel free to send an ask or message.

I am going to need to make multiple posts about this book. For this first one, I'll focus on summarizing the book and its main themes, especially the ones that I think relate to Good Omens. As always, I can't summarize it in a way that will give you a better understanding than simply reading the book, but summarizing it will help me put my own thoughts together and hopefully help you follow along as I try to articulate them.

Because it's impossible to miss, I think it is best to confront this issue at the outset: there is a lot of especially blatant misogyny on Winston's part in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is not meant to be a good or sympathetic thing. It is a demonstration of how messed up he is, and how messed up everyone in that society is.

The Society

The plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four is tied up very much in the story's world. The characters are at the mercy of their society in this story, much more than in most. It will make sense to describe the world first. Indeed, a massive portion of the book is just information about Oceania itself.

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the entire planet is supposedly ruled by three perpetually warring authoritarian states: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, conglomerations of Earth's former independent nations. Through the novel, it is revealed that all three states have governments that are structured in largely the same way with approximately the same quality of life for their people, and the perpetual war is itself a way of controlling each population.

Technically, we don't know for sure that the war is really happening. In fact, we don't know that anything is true, because almost all the information the characters have comes from the Party, the government of Oceania, and the Party's operations revolve around reality control. The Party's "leader" is an enigmatic figure referred to only as Big Brother, who, of course, is watching.

Our protagonist, Winston, lives in Oceania. There are Inner Party members, who are the highest-ranking, with the highest responsibility and the highest quality of life. There are Outer Party members, who work for the Party, are heavily surveilled, and whose daily needs are all provided for with low-quality supplies; they have a highly regimented daily schedule. Inner and Outer Party members have telescreens, which broadcast Party propaganda but also have cameras to monitor all Party members. It is incredibly difficult to get away from telescreens, since there's at least one in every home and they're everywhere in public. Altogether, the telescreens form a panopticon that is hard to evade.

Then there are the proles, a shortened term for proletarians, who are the lower classes of Oceania and make up the majority of the population. The proles live in poor conditions and are constantly manipulated by State-generated propaganda. However, they have more freedom than Party members, in the sense that they are also largely ignored by the Party because they have no real power and are assumed to be incapable of engaging in revolutionary behavior. For this reason, proles get to have human relationships and enjoy pleasures, wherever they can find pleasures, in ways that Party members are not allowed. In reality, the Party's perpetual war is a way of grinding through resources in order to keep people, especially the proles, buried under work without improving their quality of life. This is because when people have free time, they can use it to learn and organize, and they might become a threat to the Party.

Winston is one of the Outer Party members. He works in the government department that rewrites history. See, every time a fact or anecdote in the media is inconvenient for the Party, the Party goes back and destroys all old copies of newspapers and books, all old video content, all paperwork, any scrap of evidence that anything was different. Newspapers are routinely reprinted with "updated" (falsified) information. For example, Oceania is always either at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia, and as far as the Party is concerned, this has never changed. Every single time Oceania's alliance changes, the newspapers are updated so that the current alignment has always been true. Every time someone becomes a disgrace to the Party, their previous deeds are rewritten.

On the surface, this sounds difficult to implement, but over the story, one realizes the vast majority of the Party's operations revolve purely around the constant reshaping of history, control of people's memories, and control of people's emotions for the purpose of maintaining power eternally. Art produced by human beings is actively discouraged; instead, the Party mass-produces art, including novels, using machines, to control what kinds of ideas people are consuming.

The Party is essentially a machine that controls reality, or at least, what the people inside it consider to be reality. There are people who specialize in managing the thoughts of the public: the Thought Police. While they may technically not be able to literally see inside one's mind, they watch everyone carefully and are excellent at noticing everything: every facial expression, every eyebrow twitch, and every breath.

The Party rules through a series of four "ministries." These are the Ministry of Truth (like an educational ministry, responsible for producing propaganda), the Ministry of Peace (like a military, responsible for warfare), the Ministry of Love (like the correctional system, responsible for jailing and torturing dissidents), and the Ministry of Plenty (like the treasury, responsible for rationing).

When it suits the Party, anyone can be "vaporized." This means they are secretly murdered and all evidence of them - any existing record whatsoever, any news story, any list or database entry - is erased.

The Party has a new language they're developing as a method of thought control called Newspeak. The purpose of Newspeak is to make it impossible to articulate certain kinds of thoughts. The following is a character named Syme describing Newspeak:

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. ... In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

It's worth noting that Syme is later vaporized, presumably just for being too insightful out loud about Newspeak. In Newspeak, people who have been vaporized, if they must ever be referred to at all, are called "unpersons." In this way, no one has ever been killed by the Party, because those people have never existed in the first place.

There's a key Newspeak word that appears over and over: doublethink. It's the ability to believe two contradictory things simultaneously, and unlike the way we usually experience cognitive dissonance, there is no urge or attempt to reconcile what is really true. With doublethink, the existence of two contradictory ideas at once is itself exploited to help Party members serve the Party.

The Party (and its equivalents in Eurasia and Eastasia) uses perpetual war to control the population by squandering the resources produced by human labor and keep people in a perpetual combination of patriotic fervor and fear. The war is infinite and can never be won; the whole purpose of the war is to be at war.

Socially, the Party has destroyed family life. Winston was married years ago. He and his wife are so estranged that he is no longer sure if she is alive. They did not have a good relationship. The Party does not want close emotional relationships between its members, so while they are strict about who is allowed to marry (not for love, strictly for procreation), they don't care if people continue to live together. However, the Party does not want people forming new relationships, so divorce and extramarital sex are also illegal. The Party has also turned children against their parents by encouraging children to report their parents' potential thoughtcrimes. All in all, family members are generally afraid of each other.

We see, over and over again, how the Party does its best to frame human beings as both inherently untrustworthy and as objects to be used. Pitting people from individual family members to entire classes, sexes, and races against each other is one of the Party's many techniques for controlling people, and it has seeped into Winston's everyday thought processes. Only actual experiences with other human beings even begin to break these ideas down.

Eventually, it becomes apparent that the Party's motivation is immortality through the denial of the individual. Human beings are denied their own personal thoughts, feelings, and bodies. Only their ability to be assimilated into the Party is permitted. Even thoughts and feelings about the greater good are unacceptable because these lead to regime changes and interfere with the raw totalitarian power of the Party. Every Party member in Oceania is meant to strive exclusively for the continued power of the Party. Dissidents are denied even the ability to be martyrs, because the Party does not kill people while they carry hatred for Big Brother; they simply change their thoughts until they are good Party members again, and then kill them later, when they are no longer dissidents and have no legacy of resistance to leave behind.

Winston's Plot

Winston has a secret desire to be free of the Party. He does get swept up in the Party's fervor when he's in the middle of it, but he also longs for the extremely basic pleasures and freedoms that have become taboo. For example, Winston secretly buys an old pen and journal to write in - a completely forbidden act that he has to conceal from the telescreen in his own apartment. He finds himself almost unconsciously writing things like "DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER" in that journal.

There is an Inner Party member named O'Brien who Winston admires greatly from a distance despite knowing only his appearance: "intelligent" with a "prizefighter's physique." Winston perceives that he and O'Brien "understand" each other somehow, and even believes O'Brien has spoken to him in a dream, saying they "shall meet where there is no darkness." Eventually, Winston imagines he is addressing his journal to the mysterious O'Brien, believing him to be an ally.

Winston has an acquaintance at work named Syme. Syme is very passionate about revising the Newspeak dictionary. However, he is a little too openly insightful about the true purpose of Newspeak for his own good. Even though Syme does not seem to have any intention of betraying the Party and in fact is extremely taken with Newspeak, Winston is convinced he will be vaporized, and sure enough, he is.

There is a woman Winston thinks he hates because she looks like the perfect Party member who would turn him in to the Thought Police. Actually, the narration outright states that he doesn't like women entirely, because he thinks they're too committed to the Party and enjoy betraying men. However, it turns out that this woman observes Winston by the shop where he bought his illegal notebook. By simply observing Winston in that shop, the Party would suspect he's committing thoughtcrimes, and Winston panics. However, the woman later bumps into Winston at work and passes him a note that says, "I love you." Winston then instantly decides he wants to be with her; the idea of not being with her never even occurs to him.

The woman's name is Julia. It turns out Julia is putting on an incredibly convincing act, but she hates the Party, too. Winston is technically married, so he can't legally marry Julia, and any kind of non-procreative sex is illegal anyway, so their relationship is entirely forbidden.

Winston and Julia meet up and have sex in secret. It's worth noting that during their first meeting, they enjoy listening to a thrush singing. During this first meeting, they go out to the countryside, where there are fewer telescreens and microphones; Winston comments that it's like the "Golden Country," his symbolic dream-place where people are free.

A man named Mr. Charrington owns the shop where Winston had bought his notebook, and he also owns a room for rent above the shop. It's an old-fashioned prole room without telescreens and with a great number of old-fashioned fixtures. Winston and Julia rent it to get away from Party life for a few hours every now and then. When they first start staying in the room, Julia observes a rat and throws her shoe at it. Winston is utterly terrified, showing that he has a serious phobia of rats; it is vaguely implied that he had a traumatic moment related to them as a child. Julia takes the rat in stride; they are everywhere. She promises to block up the hole so the rat does not return.

Julia and Winston spend time in their prole room knowing for sure that it will eventually lead to their capture, torture, and death, but they decide it will be worth it. Winston voices some interest in trying to work against the Party; Julia does not believe this is possible whatsoever, and is not interested in trying. She believes people are better off putting on a convincing act and getting away with as much as they can for as long as they can.

Meanwhile, during the workday, O'Brien speaks to Winston. He mentions Syme without using his name, which is incredibly unusual, since people who are vaporized are never ever acknowledged again; all their work is erased from history. But O'Brien mentions Syme's work on the Newspeak dictionary and gives Winston his home address so that Winston can borrow the dictionary. Party members also don't often give each other their addresses. Because of these unusual cues, Winston infers that O'Brien is inviting him over to conspire against the Party.

While Winston and Julia meet up and have sex, they also indulge in other pleasures of the world, like real coffee and chocolate, and proles singing outside their window, and art that hasn't been generated by the Party. Observing the proles and their richer emotional lives, Winston and Julia decide they are going to worry only about their feelings. The Party can coerce them to do anything, including to confess, but as long as the Party can't make them stop loving each other, they agree, they will never have betrayed each other. Julia says that for all the things the Party can do, they can't get inside their heads.

So seized are Winston and Julia by their conviction that they decide to go visit O'Brien together and confess to wanting to destroy the Party. O'Brien tells them they may join the Brotherhood, a mysterious group of dissidents working to bring down Big Brother, but they must be willing to sacrifice everything; they must be willing to not only suffer and die, but to murder civilians, to spread disease, to sow discord, to do anything the Brotherhood asks of them. They even, O'Brien says, must be willing to "separate and never see one another again." This is the only thing Julia and Winston are unwilling to agree to. O'Brien accepts them anyway and, many days later, gives Winston a book through a secret messenger.

This book contains the writings of Goldstein, the supposed leader of the Brotherhood, outlining the Party's core philosophy. Winston reads this to Julia, who is hinted to not be all that interested, but she does listen a little.

While they look out the window and contemplate that the proles are alive and the Party members are already dead, Winston and Julia are captured. It turns out Mr. Charrington was a member of the Thought Police and the room had surveillance in it. Winston and Julia are separated and dragged to the Ministry of Love.

While at the Ministry of Love, Winston spends a lot of time waiting, watching other prisoners pass through. Some of them are proles, and some of them are people he knows. The waiting room is enormous and brightly lit with telescreens on all walls. There are essentially no shadows.

Another familiar face appears at the Ministry of Love. It's O'Brien. Winston first thinks O'Brien has been captured, but it soon becomes apparent that O'Brien was masterminding this whole operation and is in charge of Winston's torture. They have, indeed, met "where there is no darkness" - because of all the telescreens and artificial lighting. O'Brien and other Party members even wrote Goldstein's book as yet another propaganda piece. O'Brien states the description of the Party in the book is true, although the book's implication that the Party can be defeated through a prole uprising is false because a prole uprising will never happen. (Note that Winston did not actually read the part of the book where "Goldstein" outlined how the Party should be defeated.)

Winston is tortured for an undetermined amount of time. He discovers that he is a prisoner of his body; his torturers can get him to say pretty much anything through punishment and reward. In fact, they can force him to feel certain ways, too. O'Brien and the Party aren't only trying to get Winston to give away information; they want him to really internalize sincere belief in the Party doctrine, like doublethink, symbolized by the concept that 2+2 equals 5.

Winston starts out promising to himself there are certain things he will never agree to or say out loud, but torture proves an effective method at getting him to say whatever O'Brien wants. Winston vows that he will recite the Party lines, but will not actually believe them. If he lies to get the torture to stop but still retains his ability to reason for himself, Winston believes, then he can beat the Party.

However, O'Brien and the torturers are slowly able to break that down, too, as they are good at reading Winston's emotions, and they torture him every time he recites their desired lines without the sincere belief they're looking for. Winston is highly resistant to the 2+2=5 idea, but as he is tortured over and over, he does come to believe that because the Party can define his reality through brute force, then 2+2=5 could very well be true. They can force it to be true. He has no choice but to believe it, because only believing it might possibly end his torture, and the torture must end.

In other words, Winston and Julia were wrong. The Party can, in fact, get inside your head.

When Winston starts to believe 2+2=5, O'Brien does indeed start to improve his treatment of Winston, providing him with food and comfort, allowing Winston to become much healthier over time. This bonds Winston to O'Brien and makes him feel attached. However, Winston has not forgotten Julia, and in an unguarded moment, he cries out for her. This prompts O'Brien to ask Winston his feelings, again, about Big Brother. Winston states that he hates Big Brother.

It is at this moment when O'Brien sends Winston to the notorious Room 101.

In Room 101, prisoners face their worst fears - which, of course, the Party knows, because they know everything about everyone. Winston, who we know has a phobia of rats, is shown a pair of cages with starving rats in them. He is told that the rats are, as everyone in this world knows, flesh-eaters, despite being rodents. Winston is restrained, his head held in place, and O'Brien informs him that the rats will be released to eat his face.

Winston realizes what O'Brien wants to hear: he realizes his torturers will probably not allow the rats to eat him if he is willing to inflict the torture on Julia instead. They want Winston's betrayal of Julia to be complete. They want him to stop caring for her, the one thing he and Julia had once agreed they would never, ever do. And Winston has reached his limit: he cannot tolerate the idea of being eaten alive specifically by rats. So Winston says, "Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia!"

And then he is finally let go.

We continue with Winston once again living on the outside. He has seen and spoken to Julia, who was also let go. But the bond between them is completely broken. Julia admits she also betrayed Winston when she was faced with Room 101.

"Sometimes," she said, "they threaten you with something---something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, 'Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.' And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself." "All you care about is yourself," he echoed. "And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer." "No," he said, "you don't feel the same."

In other words, by demonstrating to Winston and Julia that they ultimately cannot escape their own self-interest, O'Brien has caused them to reject each other.

At the tail end of the book, Winston is sitting in his usual spot at a place called the Chestnut Tree Café, pondering a happy moment from his childhood before pushing the memory away, believing it to be a false memory. When an enormous military victory is announced on the telescreen, Winston realizes that he finally, truly loves Big Brother.

Interpretation of the End

Although the events at the end of the book are pretty straightforwardly described, I found them slightly confusing on an emotional level. Winston and Julia aren't really angry at each other for their betrayals, it doesn't seem - in fact, they admit to each other that's what happened, and they agree on their mutual experience. But they don't love each other anymore, and Winston loves Big Brother instead.

So, here is my initial thought on what the characters went through:

For people to love each other, both need a sense of individuality. There needs to be a connection, but there also needs to be a specific You and a Somebody to love, to connect to.

Through torture, O'Brien has effectively torn away Winston's individual sense of self. I know that's a weird thing to suggest when the book repeats "all you care about is yourself" multiple times, but I think that by so completely obliterating Winston's ability to make anything resembling his own decision, O'Brien has essentially made "Big Brother" and "Winston ('yourself')" the same person. Big Brother's wishes are Winston's wishes. Winston has been assimilated into Big Brother. Winston and Julia's conversation at the end describes what it feels like to be liquidated as a person and assimilated into a collective.

Winston now knows that the one core impulse he can never escape is self-preservation, and the only one who can provide that, with infinite military might and an infinitely-deep torture repertoire, is Big Brother. Julia represents the ideal that caused Winston to estrange himself from the safety of embracing and trusting Big Brother. And because Big Brother is both eternal and almighty, giver of both life and death, he is the only one it is safe to trust.

By betraying Julia, Winston discovered that his own will inherently had limits; because he would always, eventually, revert to self-preservation, his will and therefore his identity became synonymous with the force that decided whether to preserve him. That's why the end of the novel involves Winston imagining that he has finally been shot in the head and killed; he has experienced the death of his sense of self. And this is exactly how "Goldstein's" book indicated the Party's operations work: eliminate individuals and assimilate them into a collective to achieve immortality.

Character and Faction Parallels Between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Good Omens

The Party and Heaven and Hell

They're both the one overarching power over everyone's existence. The inner workings of it are mysterious to the characters and even moreso to the audience. The main characters are agents working for these entities, and they are controlled through surveillance, punishment, and reward.

Although Heaven and Hell give the impression of being two large overarching powers, it seems apparent to me that the whole thing is really just one system that has intentionally split its workforce into factions. Ultimately I think we will see in the most explicit way possible that whoever is actively calling the shots in Heaven is also actively in charge of Hell.

Winston and Julia, Aziraphale and Crowley

Both pairs are agents who are in love with each other even though they're not supposed to be, who enjoy Earthly pleasures and experience the joys of humanity before getting arrested and dragged away by their authoritarian "employers."

It's tempting to try and figure out which character mirrors which - Aziraphale mirroring Winston, Crowley mirroring Julia? - but I think, sort of like with Nina and Maggie, the reflections work in every direction. The characters aren't literal stand-ins for each other, but they are exploring similar themes, including what happens to people when a society forbids intimacy.

O'Brien and the Metatron

"More even than of strength, he gave an impression of confidence and of an understanding tinged by irony." This line describes O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it sounds quite a lot like the Metatron's manner as he enters Aziraphale's bookshop. Confidence and an understanding tinged by irony indeed.

O'Brien seems to appeal to Winston's ideal in authority figures, appealing both intelligent and physically strong. The Metatron seems to have tailored himself to appeal to Aziraphale's ideal of an authority figure: someone who is calm and in control, but also has an exceptionally gentle manner (and this isn't really true of the Metatron, but he can make it look like it is).

There are more similarities. Winston thinks and hopes O'Brien will be a helpful figure, and O'Brien convinces Winston he's a helpful figure, but in the end, O'Brien is the mastermind behind Winston's capture and torture. Additionally, Winston assumes, during his torture, that the Party's drive for power is for the Greater Good. But O'Brien tells him this is stupid, and the Party's drive for power is just for the pure sake of having power, because that's the only thing that will guarantee the Party's immortality.

This reminds me a little bit of the Metatron telling Aziraphale the point of the war is to win it, not to avoid it. It also hits me as a potential motivation for Heaven - like, why do they do what they do instead of doing something else, since the universe seems perfectly capable of running itself? "Power" or "immortality" could be a reason, and it would also be a reason that would resonate with very human themes, since power and (symbolic) immortality are among the motivations that can drive real-life authoritarians.

The Proles and Humanity

The common people. The populations who are considered by the main characters' societies to be "beneath" them, but who the main characters become fascinated by, and whose lifestyles the main characters come to prefer.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Good Omens contain in their narratives the notion that the prole or human way of life is where true meaning can be experienced. Winston and Julia go as far as to announce that proles are alive and Party members are dead. And at the end of Good Omens Season 1, Aziraphale outright tells Adam that being "human incarnate" is better than being Heaven or Hell incarnate.

This mirror is probably the one that brings up the richest speculation possibilities for me. I won't go in-depth here, but I see in both stories the main characters developing this love for the proles and humans while continuing to separate from them - even trying to turn around and exploit the very power structures that have oppressed them in an effort to fight against the oppression.

It's worth noting that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Charrington, the man who Winston and Julia rented their secret love nest from, and whom they thought was a prole, was actually a member of the Thought Police who helped capture them, whereas in Good Omens, so far, the humans have just been humans, and while Adam Young started out as an incredibly powerful non-human, he later chose to be a human and used his power to reject authoritarianism.

The Themes

Authoritarianism and Power

Obviously, the whole overarching cautionary tale in Nineteen Eighty-Four is about authoritarianism and the insidious ways it affects populations. The Party's power is almost as absolute as it can possibly be. Big Brother really is almost always watching; there is almost always a telescreen somewhere nearby. Even when there isn't a telescreen, there are microphones. And unorthodox ideas and behavior are punished with annihilation - not just death, but the total annihilation of the self.

Doesn't this sound like a version of Heaven and Hell in Good Omens?

At first glance, it appears Oceania's Party is more aggressive about surveilling its Party members than Heaven and Hell are about surveilling Aziraphale and Crowley. One has to wonder if perhaps Heaven and Hell are just as aggressive with surveillance in the Upstairs and Downstairs themselves, but are less aggressive or maybe even less capable on Earth, just like the Party's surveillance is less in the countryside (although it is still a significant threat there).

But still, we see Michael pull out those photos of Crowley and Aziraphale through the ages, and we hear the Metatron refer to reviewing Aziraphale's "exploits," and we see Hell drag Crowley down in 1827, and we see both Crowley and Aziraphale anxiously glancing around throughout history with the assumption that someone might be listening, and we see how ready Heaven is to erase Gabriel's memories (his identity! his entire self!) from existence. We also watch Heaven and Hell try to make Aziraphale and Crowley disappear in a gout of hellfire and a tub of holy water after realizing that Aziraphale and Crowley do represent a threat to the current celestial order. Heaven and Hell's Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque insidious threat is clearly established in both seasons.

Vaporizing Dissidents

In fact, Heaven and Hell's arrest of Aziraphale and Crowley reminds me a bit of Winston and Julia's arrest, in the sense that the protagonists knew what was probably coming but not exactly when. And Heaven's attempted execution of Aziraphale in particular reminds me very much of the Party choosing to vaporize a dissident. They were going to try to disappear him. No angel or demon other than the ones who were involved would have known what happened to him. Hell's attempted execution of Crowley, meanwhile, reminds me of the Party's public executions of war prisoners.

Finally, the Party will attempt to erase people from existence by killing them and then erasing all records related to them, down to the very last detail. Meanwhile, the Archangel Michael threatens Aziraphale with being literally written out of existence in the Book of Life. There's lots of speculation about how possible this is. I wonder if maybe, it's a flawed process. Maybe erasing someone from the Book of Life can cut a hole shaped like them in the universe - but maybe it isn't that simple, and they don't actually get taken from anyone else's memories. Maybe, as people in Oceania haven't quite lost the ability to remember their dead, Heaven cannot actually erase the fact of anyone.

Social Disconnection

I see a lot of complaints online about the characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four being impossible to like. What tends to make characters likable? Their behaviors toward others, especially humor, compassion, individual quirks, and affection. Their moral strengths, like a sense of justice, might appeal to us, too. And what has the Party been systematically beating out of people for decades now? Anything that could possibly make fictional characters likable.

One of the Party's primary modes of social control is to keep people from having individual, intimate relationships outside of the Party. Each individual regards every other individual with distrust at all times, and only the Party is capable of providing safety. Winston mentions many instances in which he believes parents are afraid of their children, for example. There are also a number of people who he thinks would report him for thoughtcrimes.

This is getting into heavy speculation territory, but it hits me as a major motivation for the Fall in the first place. It's a great way to instantly divide Heaven itself in half, make everyone instantly suspicious of everyone else, and set up a whole bunch of rewards and punishments to hold over people's heads related to Falling.

One thing that's obvious, though, is the total lack of social connection in Heaven. Michael and Uriel are constantly treating each other with barely-suppressed contempt. Muriel wants approval so badly, but nobody has any patience for them. The "friendliest" any angels get are Gabriel and Sandalphon in Season 1, and that's still like, corporate-coworkers-style friendliness. Gabriel outright tells Beelzebub that no one has ever given him anything. Although it's...theoretically possible Gabriel is an outlier, I think his experience is probably representative of all the angels.

Bodily Experiences, Physicality, Gross Matter

There is a moment that made a big impression on me. Winston observes a prole woman outside singing a silly popular song at the top of her lungs as she works. This woman is not an attractive person by Winston's or Party standards; she is older, she is fat, she has a "lower-class" accent, her skin is weathered and reddened from working outside. But Winston, self-admitted misogynist who came of age on the Party's feminine ideal, thinks she is beautiful. He has a moment of realization that she's beautiful because the very things that theoretically would make her "unattractive" are evidence of a human life fully lived.

We also have Winston and Julia enjoying the world through their senses together in a way that they simply cannot in the grips of the Party. From listening to a thrush in the countryside to drinking real, delicious coffee, they experience pleasures that are denied to them and cause them to feel peaceful in a way that is denied to Outer Party members. As they experience life in a way that is much closer to the ways of the proles, they decide that only proles are alive; Party members are dead. It is at the moment when they speak this out loud that the Party chooses to capture them.

There's a darker side to the bodily experiences explored in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that's experienced in the Ministry of Love. Here, Winston and Julia discover that their thoughts and feelings are indeed controlled by their bodies. There is only so much pain a human being can withstand before they will comply with their captors just to get the torture to stop. In fact, if the Party's psychological manipulation tactics haven't worked thus far to indoctrinate the population, then the body can be used to brute-force an attitude change.

The connection to Good Omens here is obvious. Aziraphale and Crowley are just like a couple of Outer Party members who haven't experienced real pleasure before, and then they discover wine and ox ribs and music and nice clothes and all those delightful human experiences that the other angels sneer at. It seems Heaven looks down on Earthly pleasure as a morally inferior, dirty pursuit, while Hell looks on Earthly pleasure as a kind of weakness, a pathetic softness. But Earth is where Aziraphale and Crowley have found meaning. Physical existence is where they've found themselves, where they've connected with each other, and where they've connected with the stuff of the universe itself.

Memory Manipulation and Thought Policing

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are massive governmental departments dedicated to revising all printed records, including reprinting newspapers as needed. Private writing is also not allowed. This means that even if a Party member has a memory, there is no physical evidence of it. Even if there were physical evidence, something a person had stuffed away in a safe place, there would be another, more "official" source to prove one's personal source wrong. Of course, anyone trying to make any kind of fuss about official sources being wrong would disappear, too, so no one will even try.

Winston mentions often in his narration that he has trouble remembering large portions of his life because of the way the Party has controlled the public narrative and obscured any fact that would once have been a point of reference for him. For example, Winston estimates that the date his journal starts would be April 4, 1984, but he actually isn't certain, not even about the year, because time isn't kept track of by those dates anymore. Historical facts, like events that led to the Party's ascent to power, have been rewritten so many times that Winston can no longer know what really happened. He can be sure there was chaos in the streets, followed by violence, and then proclamations from above about what was supposedly true, but one individual human being usually can't judge the big picture of what's going on in their entire society without a relatively objective source of information for major events.

Nineteen Eighty-Four also has literal thought police, Party members who study their fellow citizens for any sign of even the most remote disagreement with Party doctrine. If someone proves to be a problematic thinker, as Winston and Julia both did, they are dragged to the Ministry of Love to be violently re-educated. Using a series of punishments and rewards, prisoners are slowly broken down until they are unable to think for themselves at all.

Although it's unclear what Heaven is like in regards to spreading information, we've got the Metatron and the Archangels literally ready to erase Gabriel's memory. In Good Omens, since it's all dressed up in Heavenly attire and the characters have their unique attitudes, it comes across as less dystopian, more quirky and fantastical. But they are fundamentally threatening exactly what is done in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And based on Beelzebub's comment about how Gabriel's memory is "all your...you," the same identity issues would be at play. To erase Gabriel's memories would be to erase everything that makes Gabriel himself - an execution by another name.

Reality As A Construct (Or Not)

The Party's stance on reality is fairly simple: human beings perceive reality, so if human perception can be altered, reality can be changed and turned into whatever the Party wants it to be. This sounds wrong because it is wrong, but people who the Party has targeted for thought control don't get to think for themselves about it, because they can't withstand the torture.

This might be Heaven's approach to reality as well. Look at how questioning is discouraged, and how the angels choose to believe whatever is most convenient for Heaven, or whatever they believe should be true ("there are no back channels").

More importantly, though, we have characters in Good Omens who actually can change reality. In particular, this is what Adam Young does - and what he actively chooses not to do for the majority of the world, in the end. He only adjusts reality enough to be allowed to make his own decision: he's not the Antichrist anymore. Otherwise, he restores the world to its state from before he ascended to power (aside from a couple of tiny little eleven-year-old-boy-ish tweaks here and there; hey, you can't blame a kid for adding a few extras of his favorite books to the world).

Proles as the saviors of society

So this one is complicated because repeatedly through Nineteen Eighty-Four, we come across this feeling from WInston and Julia that the proles have some almost mystical connection to True Humanity which Party members have lost. However, there is also the repeated assumption that the proles are incapable of revolution on their own. And in a practical sense, this appears to be true. The intellectuals of their world look down on them for it, but the truth is that just as in real life, the proles are living in poverty and are far too desperate for their basic necessities to ever gain the class consciousness needed to overthrow the Party. This is, of course, by design.

Winston goes as far as to believe the proles might possibly rise up and overthrow the Party, but he never considers working with them. He goes straight into the jaws of the Inner Party instead! This seems to be for a couple of reasons, but primarily because Winston has formed this sort of attachment to O'Brien, his Inner Party member of choice.

In Good Omens, Season 1 and the book, humans do eventually save the world. Well, Adam - technically an Antichrist - saves the world by thinking like a human and accepting humanity as his true "side."

Free Will

"Free will" as a theme really ties into humanity as a theme in Good Omens, since Earth is neutral ground between Heaven and Hell and humans aren't born to a particular Side. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, of course, the Party's goal is to eliminate free will, while in Good Omens, Heaven and Hell are looking to eliminate humanity.

Individualism Versus Collectivism

Oh there it is! There's my pet theme!

I've always argued that in Good Omens, the core of the dualism explored between Aziraphale and Crowley is individualism and collectivism, with Crowley the dedicated individualist who nonetheless would like to belong somewhere, and Aziraphale the nervous collectivist who is secretly desperate to have an identity and belongings to himself. Good Omens has already touched on the notion that working together as a collective is necessary to keep the world turning, but it's also important to preserve individuality, so we have people to keep us company and meaning to live for. I think this will come up again.

Meanwhile, Nineteen Eighty-Four explores an authoritarian and destructive form of collectivism in which human beings are not allowed to have individual interests or experiences; everything flows toward the power of the Party. Individual identity is viewed as a weakness. With that said, Nineteen Eighty-Four does consider the potential power of collectives to overcome authoritarianism.

Mortality, Immortality, and Change

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O'Brien eventually reveals that the goal of the Party is to become immortal through collectivism. While the fate of an individual human being is always to die, the Party believes a collective that is single-minded enough about maintaining power can live forever. In that way, people who submit to the Party's power can live forever, too. One has to wonder about the real point of all this, of course. The Party regards change as its downfall. For the Party to succeed, it must keep everyone moving toward the exact same goal of maintaining power forever.

In Good Omens, many of the characters are naturally immortal, as angels or demons. They don't have to change, and Heaven and Hell don't have to change. However, existing as immortals in Heaven or Hell, not experiencing any of the things mortals do in the physical world, all seems pretty obviously pointless. Aziraphale and Crowley, and then Gabriel and Beelzebub, and then Muriel, all start to find meaning on Earth among mortals. And I think this is all yet to be expanded upon, especially with the looming Second Coming.

Where Good Omens is concerned, the notion of change as a type of death and/or death as a type of change may be important (and ties into The Crow Road by Iain Banks as well).

By coming to Earth, the immortal characters are essentially doing the reverse of assimilating with the Party or Heaven and Hell: they're discovering themselves. With self-discovery comes the risk of change - changing from who they used to be in Heaven or Hell - and the reward of meaning.

The Party of Oceania wants to assimilate everyone into the same goal of maintaining the Party's power in order to make the Party immortal. While "maintaining power" is a "purpose" of sorts for the collective, on an individual level for any specific human being, it is nihilistic, since there is no place for the individual other than ensuring the success of the Party's destruction of the individual.

Freedom in the Natural World

In both stories, we've got the notion of nature as a place of freedom. The countryside where Winston and Julia first meet up lacks telescreens, and there are fewer microphones as well, allowing them to act naturally in a way that isn't usually permitted in the city. The room that Winston and Julia rent from Mr. Charrington is also so old-fashioned that it doesn't have a telescreen; they believe themselves to be momentarily safe in their own little world there. Unfortunately, Mr. Charrington is not really an ordinary prole, but a member of the Thought Police, which allows the Party to invade Winston's and Julia's space.

Of course, in Good Omens, Earth is the ultimate place of freedom. Heaven and Hell are both awful in their ways, hyper-controlled and devoid of real meaning. It's on Earth that Aziraphale and Crowley can begin to truly live. Of course, the safe little place they create together, the bookshop, is eventually invaded by Heaven and Hell.

I'd like to leave you with a pair of quotations.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face---forever. ... And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands---all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease." O'Brien Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell Part Three, Chapter III

"If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot . . . no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human . . . Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. . . . . . . forever. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

#good omens #nineteen eighty four #good omens 2 #good omens 2 spoilers #1984 #good omens book club #long post #torture mention #sa mention

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physalian · 2 months

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8 Signs your Sequel Needs Work

Sequels, and followup seasons to TV shows, can be very tricky to get right. Most of the time, especially with the onslaught of sequels, remakes, and remake-quels over the past… 15 years? There’s a few stand-outs for sure. I hear Dune Part 2 stuck the landing. Everyone who likes John Wick also likes those sequels. Spiderverse 2 also stuck the landing.

These are less tips and more fundamental pieces of your story that may or may not factor in because every work is different, and this is coming from an audience’s perspective. Maybe some of these will be the flaws you just couldn’t put your finger on before. And, of course, these are all my opinions, for sequels and later seasons that just didn’t work for me.

1. Your vague lore becomes a gimmick

The Force, this mysterious entity that needs no further explanation… is now quantifiable with midichlorians.

In The 100, the little chip that contains the “reincarnation” of the Commanders is now the central plot to their season 6 “invasion of the bodysnatchers” villains.

In The Vampire Diaries, the existence of the “emotion switch” is explicitly disputed as even existing in the earlier seasons, then becomes a very real and physical plot point one can toggle on and off.

I love hard magic systems. I love soft magic systems, too. These two are not evolutions of each other and doing so will ruin your magic system. People fell in love with the hard magic because they liked the rules, the rules made sense, and everything you wrote fit within those rules. Don’t get wacky and suddenly start inventing new rules that break your old ones.

People fell in love with the soft magic because it needed no rules, the magic made sense without overtaking the story or creating plot holes for why it didn’t just save the day. Don’t give your audience everything they never needed to know and impose limitations that didn’t need to be there.

Solving the mystery will never be as satisfying as whatever the reader came up with in their mind. Satisfaction is the death of desire.

2. The established theme becomes un-established

I talked about this point already in this post about theme so the abridged version here: If your story has major themes you’ve set out to explore, like “the dichotomy of good and evil” and you abandon that theme either for a contradictory one, or no theme at all, your sequel will feel less polished and meaningful than its predecessor, because the new story doesn’t have as much (if anything) to say, while the original did.

Jurassic Park is a fantastic, stellar example. First movie is about the folly of human arrogance and the inherent disaster and hubris in thinking one can control forces of nature for superficial gains. The sequels, and then sequel series, never returns to this theme (and also stops remembering that dinosaurs are animals, not generic movie monsters). JP wasn’t just scary because ahhh big scary reptiles. JP was scary because the story is an easily preventable tragedy, and yes the dinosaurs are eating people, but the people only have other people to blame. Dinosaurs are just hungry, frightened animals.

Or, the most obvious example in Pixar’s history: Cars to Cars 2.

3. You focus on the wrong elements based on ‘fan feedback’

We love fans. Fans make us money. Fans do not know what they want out of a sequel. Fans will never know what they want out of a sequel, nor will studios know how to interpret those wants. Ask Star Wars. Heck, ask the last 8 books out of the Percy Jackson universe.

Going back to Cars 2 (and why I loathe the concept of comedic relief characters, truly), Disney saw dollar signs with how popular Mater was, so, logically, they gave fans more Mater. They gave us more car gimmicks, they expanded the lore that no one asked for. They did try to give us new pretty racing venues and new cool characters. The writers really did try, but some random Suit decided a car spy thriller was better and this is what we got.

The elements your sequel focuses on could be points 1 or 2, based on reception. If your audience universally hates a character for legitimate reasons, maybe listen, but if your audience is at war with itself over superficial BS like whether or not she’s a female character, or POC, ignore them and write the character you set out to write. Maybe their arc wasn’t finished yet, and they had a really cool story that never got told.

This could be side-characters, or a specific location/pocket of worldbuilding that really resonated, a romantic subplot, whatever. Point is, careening off your plan without considering the consequences doesn’t usually end well.

4. You don’t focus on the ‘right’ elements

I don’t think anyone out there will happily sit down and enjoy the entirety of Thor: The Dark World. The only reasons I would watch that movie now are because a couple of the jokes are funny, and the whole bit in the middle with Thor and Loki. Why wasn’t this the whole movie? No one cares about the lore, but people really loved Loki, especially when there wasn’t much about him in the MCU at the time, and taking a villain fresh off his big hit with the first Avengers and throwing him in a reluctant “enemy of my enemy” plot for this entire movie would have been amazing.

Loki also refuses to stay dead because he’s too popular, thus we get a cyclical and frustrating arc where he only has development when the producers demand so they can make maximum profit off his character, but back then, in phase 2 world, the mystery around Loki was what made him so compelling and the drama around those two on screen was really good! They bounced so well off each other, they both had very different strengths and perspectives, both had real grievances to air, and in that movie, they *both* lost their mother. It’s not even that it’s a bad sequel, it’s just a plain bad movie.

The movie exists to keep establishing the Infinity Stones with the red one and I can’t remember what the red one does at this point, but it could have so easily done both. The powers that be should have known their strongest elements were Thor and Loki and their relationship, and run with it.

This isn’t “give into the demands of fans who want more Loki” it’s being smart enough to look at your own work and suss out what you think the most intriguing elements are and which have the most room and potential to grow (and also test audiences and beta readers to tell you the ugly truth). Sequels should feel more like natural continuations of the original story, not shameless cash grabs.

5. You walk back character development for ~drama~

As in, characters who got together at the end of book 1 suddenly start fighting because the “will they/won’t they” was the juiciest dynamic of their relationship and you don’t know how to write a compelling, happy couple. Or a character who overcame their snobbery, cowardice, grizzled nature, or phobia suddenly has it again because, again, that was the most compelling part of their character and you don’t know who they are without it.

To be honest, yeah, the buildup of a relationship does tend to be more entertaining in media, but that’s also because solid, respectful, healthy relationships in media are a rarity. Season 1 of Outlander remains the best, in part because of the rapid growth of the main love interest’s relationship. Every season after, they’re already married, already together, and occasionally dealing with baby shenanigans, and it’s them against the world and, yeah, I got bored.

There’s just so much you can do with a freshly established relationship: Those two are a *team* now. The drama and intrigue no longer comes from them against each other, it’s them together against a new antagonist and their different approaches to solving a problem. They can and should still have distinct personalities and perspectives on whatever story you throw them into.

6. It’s the same exact story, just Bigger

I have been sitting on a “how to scale power” post for months now because I’m still not sure on reception but here’s a little bit on what I mean.

Original: Oh no, the big bad guy wants to destroy New York

Sequel: Oh no, the big bad guy wants to destroy the planet

Threequel: Oh no, the big bad guy wants to destroy the galaxy

You knew it wasn’t going to happen the first time, you absolutely know it won’t happen on a bigger scale. Usually, when this happens, plot holes abound. You end up deleting or forgetting about characters’ convenient powers and abilities, deleting or forgetting about established relationships and new ground gained with side characters and entities, and deleting or forgetting about stakes, themes, and actually growing your characters like this isn’t the exact same story, just Bigger.

How many Bond movies are there? Thirty-something? I know some are very, very good and some are not at all good. They’re all Bond movies. People keep watching them because they’re formulaic, but there’s also been seven Bond actors and the movies aren’t one long, continuous, self-referential story about this poor, poor man who has the worst luck in the universe. These sequels aren’t “this but bigger” it’s usually “this, but different”, which is almost always better.

“This, but different now” will demand a different skillset from your hero, different rules to play by, different expectations, and different stakes. It does not just demand your hero learn to punch harder.

Example: Lord Shen from Kung Fu Panda 2 does have more influence than Tai Lung, yes. He’s got a whole city and his backstory is further-reaching, but he’s objectively worse in close combat—so he doesn’t fistfight Po. He has cannons, very dangerous cannons, cannons designed to be so strong that kung fu doesn’t matter. Thus, he’s not necessarily “bigger” he’s just “different” and his whole story demands new perspective.

The differences between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are numerous, but the latter relies on “but bigger” and the former went in a whole new direction, while still staying faithful to the themes of the original.

7. It undermines the original by awakening a new problem too soon

I’ve already complained about the mere existence of Heroes of Olympus elsewhere because everything Luke fought and died for only bought that world about a month of peace before the gods came and ripped it all away for More Story.

I’ve also complained that the Star Wars Sequels were always going to spit in the face of a character’s six-movie legacy to bring balance to the Force by just going… nah. Ancient prophecy? Only bought us about 30 years of peace.

Whether it’s too soon, or it’s too closely related to the original, your audience is going to feel a little put-off when they realize how inconsequential this sequel makes the original, particularly in TV shows that run too many seasons and can’t keep upping the ante, like Supernatural.

Kung Fu Panda once again because these two movies are amazing. Shen is completely unrelated to Tai Lung. He’s not threatening the Valley of Peace or Shifu or Oogway or anything the heroes fought for in the original. He’s brand new.

My yearning to see these two on screen together to just watch them verbally spat over both being bratty children disappointed by their parents is unquantifiable. This movie is a damn near perfect sequel. Somebody write me fanfic with these two throwing hands over their drastically different perspectives on kung fu.

8. It’s so divorced from the original that it can barely even be called a sequel

Otherwise known as seasons 5 and 6 of Lost. Otherwise known as: This show was on a sci-fi trajectory and something catastrophic happened to cause a dramatic hairpin turn off that path and into pseudo-biblical territory. Why did it all end in a church? I’m not joking, they did actually abandon The Plan while in a mach 1 nosedive.

I also have a post I’ve been sitting on about how to handle faith in fiction, so I’ll say this: The premise of Lost was the trials and escapades of a group of 48 strangers trying to survive and find rescue off a mysterious island with some creepy, sciency shenanigans going on once they discover that the island isn’t actually uninhabited.

Season 6 is about finding “candidates” to replace the island’s Discount Jesus who serves as the ambassador-protector of the island, who is also immortal until he’s not, and the island becomes a kind of purgatory where they all actually did die in the crash and were just waiting to… die again and go to heaven. Spoiler Alert.

This is also otherwise known as: Oh sh*t, Warner Bros wants more Supernatural? But we wrapped it up so nicely with Sam and Adam in the box with Lucifer. I tried to watch one of those YouTube compilations of Cas’ funny moments because I haven’t seen every episode, and the misery on these actors’ faces as the compilation advanced through the seasons, all the joy and wit sucked from their performances, was just tragic.

I get it. Writers can’t control when the Powers That Be demand More Story so they can run their workhorse into the ground until it stops bleeding money, but if you aren’t controlled by said powers, either take it all back to basics, like Cars 3, or just stop.

—

Sometimes taking your established characters and throwing them into a completely unrecognizable story works, but those unrecongizable stories work that much harder to at least keep the characters' development and progression satisfying and familiar. See this post about timeskips that take generational gaps between the original and the sequel, and still deliver on a satisfying continuation.

TLDR: Sequels are hard and it’s never just one detail that makes them difficult to pull off. They will always be compared to their predecessors, always with the expectations to be as good as or surpass the original, when the original had no such competition. There’s also audience expectations for how they think the story, lore, and relationships should progress. Most faults of sequels, in my opinion, lie in straying too far from the fundamentals of the original without understanding why those fundamentals were so important to the original’s success.

#writing advice #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #sequels #kung fu panda

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orchidyoonkook · 1 year

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Under The Willow Tree | MYG

Title: Under The Willow Tree

Pairing: Bad Boy!Min Yoongi x (F)!Reader

Rating//Genre: (T) | One Shot, Small Town AU, S2F2L, Implied Age Gap, Slow Burn, Angst, Touch of Fluff, Darker Subject Matter, First Kiss, Silce of Life

Summary: The town outcast shows up in the one place you find solace from it’s residents. The people you force yourself to fit in with, even though you never want to be anything like them. Will he ruin your only place of salvation, or become the most unlikely friend?

Warnings: PG16, some not necessarily positive non-specific religious discussions, people using religion in a negative may, plot twisty, cursing, kissing, semi-apparent abandonment issues, discussions of dead parents and guardians, mentions of alcoholism in a parent, mentions of illness in a parent, yoongi has tattoos and a motorcycle, motorcycle lessons, longing, mishandled emotions, catharsis.

Word Count: 7401

Release Date: April 10, 2023, 4:05PM

A/N 1: This happened due to a writing prompts post I shared sometime in late march. I’m quite proud of it considering I hadn’t planned anything so the entire story was written as I was writing. Very different than my normal writing process.

A/N 2: Thank you endlessly to @borahae-k, @katykatmeow, @here4btsfics and @phthartic-fox for beta’ing this. I love you all for your help, support and kindness.

It happened under a willow tree. A weeping willow.

Your favourite willow, to be specific. Even though there’s just the one.

It’s by the pond deep in the woods behind your house, where you watch ducks swim through the long, wispy branches that just reach its shore. Where you sit at the base, waiting for the sun to set the sky ablaze with colour as it falls into the horizon for another good night's sleep.

The one under which you had your first kiss.

You’d been waiting. Wanting it to be special, with the right person.

But a brief brush of soft, pink lips with the last person you ever expected had you wanting more, more, more.

It’d been a few months since he started coming to the willow. You’d assumed for the same reason you did.

To get away. From anyone and everything.

There aren’t many places in your hometown that allow for privacy, and you imagined he needed it more than anyone. Somewhere far from the residents' judgmental stares that were always nothing less than smothering.

Hailing from a very small, very rural, religious town where everybody’s known everyone for generations, your community is one where you follow in the footsteps of your parents and grandparents before them.

Where your life is already decided for you at birth, whether you know it or not.

Copy. Paste.

Copy.

Paste.

You’re born there; either at home with a midwife or in the one floor hospital down the main road. Raised there; a hand-me-down wearing, bike riding, creek-playing child.

You go to school there; stuck inside the same four walls from the ages of 4 to 18. Get your driver's licence there; from the sheriff after a road test that a 9 year old could pass.

You graduate there; from the same high school your friends, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents went to. Get a job; in town or on a farm, the only two options there are.

And marry there; before 25, lest you become a spinster, subject to the gossip vultures also known as your neighbours. Then have some kids before growing old and dying, your permanent resting place dug in the same graveyard as everyone else that came before you.

Copy.

Paste.

It’s a suffocating fate that petrified you to your core. And you’ve known you didn’t want it for as long as you can remember.

You never liked their rules. Didn’t want to become one of them, to do as they do, live the way they live.

You’d skillfully escaped making any true friends as you grew older, but kept the people you could tolerate close enough to not be bored on weekends. They’re all temporary placeholders in your life anyway, people who sound like robots stuck in the same settings. People who would hold you back.

What’s worst of all is that you don’t share the religion they claim to be so hallowed and wonderful. The one that’s unwittingly forced them all into this life of monotonous repetition.

You dream of more. Of life outside this dreaded purgatory.

Of leaving.

But no one ever leaves. They’re stuck here, in this downwards spiral of life you’re so desperately trying to dig yourself out of. It makes you feel like a fraud, constantly pretending to be one of them. Always wearing a mask just to make it to the next day alive, unharmed by them and their values.

It makes you feel like there’s always a pair of eyes watching, waiting for you to mess up and reveal your blasphemous self.

You’re terrified they’ll discover the truth. Terrified of the ostracisation that will come the second they know you aren’t one of them.

You’ve seen it in real time. What they do to people who don’t conform.

Seen how they treat him.

Two years older. Bleach blond hair and a sleeve full of tattoos. A leather jacket he wears like armour with all black clothes to match. And last, but certainly not least, a motorcycle.

You daydreamed about that bike. Taking it and riding far, far away.

The busybodied people of your town never had a kind word to be said about him. Instead, choosing to call him any and every horrible name under the sun.

Beast, bastard, demon, monster, criminal.

Unable to understand him, understand anyone different.

They herd their children away from him in the streets; parting like the Red Sea when he walks by.

As if he were acid.

As if he was evil itself, and not just a young man.

You’ve never even heard him speak because no one dares to talk to him, worried any contact could turn them, seduce them into whatever his sick ways were.

And you’re ashamed to admit you’re one of them…sort of.

You aren’t worried about speaking to him, you’re worried about what being seen speaking with him will do to you.

You’re someone whose only salvation from complete and total social isolation relies on fitting in.

And even if it kills you to pretend, you only need to do it for a little while longer.

You just had to make it to college. You’d be the first one in decades to go. Their mindset of ‘you have everything you need here so why bother leaving’ having not once in your life resonated.

You can deal with them and all of their beliefs about what you should do with your life for the short hours of school and occasional shifts at the diner, so long as you can escape to your willow tree, you’ll be okay.

The weeping willow in the middle of the forest behind your house is the only one in the area. You never understood why that is, but it’s your oasis away from everything you hate.

The tips of its branches sway rhythmically in the wind, and moss creeps up its trunk. It’s surrounded by dense, plush grass for you to sit on, and after all the years of sitting in the same spot, a little groove in the shape of your body has formed at its base.

Its canopy protects you from the outside world, creating a space where you don't have to hide. Where you can proudly be yourself without fear. Where you spend as much of your time as you possibly can to keep your sanity intact.

No one bothers you here.

Your mum died years ago from an illness they never diagnosed, her plot in the town’s graveyard long since filled.

And your dad never notices you gone, too drunk in your house up on the hill to care.

So as long as there’s a constant supply of food on the counter and beer in the fridge, you’re free to do as you please.

Under the willow you do your homework and sketch. You take pictures and eat breakfasts and lunches and dinners. You listen to music and dance under the safety of its shade.

Under the willow you read great adventure novels, and dream you’re the protagonists whisked away on grand adventures. Anywhere but here.

Under the willow is your home away from home. Next to the pond, under the stars.

So it’s to your great surprise when an unexpected guest pries open the curtain of flowing foliage one spring afternoon. A bleached blond, leather jacket wearing, motorcycle riding, guest.

You don’t see him at first, too focused on the sketchpad in front of you. He steps in, and watches you work quietly, waiting for you to notice him.

You fascinate him. Every other girl in town can be found at one of three places, yet you were never at any of them. Not at the restaurant sipping on a milkshake. Not at the library studying. And not at the church volunteering.

You’re always elsewhere.

And he’s finally figured out where that is.

He was nervous at first. To follow you. You’d never spoken but that wasn’t anything new to him. No one in this town ever did.

Not to him.

But you don’t look down at him like the others do. Or jump out of the way when he walks by. You don’t tear away from his gaze as fast as the others. You hold on, even if for just a second longer.

Unknowingly, you’ve captivated him more than anyone else he’s ever met.

So he followed you to see where you vanish off to, not expecting you to go into the forest behind your house.

For a half second he considered you dangerous, because what on earth could you be getting up to in a forest for hours? But as he trailed the sounds of your footsteps and saw the small clearing with the tree, it began to make sense.

After jumping ten feet from seeing something tall and dark in your periphery, you exhale a large breath when you realise you aren’t in any danger, and shake out the nerves.

You’d normally worry he was there to hurt you, but something in you knew he never would. Never could. Maybe it was the look he gave as he regarded you.

Soft. Wistful even.

“What are you doing here?” You ask, wary. The first words you’ve ever spoken to him.

Barely contained inside the limits of the willows perimeter, he shrugs, and takes a long look around your little sanctuary.

And as he does, you get your first real look at him.

He’s handsome. Stoically so. And for only a moment do you wonder about all the stories hidden behind his eyes.

The ones now focused on you.

“Wanted to see where you disappear to. You’re never in town.”

So what if you were never in town? Why did he care? Wait—How did he know? Does he pay attention to you?

…Why you?

You didn’t think he cared to notice anyone in this town, let alone you enough to know you don’t follow the social expectations of someone your age.

To pick up on the fact that you’re never there at all.

It makes a million things run through your mind—Why does he care about where you go? What about you is so special? Does he even know your name?—before one resounding thought hits you like a ton of bricks.

Can you trust him?

No one else in this town does, but all of their reasons are superficial bullshit.

All you know is you don’t know the first thing about him, and that now he knows about the one place you feel safe.

“That’s intentional,” you say, cautious. Not giving away anything but not saying much either.

“Can’t blame you,” he responds, before checking out the rooftop of bright green and muttering, “Eyes and ears everywhere.”

Those four words alone are all you need.

He gets it.

“Yeah.”

Maybe you can trust him.

Observing each other for a silent minute, there seems to be an unspoken understanding forming between the two of you.

And he shoves his hands in his pockets, asking, “Mind company?”

You think about it for only a second.

No. No you didn’t.

“As long as you’re quiet. I’m trying to focus,” pointing the eraser end of your pencil to the sketchpad on your lap. “The cattail leaves are the hardest to get the lines right.”

He nods, finally breaking free of his position at the branch's edge. Nearing the base of the tree, he crouches down, about a quarter of the trunk's diameter away from you. It’s close enough to still see each other, but far enough to not bump into one another.

And before nestling in fully, he extends a tattooed hand to you.

“Yoongi.”

An introduction.

“Y/N,” you return, putting your pencil down in the crease of your pad and shaking.

His hand is calloused, the ones you get from years of working with your hands. And strong, a firm grip. The kind you’d want to pull you up if you were dangling over a cliff.

So many stories contained in a 3 second touch. Yet you find yourself wanting to know all of them.

Releasing, he settles in.

What surprises you most about the whole encounter isn’t his arrival, or speaking to him for the first time, or even the handshake.

It’s that when he’s comfortable, with one leg up for an elbow to rest upon, he digs a book out from the confines of his jacket.

Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island.

Your favourite.

Spring fades into a wonderful summer of late nights and early mornings. Of beautiful blue skies and vivid sunsets you appreciate a little more now that you have someone to share them with.

Yoongi comes almost, if not, every day to the willow. Always a different book in hand. Always one of the classics.

The Iliad, 1984, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, Anna Karina, Dracula, Little Women, Frankenstein, Catcher in the Rye, and those are just the ones you can remember because you’ve read them too. Some of them more than once.

You never expected to have anything in common with the boy that sits next to you. But from the little you’ve spoken to one another over the months, you’ve found that you share so much more than just reading habits.

On a warm April afternoon he told you he reads because he loves it but also to escape the daily hell that is your town.

“Mmm, what’s your favourite?” you’d asked.

Yoongi was lying down with an arm behind his head, staring into the treetop. Brave New World sat opened and facedown on his chest, his hand resting atop it.

“Pride and Prejudice.”

That was the last answer you expected.

“Why?”

He lifts his head to look at you.

“I thought the answer would’ve been obvious.”

After a cold drink on a hot June morning he told you his dreams of moving across the country. As far away as he could get.

“Just have to save up enough money first.”

You wondered how he made any. He definitely didn’t work anywhere in town…maybe waiting to inherit?

Who knew?

Both on a blanket you’d brought, Yoongi’s lying opposite and beside you, his feet by your hips. He used his balled up jacket as a pillow while you sat in your usual spot, capturing the way the branches swayed in your sketchpad.

He’d taken to reading to you while you drew, including you in the grand stories he now knew you loved to read too.

That day he had The Great Gatsby, a story you’d read about 20 times.

You often dreamed of attending one of his parties. Of seeing the green light across the way, or having a conversation with Nick, why he stayed.

“Are you anywhere close?” you asked, in reference to his saving goals.

“Getting there,” was all he gave.

And on a miserable, rainy night in the middle of August, is when you learned he’s all on his own.

Sitting beside each other, you both huddled underneath his jacket for what little protection from the rain it could give. Water droplets fell from the tips of his bangs as he spoke.

“My parents died in a car crash when I was 9, and then my grandma who took care of me, when I was 15.”

You grieved for him as he told you his story.

How he had to raise himself.

Just like you did.

“I’m sorry,” you’d replied gently. Softly. Knowing how it felt to have no one support you. No one to help you.

Knowing how it felt to be alone.

You understood.

You did, you did, you did.

Yoongi just stared at the ground, unable to meet your eyes. And you’d wondered if any of the water on his face was salty as he breathed out a quiet and heartbreaking, “Thank you.”

It made you question how many kind words he’d heard since his family passed.

And also incredibly pissed off at the people in your town for how they’d treated him.

How you’d…treated him.

A silent promise was made then and there. Never having felt more embarrassed and furious with yourself than in that moment. You’d learned your lesson, and hoped that offering up your own piece of vulnerability might help him feel not so alone.

Though you watched the rain turn the pond into a canvas of vibration as you did. Words dragged from the deepest parts of your soul, burning the back of your throat as they left.

“My dad hasn’t been sober a day since my mom died. His eyes are turning yellow,” you said, hugging yourself to stop shaking, convinced yourself it was because of the cold.

Even though it was August.

“He doesn’t recognize me most of the time.”

You closed your eyes, a familiar tang washing over your tongue as you licked the water dripping from your lips. He gave no response, but an arm found its way over your shoulders and squeezed.

He understood.

It’s the beginning of September. The air’s started to nip at your cheeks, and the ground crunches a little more everyday with all of the leaves falling underfoot.

The tips of the willows leaves have begun to turn the colour of the morning sun, and by the time mid October rolls around, it’ll look like golden hour every hour of the day.

Yoongi finally tells you about the job he has at a mechanic's in the next town over. He explains how they don’t pay him nearly what they should, but he doesn’t complain because every cent brings him closer to leaving.

Just him and his bike.

You turn sheepish.

“Can I tell you something?”

He sits closer after all this time, more comfortable around one another. Still not enough to touch, not crossing that invisible boundary line, but enough that you don’t have to turn your head much anymore to see his eyes.

Brown and endless.

“Yeah, sure.”

You take a deep breath.

“I kind of always dreamed of taking your bike to get away from here and never come back.” He gives you a look and you shrug. “Seemed the easiest route to take.”

A smile that starts as a smirk turns into a healthy laugh.

“What’s so funny?” You demand. He has to calm himself down a bit before answering.

“You just uhm…don’t seem the criminal type to me, Cattails.”

There’s a flutter of something in your chest at the stupid nickname. For the drawing you did the day you met.

He continues, unaware of the goings on inside you. “Stealing? You? Nah. Not a chance.”

You open your mouth in mock outrage, scrunching your brow and bringing a hand to your chest.

“I’ll have you know I’d make an excellent criminal,” you lie to his face. He knows it too.

But giving in, you detail the plan you’d always kept in your head for emergencies, heat slowly rising in your cheeks with every word.

“I’d take the key from you when you weren’t looking, duplicate it at the hardware store, and slip it back into your pocket before you ever noticed it was gone. Then go to your place in the middle of the night and be halfway across the country before morning.”

“Oh yeah?” he says with a raised brow you don’t trust.

“Yeah,” you confirm with a little too much faux confidence.

“And where do I keep my key, Y/N? Hmm?”

“Your jacket pocket,” you’d deduced long ago.

“Mmm,” he tsks with a shake of his head. “Nope.”

Oh. Well then it must be,

“Your pants pocket?”

“Nuh uh, try again.”

Damnit!

You’d never thought much about it. How many places can someone keep a key on them without a bag and it not be in their pockets?

“Ummm, in your wallet?” Far-fetched but worth a shot.

“Ooo,” he blows through pursed lips before smirking at you again, but this one was different. It caused something very deep inside of you to turn to lava. “Good guess, but also no.”

Closing his book and setting it down, Yoongi straightens and reaches inside the collar of his shirt, retrieving a necklace you didn’t know he wore.

It’s small, the key, and almost silver. The colouring is tarnished from years of use, with worn teeth and some lettering at its base.

He holds it against a palm to show you.

“Why there?” You ask, wondering if there’s a reason aside from convenience.

With a sad tug of his lips, he answers. “Bike was my dads. I like to keep him close.”

A tender smile meets your own plush as you stare at the little key, appreciating it more after learning the importance it has to him.

And Yoongi watches you, viewing his ticket to freedom with the biggest eyes he’s ever seen, full of that same compassion and understanding you’ve always given him.

An understanding he didn’t think he’d ever see again from this place.

One he doesn’t know if he deserves.

Before you can respond, he’s taking the chain off and sliding it over your head, hand lingering for a second longer than necessary at your nape.

“Yoongi,” you hesitate.

It’s the first time you’ve said his name out loud.

You like the way it feels on your tongue. Warm, sweet. Like honey.

What you don’t know is he loves the way it sounds coming from you.

You falter. “W-what are you doing?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“But it’s your key! Don’t you need it?”

“Nah, got a spare in the storage compartment of the bike,” he says, gesturing to the one you now hold in your palms. “This way you won’t have to go through the hassle of stealing it.”

“But I—”

“Keep it,” he cuts you off. “In case you need it more than I do.”

It never leaves your neck.

“You want me to what?” You ask as you walk towards the forest edge, Yoongi trailing on your left.

“Take her out for a spin. See if you even can. You’re the one who has all these grand plans but doesn’t even know how to turn it on,” he explains, referring to his motorcycle.

“Those were just daydreamed plans! I never thought I’d actually use them! What if I crash?”

He was kidding right? He must be.

For all the time you two have spent together, you’ve never spoken or been around one another in public. An unspoken agreement.

What happens under the willow tree, stays under the willow tree.

So to be out in the open? On his bike? You don’t know if you can. Or if you should.

But then you remember a promise you made not long ago.

“You won’t crash,” he says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.

“How do you know? Like you said, I don’t even know how to turn it on,” you hmph.

“Because I’ll be there.”

And maybe it’s the tone of voice he uses, or the fact that you trust him, you find yourself saying,

“Okay, fine.”

Minutes later you’re swinging a leg over the bike, and sinking on to the surprisingly comfortable seat.

“Where do I put the key?” You ask, taking it from your neck and handing it over.

Yoongi puts it in the side of the motorcycle, somewhere close to your knee.

“Here,” he shows as he turns it to the ‘ON’ position.

“Oh.”

What a weird place for an ignition.

“Mhm,” he acknowledges, then points. “Put your hand on the brake, it’s the part that sticks out on the right hand side. Hold it firmly against the handlebar. Don’t roll the handle bar itself back though, okay? That’s the throttle.”

Doing what he says, you hold the brake tight against the handle bar, murmuring an ‘okay’ under your breath.

“Now hit that button there on the right to let the fuel pump start up,” referring to the button beside the brake near your thumb. You do so.

He checks a little gauge on the side near the ignition. Seemingly pleased, he continues. “And now hit the button on the left to start it.”

Following his words once again, the engine roars to life the second the button is pressed, purring powerfully.

You feel exhilarated and a little terrified. But he’s here. You know you’re safe.

Voice a little louder to combat the noise from the motor, he says, “Okay, now on the left handle bar, grab the clutch. I’ll show you how to move into first gear, and look at me,” your eyes meet his, “do not let go of the clutch.”

You nod, but for extra precaution, he clamps his hand over the one you have holding it. You watch as he bends to put your left foot on a pedal and presses it down till you hear a pop, pushing up the kickstand when he rises.

The bike is heavy, now that you’re the only thing keeping it up right, you can feel its weight. And you understand why they’re designed to be able to have your feet on the ground even when sitting. You’d probably fall over otherwise.

“If you’re uncomfortable you let me know, yeah? And if you get scared just do what you’re doing now with this hand,” he squeezes for emphasis, “it’ll take all the power away from the engine and you’ll just coast until you stop, okay?”

“Okay!” You say, more excited by the minute. Your toes and fingertips are starting to tingle.

“I‘m gonna let go and you’re going to very, very slowly let up on the clutch—not all the way. Just enough that you move at about a pedal bike's pace. Let me jog down the road about 50 feet or so, and then you meet me there. Hold tight to the clutch again when you’re about 20 feet from me and I’ll catch you. Sound good?”

Nodding one more time in confirmation, nerves crawl all over your skin. You can’t describe the new feeling fully, but the closest you can find to it is probably the beginnings of an adrenaline rush.

You watch as Yoongi jogs down the road, throws his hands up over his head, and gives you two big thumbs up.

Taking a deep breath, you slowly release some pressure off the clutch and begin to move forwards. You know your feet are supposed to go on the metal foot rests below you, but you're so focused on not falling or crashing that you just stick them out so they don’t touch the ground.

Halting your left hands release at the speed he said to, you cruise along, wind picking up with your increased pace.

Holy shit!

You’re riding a motorcycle!

You never thought you could, it was just a dream for so long. Something you kept in the back of your mind just for fun, but now you’re actually doing it! Your driving down the road on an actual real life motorcycle!? All by yourself!?

Turns out all you needed was a little encouragement and someone you trust to spot you.

Aiming for Yoongi, you clamp down on the clutch once again, cutting power to the engine. You drift right into his awaiting hands braced for the impact, and he slides a little on the gravel road before getting you to a full stop.

He presses one of the buttons you did earlier and the bike shuts down, allowing you to jump off.

You’re positively giddy.

“Oh my god did you see me?! I just did that! I just drove a motorcycle! Can you believe it?! I can’t believe I just did that!” You don’t even register what you're saying, too full of excitement to care.

Yoongi can’t contain his grin as he gets the bike standing on its own. Your joy is too infectious not to take part in, and he walks over for a high five to celebrate.

But to his surprise, you bypass his hand completely and embrace him, throwing your arms around his neck.

It takes only a second before he’s enveloping you with his own, not letting the chance to hold you go by.

“Thank you!” You say, before letting go, not even realising what you did. You’re too busy catching your breath from all the rambling and jumping around, still filled with the remnants of your elation.

Meanwhile, Yoongi can’t get the feeling of your body against him out of his head. How soft you were. How warm. The way you smelled like a mixture of your natural scent and outside.

And he’s asking, “You wanna to go for a ride?” before he can tell himself not too.

The question makes you pause. Was he serious? Because you can’t think of anything you want more.

Staring at him, your answer is far too gentle for someone who was just screeching with joy.

“Really?”

He nods, still untrusting of his mouth, confirming with a ‘mhm.’

You don’t hesitate. You want to feel like that again.

Not a minute later he’s giving you the helmet and securing it tightly. He also makes you wear his leather jacket to protect your torso, leaving him in just an oversized black t-shirt and dark ripped jeans.

Swinging a leg over, he pats the seat behind him.

And you’re glad to have the helmet on because without it he would most definitely see your inability to meet his eye. You can barely focus on anything aside from the sight in front of you and being wrapped in the scent of him. But then he gives a tattooed hand to help you hop on, and says,

“You have to put your arms around me and hold on. Otherwise you might fly off the back when we accelerate,” holding his hands behind him to guide yours.

What? You didn’t think this far. He—you have t—Ummm, well...

“Okay,” you answer, voice small, letting your hands be guided.

Despite the loss of his jacket, he’s still deliciously warm, and the heat in your cheeks increases tenfold with your hands now splayed over his abdomen.

Lightly defined muscles meet your fingertips through the thin material of his shirt and you do your best to memorize them as he turns on the bike and pulls away from the curb.

He starts slower than normal to make sure you’re alright, but when you give him the thumbs up, he speeds up to just over the limit and you hold tight.

You’ve never felt so free, loving the rush of wind that flows over your body from going so fast. It’s pushing a welcomed cold through the fabric of your clothes as your body temperature has only increased since getting on.

You could go anywhere, do anything. Nothing and nobody could stop you.

You want that. You want it so bad. And he gave you the key to be able to.

Literally.

But now when you think about leaving, you think about leaving with him. Yoongi driving and you sitting right here on the back, nothing but each other, the road, and hope for the future.

Growing confident enough to release your grasp after a few minutes, you raise your hands in the air, and let the wind catch your fingertips. A whoop of joy leaves you at this newfound feeling he’s given you.

Then another, and another, before returning them to their place around him.

Yoongi can’t help but smile the biggest he has in years when hearing your squeals of glee.

Because for the first time in a long time, he feels it too.

Yoongi doesn’t come to the willow for almost a week.

He’s never done that since he started coming. Not once.

And you’re worried.

Where is he? Is he okay? You have no idea.

It’s not like you can go looking for him.

And you two aren’t anything anyway, so you shouldn’t even be this worried in the first place. If he’s safe, or in the bottom of a ditch somewhere.

But you can’t help it.

Just like you can’t help the feelings that have blossomed for him over the months. The feelings you didn’t want to admit to yourself for fear of him not returning them.

Yet there they were, and there isn’t anything you can do about them now.

They make you wonder if you’ll ever see him again.

Six days.

It takes him six days to return. Stomping in, and visibly pissed off.

“What’s wrong?” You ask once he’s close enough to hear.

“I’m leaving,” he says flatly, uncaring. Like you asked him what colour the sky was.

And your stupid, silly little unrequited heart shatters.

“What?”

“I’m leaving. Taking off. Getting out of here. I can’t do it anymore.”

Piece by piece it falls from your chest and into the depths of your stomach.

“B-but why? What happened?”

“I got fired.”

“Fired?”

“Yeah, fired. I tried all week to fix this one stupid mistake I made,” he explains, smoothing over his creased brow with two fingers. “But it cost more to fix than to keep me around, so they fired me. I don’t have the amount of cash I planned for, but I have enough to make it work. And I can pick up odd jobs on the road if I need to.” He nears, extending a tattooed hand. “I just came to get my key and say goodbye.”

Your hand reaches for it, clutching it tightly. You don’t want to give it back.

Who the hell is this? Because you barely recognize him. It certainly isn’t the Yoongi you’ve come to know.

The wonderfully kind, classics reading, dream-sharing, motorcycle instructing, freedom key giving man.

The one who told you about his grandmother, and his parents. Who read you stories while you drew and ate meals together. Who taught you how to ride his motorcycle.

The Yoongi you fell for.

Your Yoongi.

The person currently standing in front of you isn’t him at all.

He’s the hard, cold exterior, crafted over years of verbal and societal abuse. The one everyone avoids at all costs when walking through town. The person he had to become in order to survive.

You don’t know this person.

And you hate it.

You hate it so much it decides to exit your body in the form of tears. Ones of sadness, frustration, and heartbreak.

He’s—he’s leaving.

Actually leaving.

This place, it’s people.

You...

The few remaining pieces of your heart plunge to the floor, crumbling to dust as they hit. Nothing but a hollow, empty cavern remaining where it once sat.

“But I–you…,” the lump in your throat only getting bigger when you try to speak. You face away from him.

Don’t let him see you cry.

He’s clearly never felt anything close to what you do for him, so suck it up. Reign it in. You do it everyday. So why can’t you do it now?

You don’t get to feel this way!

Shove it back down, get it down!. Crush it all until it’s nothing.

Make it go away. Far, far away.

Yoongi’s face is falling while you’re taking deep breaths to calm down.

In all of his rage and despair at his terrible week, he’s forgotten who he was speaking to.

His kind hearted, music-sharing, been through hell and back, kickass girl. The one he can call his only true friend.

He’s such an asshole. He hadn’t seen you for almost a week, which killed him in of itself. And then the second he does, all he‘s able to do is spew the frustration and misery he’s been feeling the entire time you were apart.

Nah, he’s worse than an asshole.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ha—”

But he freezes at the sound of a small, wet inhale.

You’re crying.

He made you cry.

And a regret bigger than the ocean drowns him.

“Hey, wait, please,” he says, rushing over, but you hold out a hand to stop him. “Please, don’t cry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

He reaches for you again, and again you stop him. You can’t let him comfort you.

Not when he doesn’t realise he’s become the only person in this whole godforsaken, judgemental hellhole of a neighbourhood wasteland you have.

Your grandparents are dead, along with your mum. Your dad’s an abusive drunk, too far gone to remember he has a daughter. You don’t have any aunts or uncles or cousins to rely on, nor do you have any real friends.

You have no one, aside from Yoongi.

And now you won’t even have him.

So you can’t let him comfort you. Can’t let him see you break.

You can’t, you can’t, you can’t.

Because you don’t know if you’ll be able to put yourself back together without him if you do.

But a quiet, “Y/N, please,” imbued with pain you haven’t heard since a rainy August night leaves his lips. A last ditch effort to get you to look at him, to let him help.

And it breaks you completely, bursting into a million tiny pieces to match your heart on the floor.

An unrestrained sob falls from your mouth, and he pulls you into his chest, wrapping his arms around you. Yours go to his neck as he drags you onto his lap, gripping tight.

He holds you through every whimper and hiccup and stuttered inhale and shudder. Through every muttered ‘please don’t go’ and ‘please don’t leave me,’ that escapes, stroking a hand along the back of your head and down your spine, soothing.

He whispers, “it’s okay. I’m right here. It’s okay,” on repeat with the motion. Over and over and over until only occasional sniffles and deep breaths remain.

You hug him tighter as you start to shiver, the warmth created from your breakdown beginning to wear off. Yoongi doesn’t hesitate to slide off his jacket and throw it over your shoulders. An instant cocoon of warm and comfort.

When his hands find their place back around your waist, he dares to speak.

“I got you.”

“I know.” And you do. Your voice is a little wobbly, as you’re unmoving from the embrace, but you most definitely do.

This is your Yoongi. The one you’ve come to know. To trust.

Of course he’s got you.

You use one of your long sleeves to dry your eyes and under your nose. With the nearing autumn weather, you’ve returned to occasionally wearing them.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe into his neck after a long beat of silence.

“What could you possibly be sorry for, Cattails?”

The return of your nickname has a grin threatening to emerge.

“For freaking out. I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

“Don’t be,” he says firmly. “I sprung that on you in such a shit way because I was in an even shittier mood. And you clearly weren’t prepared to hear it. I should’ve known better, so don’t you dare be sorry about anything,” he loosens his hold to pull back and look at you. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

You look down, hiding, not wanting him to see you like this.

“None of that,” he whispers, and brings a finger to your chin, tilting up.

It doesn’t meet much resistance.

Your eyes are still a bit swollen and patchy, but it’s the concern in his that makes you crack the smallest of smiles, if only to see his worry erased.

He already has enough on his plate. No need to add to it.

Not able to offer much more than a quirk of the lip, you’re relieved that it’s enough when he starts to wear one of his own.

It’s then you realise your position. Like the sight of it cleared your brain fog.

You’re kneeling over his lap, sitting on his thighs, face inches from his. One of his hands is holding your chin up while the other rests low on your waist, your own still loose around him.

So close, yet so far away.

Because he’s leaving.

And that thought alone allows you to throw caution to the goddamn window. It’s not going to matter once he’s gone, and you’ve wanted it to be with someone special.

He’s as special as they come.

Leaning forward, you close your eyes and the gap between the two of you.

Eyelids fluttering as your lips brush his. Soft, and gentle.

Like him.

You hold only long enough to make sure it counts before pulling back.

It’s funny, really.

It was just a few seconds, but you already find yourself wanting so much more with him. An unfamiliar but welcomed electric pulse finds itself running through your blood at the thought, and it makes you want his lips everywhere.

Your mouth, your jaw, your neck.

Anywhere he can reach.

Sparks pool inside you. Sparks and butterflies and fast flowing lava.

You let yourself relish in the glorious feeling for a single moment, before the reality of what you just did sinks in.

And then you’re scared.

Terrified, actually.

To open your eyes, see his face. His reaction.

What if he hated it? What if he’s never felt anything but platonic affection towards you and now you’ve gone and done this?

Sure, he’s leaving. But now that you think about it, does him leaving mean you’ll never see him again?

What if you just ruined everything?

Teeth sinking into the plush of your bottom lip, you take a peek.

For the second time today you feel your heart breaking, this time at the look on his face.

Is it shock? Or worse.

Disgust?

Doesn’t matter.

“I’m sorry,” you blurt. Not knowing what else to say.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, trying to get out of his hold, but he keeps you there. Unyielding. And you start rambling. “I shouldn’t have done that. You clearly don’t—It’s just that you’re leaving and I—“

Lips on yours shut you up.

It’s fervent and needy and passionate as he pulls you closer by the hips, desperately trying to get you as close to him as physically possible. Your nails drag over his scalp as your fingers snake through his blond locks. They elicit a delicious groan from his mouth that you consume with your own.

It’s the most intoxicating sound you’ve ever heard, and you want more of it. So you do it again, and again, and again.

He moves down your jaw and neck, sucking at the tender flesh near your pulse point, and your mouth drops open at the feeling.

You’ve always wondered, but…you didn’t know it could feel like this.

Every touch, every whisper, every press of his lips to yours feels amazing. He’s pulling pleasure out of places you wouldn’t have thought possible before him. And you never want to go back to not knowing.

The sweetest of whimpers leaves your mouth as he gently bites a soft spot, then soothing the glorious pain he created with the kindness of his tongue.

Yoongi swears to any god who will listen that he’ll do whatever they want so long as he gets to hear that sound repeatedly and for the rest of his life.

He returns to your lips and says, “come with me.”

You’re so focused on feeling that it takes a moment for his words to land. “What?”

“Leave with me. Let’s get the fuck outta here, and never look back, the both of us. Together.”

Yoongi looks so serious but..

He—he can’t be serious can he? 15 minutes ago he was going on and on about leaving and needing his key back and saying goodbye.

And now?

Sensing your hesitance, he punctuates each of the next three words with a kiss.

“Come. With. Me.”

It makes your answer arrive without really thinking. You don’t need to think. Not when you know deep in your newly reconstructed heart that it’ll always be the same whether you think about it or not.

So long as you’re with him, you know you’ll be,

“Okay.”

“Yeah?” He questions like he can’t believe it. Can’t believe you'd agree.

You make sure there isn’t a single doubt in his head as you look him dead in the eyes and confirm.

“Yes, Yoongi,” another kiss. “I’ll go with you.”

He pulls you into him for what feels like a million more under your shared willow tree.

Your salvation.

And you know they’re going to be the firsts of many, many more to come.

Three days later, and two bags packed full of all your earthly possessions, you’re on the back of Yoongi’s motorcycle.

In those three days he’s prepared everything else you’ll need. He’s gotten a cute leather jacket and helmet for you, some reading materials for the road, snacks, drinks. A place by his side for the foreseeable future.

In the same span of time, you’ve given him a home in your heart, someone he can rely on other than himself. Talk to, trust, experience life with.

Something he hasn’t had in nearly ten years.

Something he never wants to lose again.

He swings a leg over and you unclip the chain from your neck, handing him the key to the bike, to your now shared future.

Driving out of town—straight down Main Street—you watch as all the people you grew up with, who you almost destroyed yourself to fit in with, gawk.

Watch as they judge you for being with him, your best friend. For leaving, and not doing what they all expected of you.

For not being like one of them.

Because you’re not one of them.

You never have been.

And just like the dust that flies behind the wheels, you feel weightless, not giving a single fuck what they think for the first time in your life.

You don’t have to anymore.

You’re free.

A/N 3: Thanks for reading, loves. Xoxo, - Yoon <3

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