#damages of grey rock
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I ask once again........
HOW MANY TIMES ARE YOU GONNA POKE ME.....UNTIL I
BREAK!
My third and final vent piece for now. I obviously put a little more effort into this one and tried out a worms eyeview perspective. I was inspired by Midnight Lycanroc and it's pose and I gotta say, the dynamic pose, harsh lines, dramatic pops of color, the 3D lettering.......oh yeah.....this pretty much sums up how it feels to keep in all of your anger, hurt, and frustration. Especially when you are required to for your own good until you find your way out, and you have to continue your false ambivalence while becoming a pin cushion for someone's provocative behavior towards you. Only when you are free to fly away, can you safely unravel and split at the seams. But for now, you remain in Grey Rock Method.
#venting#vent drawing#vent art#vent#symbolic vent art#vents#cool vent art#sinister#breakable#break#grey rock#grey rock method#grey rocking#damages of grey rock#grey rock method drawing#grey rock method art#madness#blood#worms eyeview#HOW MANY TIMES ARE YOU GONNA POKE ME UNTIL I BREAK#oh no! she's got a pen!
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prompt: forced throuple au; Ghost decides that you and Johnny are his (part 5; ghoap x reader)
part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4
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Give him blood and he’ll give you something new to chew on.
Except that isn’t the way it goes. Not this time at least.
He tries to talk Ghost out of it, but it falls on deaf ears. Blatantly ignored. The car barrels down the motorway under the cloak of night, a swell of stars overhead as the city falls farther behind. Radio shut off. Johnny thinks if Ghost had his way, the radio would’ve been pulled out entirely, just wires and an empty, black cavity in the dashboard, but it’s a rental.
And no one wants to deal with the paperwork involved in damaging military property. Not even Ghost.
Ghost won’t so much as glance over at him. Unaffected as ever, as if they didn’t just fuck. Johnny’s stomach hurts when he thinks about it. Even without her knowing, he’s broken his girl’s trust. Not for the first time; maybe not even the last. His guilt echoes not only that he let Ghost make him come, but that he liked it—that the buzz in his bones says do it again, please god, again, please let me come, I need to come, touch me, please—
He thinks about his girl, then turns to Ghost again.
In the pit of his stomach, Johnny knows this is wrong. In his rational mind, he knows it. If he were in a better place, he wants to think that he’d make a real attempt to change Ghost’s mind, maybe get him to turn around at the next gas station, but he can’t deny the excitement bubbling in his belly at the prospect of seeing his girl again after a week of nothing.
The silence has been eating away at him. Bits of his brain flaking away, moth-eaten. Checking his phone again and again to no new messages, getting the same voicemail message whenever he calls. Something flutters high in his chest, an itch he can’t scratch; it tells him to take off in the middle of the night, drive all the way back home and pound on her door until she’s forced to answer it, forced to talk to him face to face.
Again and again, he tries looking at it from her perspective—tries to empathize with her. What he would’ve done in her shoes had she allowed a coworker to grab his dick in front of a crowd of strangers. It’s more than fair, he thinks. His own shame leaks out of his pores in the middle of the night, sleeping on top of the covers because he sweats right through the sheets.
And yet, he keeps butting up against his own anger. Talk it out with me, yell at me, he growls into her voicemail, anger growing as the days pass one by one.
It’s the road that alerts him to their arrival into the city more than anything. More cracks in the asphalt, the car rattling over sewer depressions and potholes in a way that says home sweet home. Usually it’s a source of comfort, like seeing the silver lining on grey clouds or the iridescence in an oil spill, purples and greens catching the light. Not now. Now the road winds like descending into the underworld, each turn coming with a sinking feeling.
They park down the road from the flower shop, tucked just out of sight. A cool breeze wafts over his hot face when he steps out of the car. It nearly rocks him back. When he glances up, his heart stutters at the sight of her bedroom window, sealed tight now. Only cracked open during their sleepovers, when Johnny runs a bit too hot at night for them to sleep comfortably with the window closed.
“Should I…do ye want me to give her a call to wake her up?” Johnny asks tentatively, shutting the car door softly so as not to make a noise.
Ghost shakes his head. “We’ll let ourselves in.”
Johnny’s picked hundreds of locks in his time; he’s jimmied open doors with crowbars, set up explosive charges, used a good old fashioned ram from time to time—no stranger to the trade—but it feels decidedly uncomfortable with Ghost at his back, staring down at him as he breaks into his own girlfriend’s apartment.
“This is a bad idea,” he grumbles, turning the pick in the lock until he hears a familiar click inside.
Ghost doesn’t answer, just raps his knuckles against the back of Johnny’s head. A silent get a move on.
Her apartment looks the same but different when they enter it. His muscles remember the layout though. The pink couch in the living room with two dimpled pillows on either side, the footstool by the door, the stand with her shoes all piled in neat little rows, the vase on her kitchen island with a fresh new bundle of flowers, fragrant when he dips his head to take a whiff. He’s loved flowers ever since meeting his girl.
Ghost doesn’t try to muffle his footsteps for once. He rummages through her cabinets and drawers with all the finesse of a first time burglar looking to get caught. It smacks of intentionality. Johnny’s worked with him too many times in the field to know that if Ghost wanted to disappear into the darkness, he would. He’d be the thing creeping silently through the shadows, tread lighter than air, close enough to touch but never see.
So it’s more than deliberate when he noisily shuts a drawer. Baiting her out.
It’s no surprise when Johnny hears her creep around the corner from out of her bedroom. He’s tucked in the shadows of the living room, just out of the light, so he sees her first when she comes silently down the hall, whole body trembling with fear, the bat she keeps beside her bed drawn over a shoulder. Even her hands shake around the grip.
Of course she yelps when Johnny says her name, stepping out of the shadows, swinging wild. He winces when the bat smashes into a lamp, shattering it on impact.
“Fuck!” she screams, scurrying backwards into the wall behind her. Several framed pictures rattle against the wall, nearly knocked off their hooks.
“Noisy, isn’t she?” Ghost grumbles from the kitchen, tossing a bored glance over, unbothered by the commotion. He undoubtedly heard her creeping down the hall as well.
“What the fuck?” she gasps, chest heaving when she breathes. Her eyes dart from Johnny to Ghost’s massive form in the other room. Poor nervous thing. She must recognize Johnny’s voice saying her name even through the panic because her lips droop in a frown, more confused than petrified.
“Hen, it’s jus’ us—nothing to worry about,” Johnny coos, hands stretched out in front of him to show he means no harm.
It gets her to lower the bat, but only just, the slightest dip that has him darting forward to pry it gently from her hands. The ceramic shards on the floor will have to be swept up later, but he’s relieved that at least she didn’t step on any of them.
Up close, she’s just as pretty as he remembers. Pretty as pie. How could she not be? In the glow of youth still, not like it's been a decade since they last spoke face to face—only a little over a week. A sight for sore eyes, even though Johnny’s narrow when he stares down at her and thinks about the week of his texts and calls going unanswered. His jaw undulates, rage held back by the thin thread of her scent that wafts under his nose, making him lean into her.
Breathe in and out.
“Us?” she repeats, brow furrowing.
She glances over at Ghost again, the man still ambling around the kitchen, at home in her little one bedroom apartment like he visits her frequently. Like it’s his as well.
“Aye…Ghost wanted to come—Simon wanted to apologize…for the other day,” Johnny explains.
“You broke into my apartment in the middle of the night…so Simon could apologize for sexually harassing me?” she says, the disbelief smacking in her words.
“Hen, it's no' nice to say it like that—”
“No time like the present,” Ghost says, not ashamed in the slightest. “Heard you weren’t taking Johnny’s calls. Might not’ve had to do this if you’d picked up.”
Johnny doesn’t believe a word of that, but there’s no reason to call him out on it now.
He can see her wrestle with a trifecta of emotions competing for first place. Anger, embarrassment, and then, a smidge of worry holding up the rear. Aware of the fact that she woke up to two grown men, one practically a stranger, breaking into her apartment under the guise of having a conversation. His heart aches at the thought. The lion’s share of the blame rests with him, but still it’s her that suffers for it.
“You…you shouldn’t be here,” she rasps, flinching when Johnny lays a hand on her waist, towering over where she’s still cowered against the wall. Bat gone now, defenceless. Her pupils narrow to a pinprick. He almost tuts, poor thing. Scared out of her wits.
It feels so good to touch her though. Soft and yielding.
“‘Was Simon’s idea, hen, but, ah—” his breathing picks up when his fingers tighten on her waist and she squirms “—I was goin’ crazy thinkin’ ye were pissed for what happened last week. Couldnae get a wink of sleep—kept closin’ my eyes and seein’ your face. Nearly broke me.”
“I am pissed at you,” she snaps, temper getting the better of her.
“I ken, I ken,” Johnny coos, ducking his head until his lips graze her temple. “Simon’s sorry—we came all the way here so he could tell ye to your face, but fuck, hen, I’m sorry too—shoulda said something instead of standin’ there like a fuckin’ dolt—”
“You should’ve,” she interrupts, still fuming mad, an iceberg melting right in front of them. It makes his cock pulse.
“—Aye, hen, I’ve no excuse, none at all. Shoulda told Simon to fuck off and keep his hands to himself—”
“Careful, Johnny,” Ghost says warningly, finally stepping into the living room. He fills out the archway imposingly, almost forced to twist his body on an angle to step in.
Her eyes cut over to Ghost, narrowing, lips pursing. Johnny’s heart jumps in his chest. It’s one thing to see his girl again in the flesh, but to see her all righteous and on the verge of an argument—he could bend her over the back of the couch now, sink into the plush, delicate folds of her pussy, reacquaint himself with deep, languid thrusts. Heaven after not getting his cock wet in a week.
He flinches when he thinks about the last person to touch his dick.
“So you’re sorry?” she says to Ghost, her disbelief clear. Difficult to see why she wouldn’t find it hard to believe that the man that shamelessly grabbed her ass in broad daylight in front of a group of his colleagues and her boyfriend would now choose to apologize.
Johnny knows the answer is no when he sees the way Ghost’s eyes rove over her body, taking stock of her little cotton pajamas and her bare feet curling against the cold floor. Ghost tilts his head to the side, eyes travelling back up to meet hers. “Sure I am, bird. Don’t I look sorry?”
Neither of them answer that. Arguing with Ghost feels different, like inviting in danger. Moving too suddenly in front of a hungry dog, jowls loose and salivating for a bite.
He takes a step closer. “Complete pillock, wasn’t I? And now Johnny’s getting the silent treatment ‘cause of it. Just couldn’t bear another second of him moping around base on the verge of tears.”
Johnny frowns at that. His girl frowns too, but there’s something more to it. He wouldn’t blame her for not accepting Simon’s apology, if he could even call it that—nothing about it rings sincere, more like words spoken softly to call a kitty over—but questioning it feels worse somehow. Like detonating a bomb at two thousand feet above ground.
“…Okay,” she says instead, voice trembling a little. “Apology accepted. You guys can go home now.”
“Bird’s forgiving, huh, Johnny?”
Johnny preens despite himself. “Aye. She’s a good girl, Lt. Told ye so.”
Ghost nods. “That’s right. A good girl who’s gonna let us make it up to her ‘til we have to report back in forty-eight hours.”
“Wait, you can’t—” she starts, then cuts herself off when Ghost’s eyes flash.
He can’t help the way he shudders at the helpless look on her face. Downturned eyebrows, pretty lips slack with disbelief, just the slightest hint of a whine building in her throat that dies when it dawns on her that nothing short of calling the cops will make the two of them leave.
And she’s a good girl—would never call the cops on him. His perfect girl. Sweet as pie.
Johnny falls in love a little bit more when she presses her squeezed fists against her eyes and exhales. “Fine. I’m too—I’m going back to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”
Ghost doesn’t react to her acceptance. It’s taken as a simple fact of nature—he says something and it happens. He speaks the world into being.
“I’ll take the couch,” he grunts, finally sitting down to unlace his boots. He looks comically large on her little couch—it’s more than likely that his feet will hang off the end, if not everything from the knee down.
Johnny already figured as much. No point in them driving all the way back to base when they both have the next two days off duty and there’s a perfectly serviceable couch for Ghost and the other half of her bed for him. He thought they’d have to convince her a bit more or strong arm her into it (a putrid thought; he’d rather have sweet talked her into the idea), but his girl always manages to surprise him in the best way.
On that thought, he looks over his shoulder towards the bedroom door, cock throbbing again at the thought of getting to hold his girl’s body against his. Touch starved dog. Mangy mutt, tongue lolling out at even the possibility of a pet.
Ghost must notice the object of his gaze because he sets him straight. “You can take the floor, Johnny.”
His tone brooks no argument. When Johnny whirls around, the words already on his tongue, she’s my girl, I’ve already slept in that bed ten times over, the sight of Ghost’s bare face, the mask now off, dangling in his hand like some scrap of fabric, makes him lose his train of thought. It’s not often he’s granted the luxury of seeing Ghost’s face—wide, clean shaven jaw, buzzed blond hair, old burn marks like a half-moon around his eye, nasty old scar slicing through his lips—and to see it now, here, makes something in him give.
Saturnine man with a wolf’s appetite. Ravenous.
It burns him that his girl looks slightly relieved at having the bed to herself. Irks him. Makes his jaw clench on a mean remark, half tempted to spit out something cross. Just because things have gotten complicated, now he’s not welcome in her bed? After the week he’s spent toiling, trying to make amends? Pleading desperately over the phone, stewing in guilt and heartache—Johnny knows she’s a good girl, but if he finds out that she’s replaced him with someone else in the week since they last saw each other—
Even the thought makes him see red.
He watches her as she turns around to retreat back to bed, more than a little displeased.
“Give Johnny a little kiss before bed, why don’t you, bird?” Ghost lightly suggests. Not a suggestion.
She freezes mid-turn. His expression dares her to put up a fuss. Johnny again nearly clucks his tongue, troubled on her behalf. Her spitfire nature is snuffed out easily under that stare. Grown men with experience in the field wither under Ghost’s stare. It’s no weakness of hers that she acquiesces time and again to his demands, glancing up at Johnny from under her eyelashes before shuffling over, pressing the lightest of kisses to his cheek.
“Better than that,” Ghost grunts, unimpressed.
His poor darling. Humiliated now. No skin off his back though. Johnny’s heart pumps double time when she presses her lips to his; soft petals that spread when he slips his tongue into her mouth, too eager after a week of nothing. Touch starved. Desperate to sink into her, lap his tongue over her lips and the roof of her mouth and press her jaw open to spit messily in her mouth. Take it, hen, every piece of me.
She rips her lips from his and dances away when he tries to get his hands on her, eyes wide, casting one last glance over at Ghost before hightailing it back to her room.
He barely resists going after her. Only Ghost’s stare roots him in place; his voice in Johnny’s head that rumbles, heel. I’ll tell you when to go.
He still doesn’t know what it says about him that he angles himself towards it. Bows his head to it. Moth to a flame that shocks him to the bone when he touches it.
Ghost tosses him the second pillow from the other end of the couch and takes the only blanket for himself. No matter. Johnny’s bivouacked on snowy cliff sides, chilblains blistering his toes for weeks; nights spent camped in torrential downpours, his tent on the verge of collapsing; windswept baysides chilling him to the bone. He can handle a pillow on a hardwood floor.
The ebb and flux of an ocean in his ear, and then Ghost’s voice from the couch: “I’ll take first watch.”
Whole body falling loose as if snipping a cord tethering him to the world.
“I’ll clean up the lamp in the morning,” he mumbles, vision already blurring. Ghost hums low in his throat.
He falls asleep with Ghost’s voice in his head, his girl’s taste still in his mouth.
#ceil writing#cod mw2#cod x reader#soap x reader#ghost x reader#ghost/reader#soap/reader#ghoap x reader#ghost/soap/reader
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SEA FEVER | Sailor!John Price x Reader
When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come-on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, after all, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night?
And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep.
But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger.
And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve.
tags: fluff, angst, unapologetic pining, obsession at first sight (but then love follows), blink and you'll miss it awful coping mechanisms (self-isolation, self-exile) and brief allusions to trauma (unresolved because this is about fucking the physical manifestation of the ocean, lads; it ain't about healing), egregious sea themes, a Newfie and his Newfie-isms, whirlwind romance; questionable sailing choices
warnings: 18+ | allusions to smut but everything is brief and vague and more about the Feelings™ than the act, explicit male solo though but also very brief and about the Pining™.
word count: 25k
notes: unconventional leading man (haggard sea boy) romances local travesty (ambiguous, wishy-washy bartender) in a love affair no one asked for. That's what this is. Enjoy.
*Suggestive themes are signified by a sailor's knot above the paragraph for those who want to read this, but don't care much for smut. SFW will begin with an anchor and wave divider above it.
NSFW & SFW shown below:
—PRICE
The storm off the coast of Newfoundland is stronger than he'd anticipated.
What starts as a bleak looking cloud on the horizon quickly churns the waters into a rough, sickly looking grey that rocks against his vessel without any respite. The cabin is in utter disarray within seconds of being battered by waves that seem to grow in size with each harrowing shade of charcoal blue the sky turns.
A few warnings from local trawlers in the area, ones quickly turning into the nearby harbour, and a firm reprimand by the Canadian Coast Guard when he radioed back and asked if anchoring was a feasible option (oh, sure, b'y, the man said, his thick Maritime twang hiding none of his derisive scorn. If ye wan'na meet y'r mak'r, it's a safe place to capsize, luh. We'll risk our arses in the morn' when y'need savin', we do. If there's anythin' left of ya that needs savin', anyhoo), he's quick to follow their example.
But, unfortunately, not quick enough.
The sudden squall tears through his hull with a vengeance, ripping the sails from their perch with a gust of wind that seems determined to play chicken with the efficiency of his ballast tanks (a pyrrhic victory for Captain and her unquenchable bloodlust for trying herself on just how far she can list before rocketing back upright). He knows with full certainty, and innate experience traversing through the Gulf Stream when he was younger and much more foolish, that the damage is nearly catastrophic. Nearly, of course, because while it clipped his sails, he has engines to bring him back, limping, to the coast the Guard directs him to.
"See there, y'er ten clicks away, b'y. Sending coordinates in a minute, now."
He's reminded of the warnings given by gnarled, old sailors who told him about the dangers of solo-sailing as he tries to be everything all at once to get his ship to the harbour they directed him to. Asking him, how can you be the captain, the navigator, and the watch all at the same time? When do you sleep? The answer, of course, is barely, but Price likes the freedom of being on his own. The isolation at sea isn't for everyone, but he takes to it with an ease that seems to defy all the gods of the ocean until he stands triumphant in his own domain, on his own ship.
Until now, that is.
Until he's battling with a handicap in the ocean.
But somehow—luck, maybe—he limps his way to the port where he finds fishermen helping latch the vessels to the marina in the harbour.
Shaded in a dreary grey, the port looks grimy and desolate from his cabin's porthole. A few wooden shacks on the beach are painted in faded primary colours and bear the quintessential marks of a seaside town—seashells, sailors knots (Carrick bend and Ashley stoppers), seahorses, and anchors. Without the dour grey of the downpour, he thinks it might be charming in a way. Quaint. There's a market to the west of him where stacks of lobster cages sit. Men in wellies and rubber dungarees shout orders amid the chaos of the storm, and he takes a moment to gather his things in a rucksack before he joins them on the deck.
This late at night, there isn't much anyone can do but hunker down and hope for the best. The men point him in the direction of the closest inn—the only one, another jokes—and he tries not to think about how badly damaged Captain will be in the morning. His own stupidity, of course; he knew there was a storm coming but he underestimated how vicious it would be.
With a nod of thanks, he sets off.
Brushing against the Eastern coast of Canada was meant to just be a simple drive-by back to Liverpool. Barely a stop, really. Just a scenic route so he could spend his thirty-ninth birthday over the sunken wreck of the Titanic before continuing on the nearly week-long journey across the Atlantic.
But instead, he celebrates it with a bottle of rum, and a ship on the verge of sinking—stuck, now, in Nova Scotia until he can find a mechanic to patch her up before he sets sail again.
He sends a quick text to Soap about the delay—stuck in Canada, fuckin' hurricanes—and tries not to dwell on the sudden ease in his guts at the prospect of not going home anytime soon.
(There are worse places he could be for his birthday, he thinks. Like Liverpool.)
The port he anchored his vessel to is a bottleneck between the last stretch of land for some hundreds of kilometres and the vast, ungiving ocean.
It isn't much to look at—just an empty boardwalk shaped like a horseshoe with most of the shops closed down for the season (or permanently, if the ramshackle state of them is anything to by), save for a grocer, an inn that takes up most of the middle section of the pier, a fisherman's village on the inlet with locals buying the wares from the lush waters filled to the brim with lobster and Atlantic salmon, a seafood restaurant, a cafe that moonlights as a pizza parlour in the evenings, and a pub—but it's enough for now. It's quaint, he thinks, even in its seasonal destitution.
The buildings are all painted in faded primary colours that are washed out in the heavy rain that falls from some coastal hurricane just touching down in Labrador.
It's one of those small seaside harbours that have seen better days. One with an economy wholly dependent on passing sailors just to survive, and he feels the despondency in the air like a thick, humid fog clinging to the skin of his neck. Fading signs. Peeling paint. There's damage to some of the buildings from a hurricane that must have swept through some several seasons ago, but the funds to repair are almost nonexistent, and so it sits. Festers. A broken reminder of how deadly the sea can be, even on land.
The herringbone pier creaks under his weight as he walks the sandy trek from the marina beside the village to the inn (no vacancy, it reads, with middle letters flickering ominously), and he grapples with the unease that fills him at being on solid land for the first time in months. A strange, unshaky gait, as if the cartilage in his aching knees turned to liquid while he was at sea.
It doesn't bother him too much—by the time he recalibrates to the weight of land pressing down on his soles, it'll be time to leave.
Maybe.
("It'll pass," the innkeeper sniffs when he asks about how long these things usually last. "Give 'er a week or so, and she'll blow right by. Might cause some floodin' in Halifax, but we're on the opposite end of 'er. Should be fine.")
It smells like rotten fish, blooming algae, and old frying oil—a typical thoroughfare for most of the harbours he's saddled up to in the years he's been traversing the open ocean. He breathes it in and finds himself already missing the potent loam that brims from the seawater at night. Salt, humus, brine, eelgrass; the ocean smells distinct in its rot. This, then, is a pale ersatz.
He's been here for a short, few hours already, and still can't seem to adjust to life on land. To the smells, the sounds, the people—not that there's too many of them around here. Price would be surprised if this town's population was higher than three hundred.
But it's stifling all the same.
And cold.
Being at the very tip of the Atlantic ocean, the weather is a near constant gloom. Grey, lacklustre skies smeared with thick, black clouds looming in the horizon like an omen. Salt-saturated air. It's a strange amalgamation between a chilling breeze from the sea and a dense wall of humidity even this late in September. It's uncomfortably thick under the veiled sun—a pale yellow hidden behind streaks of grey cloud cover.
The best description for this little place is dreary.
One he thinks might still be true even without the hurricane looming in the distance; a constant, inescapable chokehold within reach.
In the interior of the small fishing village, people chatter aimlessly about everything except the hurricane (but he supposes that with the frequency of them happening, there isn't much else to say about them except, ah, fuck, again?). He finds a modicum of comfort in their strange twang—a mangled bastardisation of Irish, Scottish, and something unique to the barren, eastern coast of Canada. It almost feels like home, strangely. Like someone dropped him in the Canadian version of Cork, Ireland.
The people he meets in passing as he drifts aimlessly between the shops, picking up something for dinner and a set of clean clothes, are friendly in an almost aggressive way.
Then, of course, there's you.
You weren't expected. A catastrophe in the making, one that he can see coming from a mile away. It's something he has a keen intuition for—being able to sense the kind of trouble that will make leaving harder than it has to be—and he knows better than to entertain this little fantasy, but there's something about you that makes him keep coming back.
Maybe it's the booze you ply him with; top of the shelf despite adding it to his tab under a bottom barrel price tag. Or the fact that no one has been able to replicate the perfect whisky sour he had down in Barbados, but—goddamn—you come very close.
Or maybe it's just exactly what it is:
Loneliness. Distraction.
He's a man always on the move. One who hasn't kissed land in months. And you're—
Well.
You're the prettiest thing he'd seen since a rainbow cast a glimmering ring on the horizon eighteen kilometres off the coast of the Philippines.
He isn't old. Not in the way that matters, but the sea has a way of chipping people apart; ageing them in ways that land just can't replicate. He's not yet forty, but sometimes he wakes up after barely missing a brutal storm in the middle of the ocean, and he feels like he's almost sixty. Battered body, bruised and broken; sunscorched. Salt-weathered.
You, though, make him feel his actual age. As if he's some young, dumb lad who ought to know better but doesn't care. Flippant in the way only the people in Liverpool can be. Young of heart. Dumb of mind.
And fuck—
Thinking about that place, those goddamn idiots in the pub who didn't know what quiet meant, makes him realise just how much he misses it. Not home. Never home. Home is the sea. The ocean. Home is this little place between land. A wild, untamed beast. The place where, when he was eighteen and smitten, he threw his heart down to the bottom of that unending chasm of midnight blue.
But you make him homesick, and he thinks he ought to resent you a little bit for it.
(He doesn't, of course; doesn't think he could ever hate you for making him feel even though he should because you make leaving harder than it's ever been, and he doesn't know what to do about that.)
It starts over a glass of whisky.
He's no stranger to being the foreigner, the tourist. Price is a tall man with broad shoulders and a permanent smear of sunburn across the bridge of his nose, no matter the season. With his unkempt beard of wry umber curls, his deep timbre that sounds more like the battered engine of a classic, American muscle car, a sea-weathered gaze, and his penchant for a stiff drink and an unfiltered cigar, he has a tendency to stand out.
(Or so he's been told.)
So, when you round the corner of the bar, brow ticking up in intrigue as he wanders in, sun-beaten and salt-slicked, he isn't surprised to hear you murmur:
"Not from around here, are you?"
Still. It makes him huff. "How'd you guess?"
Your other brow joins the first. "This town has a permanent population of maybe sixty people. I like to think I know every single one of them. You, however, I don't know."
"That so?"
You nod. "Yes, sir—"
And fuck. The way you speak, softly but with a rawness in your tone that's completely void of any false pleasantry, seems to notch somewhere in his ribcage, however dusted it is with barren white cobwebs.
"No. No sirs here," he finds himself saying, unprompted, and a little adrift from his usual character. He likes the importance that comes with being known as an authority figure; respected—the responsibility gives him something to do, and John has never really known how to be anything other than a leader, even when he shouldn't be.
(Especially when he shouldn't be.)
"Then what should I call you, stranger?"
He shrugs one shoulder in a lofty reply, but doesn't give you his name. Not right away, anyway—he also thinks he likes the mystery of being a stranger in a strange land—but you don't press. Your hands lift, palms facing him, in a mockery of surrender.
"Okay, stranger. What can I get for you?"
"Whisky," he says, a touch gruffer than he should be considering how nice you're being, but he's also never been the sort to care much about social niceties. "Neat. Bottle of spring water on the side."
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees you mouth the words back to yourself, a little smile clipping the corner of your lips. Bottle of water. It makes him huff again.
"Good business to mock your guests, is it?"
It's your turn to shrug. "Only when they don't give me their name."
You're quick in a way he doesn't expect. Snappy. Unpolished. But considering the way you walk around the bar, snatching up a bottle, and then a glass without even sparing a glance to see what's in your hands, it tells him you're familiar with this place. I know everyone, it screams.
It's an inference—but he's always been rather good at those as well—that you've been here a while. Maybe this place is home to you. Maybe it has always been.
Growing up in a dilapidated port town must have rubbed off on you in all the wrong ways. Waspish but still deferential to your elders. Quick with your words. Taking everything to the chin without a flinch.
You grew up around sailors. Around men who can't seem to stand still on land long enough to call any place home. And he almost pities you for it. Almost.
But he doesn't know you well enough to care.
So, he doesn't.
Motions, instead, to the cigar case he lays flat on the table after fishing it out of his front pocket with a small murmur to see if it's alright if he smokes inside. Places like these are so far behind on bylaws, he doubts anyone would blink if he smoked indoors, but it's better to be safe, he reasons, than to find himself on the curb nursing bloodied knuckles and a black eye.
(One too many nights down in Manila taught him well enough.)
You nod, then look around the empty pub. "Go ahead. I don't think anyone here will mind."
It makes bark out something that sounds too shorn around the edges, too frayed and unevenly cut, to be a laugh, but it still makes your lips quiver, pulling up in a smile.
"Glad you've got my back."
He leaves it open. An empty space for you to fill in, give him your name. A proper introduction.
Price isn't too surprised when you don't, and instead use two, well-practised fingers to slide his drink over to him, not spilling a drop. There's a flash of teeth. A mockery of a smile.
And then: "drink up. First one is on the house."
"Well, aren't you charming."
"It's just good business," you quip with a little more teeth. "Gotta stay above the competition."
It pulls another bark from his chest. The second in less than ten minutes. He can't remember the last time he laughed this much, however lumpish and unrefined it might be.
"It's working," he adds, tipping the glass in your direction. "Might come back for a round yet."
"Just don't be a stranger."
He should have been.
Living a large majority of his life floating aimlessly in the vast expanse of the open sea has given him several insights into who he is as a person, as a man, and what makes him tick. The situations he was forced into, almost all of them being life or death, make him acutely aware of himself in a way that only those who have trust pushed past the limits of their mettle know.
Price is good at spotting danger. Looming storms. Rogue waves. Reefs jutting out in the middle of the ocean.
And everything about you is dangerous.
He knows himself well enough to know that you're his kryptonite. His weakness. That those glossy eyes, your stubborn pride, your spitfire mouth, are all things pitted against him. All designed to make him suffer as much as possible.
You're more dangerous than running out of fuel near Australia. Almost getting capsized off the coast of Sri Lanka. Surviving a sudden hurricane in the waters around Mexico.
You—
You make him yearn. You make him want.
You make him think about things he swore off of when he was eighteen and set sail around the world all on his own.
For the first time since he left Liverpool in a boat he named Captain, Price thinks about home. Solid land beneath his feet.
Dangerous, indeed.
And despite everything warning him away, he goes back.
Blames it on a litany of things—all half-truths that are only marginally easy to swallow. Things like: it's been ages since he had a stiff drink, and this is the only pub in some ten kilometres, or so. The only licence he cared enough to renew is his boating permit, and he isn't even sure if his driver's licence from Hereford is valid anymore. Never bothered much to check.
He needs to get out, anyway. Has to find someone to fix the leak he'd sprung crossing the Labrador Strait. Needs to get more fuel. Enough to last him until he can get to Maine.
And where else is he going to find anyone in this town to do all of that if not at the pub?
It's practical. A necessity.
(And if he wears his nicest shirt that only barely smells sunbleached, then no one has to know.)
No one. Except you, that is.
You wave to him in what's quickly becoming known as your usual greeting. A slight widening of your eyes, as if you're surprised to see him. Then a small quirk of your lips that always accompanies the briefest flash of teeth. If you're not busy making a drink, you lift your hand up, fingers loosely curled over your palm. A lazy wave.
He echoes it all back with a sharp nod as he takes his seat at the bar. His usual, too, because despite having not been a marine since he was twenty-six, he still has the training he picked up ingrained in his marrow. Back to the corner. Exits in his periphery.
(Old habits die hard, he thinks, and feels his heart leap to the base of his throat when you grin at him from over the counter, wide and infectious—)
He needs a smoke. A stiff drink.
There's an ashtray laid out on the table in front of him, a coaster with an empty glass. You're quick to rectify that, sidling up to his spot with a bottle of whisky tucked between your palm and thumb, a bottle of water secured in your grasp by just your pinky looped around the nozzle.
"You should try my whisky sour," you murmur conversationally—like this is normal. Commonplace.
It is in a way, he notes. But there's something much too domestic about the way you take him in. Fluffing pillows. Resting a cool hand against a warm forehead. Sweetness bleeds into his teeth, makes them ache. He needs to rinse it away before he gets a cavity.
"Mm," he mumbles, fingers curling around the glass. The whisky is only slightly chilled—the way he mentioned he liked days ago—and he wonders if you took it out of the cool, let it sit on the shelf, waiting for him. He doesn't know how he feels about the idea of that. Of being waited for. Expected. "Not a fan of that nonsense."
Your head tilts to the side. Narrowed eyes reading him. Trying to sear through the layers that accumulated over the years, thick growths. Barnacles bunched around his body from stagnancy. He wonders what you think you see when you look at him.
Wonders, then, why he cares so much about what the answer might be.
John hides it all in a swallow. A gulp of whisky that never stops burning no matter how many times he washes his blues away with a swig of it. Lights a fire in his throat that catches and spreads through his chest, all the way down to his belly. Smoky. Ashes. He wheezes through the burn of it. Let it strip his insides, taking all the pollutants with it. The ones that build up whenever he catches sight of soft, coy smiles, and warm eyes.
Dangerous if left unchecked.
"You never know," you say, and he's already forgotten what you were talking about originally. Too many dips into the margins. Too much reading between the lines. "You might like it if you try."
And he knows, immediately, that he would. That he'd order whatever fancy drink you whipped up for him tonight with lemon and liquid cane sugar and a pinch of salt to cut the sweetness (your secret ingredient), and would do it for the rest of his life if he could. Would drink himself into cirrhosis just to see the way you smiled when you made it.
He swallows it. Chases it down with water. He's always been rather good at that—running. Avoiding the things that make his heart thud, and the back of his neck prickle.
So, he says: "nah, m'set in my ways."
And you smile, let him flee. "If you say so." Then, with eyes that drop to the three wrinkles in his collar, and the ambiguous stain on the breast pocket of his shirt, you add: "don't you look nice tonight. Who're you trying to impress?"
There's an itch under his skin. He paws at his pocket for his cigars. You meet him in the middle with a lighter in your hand, held out to him when he jabs the butt of one between his teeth. He needs the distraction. Needs nicotine to quell his nerves. Smoke-stained apathy. Just enough to soften the urge to do something ill-advised. To say something uncharacteristically flirty, like—
You. If you'll have me.
(And then desperately. With a quiver in his voice, and blood in his throat; if you'll let me. I'll be so good to you, so, so good—)
"Mechanic," he rumbles, words muffled and gruff from around the end of his cigar. The way the flames catch the softness around the ring of your irises makes him ache in all the wrong ways. "Boat mechanic, specifically. To help fix up Captain."
"Captain?" You echo, brows rising. He leans forward, pushes the tip into the fire; inhales to let it catch.
"M'ship," he rolls the word around a mouthful of smoke. "My first love."
"Ah," you say with a smile that tugs on the corners of your eyes. "She must be a thing of beauty, then."
His mouth is already forming the affirmation—yes, she is—and the question—why do you think that?—but you beat him to it with a softness that hints at more, that lays itself bare on the grimy, acetone bleached tabletop:
"To make a man like you so smitten."
And Jesus Christ.
What is he meant to say to that? How is supposed to respond with his heart in his throat, and pulse in his ears?
He's too old for this shite, he thinks. Then, not old enough. Not nearly old enough—
"Right," he grumbles, gruff and unfriendly, and everything that's meant to make you stay away for good, to look at him like the sorry sap of an empty man he is. But there's a tint in his words. A blood-drenched fluster.
You catch pieces of it, and smile behind the counter as you pour another drink.
"Anyway," he's grasping at anything with knotted hands, something to take the edge off of his nerves. To put distance between this, you and him, and all the things that will eventually come after it. "This mechanic. Know where I can find one?"
The derision that dances across your pretty face has heat blooming in his chest.
"Look around. This is basically a town hall meeting tonight."
He likes the way you ride sarcasm and sincerity so finely that he always seems to oscillate between believing your words or wondering if you're making a mockery of him. Most of the time, you seem to be—if only to get a rise out of him. To draw out his sense of humour, mordant and drier than a desert. One that pairs quite nicely with your own.
(Another tip to the scale he tries not to think about.)
So he doesn't. He huffs instead as he ashes his cigar, and reaches for the glass with his other hand.
"Well, ain't you funny."
You are, of course. Of course. He thinks about the things you say to him when he comes down for breakfast at noon and dinner well after the sun has set beyond the horizon, making a meal out of the lobster rolls you make for him in the kitchen, the tuna sandwiches. The garlic shrimp. The salmon and rice. Idle comments about the locals—or lack thereof—and their spotty reputation. The history of the town. Of your Province.
"You love it."
And God help him, he does. He does. He likes the way you drag snorts out from the depths of his chest, clearing out empty cobwebs, and filling the barren space with warmth. Or something like it. Everyone he's met so far always seems to want something from him, but you don't. You don't even make him pay for the extra heaping of lobster you pile on his plate even though he's heard you say it was an extra five dollars to a passing sailor.
He seems to be your exception, and he doesn't know why.
(Or maybe he does, but looking at it too closely fills him with dread. The kind he only feels when he finds out a storm cell is headed toward him. When he has to anchor down in a bay and settle the sickness in his guts as Captain is viciously thrown from side to side.
The morning after when he has to clean up the broken pieces and examine the extent of the damage, it's always filled with a sense of moroseness. Uncomfortable, in a way, like the aftermath of a vitriolic row, a devastating argument when he emerges with a sense of uncertainty, no longer quite sure he was justified in the things he said, the anger he felt. But too prideful to apologise. The awkwardness of navigating the ruins of calamity with a sense of regret that blooms alongside his lingering anger.)
So, he does what he does best:
"Not in your lifetime, love."
He runs.
Because lying has always come easier to him, hasn't it?
The mechanic is an old man with an accent thicker than his own.
He speaks entirely in regional colloquialisms that Price can't make sense of. Even when he makes it known that he has no idea what the fuck the man is on about, he just breathes out his nose, as if to say, what can't ye understand about me words? and continues in the same mishmash of something that might be English, but honestly—John doubts it very much.
Still. He's quick. He checks the hull, the mast. The engine. Checks off a list as he goes, muttering to himself (himself, because John stopped listening after the third, what? Come again? I can't understand you, mate that went entirely ignored save for a few, luh, buddy, I knows yer not stun but yer gettin' me right rotted, ye'are), and then slaps the side of Captain, nodding to himself.
Three weeks, he says, words stretched out and stressed, like he was speaking to a child. 'ave 'er all fix'd up in t'ree weeks, b'y.
Three weeks.
It's in line with the seasons, too. If he times it all just right, he could be eating jerk chicken, curry, and oxtail soup in Jamaica soon enough. It would be stupid to go against the Gulf Stream (something he knows from experience when he was younger and dumber and thought he knew better), but a short stint across the Atlantic to Bermuda would suffice. Then once he's finished, he could set sail to the Azores, and then to Gibraltar, or Portugal, back up to the UK.
Well, then.
It's set.
He hands the man a deposit, and tries not to think about the hourglass looming in the distance.
Or you.
(He always has to leave eventually. This, he knows, is no different.)
A routine forms. It's not terrible—not at first. Just an itch in the back of his head, talons raking across the inside of his skull, right behind his eyes.
It's fine, he reasons, taking his spot at the bar while you bat away grabbing hands reaching for free beer, more booze. In three weeks, this place will be a memory replayed in his mind when the stretch of ocean idles, and loneliness sets in. A soft comfort for him to break into pieces, into regrets and spots of unhinged laughter when the isolation in a wet, unfathomable desert sinks its maw into his psyche.
He'll resent himself, he's sure; curse the winds and the squalls that threaten to tear his boat into pieces. The idle sense of listlessness that comes with seafaring long distances.
He's done it enough times to know that between the inexorable sense of freedom and insignificance in the gaping maw of an untamable beast, he always hates himself a little bit for not taking someone with him.
Solo-sailing is ill-advised, but he's always been a stubborn bastard. Too prickly to be good company, too gruff to care.
Maybe he'll ring Gaz when gets close to Europe to see if he's up for a stint jaunting through the ocean to see the Caribbean with him. Or Soap if Gaz is still hunkering away with the military.
(You—
He doesn't think about that. Carves the thought out of his hand as quickly as it forms.)
But even so—
You're a constant on his mind. The first solid presence he's had in months, too.
Despite his cantankerous disposition—sometimes he finds himself snarling more than conversing; sometimes he has this urge in his blood to lash out, to push things away just to see how far they go—you navigate his mercurial temperament with ease. His shorn, gruff words bounce off of your skin and fall to the countertop where you pick them up between delicate fingers and throw them right back at him—all with a smile.
See, you seem to say. Nothing you can do will push me away so just shut up already and drink your fucking whisky, old man.
He doesn't know if he believes you. Or the phantom echo in his head.
"You're shedding," you murmur, drawing his attention back to you. At his raised brow, you lift your hand up in front of him, thumb and forefinger pinched together.
It's only when his vision steadies that he sees the single strand of hair wisping up from between the tips of your fingers. A coarse hair of dark brown with lightened tips.
His hand lifts to his beard, roaming over the wry curls peppered, unkempt, around the bottom half of his face. His moustache is overgrown, eclipsing the entirety of his lips. He feels the wetness from his whisky staining the ends.
You laugh when he pats along his cheek and jaw, as if he could find the missing follicle amid an unruly basin of knotting hair.
"Ah," he rasps. "Guess I'm in need of a shave."
It's not a priority anymore. Hasn't been since he left the Navy, or when he realised how troublesome it was to try and shave his face while crossing the Atlantic. It just stopped being something he cared much about.
But he feels the long ends catching on the rough patch of skin around his knuckles. Straggly and whitening at the tips.
"Maybe," you quip with a shrug, and he can't really place the note in your tone that tries to linger between feigned indifference, but misses the mark entirely.
You don't say anything else as you drop the fallen strand into the bin behind the counter, but as the night progresses, he catches your eyes straying toward him more often than usual, lingering on the expanse of his covered jaw. Something flashes in those depths—intrigue, maybe; curiosity—and John tries to convince himself it doesn't matter even as he pulls out money from his wallet at the crux of the evening when everyone has gone home, save for himself and you. The only two left in an empty pub.
It shakes him, somewhat. As if he's only realising just now how normal this has become. For him to wait for you. To walk you to the edge of the boardwalk, where a little cottage sits across a sandy embankment. Home, you told him once. The first night he kept pace with you just to keep the conversation going.
Never been anywhere else but here, you said, a touch wistful. Must be amazing, then. Going anywhere you like. Always at sea.
He swallows down something bitter at the memory. Something aching and acrid. Yeah, he murmured when the silence stretched on for too long and he saw the apology forming on your lips. Nice. It's—it's good, yeah.
The years have muted the resentment he felt toward his home. His father, in particular. He doesn't think he's ready to step back into Hereford—maybe not ever—but he might be ready to see the old bastard's grave. Drop a couple of flowers down.
The memories he has are embedded in thrown cast iron pots. Fist-sized holes in the wall. Sealed with bitterness, resentment.
He didn't know how to summarise all of that into something digestible for you. So, he didn't. Doesn't.
(Can't, maybe. Won't.)
You'd stopped aiming for personal and instead focused your attention on the things that made him snort. Made him laugh. He can't remember the last time he had a moment to breathe. Land makes him feel claustrophobic. Itches under his skin in a way that drums up the instinct to flee. Or fight.
But with you—
It's easy.
It awakens something in him, too. Something that has been there all along, maybe. Lingering on the periphery. One he tried hard to ignore as it raked down his skull, leaving false starts in his bones.
There's an attraction there, seeding in the gaps between your bodies. One that becomes harder to ignore as the days pass. And how could there not be, when you're pretty in a way that makes him flounder. That makes him want to bend you over the counter just to see what expressions he could pull out of you with a mere touch. The sounds—
Fuck. You'd sound so pretty, he thinks. Has thought. Many times in the sanctuary of his hotel room that stunk of algae and smoke. Images of you splayed out on the sheets, begging him for more—
His hand goes back to his jaw. Feeling the years of accumulated indifference beneath his fingers, and needing something—anything—to take the heat in his belly, the tremble of his hand, away. To keep the thoughts of you at bay, locked up tight for no one else to see. To know.
John doesn't walk you home that night, opting instead to duck into a drug mart beside the inn, hands burrowed in his pockets, eyes lidded. Narrowed, almost, as he takes in the rows of cheap plastic he'll inevitably find at sea.
He stands in the aisle for a moment, taking in the mix of English and French on the boxes, and trying to come up with reasons for why this is a good idea—outside of the way it felt to have you look at him with lowered lashes, flickering from his chin, to his jaw, to his cheek: imagining what might be under the bushel of thick, unruly hair.
It doesn't surprise him that he comes up empty. That his head is filled with nothing but the illicit image of you leaning over him—
Stupid.
He grabs the first box he sees, crumpling the cardboard from how tight he's clenching his fist.
It isn't the first time he's thought of you like that, but it is in your presence. With you staring at him, filling in the blanks his uninspired memory couldn't conjure up. Talking to him, too—bloody fucking hell.
All frayed whispers of: you alright, John? You sure? Well, if you say so.
There's anger writ across his brow, more so at himself for thinking these things, for feeling them in the first place, but as he stalks toward the counter, frown buried behind a mess of overgrown, unkempt hair, and eyes narrowed into pinched lines, he's sure he makes quite the sight. Must, if the little jump the skittish man behind the register gives when he drops the box with a growled how much? is to go by.
John's never been good at handling his anger. Trickle-down toxicity, maybe. He's sure some fancy therapist would be overjoyed to tell him all about it—about how he's never had a good role model when it comes to biting his tongue. Never had to, when his last name is enough to pass tests, climb ranks.
Mean and drunk, his dad was.
And Price—
Well. Sometimes he feels himself getting there, too.
But this. This. It feels different.
He's not nearly as angry as he is flustered, and like anything he isn't used to, he lashes out.
John is sure they don't tip at drug stores, but he conveniently forgets his change in place of an apology when he storms out of the shop, ignoring the hesitantly called, uh, sir…? as he goes.
It's fine, he thinks and tries not to let his mind wander into uncharted territory, musing about what you might have said. Might have done.
Swatted at him, undoubtedly. Said something scathing about him being a prick for no reason. Put him in his place, kept him there.
But he doesn't think about that at all.
John stands in front of the grimy mirror in his hotel room with a brand new razor in hand, staring at himself, and wonders if you'd shave it for him if he asked. If you'd keep him in line during the long stretch of the ocean where everything is an endless crawl of muted grey-green, and take him down to the bathroom in the boat, one that's barely big enough for himself to fit comfortably, and perch him on the toilet while you tended to the too-long wisps of curls growing over his cheeks.
The thought is an algae bloom in his chest. Ethereal, beautiful. But beneath the marvel of nature's potent splendour lurks a deadly danger—one toxic in its domesticity.
Still. He latches onto it. Curls his worn fingers around the edges, clinging to rotting driftwood.
He likes the way it fits in his chest. The shape of you moulding along the barren brackets of his ribs; slotting in like a puzzle piece. It's winsome. Dangerous. But he's always like a challenge.
Always liked the way some things were meant to hurt.
(And you—you look like you were made to ruin.)
Hair rains into the stained basin with each cut. Filling the chips in the porcelain, built up from years of carelessness and indelicate hands, until a light dust of burnt umber sits like a layer of snow across the surface, hiding the blemishes below.
Each inch shorn off seems to regress him in age until he's less an unkempt seafarer, a wild man who feasts on tuna and loses his mind in the middle of the sea, and more like the thirty-something-year-old who still has decades ahead of him to try and regain his footing.
The contrast is jarring.
He runs the back of his hand across clean skin and nearly startles at the feeling of something touching that part of his face that was hidden for so long.
He's reminded about something his dad used to say—nothing like a shave to make a man feel new again—and isn't sure how he likes the sour twist in his gut when he feels the truth in those words, however hollow and artificial they might be.
The face that stares back at him is different from the one who wore a military uniform all those years ago. Cheeks sunken in. Hollow. Thinner from months at sea. His complexion is darker, sunkissed and tinged slightly red. A permanent sunburn, maybe. He thinks about the woman from Ghana who warned him with a finger pressed softly against the apple of his full cheek about skin cancer. Melanoma.
Wear sunscreen, she stressed with a shake of her head that sent gorgeous locks of midnight black spilling over her bare shoulders. It reminded him of the deepest parts of the ocean that he crossed. Endless puddles that looked like little jars of ink across the vast expanse of the sea. You're too pale not to be wearing some every day.
(After he left—twinned hearts torn asunder—he found a bottle of sunscreen stuffed inside his rucksack. It was the only time he can remember crying in some twenty-odd years—)
That man feels almost as distant as the sea is to him now. A memory. A moment when he was willing to carve off the best parts of himself just to make room for the loneliness; the self-flagellation in the form of isolation. What he'd thought he deserved. Maybe still does.
He isn't sure what thoughts were rattling around inside his head at the time to make him leave the best pieces of himself with a woman who seemed too good to be true, but still wanted him, of all people, by her side. Those, too, feel far too distant to grasp.
His hand is worn down. Knuckles more scar tissue than skin. Welts lined the inside of his palms—thickened flesh made from grabbing the ends of rope too many times to count as it reeled out of his grasp, cutting deep and cauterising the wound all at the same time. He should have known better, maybe. But when his anchor was tumbling down into an abyss, unattached to its cleat in the middle of the ocean, time for thinking was negligible. Nonexistent, almost.
The accumulated scars—some from land, most from sea—discolour his skin until it's patches of ivory, pale pink, and mounted brown, all slightly hidden under a thin crop of wry topaz hair.
His nails are short and lined with boat oil. Dirt. The beds are yellowing from nicotine.
He scratches the rosy skin of his upper cheek where it meets the cut of patchwork mutton chops. His signature style when he was Captain. When he was responsible for more life than he knew what to do with or knew how to protect.
(The men he couldn't save always seem to stack higher than the ones he did.)
John sees fragments of his old self in the mirror. Pieces of an incomplete puzzle he thought he left scattered on the battlefield, and then tucked inside a box when he handed in his medals for a trawler (a trawler for a sailboat). The fit is tight. It sits uncomfortably over his new skin—scarred and sunkissed—and he gives himself a moment to wonder about where he'd be in life now had he stayed behind.
But a moment feels too long. Not long enough.
He brings the razor up to his cheek and cuts the rest of that man away.
He isn't him. Not anymore.
(Hasn't been for a long time.)
The skin of his cheeks sting from the bitter evening winds billowing off the icy Atlantic and he's reminded why he kept his beard overgrown and thick when he was out at sea.
November is a cruel month, he always found. Cold. Desolate. This close to the ocean, and he feels the chill deep in his bones, even though several layers of leather and fur. It's enough to make his teeth chatter.
The fur lining the collar of his Levi's jacket does little to stem the vicious onslaught, but he makes a point to bunch his shoulders closer to the bottom of his earlobes in an effort to salvage some heat. Not that there's much to spare.
But the walk from the inn to the pub is blessedly short, and the brief cold gives him enough time to clear his head. To think about turning back. Stopping whatever it is he thinks he's doing.
He isn't a young lad. Not anymore.
He knows this, of course. Knows it enough to feel the ache in his joints. In the raw scar tissue that is always a little tender in colder weather. Still. It wasn't enough to stop him from washing his clothes in the coin laundry of the inn. Buying fabric softener and forest-scented detergent from the grocer. A beanie (toque, he supposes, though he's never heard anyone out East use that word), some cologne—the expensive kind. Tom Ford, the lady at the cosmetic counter said. You look like you'd like this one best.
He didn't ask why. She didn't tell him.
It smells good, though. Like new leather, vanilla, and tobacco—a strange concept considering most of the time people couldn't stand the smell whenever he smoked, but maybe that's only in cigars and cigarettes.
There was a moment when he stood in the washroom, buttoning up his freshly laundered (and newly purchased) shirt when he felt like a fraud. A goddamn muppet.
This isn't him. He reeks of smoke, salt, and sun-dried sweat. He scrubs his clothes clean with extra shampoo inside the shower on his boat when they start to smell a little too pungent, even for him. He doesn't shave. Barely showers—
Who needs it when he can just anchor on a reef, or a distant, uninhabited island and take a dip in crystalline waters for a few hours?
He feels—
Stupid.
But he can't deny there's something a little invigorating about slipping a clean body inside clean clothes. Dressing up like some young lad taking his girl out to see a film, grab a burger to eat. Maybe bum around Liverpool until he had to go back to the barracks.
He bit his tongue until he tasted iron and slipped on his jacket. Pulled the beanie over his head. Sprayed some cologne on the sleeves. And then kept his head low to avoid anyone's eyes, even though no one in this town has really bothered to get to know him like you had.
John just feels a bit like a swindler. This isn't him.
Fancy shirts. Clean jeans. Boots. A new leather jacket. Cologne. Barefaced. It all feels like a hollow pastiche of some clichè role he's trying to fill. Leading man, or something stupid like that Soap might jostle him about.
Who're ye tryin'ta be, Cap? Tom Hardy, aye?
Fuck. Fuck. He should leave, just go back to his inn—
But the door is already opening. You're looking up, taking him in, and then—
Nothing. You offer a slight nod. No smile. No wave. And then you're looking away, eyes dropping back to the tabletop you're always cleaning despite the stains and the stickiness never going away.
He expected worse, maybe. His hand reaches up as he steps inside, feeling the uneven skin beneath his palm. Rugged craters. Knicks from the blade when he got too close to his skin. Scars, maybe. Patches of hair he missed.
He wonders what you thought when you saw it. Chiefly disappointed, perhaps, that whatever image you had in your head of him, all clean-shaven and dressed up, wasn't quite the same as reality. There's a sinking sense of disappointment in his guts, but it's almost minuscule compared to the relief of knowing that you don't care. Maybe it'll be enough to quash whatever has been rotting in the crevasse between you. Crush whatever idealistic notions of him you have in your head.
John would rather you were bitterly disappointed now than realise it after. Regret. A mistake. It's good. Fine.
It's only when he takes his usual seat does your head pops up again, eyes cutting across the counter to stare at him.
And—
Shit.
The way you look at him knocks the air from his lungs. The deep appraisal, the shock, the curiosity, and the—
"Wow," you whisper, eyes widening. He isn't sure what you think, but he knows that look in your eye; a keenness. Sees it sometime staring back at him in a cup of amber when you don't notice him looking. Shit. Shit.
He clears his throat, uncomfortable under the intensity of your stare, and tries to soothe his nerves as quickly as he can, patting down for his cigars left somewhere in his pocket. In one of his pockets. Fuck—
"Well," you breathe, and he dreads your words immediately, not quite ready to hear them without something in his veins to dull the pinballing emotions in his chest. "Don't you clean up nice. Didn't recognise you at first."
He grunts. "Yeah, yeah. Talkin' nonsense now, aren't you?"
"Nonsense?" You echo, tone subdued, now. Soft. Too soft. He hates the way it makes his chest feel like it's caving in. "What? A handsome man like you can't take a compliment? That's a surprise."
Handsome.
He feels his pulse in his throat. Heat under his collar. Something spreads across his skin at words, glueing itself down, uncomfortably tight—constricting, smothering—and he fights the urge to reach up to his neck, clawing at it until it's all gone. Peeled off in strips, taking with it jagged swaths of too-hot flesh.
Your words are painted with too much sincerity, and it drips over his skin—thick and oily—until he's stained in the offering they make. Drenched in the sudden realisation that this is far too much than he can handle.
That he needs.
The way you're looking at him—bare-faced honesty, scoured of anything other than a genuity that trickles into the gaps in his crumbling chest, sticky filament made of saccharine promises and a dizzying sense of open affection—makes him heave; chokes him on the embers of that tantalising what if you let echo in the recess of words.
It isn't grabbing, or taking what he wants. This is you lying flat on the table. His choice to reach for it. To curl his fingers around the bulk of it, feeling the heat in the palm of his hand.
And he wants. Oh, how he wants—
But it feels a little bit like a betrayal. Self-sabotage from within as his body turns against him. Feelings conspiring with his whims, the ones that force out their pleads between bloodied teeth; yearning as they rattle the cages of this forced prison. Lost in absentia.
He can't make sense of the tremors that follow, roaring through his chest in a deluge of innominated emotions that seem to shake the foundation he stands on. He reaches, but can't seem to grasp them. Temporal feelings without cause. Intangible. They slip through the gaps in his fingers. Slide off of his flesh as he was trying to catch mercury in the oil-slick palm of his hand.
John can't make sense of it. Why him? What's drawing you to him outside of carnal attraction? It's always been there—that magnetic pull: his marrow to yours.
But for the first time since he traded in medals for oars, he feels the pull back to shore. That unquenchable urge to dip his toes into the sand. To keep his feet firm on dry land.
The feeling of it itches in the palm of his hand.
And like most things, he doesn't understand, doesn't agree with, he feels the unrelenting urge to lash out against it. Push back. Carve out some semblance of distance between the thing he doesn't understand, and what it's making him feel.
And then he snaps. Bites back against the headiness admixing in the back of his head; noxious, dangerous. It's a discomfort. A slash of clarity that makes him all too aware of himself. Of you. This. Everything. It's too much.
So easily swayed by a pretty word. What a damn fool.
The snort he gives in response is a gnarled mess in his throat, all mangled up and shredded on the barbs of his sudden vexation. "Flatter all the poor sods like this, do you?"
It crackles in his chest. Smouldering embers. Dampened by the blood filling his lungs, choking him on what spills out of the shattered levee.
This isn't—
Isn't him. It isn't you.
He feels claws raking across the inside of his skull. Sharpened talons digging vengefully into the back of his sockets until it aches. Forcing him, maybe, to see the aftermath of his anger.
"No," you say, pulling back. Stepping away from him. Giving him space. Not enough, and entirely too much. A sad echo snakes through the crevasse. Glass breaking. Shattering. He thinks of self-sabotage. Tastes it in the back of his throat. "Just you."
It's mean, awful, when he huffs, asks: "yeah? Why bother?"
"Why not?" You volley back, and he can't quite place the look in your eye. Disappointment, maybe. Something tinged in regret. "Maybe I want to. Maybe I—"
You don't finish.
Good, he thinks. Good. Stay away. Far away.
And softer. Softer still—
It's for your own good. Better off this way. Don't turn around. You'll only end up hating what you see. Regretting what you find—
"Don't know what you're getting yourself into." His words are stagnant. Hollow. The consistency of ash between dry palms. He tries to swallow, but can't. Can't. Gives up instead, adds: "won't like what you find, either."
You hum and it hurts. "Maybe I might. Can't be all bad under there."
They're sharpened with an edge of sincerity he can't bring himself to acknowledge, not now; not yet, so he huffs instead, and brings a cigar to his lips just so he doesn't have to respond. Doesn't have to engage again. Can't, he thinks, with a cigar between his lips, stuffing his mouth full.
A pathetic escape. He's never been the type of man to retreat when it isn't the best option strategically. Or when he has no other choice, and too many men on the line.
But he can't—
(Knife to his chest, you walk away.
Blade against his tongue, he says nothing to call you back.)
A fissure sits at the zenith that once was a sense of ease, comfort. It leaks a coldness that shakes him to the core when it drifts over gaping wounds and milky-white bones.
(All of his own making, of course.)
In the midst of it all, he tries to convince himself that this is the right thing to do despite never being a man of altruism in his life, and the lie pools in his empty gut where it sloshes around in the shots of whisky you still pour for him even though he can he see the cruel lashes of his words striking over your expression when you look at him when you think he isn't watching you back.
Better this way, and he downs a shot just to ignore the merciless echo that asks, for who?
Both of you. Both.
Because despite what you might think, or whatever little fantasies you made up inside your head about him, he knows they aren't true. They aren't him.
A man who climbed ranks on the back of his last name. A borrowed legacy with no honour of his own. One who had no qualms about crossing lines that others couldn't until they blurred, until his morality was a sickly grey.
Until a prison cell in Siberia rewired the fibres in his head, and he was forced to reconcile the unignorable truth that stripped of his rank and the protection he offers there is barely any discernible difference between him and them. The enemy.
He thinks of Gaz, and the words he uttered become a portend for the calamity of a man who always seemed overly keen to take things too far.
It's them or us, he used to say. Them or us—even as he tossed an innocent man over the ledge to fall to his death. As he let a child watch him emasculate his father when he knew pride was all they had left, doing nothing in the end but creating another monster for him to hunt down at a later date. Threatened families. Threatened men. Women, children.
His punishment was nonexistent. Self-flagellation in the form of exile. He cast himself out to sea and pretended it was enough.
How is he supposed to pretend who is he isn't? How is he meant to touch you with blood writ in the lines of his palm?
Selfish. Mean. Cruel.
So, he lets it rot—just as he does with everything else.
There have been others, of course; but Price has always been attracted to older women. Laugh lines and crows feet; swatches of grey kissing their temples. A certain coldness to their touch. An unspoken understanding that everything that is, and will ever be, between them is temporal. Love was just a crutch. A fallacy uttered in the dark to soothe the rugged parts of themselves that worried they might never be enough.
He can handle women like that. Prefers them.
The youngest he's ever dated was a woman his own age, and he realised soon after that there was a disparity between he couldn't placate. One that left scars.
He's a mangled soul in a young man's body. Rough and callous and unwilling to compromise. He's more scar tissue than man, and what can he offer someone idealistic with inexperience and youth except a bitter tangle of hurt that cuts deep.
But you're an outlier, he finds. Only shades younger than himself, really, but it's not so much your age, but the way you carry yourself. Heart on your sleeve. Aching for love.
He can't give that to you.
The last time he tried, he ended up sneaking out on a woman in Ghana, leaving the pieces of him behind that dared to even try.
He can't offer you anything that isn't temporary.
And he thinks that might be fine. Maybe it's all you want from him, anyway—just a night. A moment. A memory to keep.
But John's always been greedy. The kind that wants, and wants. Once would never be enough, and he knows that if he sunk his teeth into you, a bite would never satiate his rapacious appetite, never quench the hunger.
And since he can't make a meal out of a morsel, he'd rather starve.
He thinks about leaving six times in three hours, but you carry on as if nothing has happened even though he catches weariness in your gaze whenever you look at him. His glass is filled but the conversations are bereft of their usual cheekiness. The gaps between are no longer filled with his scored laughter or your amused hums.
You spend more time away from him than you have since he first sat down. The deviation away from what quickly became a bruised touchstone, laden with clumsy fingerprints is jarring, but he can't claim to be upset by your distance when he was the one who caused the rift in the first place.
So, he drinks. He smokes his cigar. Tries to not think about why his hand itches in a way that he knows can only be sated by sliding his knuckles across the worn wood of the table, linking his fingers with yours. It's a stupid whim. He swallows it down with a shot of whisky that makes his stomach curdle. Seals it with an inhale of his cigar. Forgotten, now. Covered in ethanol and smoke.
But even with the crowbar in his hand, he can't stop himself from watching you. Eyes trailing along the paths you carve between old wooden chairs, and scowling men waving their hands at the staticky television set, upset by yet another bad call by the referee.
(He's always thought it was stereotypical to equate Canada with hockey, moose, bears, geese, and maple syrup but so far, he's seen nothing else play inside the pub—aside from a polar bear warning being issued out for northern Newfoundland—but sometimes, the shoe just fits.)
You sift through the throng carrying drinks in your hand and impish grin at the men you recognise. Words he can't hear, ones he isn't privy to, are spoken softly and reinforced with a small grin. Seeing it on your face, pointed away from him; meant only for another, is a white-hot dagger to guts, scraping across his delicate insides.
The flashes of anger are directed inward. Each stab is a reminder that they once were for him. That had he not gone and ruined a good thing, dangerous though it might be, you'd have been standing in front of him, curbing nonsensical requests over the bulk of his shoulder, unwilling to leave from your perch across from where he sat.
(Hindsight is a brutal, bitter mistress, but it has nothing at all on pride.)
He swallows it. Smokes. Pretends he's interested in the game that plays but it's just flashing colour on an oversaturated screen. A foreign language to his ears despite the words on the chyron flickering past in his mother tongue.
John thinks about packing it in for the night. Heading back to his empty hotel so he can think about you in peace—in vivid, fantastical images of equilibrium; comfort—and finds that might be for the best. For both of you. Some distance to soothe the ache he caused. To reacclimate back to strangers in a dilapidated pub. A sailor and bartender: ephemeral, the way it ought to be. The way it must.
With his dwindling pack of cigars slipped into his breast pocket beside the lighter he nicked from you ("people always seem to leave them behind in bars," you'd winked, handing him an ugly lighter in the shape of a bear with a pipe in his plastic mouth. "I picked out the one that made me think of you."), he finds himself at a loss for a reason to stay. All packed up. Ready to leave.
He raps his scarred knuckles on the table, a final farewell that he can feel heavily in his bones, filled with iron as they may be. Still. Still. It's for the best.
Whose, he still doesn't know. His own, undoubtedly, in that selfish sort of way that makes it feel selfless. Like it's the right thing to do even though he bloody well knows it isn't. Won't be. That he'll think about this moment in time when he's all alone at sea and cuss himself out as he readies for a squall.
John means to leave, but a man gets to you first.
The man makes a noise in the back of his throat. A complaint, maybe, but it's swallowed by the creak of the floorboards when he sways on his feet.
"Listen t'me, you—"
But you're not. You make a move to turn around, and he seems to realise you're not paying him any attention. Anger flickers over his slack face, and he's reaching for you with a clumsy paw before John has time to move. The moment he makes contact, fingers skating off the sleeve of your shirt, he's out of his chair, letting it clatter to the ground. The noise is swallowed by all the chaos. Murmurs, shouts. The music feels so out of place in this moment when he can feel his blood run hot, turning molten in his veins.
"Hey—!"
But your hand is gripping his wrist, pulling him off of you, before John can finish. Eyes narrowed, jaw set, you shake your head once before pointing to the door with your free hand.
"It's time for you to leave."
He pitches a fit. Petulant whinging that cuts through the noise. Vague insults hurtled at you, words of complaint that barely make you flinch.
John's rushing over before he can even think—thoughts all asunder, bouncing around his head in an unrefined mess of shorn noises and fervent anger—but you stop him with a jerk of your head. No, it says. I don't need you.
And you don't.
The swelling chaos dims and in the aftermath, he realises he's the only one standing. The only one hovering in your periphery as you shove a man twice your size away from the counter when he tries to swipe a bottle as he leaves.
Everyone is watching, wary, but there's an unspoken sense of understanding amongst them that makes him feel decidedly like an outsider, and wholly out of the loop.
Where he's from, if you see someone being harassed, you step in.
Things, apparently, are very different here.
He catches your eye when you turn back toward the interior after slamming the door shut, and there's a moment where he almost rushes to your side, checking you over for any marks that man might have left behind, but you're shaking your head before he can even lift his foot from the floorboards. As if you know. And maybe you do. Maybe you know him more than he knows himself. Maybe, maybe—
You give him another shake. No, it says, and the soft quirk of your lip echoes in his head, a soft: down boy that makes him bristle.
It's telling, of course, that he still heeds your wordless command. Hackles lowering, muscles unfurling from their rigid coil.
Your nod, then, is a soft purr that rolls through his guts like a marble. Good boy.
John feels leashed when he settles back into his chair. Anchored. All it takes is a nonverbal cue from you, and suddenly, he's tempered. Tamed.
As if to reinforce the thought, his hand strays to his chin, feeling the scarred, bare skin under his palm. All done because of a simple glance, a fleeting moment of curiosity from you.
He isn't sure how he likes the fit of it around his neck. Too tight, maybe. Dangerously claustrophobic. But it sits there, untouched. He has no desire to pull it off. To divorce the collar from his neck.
(Maybe, maybe, he thinks he could get used to the way it feels.)
As he settles in his chair, his eyes never stray from you, standing lax and unphased against the door, chatting idly to the patrons who murmur in tones too low for him to pick up over the rhythmic echo of the sea shanty and the slew of voices in the background, cheers from the hockey game that hasn't quite held his interest long enough for him to know the score. Nothing is amiss, it seems. As if bullying out men twice your size was a regular occurrence—not even newsworthy enough to pull gazes glued to the flashing television, or stop the minutiae of mindless conversations from happening in sparse passels around the pub.
But it changed something for him. He feels it in his chest, his guts. Something dislodged from the cornice, falling down inside of him in an endless spiral. A sudden freefall.
He comes to the startling realisation when you look up at him as you pat someone on the shoulder, smiling softly—all forgiven in an instant, the crevasse sealed over in a thick bed of cobwebs—that he wants. Has wanted since he first lumbered into the pub and was met with a raised brow, and a cheeky wink. Not from around here, are you? and he was gone.
Lost in the swell of you.
Your mouth moulds around the words, pleading with him over the heads of everyone else, wait for me.
But John had no plans to go anywhere else.
"I'm okay," you tell him hours later, hands buried in your pockets, eyes gazing up at the midnight blue sky. "Seriously."
There's a multitude of things he wants to say. All threads of lingering, unresolved anger brought on by that man who put his hands on you. Who thought he could.
Maybe a little bit of it is directed at you, too, for not letting him rip that man into pieces even though he knows it's not your fault. Leashed, he thinks, and rubs absently at his bare neck.
"Yeah?" He murmurs, voice raw. Eroded down to bare scraps, scorched and pulsing with the poison of anger. He tries to clear it. Swallows down the acrid tang that coats the back of his throat even still, hours later.
Your head rolls toward him slowly, chin still held loftily up to the sky, and when your eyes meet, he thinks of rogue waves. Capsizing in the middle of endless azure, exposed to elements and predators. To the murky depths below in burnt sapphire.
He swallows again, but it's hard to get anything down when his heart is in the way.
"Yeah, John. I'm good."
Your words take the shape of a breath, gently ghosting over a scraped knee. It's not meant to convince, but rather soothe, and something about that, about the softness in your eyes and way you speak tenderly, cautiously, as if he might startle, makes him feel hot beneath his collar. Flustered. Foolish. A litany of things he ought not to feel, but does because it's you.
(Because it's always been you.)
"Right," he grouses, and tries to find his way out of the canyons inside your eyes.
It's hard to escape when everything looks the same, when it all beckons him deeper. Stay, stay, it whispers over artfully crafted gorges and deep ravines, a stunning beauty that makes nature feel like a paltry imitation of the carvings in your irises.
In the sandy shores of a small inlet nearly eclipsed by the sea, you turn to him fully, eyes smouldering embers catching in the flush of the full moon, and say, thank you, John.
He scratches at the collar around his neck, and thinks about throwing away the key.
"What for?" He says instead, brows knitted together—a perfect pastiche of a fisherman's knot. It's rough: words scraped from the thick of his throat, raw and pulsing and dusted in smoke, but you don't baulk at the artificial ire that oozes between his nicotine-stained teeth. No. You lean into it with a smile.
"Defending me. Trying to, anyway," you tack on with a small huff at his expense, a finger poking at his inflated pride. In jest, of course, but it still makes him frown. "I guess I just got so used to sticking up for myself that I forgot how nice it was to know someone is looking out for me, you know?"
"Should be expected."
There's a heat simmering beneath his tone. An underlying sense of anger that hadn't abated entirely yet, just began slumbering. Dormant, but still burning. Still hot enough to hurt.
"Maybe," you hum, and the blitheness in your tone makes him bristle. Hackles raising. "But it's probably for the best."
"Tell me how none of those fuckin'—" There's a snarl in the back of his throat. He swallows. "None of them standin' up for you is for the best, 'cause it looked pretty fuckin' cowardly to me."
"If they defend me every time something like that happens, then it'll only be worse when they're not around. Most nights, it's just me working. I gotta know how to take care of myself just fine—"
"—shouldn't bloody 'ave to—!"
"—and I need them to know it, too. That if they try anything like that, I'll kick them out. I won't go screaming for help just because they're being rude. I'll handle it on my own because I have to."
It quiets him. Not enough to quell the anger burning in his chest, or the urge to tear them into pieces for sitting back, watching you get disrespected while they throw peanuts at the television screen, and jeer about something as arbitrary as a fucking game, but he finds something akin to understanding. Common ground.
It makes sense, suddenly, even though it sets his teeth on edge and makes his knuckles itch.
"No one else will do it for me, y'know?"
"I will."
The words tumble out before he can make sense of them in his head. A disconnect between his mouth and his thoughts, eroded by the smoke leaking into his throat. The fire in his chest.
A mistake, maybe, because they're futile. Pointless. More so a whim of pride, a flash of possessiveness just to stroke the smouldering embers of the ego you bruised earlier with the tip of your finger.
(Or maybe they're the afterbirth of his righteousness; that insatiable beast he conceived into the world he swore he'd save—no matter what—only to realise somewhere after leaking madness into the fibres that he was making more monsters than he was culling.
A lingering remnant of when he bore the burden of the world on his shoulders during a botched pantomime of Atlas.)
You know it, too. "You won't be around all the time, John."
He tastes salt in the back of his throat. It burns when he swallows. When the words that tore through the seam of his lips dissolve into ash, into smoke.
Your hand on his shoulder is meant to be placating but it feels like a dagger to his gut.
"I can take care of myself. Been doin' it all my life, anyway."
He can't make sense of it. Can't understand how your words fill the hollow crevasses inside of him until he feels more like a mortal man than an untouchable mountain.
You bring him back down to the solidness of land, of the earth. An anchor.
John touches his neck again. "Yeah," he rasps. "I get it. Now, let's get you home."
He thinks about you.
A lot would be an understatement considering how many times he's taken you to bed, pulled you down into the sheets with him. Tangled limbs. Rushed breath. He thinks of you now, too, with heavy eyes and a little smile, beckoning him forward.
His own illicit sanctuary. A place in his head where he ruins you over, and over, and over again until there's a permanent stain on the tips of his fingers, the back of his throat. A constant reminder of you—the way you smell, sound, taste—
It's been a while since he had a moment like this, when he could relax, feel himself—already half-hard when he palms himself through his boxers—and just—
Lose himself. Body melting into the sheets. Tension bleeding together into one mass that pools in his lower belly, coalescing into a tight knot in his groin. It spools, pulls taut, when he runs the flat of his palm down the length of himself until he meets the soft flesh of his perineum.
It's easy to tilt his chin up, eyes gazing at the seashell colouring of the popcorn ceiling, stroking himself in slow, unhurried rolls of his hand, and thinking of you. Your hand on him. Your breath tickling his ear, spurring him on.
"Come on, John," you'd say in that voice made to bring him to his knees. "You can go faster than that, can't you?"
He responds instantly to the faint echo in his head, grunting at the pleasure that races down his spine. Tugging on that tightly wound knot until it trembles.
His hand around the length of him is replaced with yours. Tentative, exploratory strokes from frenulum to his thickened base; up, up, a teasing swipe of your thumb across his weeping slit but only enough to make his hips arch off the bed, and then you pull away, down. Down. Over and over again. He thinks of the way your breath would feel ghosting over his temple. The press of your chest when you leave over his shoulder.
John rocks into it, hips undulating with each pass of the hand that is too gnarled, too scarred to be yours; lost in the fantasy of your presence around him, on him, in him.
Maybe your other arm would be tucked under the nape of his neck, bracketing him into your body. A safety net. A security blanket. You'd toy with his cheek—twee and gentle; a ginger touch to offset the illicit press of your thumb into his frenulum. Lean over, too, perhaps, and press those inviting lips to his. A soft kiss. Barely a whisper. A brush.
His tongue rolls over his bottom lip, chasing the phantom taste of you that isn't there. He imagines you'd taste like the sea. Briny, but mild. Salted winter melon. A sweetness, too, beneath the tart tang of iodine, but one that was metallic—copper. Iron.
Pleasure knots in his groin—tighter, tighter, tighter—and even with each stroke a pale imitation of your warm flesh on him, he finds the spooling coil building in a quick crescendo of bliss to be somehow more potent than it ever was. A feverish heat at the mere thought of you.
It builds. Builds. And breaks—
Your name is a broken snarl in the back of his throat as he spills over himself in thick, molten ropes. Each pulse of his heart floods more liquid heat onto his hand (hot enough, maybe, to burn), and he leans into the sudden deluge of a chemical frenzy ripping through his synopses—all liquid euphoria, static endorphins, and a heady rush of dopamine that makes the edges of his vision blur just a touch when he blinks his tired, heavy, eyes open, staring back up at the off-white ceiling.
The surge and plummet of adrenaline leaves him feeling fatigued. A bone-deep torpor that comes swiftly in the simmering aftershocks of his pleasure.
He could close his eyes now and sleep—even with the mess on his hand, come cooling against his heated flesh, growing tacky and uncomfortably wet as it sat there. The idea is more appealing than standing up and washing himself down, and in his sudden languor, he haphazardly lifts his hand away from his still-throbbing cock softening against his damp thigh, and pats the mess on his hand against the extra pillow he doesn't use. It's hardly the cleanup he needs, and he knows washing the dry come from the coarse hair on his thighs and groin is going be a nuisance in the morning, but he can't muster the energy to open his lids past half-mast let alone stand and hobble his way into the washroom.
(And maybe he doesn't want to see himself in the mirror right now. Doesn't want to contend with the same routine of thinking of you, getting off to the thought alone, and then slinking into the tub for a quick rinse of his regrets. Not tonight, anyway—)
So, he stays in bed, laying there in his own filth, and still thinks of you. With his eyes closed tight, he doesn't have to face the reality of your absence. Of his dirty whim that sullied you in his head (over and over and over again—). His loneliness.
And it's nice to bask in the glow. To imagine you beside him still.
John's never been as delusional as now when he can taste the Caribbean sun on his tongue. Feel the salt on his skin. He smells sand. Feels it under his back as he lays down with you curled over him, hand tucked against his chest where it belongs. Dosing under the shaded pyre. You'll catch fish in the morning. He'll take you out to places you'd never been, all of them. Every single one. Until the world is shaded with your fingerprints.
He's never been much into lyricism, but you make him contemplate the dividing line between prose and poetry, and where he fits between the two. The bridge, he thinks. The gaps between words, the space between letters: heart and soul (and the tangibility of them both).
He wants to go there with you.
The vision of you laying with him in sand embeds itself in the weakened link of his splintering resolve, eroding the chain away until it breaks, and the next night finds him sitting in the same spot, drinking the same whiskey, but his thoughts are subsumed by you.
Without it keeping him at bay, he makes a terrible decision—one he wishes he could blame on whisky, but he's sober in a way he hasn't been in years—but when he looks up at you, twenty minutes past closing after everyone has stumbled out of the pub, something blooms in his veins.
It's white-hot—hotter than the sensation of being shot in the thigh by a stray bullet when he was still figuring himself out in a battlefield—and dredges up dormant feelings he hasn't made room for since he was twenty-seven and fell in love in Ghana.
It's cacoëthes.
(But maybe it's been heading forward this all along. Ever since he saw you tug around a man twice your size, and wanted to bruise his knuckles on this stranger's enamel. The one who dared touch you. Disrespect you.)
John makes the awful choice to kiss you.
It starts with a look.
The night ends later than usual—a hockey game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Ottawa Senators draws a big, rowdy crowd of nearly fifteen people ("truly record-breaking numbers," you quip with a grin) that bemusingly celebrate the Senators' victory and mourn the Penguin's loss at the same time ("it's a cultural thing—Sydney Crosby plays for the Penguin's," you tell him as if it explains everything)—and when he finally pockets his cigars, the sky outside is already dusted with crops of mauve as the hazy sun tries to blink through the thick clouds of gunmetal and charcoal.
You wave to the fishermen on the boardwalk as they prepare their empty lobster cages for the morning haul, and he tries to think of every reason why he shouldn't be standing with you right now, puffing away on one of his last few cigars.
There are multitudes, of course, all of them eagerly buoying to the surface, and just as viable as the last. Just as concrete. But that's the thing about desire, isn't it? Reasoning is skewed. Malleable. For each con that is squashed by the claws of fatigue, a pro subsumes in its stead. They add up. The scales tip. And all at once, he's no longer oscillating between no and here's why, but how come.
How come he can't give in, if only just once?
But once will never be enough. He knows this. He knows it, and yet—
When John happens to glance at you from the corner of his eye, he finds you turned to him already. Watching him.
Despite what the furious stutter in his chest at this bare appraisal would lead him to believe, this isn't anything new.
(Neither is his reaction. The blood rushing in his ears. The hiccup of his heartbeat.)
You've always unabashedly worn your curiosity like this. Open, bare. Letting it moulder on the very ledge of a cornice for all to see when they looked into your eyes. Liquid gems, molten coins. They've always gleamed with a sense of misplaced curiosity whenever they rested on him; seemingly lost in the labyrinth of your thoughts as you tried to unravel the reef knot that is John Price.
He supposes it's the novelty of a man washing up on shore in the middle of what's meant to be the most boring season of the year—your words, naturally. Nothing ever happens during hurricane season, you mentioned to him once. The maritime is quickly forgotten about until summer when stupid tourists head to Halifax or Peggy's Cove in droves.
Until him, that is.
(Until you, as well.)
But the look you grace him with right now is somehow on the precipice of being both foreign and familiar at the same time. A muddled sense of jamais vu that seems to wrap itself around his throat, pressing taut to his pulse. Mocking him. Confusing him. It's all a muddled mess of known and unknown and—
Want to know. Need to.
He knows this look. Knows it as intimately as he knows the hand he used to stroke himself, pretending it was you. Your touch. It's want. It's—
Desire.
Intrigue.
You stare at him—unabashedly, as always; lost in your perplexing keenness for him, for the man he is (and the one he definitely isn't)—and John sees that same, misplaced rapaciousness in the shaded valleys and unfathomably deep ravines. It's an almost visceral hunger that seems to eclipse everything else; colouring the topography of your gaze in its wake. The glittering scales of a meandering coelacanth.
Getting caught looking at him in such a way does little to embarrass you. If anything, having his eyes meet yours seems to subsume want with need, merging the two until all that gazes back at him from that prismatic abyss is desire crushed into diamonds from the absolute pressure that leaks from the black holes in the centre.
He's been warned before about sirens and sea monsters, but standing in front of him with the raging ocean as your backdrop, he finds he cares very little for portends after all.
John gives you every chance to pull away, to tell him this is a mistake, that you don't feel the same way, that you couldn't possibly do this, but you ignore all of them. Every single one until his hand is around your waist, the other cupping your jaw, and your breath is on his tongue.
You make the first move. He doesn't know why that surprises him—you have this way about you that reminds him of rogue waves: an untameable suddenness, brash in everything you do; untempered by man and their flimsy metal cups in the ocean—but when you curl your fingers into the Sherpa lapels of his jacket, and wrench him into your sphere, tidally locked in your pull, he finds himself adrift. Lost. The only thing keeping him steady is you. Your touch.
Your lips are searing when they bite into his, bruising and all-consuming. He likes the burn of it.
It's a kiss just as much as it is a slap to the mouth. A reprimand. How dare you keep me waiting? And somewhere deep in his chest, something unfurls. Something comes loose. Wants to apologise, wants to beg forgiveness, but the words are stifled by your lips sliding against his, your fingers touching the parts of his cheeks that haven't known the feeling of another since he was twenty and grew it out as long as he could get away with it in the military. You hold him. Anchor him in place as you take, as you badger his body into yours, trying to syphon all of the air from his feeble lungs.
He lets you, rocking with your demands the same way he would a sudden squall, his body a ship in the vast clutch of your ocean.
The tip of your nose slots into the corner of his own when you tilt your head into the kiss, tongue sliding, liquid, molten, against the seam of his mouth. Humid breath paints the skin under his eye until it's tacky with condensation, and he wants to feel your breath on him everywhere. Wants to touch the places your breath ghosted over with bare fingers to feel the remnants of what you left behind.
(He wants it to stain him. Leave a permanent mark for all to see. A sailor claimed by the sea, by rogue waves, and the embodiment of a pelagic calamity in the shape of you.)
His lips part just enough to let the tip of your tongue slide in, to touch his in a gentle kiss. A perfunctory greeting for what will, hopefully, become routine because he knows what you taste like now—seagrass, fennel and yew arils—and doesn't think he has the strength to let it go. A new addiction forms somewhere in the catastrophe of his hindbrain, the same place that yearns for nicotine and alcohol to blur the rugged edges of a childhood he can't quite manage to let go of. One that bled putrid blood into his adolescence, his adulthood. That makes running his first thought in the face of anything that has the capacity to heal. Or sacrifice himself for some greater good he could never really bring himself to believe in, despite the words he preached like a scratched record—we dirty our hands so theirs stays clean. A fallacy, of course, like many things in his life. A broken, fractured homunculi trying to navigate a world it wasn't made for.
But you soothe those parts, don't you? Palliative comfort in the shape of something that has the measure to hurt, to ruin.
—and fuck, does he want to be ruined by you—
You pull away from him as if you can taste his debauchery, his need, on your tongue and want to skewer him through the heart with it. The distance feels vacant and endless: a devastating bergschrund.
You blink at him, eyes heavy and full of promises, of wants. The sight of your red tongue brushing over your wet bottom lip nearly makes him ascend to some spectral plane of existence where nothing but the alluring sight of you lives in his consciousness, and it's only your hushed words—raw and tempered—that reign him in.
"Come back to my house, John."
It's not a question. He knows it in his bones. Just like he knows it could never be one—never—because doesn't have the willpower to say no. And you know this, of course. Have known it from the beginning when you peeled back the rotting layers, flaying his walls from his skin just to learn his name.
("It's Price," he growled out, words masticating between clenched teeth. "John Price.")
He wears his want in cinder and ash. Feels the fever under his skin.
"Fuck—," he rasps, throat scorched. Brittle charcoal. The words taste like wood chips on his tongue. "What are we waitin' for then, love?"
The billowing sea breeze howls outside of your small house on the mouth of the inlet, an enchanting soundscape that seems to amplify the soft noises that spill from your lips at his touch.
You burn like the sun bearing down on the desert of the ocean, and he feels your scorching presence between the split of his shoulder blades, liquifying the knobs of his spine until it pools in the clefts of his back.
Boneless, broken, he loses all sense of himself as he ruts into you like a man who's never been touched before in his life—clumsy, selfish, and unpractised. Your pleasure is the equinox in the centre of his head, a reachable goal he strives for, but each shudder that leaves the column of your throat seems to shatter him into fragments. He wants, wants, wants: there's a war in his head, in his touch. Greedily, he learns your topography until it's ingrained in his marrow. Until he knows where each dip and fold, every scar and blemish, on your skin sits, waiting for the worship of his touch.
He yields to you. Offers himself up at your altar—yours for the taking—until his sacrifice is met in seasalt and bliss. It's by this flickering dawn that spills into your bedroom window, the one that faces parallel to the sea—always there, in the corner of his eye—where his resolve is laid to rest on a bier.
It burns on the pyre when your fingers thread through his hair, gripping tight as he falls into pieces in your arms, buried as deep inside of you as he can get. And it's here, safe in the bracket of your legs, spread wide to accommodate the staggering bulk of his body, he finds both nirvana and damnation—his own personal hell nestled in the crux of your thighs.
"Stay the night," you whisper to him, the command slurred on the tobacco that leaks from the burning tip of his cigar.
One down, he counts; two more to go. The sight of the dwindling pack seems to notch inside his aching ribs, bruised with the cuts you made into his marrow until a scar in the shape of your name formed, seems like a portend.
He stares at the brittle pieces of the tobacco leaves in the metal tin like they might divine the ancient wisdom of augers and the seers who gleaned hidden truths and hindsight in a teacup, but all he gets is the heady scent of nicotine for his search.
"Mm."
Your hands press against his naked back, feeling the taut muscles flex under your touch before they move around his midsection, fingers digging into the plush flesh of his belly—too much lobster rolls, he'd snarked when your teeth sunk into the softness put there by you; a fullness he hasn't felt since he was eighteen. You knead his skin, thumbing over the indents of your teeth, a perfect tattoo, before you hum in satisfaction, the sound of a cat eating its catch, that makes his spine thrum.
"Good," you husk into his shoulder blade, teeth peppering nips across his sun scorched skin. "'cause I'm not done with you yet, John."
He shudders. "Fuck, love—gonna send me into an early grave."
It draws a simmering chuckle from deep within your chest. Sparking embers. The heat thrills him.
"A lovely way to go," you murmur, hands drawing intricate webs over his torso, tangling through the coarse hair that gathers in dark swaths of brown across his body. "And I'll even give you a proper sea burial."
The thought alone strips his soul from this prison of bone and flesh. To be known so innately is a dangerous thing, he finds; so deceptively addicting, so achingly good, and he wants to run from it just as much as he wants to bask in the feeling.
His soul is hungering for something he's never tasted before—until now, until you—and that unquenchable devotion glues to the very essence of him; a tick burrowing into his skin until it rots.
He fucks you against the window running parallel to the sea instead. Unmaking himself in the clutch of you until your fingers thread him back into some semblance of a man with a soul made for the sea.
(A place he wants to go with you.)
The unread tobacco leaves in bone china end up spelling out the end in a red flash on his phone.
A voicemail is a cruel reminder of the looming deadline on the horizon.
Fixed 'er up fer ya, b'y. She'll be ready in a night or two. Right time for lobster, too, yeah? Anyhoo, call me when you get this.
What was once anticipatory now feels too much like being caught under a guillotine. He pretends his hands are not shaking when he calls the man back.
The man meets him by the harbour.
"Should take 'er out," he says, wiggling a tooth pick between his teeth. "You know 'er be'er than I do. Make sure she's good t'go, ya'know?"
He hums something that might sound like an assent to unpractised ears, but the false starts in his rib cage flares up, a deep ache that rattles through the scarred brackets and leaves the seam of his mouth in a muted snarl of discontent.
Ready to go, he thinks a touch cruelly in a shorn off form of self-harm. Just to make it hurt. Just to feel it agony ripping through the gaps between his bones.
Right. Right.
How is he supposed to leave when he left so much of himself inside of you?
"Come with me tomorrow. Want to show you something."
"Oh, yeah?" You murmur, brows bunching together in a way that makes his teeth ache. "And what's that?"
His thumb brushes your pulse. "Mm, 'bout time you met Captain."
Newfoundland lingers in the backdrop for most of the day, rising above the waters in a rocky formation of evergreen against dark blue.
You spend most of it leaning against the port, eyes wide in wonder at the absence of land, a mere pinprick in the vast sea, and he wonders if anyone has ever taken you out this far. Showed you something this haunting, this mesmerising.
(Selfishly, stupidly, he hopes he's the first.)
The sea is calm. Almost eerily so, but he basks in the gentle rolls of the waves, the serene waters. It's picturesque in a way, the sight of an old postcard with a basin of pure azure and molten yellow sun, haloed in soft rings of ocean.
As you fawn at the beauty around you, quiet in your musings, he grabs his fishing pole and sets out to catch dinner. John hasn't looked too deep into coastal fishing laws, but from your soft snort, he thinks it might just be on the side of illegal. Still. The coast guard isn't around, and he doesn't think you'll tell on him—at least not if he catches you a salmon and makes you an accomplice.
The day dwadles, sun fading into a stunning sunset.
He catches Atlantic Salmon, and spots a commercial lobster trawler in the distance. When he radios over, they offer a trade. Salmon for lobster. You laugh as the men toss over a cooler full of fat lobster for a wriggling salmon that nearly slips from his grasp.
It's in this exchange—and a day on the water—that he realises just how much he missed this. This. Being on the water. Dependant on no one but his own knowledge, his foresight. Always just on the side of illegal in coastal waters. Making trades, and bartering for dinner. It's peace. Or as close of an approximation a man like him might deserve.
A tried and true native of the land, raised on fish and crustaceans, you teach him the proper way to prepare lobster and Atlantic Salmon, sucking your teeth at his lack of spices in his threadbare cupboards. You make do, and he can't remember the last time he had something this good.
"Just wait," you huff. "When I have a full kitchen with proper seasonings, I'll make you something even better."
There's a tightness in his chest at the prospect of next time. "Can't wait."
It's a lie. Barefaced and ugly.
He offers beer instead. Brings out some of his hidden whisky.
"Not gonna be too drunk to get us back home, are you?"
Home. He is home. Has been since he kicked off from the marina, his hands curled around the leather steering wheel. The bumps of the waves against the hill.
He wonders what you think about all of this; his kingdom at sea is nothing special. Modest, in many ways. Sometimes the toilet in the washroom leaks. He only really has warm water on Tuesdays. Something with the tides, probably. Spiders have taken a permanent refuge in the closet adjacent to the kitchenette. He thinks he might have some exotic stowaway lurking somewhere, too. A mouse of some kind, maybe, from when he was in Madagascar for a brief interlude.
The boat is never still, always rolling with the waves. Rocking. He's grown used to the feeling of it. Much too accustomed to always moving, never being still, to ever feel any modicum of comfort on land.
Thinking about it, about returning back to the inn tonight when the water is this serene, and the moon is this sull, pitches something ugly in his chest. Reluctance. And maybe the urge to show off. To share.
"Want to spend the night?"
You make a comical picture with your fingers tugging desperately on the cork of a wine bottle you found under the sink, blinking at him owlishly as you process his request, and he smothers a laugh in his chest at the sight. He knows if he lets it out he'll never look at wine or owls without thinking about you, but maybe you're already ingrained in his head. Stuck there in places he can't reach, can't scrape out.
"What?" You ask, lightly. "Out here?"
"Why not? We're close to the Labrador Strait, too. Could drop anchor now. Head back in the morning."
"Is it—?" You stop yourself from finishing with a shake of your head, and a sheepish smile. "Nevermind. Yeah, um. Yeah, I'd—I'd really like that, actually."
Is it safe, he knows you were going to ask. The question would have made him roll his eyes, and bark out something that could have been a snort of derision or a condescending laugh. He was a bloody marine, he'd have griped. I know these waters better'n I know Liverpool.
But you didn't. You didn't ask.
The harshness of the nevermind sounded like a self-admonishment for even asking such a thing. It's possible he's reading too much between the lines, but he likes the implicit trust that bleeds through—a touch of hesitation stifled by the immediate certainty that John will keep you safe.
He likes the fit of it. The way it curls around his pride.
"C'mon," he murmurs. "I'll show you around."
"It's small," he grouses, a touch uncomfortable as you patter around the bedroom that's barely bigger than a linen closet. It smells like him, he reckons. All smoke, tobacco, and stale sweat. Nothing pretty—not like your sheets that smell of fresh pine resin, or your room the scent of cornflower.
The ship itself is considered a luxury on the ocean—old, but meticulously maintained—and its age bleeds through the panelled walls, and the clumsy decor. Built largely for dedicated seafarers, the cabin boasts two bedrooms (the captain's quarters being the largest, and the crewmates dorms still stained with rust from where the nails keeping the bunk beds in place during listing started to erode), a kitchenette, a bathroom, and a small space inside the helm that could be considered a small living room—squinting, of course, required. Still. It's home. It's—
The manifestation of his pride. His loneliness. His wants.
(The walls are drenched in his madness. Do you see his ghosts when you look around—)
"It's cosy," you volley back, barely paying him much attention as you prod at his bare-bones; his sanctuary. He pretends the words don't stroke his ego in the perfect way. "It must be quite the sight to wake up to a sunrise on the sea."
"Mm, it is."
It's unlike anything he'd ever seen before. A nearly endless roll of cerulean in all directions that almost blends seamlessly with the cyanic sky. Plumes of sea clouds. Birds swooping overhead.
Often, he finds curious sea creatures coming up from the depths to investigate his boat. Pods of playful dolphins arching through the waves. A mother whale and her calf, nearly the length of his sixty-foot sailer. Rays. The occasional shark when he's fishing, lured in by the struggles and the flash of blood in the water. The feeder fish congregate beneath his boat, picking at the barnacles growing or the smaller fish gathering there for safety. It becomes its own ecosystem after a while, drawing in Remoras, various sharks, tropical fish, and barracuda.
He mostly gets avian visitors resting on his hull. Great Albatrosses and Cormorants. The odd Pelican closer to shore. Mollymawks, Northern fulmar.
The open ocean is a vast desert. Sometimes he goes days without seeing any signs of life. It comes with a sense of peace that is indescribable—an awe deep-rooted in his bones, one tinged with fear of the yawning abyss that rolls out in all directions as he knows, without a doubt, that he is less than a mere pinprick in the sea. Humbling. Awe-inspiring. It all coalesces into an experience he can't put into words. One that he yearns for when he's on dry land.
One that he wants to show you. To share with you.
A silly whim, of course. Strangers don't traverse the pelagic zone together.
He shakes it off. Recalibrates. Tries to centre himself, and shuck the thoughts of waking up to a perpetual sunrise with you. The ochre crest of it illuminates a deep blue sea for miles and miles; bare from pollutants that seep into the aether near the coast. Lights that dim the coruscating beauty above.
But as much as he thinks sunrises and sunsets are a thing of beauty, he knows there's something else you'll like much more.
"C'mon," he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. "Wanna show you somethin'."
You don't hesitate this time. "Lead the way, captain."
(And oh, how the coy honorific rumbles through his marrow.)
That something is the reason he became so addicted to the sea. It's a darkness unlike anything else he'd ever experienced before—a complete absence of light that usually pollutes the sky in the cities, one that people often think is escapable in the countryside away from bustling metropolises.
That has nothing on the ocean after dusk.
To describe the sensation would be pitch blackness. A black hole. Everything is swallowed up by it—complete antimatter—until the horizon and ocean merge together in an unfathomable pit of tenebrousness. It looks like spilled ink across a page, everywhere the eye turns is shrouded. Indescribable.
When he's in an inlet, or off the coast of an inhabited island, he used to turn the floodlights of his ship off just to see what he couldn't see, and it was endless. A vacuum. Terror drenched over him in almost equal measure to the absolute awe that rolled through his chest like a tsunami.
It was the infinite darkness of space mirrored on earth. An uncanny image. Pure nothingness.
There was more light when he closed his eyes than when he had them wide open. Phosphenes brighter than the world around him.
A harrowing, everpresent experience that notched false starts into the parentheses of his ribs, and made him ache when he wasn't surrounded by water.
He keeps only the navigation lights on when he leads you to the deck, and the sharp gasp he hears makes him burn, knowing exactly what you must be seeing. Feeling.
Even at the very tip of the ocean, barely with your toes in the vast abyss, the absence of light pollution gives way to a stunning artefact in the ancient sky. Nebulae clouds. Gleaming stars. In the distance, he spots the coruscating light of Mars, visible to the naked eye.
The moon sits in the equinox, casting out a blanket of light over the rhythmic swell of the still-black water. It paints the surface lily white.
He stands beside you, eyes greedily taking in every flickering emotion across your awe-slacked face. Each expression categorised and filed away. A preview to the experience going inside you as you gaze up at the night sky.
"John…" it's a hushed whisper, drenched in a reverence so thick, so palpable, he thinks he can reach out and catch the ghosts of your wonder on the tips of his fingers. "It's…"
You trail off, but he knows. He knows.
His hand brushes yours. "Beautiful, ain't it?"
Wordless, and maybe a little bit speechless, you nod, eyes still fixed on the indistinguishable horizon as your hands slip into his.
The stars are still caught in your eyes even after he leads you to a small sitting area with steps leading into the water. He warns you about sea lamprey and cookie cutter sharks when you try to dip your feet into the basin, laughing at the small squeak you give when you wrench your toes out of the water, drawing your knees tight to your chest.
Sharks hunt at night, he reminds you with the same cadence as a conman.
The sideward glance you give in response to his mirth spumes a strange effervescent feeling in the pit of his chest. Humour for the sake of it. He can easily imagine many nights like this with you, basking in the bloom of the ocean, the splashes in the distance, the steady rock of waves licking against the boat, and it's something that seems to syphon the breath from his lungs, knocking him offkilter for a moment. Skewing his perspective.
It's odd, he finds, to be so attune with someone so fast. To connect on a level that feels deeper than what it is. It jars him as it shatters through that ironclad resolve he wore around his heart.
"Why the sea?" You ask after a moment, thumb skating through the pebbles of condensation that gathers around your bottle.
The sight of your wet finger shouldn't be as enticing as it is, but the way you stroke the nozzle makes his stomach burn with a heat he hasn't felt in a while. It's gentle. Soft. He wonders if you'd be that tender with him—
The thought is shattered when you glance at him, eyes searching for an answer hidden in blooming blue. There's muted curiosity eked into the divot between your brow—unconsciously done—and he forces himself to turn away lest he reach out and soothe the wrinkle for you.
(You never know how much you furrow your brow around him. Price isn't sure if that's a portend, some archaic warning of the inevitable frustration you'll feel toward when all of this is over. When the hurricane season passes, and the waters are once again chartable—
Another thing he doesn't want to think about.)
He chews on the question for a moment, making a show of reaching for the—nearly empty—carton of cigars from his breast pocket (another run to Cuba is imminent, he reasons, and tries to convince himself he's not stalling). Deft, practised fingers pull one out, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger as he measures just how much of himself he wants to give away to you.
(All of it. Every part—)
The paper absorbs the whisky staining his lips when he skewers it between his teeth, a futile effort to keep the hollowness between his lungs and ribs from aching. He thinks about blaming the curdling weight in his stomach on the thought of a ruined cigar—soaked tobacco won't draw as good as dry—but he knows himself better than that.
It's the suddenness of your query, maybe, but a part of him had been waiting for this very question from the onset of—this. You, him. Together. It seems to be one of those things that just comes up, doesn't it? An unavoidable collision into abject disappointment.
In all his past flings—calling any of them relationships feels juvenile for what it was: quick, ephemeral pleasure in a foreign land, always lasting just long enough to patch up his boat; he won't disrespect the partners he had by giving it more potency than it deserved—this had been the epoch. The moment when they realised he was never really in it. That his foot was already slipping over the ledge of his boat, head full of the places he'd go next. Always alone. Without company.
Some take it in stride. They know not to expect much in terms of commitment, or loyalty, from a man who reeks of the sea, and wobbles on land. They don't begrudge him the briefness of the affair, or the lack of a promise to write, or call, or see them again, some other time. When you pass through here next… always seems to be the sentiment at the cronis. The end of them. It never goes anywhere, but it's never finished, either—because it never really began, did it?
He rarely goes to the same place twice unless he needs to (Barbadian whisky, Cuban cigars, fish and chips in Liverpool for the holidays notwithstanding).
And despite how many times he's been asked this very same question, usually with less clothes on, he never really has an answer. Not one that's enough.
"Where else would I be?" He muses instead, blinking up at the indigo sky. It's an unforgiving nothingness up there, too, isn't it? "Workin' some job in an office? Military? Nah, would bore me too much. M'better off at sea."
"All alone?" You fill the gap he didn't realise he left empty. "Isn't that—"
He doesn't think he can bear to hear you say it—
"Yeah."
—so he doesn't let you.
His cigar tastes stale. Wet tobacco. Ashes. He draws in a deep hit on the next inhale but it curdles in his mouth, leaks poison into his bloodstream. He feels dizzy with it. Offkilter.
When he invited you to see his ship, half of it was—admittedly—a euphemism. A thinly veiled come on. A facsimile of romance. Who wouldn't, afterall, want to drift out to the open ocean, making love—or some sad version of it—under the stars on a clear night.
He'd take you to the spot where land was swallowed wholly by the horizon, until all you could see was the midnight blue ocean pressing down on all sides. Gentle waves rocking the ship. The stars coruscating in the indigo sky like glittering diamonds held up to the light. The murky haze of Juniper in the distance. A splash from a whale breaching the surface.
It would have been a nice evening. He'd have drinked whisky with you—smuggled out from his secret stash of the best kind you could find in the Caribbean—and taught you how to smoke a cigar.
You'd have laid down beneath the stars, head swimming with the buzz of alcohol. John would have leaned over you, charting the open awe in your gaze as you stared up at the heavens.
Maybe you would have tried to ask a question, or marvel at the wonders of the world that might have only ever been seen by you. The first person to take in this view in all of history. Considering the vastitude of the ocean, it would be a real possibility. The very first. He'd give that to you. The first, the last, the only. All yours.
In return, he'd steal a kiss. Swallowing the question from your lips with a slow, sensual roll of his tongue grazing yours. All coy and soft. Saccharine. You'd taste of whisky. He'd drink you down in several mouthfuls, unable to get enough, until you were keening into the night, begging for more. More, John, more.
It blankets his thoughts, and the regret he feels at the loss is potent. Fragments of a good night flash before him—your fingers curling around the quilt he laid out on the deck, digging those talons into the meat of his shoulder until it breaks skin: a permanent scar. A jagged, silver meteor across milky flesh; he'd catch a glimpse in the mirror and think of you. Whisper-soft kisses. Your body opening up for him, eager and needy, calling out in a siren's song for more.
(Who is he to deny you when you beg so prettily?)
Instead it metastasises inside of him. Malignant and pestiferous. Leaks rot into his bloodstream until all he can taste is the petrified residuum of regret, bitter and acrid.
Some selfish part wanted something nice for himself. A respite from the eventual end careening toward him at a speed he can't avoid.
The ruined tatters of it simmers in the air. A noxious miasma that seems to shake something inside of you loose. Maybe you see it, too. The loss. The end. The eventuality of a bitter, and quick, conclusion.
You're quiet even as realisation darkens across your brow. Flattens the awe in your eyes with the cold douse of water to a burning flame. Clumped ash piles around a damp campfire.
The flames were not smothered slowly, gently, like they should have been, like he wanted them to. No. No. They were snuffed out in a quick end. Brutal and unforgivable.
And you say: "oh."
As if you get it, but you don't. You don't because you think about forever when you look at him. It's not your fault, though—never. Because he hasn't said a word about leaving even though it stuck to his teeth, tarry and vile. A resinous stain he chews everyday, blackening his teeth until they rot.
But he's a coward. A fool. The taste of you is sweet enough to drown out the bitterness on his tongue, and maybe he's using your kindness a bit too much—no. No. Not maybe. Certainly. Definitely. He's using the cloying taste of you as a buffer to everything weeping from the cesspit inside of his chest.
Then: "oh."
It's almost prophetic in a way. Cyclical in its heartache.
He wants to apologise, but he isn't sure where to start. How does he say sorry for something of this magnitude?
He doesn't. He can't.
John lets it necrotise instead.
"Well," you say after a moment of silence. "When are you—?"
You don't finish. Can't, maybe, and he doesn't begrudge you the inability to utter that succinct finality. Not when he doesn't think he could, either.
So, he says, "soon."
But you ask: "how soon?"
And he's reminded, quite vividly, of packing his things in the back of his nineteen ninety-five forest green Tata Estate when he was just shy of eighteen. His dad fuming on the porch.
You're nothing without me, he'd spat.
He was right, of course. Despite everything he tried, the only place that ever gave him a chance was the military solely for the thinly concealed awe that leaked in whenever he uttered his last name.
But there was freedom in leaving. In skirting around the army for a place in the Royal British Navy—separate from the shadow of his father, his grandfather, but still riding on their coattails. John quickly found sanctuary at sea. At the unignorable distance put between himself and all the terrible memories in Hereford.
In the middle of the ocean, that bastard's shadow couldn't reach him.
And now—
Nothing does.
How soon, you ask, but the real question should be: how dare you.
"Mm, a day, maybe—if the weather holds."
And it will. He's checked the forecast meticulously. Radioed in and asked about that pesky hurricane that seemed to fizzle out without much fanfare afterall. All the answers he got were the same. Perfect window, they say, is between dawn and mid-morning. There's gonna be some heavy winds on the coast, but if you set sail early enough, you'll miss it entirely.
"Ah," you murmur, and there's just the faintest echo of your realisation at uncovering yet another one of his half-truths. You know he'll be gone the moment he drops you off on the harbour. "Okay."
John doesn't mean to put all of this on you so quickly. Everything just spiralled, spun, until it was a big, tangled mess beneath his feet. Time a mere whisper in the wind. His absence is a glaring black hole that you can't avoid.
It's all pithy excuses that do little to assuage the weight of everything he'd done, but you take it right on the chin like he knew you would. A sharp nod. The barest hint of a frown.
That is the only thing you can do, isn't it? Swallow it whole and try not to choke on it because no promises have ever been uttered between him or you. Nothing to substantiate this growing, cancerous lump of emotions that feel too fast and too slow, and too—
Dangerous. Perfect.
In his silence, a crater forms again, and he's reminded how much he prefers the sea to people; gyres to love. The brittle embrace of his cabin to the warm arms of a lover.
He was made for the ocean. Meant to sink into algae blooms, and discover reefs untouched. To battle waves bigger, more meaningful than himself, and find sustenance on crated bartletts and scored tuna.
But—
But.
His hands curl around your waist, pulling you back into the broad expanse of his sun warmed chest. The heat of him liquifies your spine, and you melt, readily, into him with what might be a sigh.
It's all so quick, isn't it? And yet, he can think of nothing else except the almost perfect torture of waking up beside you each morning. Of suffusing his atoms to yours.
"Come with me," he murmurs into your hairline, breathing in the scent of you. Loam. Pine resin. Soft and earthy. And that's what you are, aren't you? Made for the land. The earth. Gaia. Terra. Can he really take you from this place and expect you to live like him on the sea?
You don't answer. He feels the disappointment like a searing knife to his gut, but he understands. Gets it. This isn't the sort of proposal a sane person would make to someone they've known for only a few, short months.
He wonders if you think he's only saying it to get into your pants. He probably isn't the first—and definitely wouldn't be the last—to make a litany of false promises just to taste you on his tongue, but he means it. Means it with every fibre of his body. Captain is roomy. Has always been too big for one person—too lonely. But it's a heavy question. A big ask. One that he selfishly presses into your hands as he litters your neck with kisses sharpened with the edge of his teeth. Leaving his mark on your skin. A semi-permanent stain only he knows is there.
It's easy to pretend this won't be the last time when he lays you out on the sheets, fingers digging into your skin as if he was trying to crawl inside of you—and maybe he is. Maybe he wants to. Maybe he could stay suffused to your ribcage for the rest of his life, waking up and falling asleep to the sound of your beating heart, and die a happy man. For once in his life, something that belongs to him that isn't shadowed by ghosts or regret.
(Something he will never, could never, deserve.)
There's something heart achingly desperate about the way he clings to you. Folds himself over you, murmuring promises and pleas into the bruised skin of your neck. Soft murmurations easily swallowed by the sounds you make as he ruts into you at a maddening pace. All clumsy and unrefined because he refuses to let go of you. Refuses to unglue his skin from yours, his teeth from your neck.
He's never had it like this—drenched in sweat, pinned in place over top of you like a weighted blanket; sloppy, messy—but he feels the curl of addiction setting in when he feels the hiccups you make when he pushes in just so. When your flesh dents under the tips of his fingers, and he feels your bones in his grip. Each moan, every tremble and quiver somehow magnified in the small cabin that's much too big for one person.
John wants to take you to this reef he stumbled onto off the Azores. Wants to walk on the sandy atoll, and fuck you under the stars. The first—and only—people on earth to feel the white sand under their skin, to whisper into the inky black of night.
You'd like it there, he thinks. This lonely, isolated patch of land just barely rising out above the ocean. Filled to the brim with tropical fish, and hammerheads. Sea turtles. Orcas chasing seals in the distance.
He presses his lips to your hairline, and breathes life into this little picture of you on the shore, whispering promises wrapped in desperation, devotion, into your skin.
"John," you gasp, and he's not sure if it's a reprimand—please, please, please shut up, stop talking about that because you know I can't, I can't—or a plea—take me, bring me there, please—but he doesn't stop. Can't. He's too invested in this picturesque fantasy, the same one he dreamed about when he fucked his fist to the thought of you. "John, please—"
His veins are filled with blood-red wine. A sudden potent cocktail that makes him dizzy. Drunk on the wisps of ethanol that burrow deeper into his body until it floods his atrium.
John wants to lean into it. Relish in the white-hot heat of it all. Wants to drag you down into the sand, into the unending sea, and stay there forever, just at the cusp of where land meets water. Your own kingdom in the domain of Poseidon. Children of Phorcys. Pontus.
You grip him tight, and he thinks like this he could pretend it's not the last time. That when your body shudders beneath him, it's not out of sorrow or finality.
"John," you say, but he can't bear it. He kisses you instead. Drows in the taste of you until his head spins. Spins, spins—
He wakes up in a tangle of limbs. Your arm strewn across his broad chest, anchoring him to the bed below. Your head nestled in the crux of his armpit, nose pressed tight to the swell of his ribcage. Mouth open, he notes, drooling into wry curls that blanket his torso in swaths of dark umber.
With you very much cocooned to his side, thigh trapping his pelvis down, he feels the sharp sting of claustrophobia raking talons over the bone encasing his eyes. He's buried under you—your body the soft swell of tumulus—and for a moment he nearly forgets himself. Nearly bolts from the bed, your arms. The room. Running, running—it reminds him too much of being a captive. Tied down. Restrained. Unable to move of his own free will—
But you mumble something in your sleep, the words lost to the blood rushing in his ears, and he finds the pieces of himself he'd lost. Lulled, almost to the point of complacency, by your breaths ghosting across the thick, coarse hair on his chest. Rhythmic. Calming.
He leans into it. Buries himself deeper.
You smell of sweat, sex. Fennel. He burrows his nose into your crown, breathes in the scent of you until his lungs burn. He wants them to scar over with just the thick scent of you. To leave a mark so deep, so permanent, that each time he inhales, all he can taste in the back of his throat is the lingering residuum of you.
There's this earthiness to you that feels like digging his feet into sand, and he wants to slink deeper into the embrace, into you, but there's a lingering forethought in his head that he ought to get up. That this moment of brief comfort will come at a cost, with its teeth bared and wrapped around his bones, and it's a price he can't afford to pay.
There's an almost cognitive dissonance between what his body wants, and what he needs to do.
It takes most of his willpower to divorce himself from your clutch, but he does. Slowly. Reluctantly. With his fingers leadened with torpor.
Regret is the feeling of cold wood under his feet. His arms relieved from the weight of you. Fix it, something inside his chest screams, but he can't. Can't.
He doesn't look back when he leaves the small bedroom that smells of you. Not that it matters.
In the separation, he finds he cut a little too much off from himself, leaving more of himself with you than he intended.
John doesn't expect much. Hasn't, really, since he set sail with his compass pointed away from home, and threw each sorrowful piece of himself into the reefs he encountered along the way.
It's the same when he gathers everything together in the morning, running through a mental checklist of what needs to be done before he sets off into the mid-Atlantic, hopeful to reach Bermuda within four, maybe five days. From there, it would be nearly fifteen days before he reached the Azores, some nine thousand and twenty nautical miles between the destinations.
He expects the winds this time of year to be between zero to twenty three knots. Waves, at most, around four to nine metres. He can keep up with it all, he's sure, but he's feeling less inclined to make the trip solo, and thinks, as he trawls back to shore with you sleeping in the cabin still, if he might pick up a small crew in Carolina before setting off. Or maybe he'll take solitude until he heads into the Azores. He isn't sure. The only thing he is certain of is that, for the first time in years, he doesn't want to be alone at sea.
An oddity, of course. John always wants to be alone.
(Until you—)
The notion is tucked away into the space inside his head where all the things he doesn't want to think about go to moulder. To rot. The idea that he's more gangrenous parts than man sits idly behind his teeth, a fleeting whim, but that, too, is shoved aside. Buried.
—like the weight of you on him. His own personal grave, a tumulus—
Another limb severed at artery. Left to bleed. To rot. He considers leaving it out, making it hurt. Salt to the wound he has no intention of healing.
He cauterises it instead, and uses the flame to spark up his last cigar for the occasion.
(There's nothing worth celebrating, but he thinks he's due a belated birthday gift to himself.)
The brackish waters in the inlet are muddied with loess, and he considers taking the longer arc into the harbour to avoid the sudden swelling of waves lapping at the sides of his vessel. Pure pride, of course. He's not a captain of a dirty ship—an oxymoron at best and a idling thought that takes the shape of stalling for time—but he trudges forward in spite of the twitch in his knuckles, the urge to notch his wheel just everso slightly to the right.
It passes, and Newfoundland curves out of the waters in a splotch of green against dour grey. Another overcast morning. The inlet, he'd heard on the radio, is dense with fog trickling down from the rolling hills in the background of this rugged landscape.
Fog on the ocean isn't rare. With a simple flip of a switch, he changes his visualisation from naked sight to sonar, and leans back on the balls of his feet, blinking restlessly into the thick plumes of smokey-white.
The cabin door rattles when you open it—the only indicator that you're awake—and the sound sits heavy across his shoulders. A noise he thinks he could get used to hearing.
"Give'er a shake," he calls, voice ashen, thick from sleep. He hasn't spoken a word since he radioed in to let them know he was moving down the channel. That was nearly two hours ago.
You appear in his periphery, wrapped up in a shawl he keeps at the end of the bed. One he thinks he picked up when he was working on a shipping vessel in Pacific, just after he'd split from the navy, and was docked for a week in Taiwan because of bad weather.
It looks good on you. The colours accentuate your features in a way that makes it difficult to focus on the black screen of the sonar, but you make it easier for him when you pad closer to where he stands, yawning around a good morning as you fic yourself to his side, reaching for him.
You curl against him as he steers into the estuary, one arm tucked around the small of his back, and the other above his groin in a sideways hug. A small shiver wracks through your frame when the chill from the frigid waters sneaks in through the open companionway of the helm, and you burrow deeper into his side, nose nuzzling against his bicep to keep warm. The weight of you is comforting. Steady.
It's a clumsy dance to free his arm, but he does it somehow without dislodging you in the process, and lifts his arm, steering with one hand through the maw of the Labrador Strait, before he quickly loops it around your neck, keeping you tight to his side. You fall into him in a hurry—maybe from desperation to keep the bitter cold at bay or for some strained, final moments of closeness before he leaves the docks, and you.
The silence is heavy. A potent cocktail of shaky uncertainty admixing with all the regret he feels for not acting on his impulsive feelings sooner. It sits low, thick, in his guts, and vacillates between mocking him for what could have been weeks of satiating himself on the fill of you, and taunting him for starting this in the first place.
Especially when he knew exactly how it was always meant to end.
And in a rather vicious moment of cruelty, that particular ending bobs up from the brackish waters with its stark brown oak pillars cutting through the dense fog. He doesn't need sonar to see the pier in the distance. Three clicks to the west.
His throat pinches tight at the sight of it—rather irritatingly unassuming in its lacklustre beginnings, but a garish knife to chest all the same. It constricts. He tries to swallow but can't get the weight around his neck to receed.
He takes his hand off the wheel, scratching at the raw skin along the column of his neck.
His jostling seems to wake you from your sleepy stare out the window. You clear your throat. He tenses. Guts wringings themselves into a frenzied coil. Don't, he wants to say. Don't speak. Don't say anything—
"Listen, Price," you start clumsily, cautiously. And despite knowing where this is going—some apology for why you can't go with him, for why you're saying no—he makes a noise to dissuade you from continuing. He gets it. He does. It's a big ask to have someone give up several months of their life to traverse the open ocean with a stranger.
"I know. S'alright, love. I'll—" the words are bitten through when he realises where they're headed. The offer to call. Or write. Things he knows he won't ever get around to doing, but the loose attempt to placate is better than hearing whatever you might say. A selfish need to keep the silence.
"No, listen," you stress with a huff. He hears the eye roll in your tone, and fights back a scoff at the image. "You're stubborn, you know?"
It's nothing he's never heard before but it still makes him laugh—some broken, ugly thing in the base of his throat. Clawing up his oesophagus.
After a moment of silence, you nuzzle your cheek against his peck, pressing a soft kiss to the edge of his heart.
"I'm not a sailor, and this is probably the craziest thing I've ever done in my whole life, but—" his heart leaps, banging against the cage of his ribs, still scarred with your name.
"—love—"
"—I don't want to just write you. Or—or wait for a phone call. I don't want to—"
He hears the click in your throat when you swallow. Feels the herringbone floor open up beneath his feet, plunging his aching heart into the empty maw of his stomach. Still. Through the blooming sense of hope tangling vines around his falling heart, he reaches for the water bottle on the console, wordlessly passing it to you to drink.
You sniff, and it's an ugly, wet noise that sends a shudder through his being. A sound he could hear, happily, for the rest of his life.
(Sappy, tragic fool—)
"How long do I have to pack?"
If he'd been a lesser man—or maybe a better one; a good one—he would have crumbled. But he's too grizzled to take his eyes off the shoreline, and maybe—just maybe—too fucking scared to. He doesn't want to look down and find this whole thing has been some horrific joke. Doesn't want to see the derision in your eyes as you ask him why you'd ever pick him, a stranger, over the sanctuary of land. Your home, even.
But he doesn't doubt you.
It's an odd juxtaposition, John finds, but he's always been the sort to work in strings of abstract hypocrisy, hadn't he? Implicit trust in the men around him, but not enough to ever let go of the urge so just do everything on his own. To shoulder the burdens a man like him was seemingly built to carry.
(And made to crack under the weight of them; a thousand fissures that were small enough to go unnoticed—until Gaz grabbed him by the lapels, shoving him against an iron door just to keep him from throwing an innocent man to his death for no other reason than his notched sense of safety—but big enough to leak a caustic ugliness into the word that threatened make the men around him bonesick.)
But he isn't thinking about that right now. Or, rather, he shouldn't be—
Because he believes you. He just believes in himself less.
So, he has to ask. Has to. "Are you sure? Hard to change your mind when you're in the middle of the bloody ocean, love."
The exasperated huff let out into his bicep seems to be the only answer he'll get from you on that particular topic, but it's not enough. Despite the miffed squeeze you give when he pulls his arm back, resting his hand against your cheek to pull your face back far enough to peer into your eyes, you go along with his demands, soft as they are. Maybe the way his thumb brushes along the curve of your cheekbone quells the stubbornness that brims at having your choice picked apart until it was nothing but bones. All just to satisfy his own internal dilemma.
Or a mockery of one, anyway.
"You gotta be sure," he says, and winces when it comes out rougher than he intended. "This is a big leap. It isn't go to fuckin' Tesco's on a Sunday—"
"First of all," you mumble, eyes narrowing up at him. "We don't even have Tesco's in Canada so that comparison is useless to me. Second of all—" and suddenly, all of that bravado falters. Shakes. You glance away from him—in askance, maybe, at your stutter, at his inability to take something someone tells him at face value.
"Love—"
There's a fire in your eyes when you turn back to him. A defiant tilt to your chin when it lifts. Sure, and firm, and a little bit proud—drenched in the same shade of stubbornness as himself—and the sight is an electrical shock to his system. A jolt to his chest. One that hangs, heavy, around the nape of his neck, the drape of his shoulders.
"I'm sure," is all you say.
And it's enough. Inexplicably, overwhelmingly—enough.
"Now, how long until we set off? I just need to get some stuff in order before we leave, but I can hurry it as much as—"
It goes against every rule in the book to take his eyes off the horizon and his hands off the wheel, especially this close to shore, but he needs—he needs to touch you. To know. To feel the commitment under your skin like an electric hum.
"However long you need, love, fuck—" his lips are on yours, stifling the rest of what he meant to say in the taste of you. "Whatever you want, whatever you need—" he makes promises he might not be able to keep, but he thinks if he could, he'd steal the stars and the moon, and let you wear them like pretty gems.
It'll never come to fruition because all he can really give you is a boat and a broken man who is only good at sailing the seas to escape everything that might get too close. None of it seems to matter. Not to you. Never to you. Every wall he's thrown up has been meticulously chipped down, and this, he finds, is no different.
You lean into him, heedless of the war in his mind, and breathe in deep. Inhaling the scent of stale tobacco, sex, and sour sweat. There's something facetious about the way you hum into the kiss, nails scratching along his crown, as if you're not committing nearly a year of your life to a man you watched crumble at the altar of your feet just for a sip of you.
"I've always wanted to go to Spain."
He groans a little into the kiss. Can't help the noises that spill out when you start mapping whimsical plans into something concrete. Something tangible.
(Permanent, if you'll let him.)
"We'll go. Spain, Portugal, Liverpool, Italy, Cuba, Jamaica, Fiji—" he names each place between a searing kiss and keeps one eye open, listed toward the horizon. He says it all in a hush, caught on the tendrils of desperation. Urgency. There's a quiver in his voice. Blood in his throat. "I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Just name it, love."
And you just smile like you know he will. That those words, caked in some amalgamation of earnestness and madness, are a promise. An oath.
"Anywhere," he swears again, brassbound in certainty, tangled in seagrass.
Your name scars the brackets of his breastbone. Notched into marrow. He feels it heavy in his ribs when he pulls you closer, wanting nothing more than to sink into you until your veins are filled with him.
Anywhere, he thinks, hushed in its reverence as the levee keeping everything he let rot cracks in your hands. Always.
YOU—
There's a certain dreariness that comes from living by the ocean, one that's often difficult to put into words or explain to someone who hasn't spent their entire youth being told, never turn your back on it. Never trust it.
(It, of course, because somewhere along the line, the sea stops being a place, a thing, an artefact, and becomes an entity all on its own. A living, breathing manifestation with its primordial history, its own mythology, all so distinct from anything someone on land could ever dream up.)
Because despite what you might wish, the sea will never be your friend. It's incapable of distinguishing the difference between affection and malice, and shows its love by dragging you to the darkest depths imaginable until your lungs fill with its briny breath and your drops to the floor, a human-sized whalefall.
The ocean loves you in the worst way.
It wants to make a tomb of you. A graveyard of algae covered bones. Bloated and unrecognisable. Picked apart until nothing remains but the ghost of you treading its pool.
In spite of this, the ocean doesn't scare you as much as it should. It's a constant in your life. Permanent. Careless guard your iron shackles.
(And maybe it's a little bit deeper than that because you never really understood the difference between obsession, devotion, and fear when they all make you feel the same.)
And being so far out from the rest of the people who live along the very same coast—well. That, too, is hard to simplify.
Life by an unpopular harbour isn't as busy as someone might assume. With its deadened boardwalks, gimmicky shops, and lack of personality to draw a crowd or any would-be tourists, it stagnantes. The place begins to look like a tchotchke. A painting on a faded, sunbleached postcard rather than a cohesive ecosystem. The cogs are rusted and broken, and the delineation between them and the people begins to blur.
And maybe that's because time feels slower in this liminal space perched between the sea and the swell of a bucolic dreamland, as if it's drenched in molasses. Bound with a ball and chain. Boring simplicity, perhaps.
Sloughing along is the most apt descriptor you think of to describe how your tarry-thick time is spent.
Work life balance loses its meaning when you feel the same at home as you do behind a counter. Listless. Lacklustre. It's hard to find inspiration when you've been to every nook and cranny in the valley. When all secrets have been exposed thrice over, and gossip is as stale as the bread Lucy always brings to the potluck each year.
It's fine, of course.
Work. Home. Work. Sometimes, you'll drive down to Halifax. Maybe stop at Shoppers Drug Mart and squint at the overpriced brands on the too-white walls. But something brand name at Marshalls for more than you can afford to placate that gnawing sense of unease that comes with realising your life can be summed up in three paragraphs or less.
Age does that, you find. Because when you're stuck in a place that never changes, when the ghost of your childhood runs along the same trails you take as an adult and feels more bitter than nostalgic, growing older starts to feel like a taunt. A jeer.
Burdened by the encompassing emptiness of time.
Somewhere along the line—or maybe from the very beginning—you start to stagnante, too. The overwhelming, unignorable feeling of growth weighing you down forms; barnacles clinging to your skin, softening your flesh as they burrow deep, deep, until striking bone.
You're fine, you think.
Until him.
Until a man shows up, hiding kindness behind a surly disposition, and offers you nothing but gruff company. Terrible jokes. Cloying sweetness drenched in nicotine and dusted in ash.
John Price makes you consider your love of the ocean in a new, tangible way.
There have been others, of course. People before John who have offered to pull you away from this anaemic corner of the world, making promises of taking you somewhere else. Or ones who offered to stay. To join you in this dreary town. An accumulation of hydrozoan floating aimlessly down this solitary stretch of ocean.
They've all come and gone, and your answer has remained unchanged. Fixed. No. And if you're being kind—no, thank you.
Because, really—
When you can't tell the difference between fear and devotion, how are you supposed to know if the ocean fills you with reverence or dread?
So, you stay.
This place might be drenched in tar, forgotten by the masses in favour of the bigger, prettier cities that share the same oceanic view, but it's home. And your roots run deep (but your shackles are even deeper).
It's odd, too, isn't it? That home feels less like a sanctuary and more like an obligation. A pact you have to keep. So, you do. And maybe you resent this place a little bit each year, but it's easy to forget all about that when John fits inside the spaces of your ribs that you didn't know were empty to begin with.
It's good. Good—
—but this is better:
You wake up to the sound of the naked ocean, unencumbered by the shore. It's quieter than you expected it to be, but you suppose without land to get in its way, there's little reason to roar.
The change in noise—and sometimes, the absolute absence of any at all—is the biggest shift you have to adjust to, but four days into your journey traversing the untamable Atlantic, the sea teaches you things you didn't know about yourself. That maybe there's a certain sort of madness that comes from being so far away from anything remotely resembling land. And a lethargy that's hard to tie down into something concrete. An abstract sense of disillusion, maybe. Bone-deep torpor.
Something, too, that feels a bit like an atavistic fear of the yawning abyss that never seems to end. It's one thing to stand on land, solid ground, and admire it from afar, or to hug the coast on a cruise ship. Seeing it like this, in all its pelagic glory, is somehow sickening in its terrifying splendour and incredible enough to snake existential dread along the curve of your fragile insides.
There's awe, as well, but in more muted shades of tyrrhenian.
Still. You take to the barren sea like a once captive orca who forgot what freedom tastes like beneath its curled dorsal fin. It's exhilarating. And in equal measures, a true shove against your mettle. Your resolve. There's no help so far out to sea. No one to depend on but yourself and this enigmatic man who brushes his lips across your forehead when he thinks you're asleep, and then snarls at the ocean in the morning about not having any cigars as if he knows nothing at all about tenderness.
It's a comfort you cling to. Embrace until your fingers ache.
John mutters something under his breath about needing sleep. Whisky. A cigar. A good fuck in a better goddamn bed—and in no particular order, he gripes when you poke his back with your index finger.
"Thank fuck," he rasps around a cigarette—a shitty fuckin' imitation—and pinches your side when he draws you close. Payback for the jab but it just makes you giggle. "Bermuda is only nine hours away."
"Nine hours," you breathe, surprised. Nine hours. It feels inconsequential. Brief. And maybe that's because time feels different out here. Inconsequential outside of where the sun sat. The only thing that matters about it is its position, and your internal clock begins to shift, turning into a sundial. To hear a length of time outside of morning, midday, noon, afternoon, evening, and night is strange.
John's gaze flickers over to you hiding something that feels a bit like an appraisal as those burning sapphires run over the length of your expression, catching every twitch.
His chest rumbles under your hand after a moment. "Excited for land, then?"
Land. You consider it—his question, and, of course, the weight of it. The way it feels. Tastes.
It's only been a sliver into your journey, barely anything at all in comparison to the kilometres left to go, but the sea feels as comforting as it does terrifying. The darker patches of blue signifying a depth so unfathomable that you feel breathless thinking about it. About the unquantifiable pressure, some metric tonnes of atmosphere pressing down on those pretty pools of navy.
In comparison, Captain feels fragile. Delicate. Brittle bones of wood and plastic and foam contending with the vastitude of the sea that sprawls out in every direction. On a map right now, you'd be invisible. The tip of a pen would be too wide to accurately pinpoint your exact location. That massive gap, bigger than the whole of your country, sometimes gives you nightmares. And some nights, the boat lists as it bobs with the rolling waves that never end, dipping down much too low for your mind to ever feel comfortable with.
The terror is almost equally as present as the awe. Both one-in-the same, almost. And it reminds you of your love for the sea. Where the lines between fear and devotion blur. It doesn't surprise you, then, that some mornings you wake up with something that curls around your head, and feels like divine euphoria, and others—
You can't stop thinking about every shipwreck movie you'd ever seen, especially when you know you'd passed over the same channel the Titanic sank in, that your bare feet stood right over top of a graveyard at a depth that hurts your head a little bit to even think about.
But—
Land.
John said you'd be missing it in due time the first hour into your trip, when you were still buzzing with the adrenaline of cacoëthes and watched the shoreline get swallowed whole by blue.
In fact, he'd expected it. Seemed to keep himself at a measurable distance, as if waiting for you to turn to him and command that he bring you back home.
A silly thought, in hindsight.
You're shackled to the sea just as much as you are to him—maybe with a bit more willingness added in. The sea feels like home in spite of the endless dreams of capsizing in the frigid waters.
And really.
You can't imagine being anywhere else but here. With him.
"I'm excited to see Bermuda," you confess, nuzzling your cheek into the warm Sherpa of his jacket. "But more so because I've never been anywhere outside of my own Country. But I like this better. I like being on Captain with you. It's—"
There's a weight in your chest. One that's almost equally composited into the ashen blue of his eyes when they flicker to you, clinging to each word. Each sentiment that spills from your sun chapped lips.
"It's home, y'know?"
John goes quiet for a moment. Far quieter than you ever expected a man like him to be capable of—someone who got road rage out in the middle of an empty sea, and screamed himself hoarse whenever he had to talk to the absolute fuckin' muppets of the coast guard or passing ships your eyes weren't good enough to see through Fata Morgana—and it almost humbles you in a strange way. Makes you consider the stunning realisation that you've only chipped the surface of his rough, wonderful, insufferable man. In that, a keen sense of wonder brims, bringing with it an insatiable curiosity. You want to strip him down to nothing but bones, and crack them open like the claws of Snow Crab, sipping from the nectar that is his marrow. His essence. You want to map him out in greater depths than you ever dream of doing to the sea.
His fingers spasm on your hip in a strange clench and release rhythm that makes you wonder if he's holding himself back for some reason you can't ascertain, but eventually, he breaks. His hand tightens, and pulls you closer to him. You feel his nose press against your hairline. Hear the sharp inhale as he breathes you in until his chest expands under your hand. Wide and broad, and filled with the scent of you.
"Yeah," he rasps, humid breath fluttering across your skin. "It is. For however long you want it—"
"Forever." You catch smouldering blue just before it's eclipsed by endless black. "If you'll let me."
"Fuckin'—Christ—"
With his words mangled in his throat, they sound more like an animalistic snarl than anything that resembles something human. The force of it seems to rattle through your flesh, dredging against bone like an anchor on the muddy sea floor until it catches.
"Forever it is, then." It's a promise. An oath. And maybe a little bit of a threat, too, in the way only John can make something so romantic sound so gruff, and when he speaks again, you smell cinder and taste the ash in the back of his throat. Sealed in charcoal and salt.
"I guess you're stuck with me, then," you tease, smiling when he huffs in a facsimile of exasperation, but you catch the softening in the corners of his eyes, and the low purr of happiness that rumbles out from his broad chest.
"Can think of worse places to be."
"Like London?" You quip, echoing his words, and there's something heavy in his eyes, something that blankets around the unease that never really goes away even as you acclimate to the sensation of being landless. Adrift. It's something deeper than devotion. A black hole you could fall into.
"Yeah, exactly." He murmurs. You taste salt on his tongue when he kisses you, and wonder how you could ever dream of being anywhere else that wasn't with him.
Home, you find, is where his heart beats next to yours.
#im so ready for bed after this#john price x reader#sailor price#kinda#like um ig hes retired#ish#captain john price x reader#price x reader#i set out to make this as unapolgetically maritimes as possible and failed#we have one (1) Newfie u can't understand and NO ONE at any point offers to go on a Timmies run for ice caps and double doubles#blasphemous#also ur from Nova Scotia (NOT HRM) but that really doesn't matter much tbh i just wanted the “this is supposed to be Lunenburg Lite” vibes#aka Chéticamp#but much more depressing
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Connecticut Tav | Wood Half-Elf | Beast Master Ranger
So, this is my sheet for @bareee's @tav-dex. Went a little overboard and made a whole ass character sheet (man the last time I made one of those was so long ago). I want to write something about my cringe boy so. Buckle up because it's going to be long and poorly written (I suck at writing).
One edit because I'm a dummy, his alignment is neutral good not true neutral idk why I did that.
He was born and raised in his mom's and step-dad's tavern called Crow's Perch (not as fancy as Elf Song but in a different category as Blushing Mermaid)(the tavern thing is just for the sake of a joke that the most popular drink they serve is called 'Connecticut Water'). He has an older brother, who's a bard. Despite the description for Urchin background ("After surviving a poor and bleak childhood") he had a happy childhood, filled with love and support. The two brothers treated the whole Lower City as their playground: breaking into places just for fun, pick pocketing nobles, climbing Wyrm's Rock Fortress etc.
His love for beasts and creatures of any kind comes from the stories told by his step-dad (both him and Tav's mom are retired adventurers). Step dad was the one who told Tav about Darkmaw the Wicked *wink wink*.
At one point he got tired of the city life and decided he wanted to become a ranger. After successfully fulfilling some contracts he became so confident of his skills he tried to build a trap all by his own. The trap exploded right into his face (he himself has no idea how it didn't kill him or damaged his eyes). After that he was sulking in his hunting hut for a month. The experience humbled the boy. Most of his adventuring prior to the nautiloid could just be boiled down to hanging around one village and talking local boars out of destroying potato fields, and occasionally getting rid of poachers.
Before the abduction he was on his way to Baldur's Gate to see his family (which he hasn't seen in months).
Trivia (because it's easier to write stuff this way):
His hair started to go grey at the start of Act 3 from the weight of responsibility and stress.
In Act 1 he was corresponding with his family thanks to Faust. After entering The Underdark he stopped sending letters (In Underdark because it would be hard, in Act 2 because he didn't want the bird to be killed by Shadow Curse).
Despite being close to his family in Act 3, he didn't visit them or send any messages in fear that Gortash and/or Orin would hurt them.
He carries with him a razor and some fancy oils for his beard.
His brother wrote one ballad about him, soon after that Tav forbid him from writing more (it was very much not accurate).
His step-dad taught him how to fight with a sword, while his mom taught him archery and the art of stealth.
Tav's biological father died when he was very young so he has barely any memory of him.
Tav's a walking Merlin app, he can identify any bird by just listening to it.
He loves climbing trees. Either to rest on a branch or to scout the surroundings.
He loves picking up herbs and making potions.
Despite growing up in a tavern he's not much of a drinker.
He's very self-conscious about his height and chest-to-belly area. He tries his best not to show it.
At one point he was persona non grata at Sharess' Caress.
He enjoys fishing.
Sir Daisy Dewdrop Fluffington is a name of his childhood plush.
He knows how to play lanceboard (he often plays against Gale and tries to teach it to Wyll).
He draws in his journal. He drew all of his companions at least once.
He almost cried when Jaheira called him 'cub' and almost called her 'mom' in response.
He's scared of Lae'zel. But tries his best to understand and help her.
He had countless heart-to-hearts with Karlach.
In his journal he described Astarion as 'his equal on the battlefield'.
#bg3#baldur's gate 3#connceticut tav#character sheet#tav#oc:faust#i accidentally hit post while editing it lmao well this is the final version dhjdjd#the fact tav and faust have the same wis is sending me
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Still thinking on the overly homogenous appearance of the Underdark races in BG3 (the drow palette being incorrectly applied to everyone, it bugs meee), so here's an overview of the appearances of all four five Underdark counterparts:
Deep Gnome: Skin in rock and earth hues; brown, grey, brownish-grey. AMAB gnomes are completely bald, and AFAB grow dark grey hair, sometimes dark enough to look black. Their eyes are dark grey and black. They're about 3' - 3'6" tall. On average they are very scrawny, with a wiry build that seems to be all sinew and bones - however they do have very high muscle strength and are heavier than they look.
Drow: Dark, desaturated skin (I have read that prolonged sun damage may turn it deep blue and give it a velvet-y look, but I can't find that damn note to quote it). Pale hair; white, silver, blonde, "pale copper". 5'5" is to a dark elf as 6'+ is to us; Height range is 4'7" - 5'5", average male is shorter than average female. Red is the dominant eye colour and has nothing to do with your relationship with Lolth, it's a sign of Ilythiiri heritage, which most drow have. Other eye colours include gray, amber, brown, black, rose-pink and lavender.
Duergar: They're called "grey dwarves" because they're grey. Skin? Grey. Eyes? Grey (sometimes dark enough to look black). Hair? Grey. Although they don't have that much hair to speak of; all duergar are bald, and unlike their surface cousins, AFAB duergar cannot grow beards. Duergar are just less hirsute in general, and personally, I blame the mind flayers. Duergar are less stocky than surface dwarves - they're no less broad, but their general build is "lean and wiry". Height ranges from 3'9" - 4'5" and they weigh the same as the average human adult.
Orog: Underdark orcs*. While technically not appearing in-game, a half-orc Tav or Durge can technically be half-orog, so I'm including them. Also because I like them.
Orogs have large ears and very big, eerily pale eyes. Their hair is usually black and their skin is "grayish". They stand from about 5'4" - 7'6", and some orogs have even exceeded eight foot in height.
*You will also see the name "orog" applied to ogre-orc hybrids. There's two types of orogs.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot the humans:
Deep Imaskari: Look like regular humans, but with white skin that looks like marble - literally, it looks like they're carved from marble, texture and all. They stand from about 5'3" - 6' tall.
They don't appear in-game either, but what's stopping you from playing one just without the extra stuff they get
The only people who haven't branched off and made an Underdark variant are the halflings, basically.
#The thing with the Underdark is that everybody looks malnourished#The drow have shrunk since their arrival and the duergar and svirfneblin look like famine victims#I have shit to do today. but the nerd rage - it grips me#And orc lore is so thin on the ground.#bg3#baldurs gate 3
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Making moves the nerd way
"Halloween" for @steddieholidaydrabbles Part II of the previous warm-up but can be read alone
G | 1k | no cw | almost getting together, slightly oblivious Eddie
next up
Eddie was sitting on the kitchen floor, painting empty pizza boxes while Steve was trying to focus on making dinner. Despite the newspapers spread around him, he managed to stain his surroundings with grey paint.
“How much do you have left?”
"I'm making a graveyard, Steve, not a random burial site with three corpses. It would go faster if you helped me, you know?”
“Well, do you want to eat? Because I can’t cook pasta and paint tombstones at the same time.”
Eddie grumbles something under his breath.
“Point taken.”
So they resume their activities, a weird mixtape of Metallica, Queen and Tears for Fears playing in the background.
“Okay, little Picasso, time to eat," Steve announces eventually.
"Don't call me like I'm a toddler," Eddie scolds him, but the fact that he's peeking over the table while on his knees, eyeing the plate put there, does nothing to help his statement.
Steve smirks at him, at the half-tied mop of hair surrounding his eyes over the counter.
"Wash your hands before eating. Kiddo."
"I'm older than you!" he protests but hops up anyway to do as he was told. It's good Steve reminded him though, he'd probably just throw himself at the spaghetti like a savage, paint stains or not.
They eat and discuss the acceptable damage to Harrington's lawn to prop up the gravestones. Eddie's devastated to hear he can't just put holes in the ground.
"We can prop them up with sticks. Or weigh them down with rocks. We'll figure something out," Steve shrugs and that placates him for the time being. He helps with the dishes but is quickly shooed back to his art station. Steve joins him later, with a hand in his hair.
"How is it going, baby?"
Eddie grumbles, not looking up.
"I know you mean it in like, a kid way, but maybe don't call me that?" he says, double-focusing on the cardboard in front of him.
"Okay, kid, sorry," Steve amends, petting his hair, and scratching his scalp gently. Pretends not to see Eddie fold under the treatment. "Does my little artist need help?"
"Your little artist has been asking for help for the past two days."
Steve snorts, detangling his fingers from the long hair.
"That's fair, sorry. I guess you wore me down," he says, sitting down. "What do I do?"
Eddie finally turns away from his work, considering him.
"You can paint them over," he decides, handing him the grave he's been working on. "I'll cut them up." He grabs a new pizza box for himself, the needed shape already drawn on it with a Sharpie. His scissors follow the outline slowly and jaggedly, struggling with the thick cardboard.
“How many do we need?” Steve asks, dipping the brush in paint.
“At least ten. I don’t have stuff for more anyway, figures I can just make extra later when I have time and supplies.”
Steve looks around.
“We have like, three,” he observes.
“Well, chop chop then, my little helper.”
Steve sighs and gets to work.
While he’s happy to indulge Eddie and help him out, he’s been imagining their evening together differently. Getting one-on-one time in their little traumatized family was a rare thing unless you're already an established couple. Or him and Robin, but that's because they work together. Needless to say, it was hard to make a move on someone. Even with something already brewing between them.
“So, are we putting our enemies’ names on them?” he settles on learning more about Eddie instead. Hopes he doesn’t mind treating his graveyard project like a shared effort, that Steve says ‘we’ instead of ‘you’.
“Oh, I’m totally absolutely putting Vecna on one. Other than that I think I’ll keep them fantasy-themed. Maybe use all the NPCs my Party killed throughout the campaign. I think we’ve seen enough of that in real life.”
“You said it.” Steve mentally kicks himself in the ass. Just his luck to start a topic that goes straight into the trauma of their Upside Down past. How is he supposed to make a move now?
He shuts up and starts painting the cardboard more angrily while Freddie Mercury screams his lungs out in the background. He doesn’t notice when the cardboard cutting ceases.
Not until their hands brush when they both reach for the paint. He looks up to see most of the boxes cut up and shaped, waiting for paint.
“My hand started to cramp from the scissors. And you looked so peaceful, I wanted to join you,” Eddie explains. Steve watches him bite at his bottom lip, mulling something over. “I’ve always liked working with someone on projects like that. Help out with school play scenography, make Halloween costumes with Wayne…” He shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, but the soft, genuine smile tells Steve otherwise. “So uh, thank you, for letting me do this here. For joining me, too.”
And Steve realizes this could be a date, too. He could make a move like this, on his kitchen floor, fingers stained with paint.
“Of course. I have this weekend off, we could work together some more,” he offers. Then frowns at Eddie’s stunned expression. “What?”
“You want to spend your time off with me, playing with paint?”
“Well, I was hoping you have something more planned. We could work on our costumes, maybe?”
He’s alarmed when Eddie makes a pained noise.
“You’ll take Aragorn from me!”
“What?”
“We’ve been fighting over Lord of the Rings characters for Halloween costumes and if you join us there’s no way Henderson will let me keep him.”
“I don’t need to join in, I’d rather just help you with your costume.”
To this, Eddie turns suspicious.
“Why?” he squints.
“Eddie,” he sighs, staring fondly into his eyes, and grabs his wrist for good measure.
Eddie’s eyes go big like saucers when it hits him.
"Holy shit. Do you want to have a nerd date with me?”
Steve chuckles.
“I guess I do.”
#steddie#eddie munson#stranger things#mine#steve harrington#ff#st#stranger things 4#steddie fanfiction#steddieholidaydrabbles#i like nerd dates#i dont get them#but i like working on stuff with friends
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I'm back wayy too early, Just as promised!👍🏻
How are you?
Would you like to explain, in the Reader of your choice that "Flaxans' king is kinda..", mister?🤨📸
Aaand that's It for now, drink some water mr. Allig-author, I'll do the same.
See you in the close future! ~💙🌺✨
Flaxan Leader x antihero male reader
Headcanons
straight up cant find any flaxan gifs
What do you mean 🤨📸 I said what I said 🗣️
Reader is kinda based on Deadpool, but with some tweaks. Insert also flaxan headcanons, cuz I thought it was funny.
Working with teen team had never really been something you planned to do. You were more of an antihero than an outright hero. Majority of the public didn’t even know about your existence, since most of your dirty work was done in the shadows.
But seeing as the guardians of the globe weren’t responsive, and you had been in this business for a long time, Cecil called in a favor you owed him, which lead to you fighting alongside this group of young heroes.
To you it felt like being a caretaker or kindergarten teacher, since you were older than all of them with a lot more knowledge and experience. Your lack of care about spilling blood and killing seemed to unnerve a few of them, invincible being one of them.
Your regeneration seemed to shock the flaxans you fought, as they’d blow your head off with their blasters, or would slice your limbs off, only for them to regrow in seconds as your damaged body kept on fighting.
Invincible may have scarred his face, but you were the one the one who would become the flaxan leader fought head on. You may not have super strength like some of the others, but your expertise made you even more of a bother to fight.
Since we know nothing about flaxans, let’s say that they flirt through sparring or fighting, so you being your joking usual Deadpool self could be seen as advances of some kind. The kiss you blow him as they flee the first time doesn’t help your case.
After the first invasion, I can already imagine the likes of invincible freaking out a little or a lot about how easily you kill and how you make a joke out of everything. It results in you having to give these young heroes a reality check, that being a hero isn’t easy, and that they’ll probably end up killing more people than they save. That’s your feelings about it anyways.
The second invasion has you involved again, since your extreme healing factor also means you barely need to sleep, eat or drink, as your body keeps itself going without issue. And once again you end up fighting the flaxan leader, whose now got a different look.
The first words that leave your mouth is ooing and awing, purring that you like em a little grey so you are happy to see him. All the talking you did during your first battle also meant that the flaxans, or maybe rather the leader, has a much better understanding of human speech.
The second invasion ends like the first, except the leader is too busy fighting with you to focus on invincible and atom eve, so Robot ends up finding their weakness on his own. Sometime during the fight your mask also ends up getting ripped off, letting you plant a big kiss on the flaxan leader’s forehead before they flee.
When members of the teen team ask why the hell you did that, you just shrug and make some comment about how you two “have a connection”. Its clearly a joke, because you take nothing seriously, but the flaxan leader seems to see it as legit.
The third invasion goes differently from the show, since the leaders risen up to rule all of his people, and instead of wanting to invade earth this time he comes through to court you, much to everyone’s surprise, both you, the teen team, and the media that’s been watching the entire time.
Imagine your surprise when the flaxan leader, now a good deal older and in a powersuit, rocking up to you with flowers native to his planet and what looks like a bracelet made out of similar material to his armor.
It takes some translation and some help from Cecil and his people to figure out what its all about, and honestly you feel a little chuffed at this big guy pretty much proposing to you after two fights. It seems completely out of the norm for humanity, but apparently its normal in flaxan culture.
In the end it helps create more of an allyship with the flaxans than them getting eradicated by omni-man. And you end up scoring a hot older guy who doesn’t seem to mind your many many scars. Its not everyone who can say their husband developed technology strictly to be able to exist in your world, is it? you definitely brag online about it, “if he wanted too, he would” and all that.
#male reader#antihero reader#antiohero male reader#invincible#flaxan leader#invincible imagine#invincible headcanon#invincible x male reader#invincible x reader#flaxan leader imagine#flaxan leader headcanon#flaxan leader x male reader#flaxan leader x reader#flaxan imagine#flaxan headcanon#flaxan x male reader#flaxan x reader#invincible series#invincible show#invincible season 2
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Breaking Up Slowly: Four
pairing: joel miller x f!reader
rating: E (18+ only, mild angst, broken bone (no gore), alcohol consumption, fingering, unprotected piv, soft!joel makes an appearance or two)
word count: 6.8k
series masterlist | joel masterlist
“Watch your step,” Joel gripped your arm to hold you steady as your ankle twisted on an unsteady rock, the mountains near Bear Lake in Idaho proving to be your least favorite terrain so far.
Letting out a curse, you sat yourself down on the rocky slope, holding your ankle as though it would fix the damage that had already been done. Joel took a seat beside you and lifted your leg onto his lap, his rough hands inspecting your ankle to assess the injury. “Looks like you’ll live, but you should take it easy. No more runnin’ off.”
“I wasn’t runnin’ off. I just wanted to rinse off in the creek,” you groaned, wincing as his fingers kneaded at the inflamed muscle of your lower leg.
“Yeah, well,” Joel sighed. “Clearly, it ain’t meant to be.”
“Everything okay?” Ellie called out from the top of the rocky hill where the three of you had set up camp.
“Yeah,” Joel called back on your behalf, his hand working it’s way up to your calf as he continued to massage away the tension in your muscles.
“How far are we from the university?” you asked, laying back against the smooth, martian-looking rock.
“I reckon we’re a few days out,” he replied in his trademark gruff tone, though these days it was laced with an undeniable gentleness ever since your reconciliation. “You can wash up there.”
“I was hoping to get clean sooner so that…you know—“ You looked bashful as you flickered your eyes to his crotch. Joel let out a chuckle and shook his head at you, amused by your determination. “Don’t laugh! I’m desperate, Joel. We haven’t done so much as kiss since Jackson—“
He shut you up with his lips pressing against yours, your argument gone as his tongue swiped it away.
“Darlin’, you ain’t gotta be squeaky clean for me,” he reassured with a smile, his lips ghosting over yours. “I’ll take ya however I can get ya.”
“Romantic, but I doubt it. Besides, it’s hard to feel sexy when I’m covered in sweat and dirt and blood,” you countered, moving your leg off his lap so that you could move closer to him, your fingers drawing shapes on his jean-clad thigh.
“Even with a busted ankle, you’re tryin’ to seduce me,” Joel teased, grabbing your hand and lifting it to his lips, placing a kiss to your knuckles. “I’ll take care o’ya when we get to the University. Promise.”
“Fine,” you agreed with a playful pout, allowing him to help you onto your feet and carry some of your weight as you both made your way back up the mountain to camp.
“God, your ankle looks like shit,” Ellie pointed out as you limped your way over to the campfire, sitting down on the solid ground with a grunt.
“Thanks,” you snarked with a pained look on your face. “Ridicule does wonders for the pain.”
“Are you really this grumpy because you two haven’t been able to make out since Jackson?” she stated more than asked, earning a scoff and a pebble thrown into her lap.
“Ellie,” Joel barked as he walked over, squatting down to sit in front of your busted ankle. “She’s right, though.”
“About the making out?” Ellie interjected with a smirk shot your way.
“About the ankle,” he corrected with an unamused tone. “I’ll go find somethin’ to wrap it up with. Don’t get up.”
“Yes, sir,” you snarked, giving him a salute as he stood upright. Joel chuckled, regardless of his best attempt not to, and shook his head.
“No wonder I’m turnin’ grey. Look at the goddamn comedians I’ve been blessed with.”
“Hey!” Ellie threw a rock at his leg. “You ever consider maybe we are hilarious and you’re the one without a funny bone in his old and achy body?”
“Yeah,” you nodded, a smirk on your face. Joel looked between the two of you with a look of utter disbelief, a scoff leaving his lips.
“Just for that, I’m keepin’ this—“ He walked over and pulled out a hefty can of “fruit cocktail”, the sight making both of your mouths water as you began to object. “All to myself.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” you pointed a finger at him, his smile growing wider as he raised an eyebrow in challenge. “May I remind you of something I’ll keep all to myself if you betray us like this?”
“Ew, but yeah!” Ellie added, standing up and walking over to him. In her most threatening voice, she placed a hand on the can and spoke, “Sharing is caring, Joel. Share.”
“You’re a scary kid, you know that?” Joel handed over the can of fruit and Ellie smiled proudly as she opened it and walked over to sit beside you. Joel joined the two of you, handing you each a fork. “Y’all enjoy, I’m gonna go see if I can find somethin’ for dinner.”
You were quick to move, attempting to shuffle to your feet. “I’ll come wi—“
“No,” he pointed at your ankle. “You’re gonna sit here and eat. I’ll be fine. Only thing out here to worry about are mountain lions.”
“Oh, is that all?” you snarked, unhappy with his choice to go alone. “Be back before sunset, please. I don’t want to go looking for you in the dark.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Joel arrived back to camp right on time, the sunset right behind him as he strutted to the two of you with a few rabbits tossed over his shoulder.
“How’d you manage to find anything out here?” Ellie asked jumping up to help as he hung the rabbits up on a tree branch to do the skinning and dressing.
“Guess I’m just good like that,” he quipped, shooting you a glance as you remained seated in the same spot he left you in. Your face was scrunched in pain, your forehead covered in sweat even in the winter chill. Looking down, he noticed the small bump on your ankle had now swollen to the size of a tennis ball. “Jesus.”
“I’m fine,” you assured, though the weakness in your voice did little to quell his worry.
“No you ain’t.” He walked over to you, leaving Ellie with the knife so that she could start on skinning. Crouching down beside you, he placed his cold hand in the inflamed flesh of your ankle and hissed at the heat it was radiating. “Shit—maybe you broke it after all.”
“Regardless,” you panted, resting your head against the tree behind you. “Not much I can do about it out here.”
“No,” he agreed. “Damn it. We gotta get you back to Jackson.”
“What? No.” You stared at him like he was crazy, but all he did was stare back just the same. “We’re so close!”
He shook his head. “We’re at the halfway mark. Besides, not like you’re gonna be much help out here with a goddamn broken ankle.”
“Joel—“
“No. We’re headin’ back.” He stood and walked back to Ellie to help with the rabbits, the conversation ending there.
After dinner, Joel lit a small fire to keep him and Ellie warm as the three of you cozied up in your sleeping bags. You didn’t need any extra warmth with the fever you were running, but still joined Joel in his sleeping bag just to be close to him.
You hugged his back, allowing him to lay on his good side to keep an ear out for trouble, not that you and Ellie needed much help at this point. He’d already shown you all you needed to know, and was confident that the two of you could handle people, maybe even a runner if you had enough time to grab your gun. Still, as though it was his life’s purpose—perhaps it was—he remained on alert, ready to lay down his life for the two of you at any given moment. Sometimes, you wondered whether death itself would even be able to stop him.
“Joel?” you whispered, earning a grunt in response. “You’re not…not gonna leave me behind, are you?”
He shuffled a bit, turning just enough to look at you over his shoulder.
“Might,” he replied. “If your leg is broken, I can’t have you out here, baby…s’too dangerous.”
That was the closest he’d come to uttering those three words since the night you shared in Jackson.
“Joel,” you sighed, though in retrospect it sounded more like a whine. “I don’t…I can’t be alone. Not again.”
“We aren’t leavin’ forever,” he assured, his eyes flickering to your lips. “I’m comin’ back. Both of us are comin’ back.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I can.” His words were sure, as if he had foresight into the future. As if he had any control over anything out here. “Get some sleep.”
“Can…can I just ask one more thing?” Joel nodded. “Kiss me.”
Turning onto his other side, he faced you, his knuckles sweeping across your cheeks as he brushed his nose against yours. Leaning in, he pressed his chapped lips against your own, slowly, gently working them like the two of you had all the time in the world, even if you both knew you didn’t.
You melted into his touch like some needy, unloved thing, desperate for any sign that you were worth something. That someone wanted you. And for the first time in a long time, you felt satisfied knowing that someone did.
“Well that was fast,” Tommy smiled as he greeted the three of you at the gate, his eyes taking all three of you in to assess your state. “What brought y’all back?”
Joel helped Ellie down before more carefully helping you, your ankle still swollen and bruised.
“Jesus,” Tommy winced as Joel lifted the hem of your ankle to show his brother the injury. “C’mon, let’s get you to the clinic.”
You threw your arms around both of the Millers shoulders, allowing them to carry most of your weight as they walked you through the town. Ellie followed behind with Callus, leading him by the reins until Maria intercepted her with a call of her name.
“Ellie, you can bring him over here, I’m on my way to the stables,” she called. Joel gave her a nod, encouraging her to go off and explore a bit while the three of you continued on.
Inside the clinic, you were set down on a gurney, a doctor walking over to greet you with a smile.
“Hi there. Let’s take a look.” She lifted the hem of your jeans, your foot covered in only a thick, wool sock ever since the night of your injury. “Well, it’s certainly broken.”
“Thanks,” Joel snarked, rolling his eyes as he stood by the head of the gurney, protectively guarding you even in this sanctuary of a town.
“We’ll get a cast put on, but in the meantime, I’ll give you an IV with some pain meds.” You shook your head at her, earning a quirk of her brow.
“No meds,” you croaked. “Don’t want to be sedated.”
“Baby,” Joel looked down at you and rested his palm on your forehead. “You’re in pain.”
“I don’t care. I want to be conscious.” With a sigh, he turned to the doctor and shrugged.
“No meds, I guess.”
“Well, I need to give you something for the fever at least.”
“As long as it doesn’t put me out.”
Tommy and Joel kept you company on either side of the gurney as you laid there, dreading your stubborn decision not to accept any meds as the nurse poked at your very dehydrated veins to put the IV in. Even before the outbreak, needles were never easy, but now? With hardly any food or water in your system to keep you conscious? You reached for Joel’s hand and squeezed it to ground yourself, forcing his conversation with his younger brother to pause.
“You alright?” he asked, squeezing your hand back.
“Yeah, just…feel…faint,” you managed, your voice barely a whisper.
“Can you just fuckin’ find a goddamn vein already? She’s about to pass out,” Joel turned to the nurse still poking around, shocking the younger man with his tone.
“Joel, calm down,” Tommy interjected calmly. “We don’t talk like that ‘round here.”
Joel clenched his jaw as he looked at his brother like he was the crazy one, but your hand squeezing his called him back to you, his glare softening as he met your eyes.
“M’okay, just…talk to me,” you whispered, earning a nod. Joel slid the chair that was sitting against the wall over and pulled it up next to the gurney, both of his hands holding yours as the nurse moved to the other arm to try to find a vein there.
“What…what do you want for dinner?” he asked, struggling to find a topic of conversation that didn’t revolve around survival or wouldn’t offend your current company.
“Mm,” you hummed in thought, closing your eyes as your ears started to ring.
“Baby,” he called, reaching a hand up to your clammy cheek. “C’mon, stay awake.”
“Potatoes,” you managed, lost somewhere between consciousness and blacking out.
“Got one,” the nurse declared, taping over the IV to keep it in place before leaving the three of you.
“All done,” Joel assured, wiping his hand over your damp forehead as your head rolled to the side to look at him. “So you want potatoes? Tommy, can we—“
“We got all the potatoes you could ever want,” he assured with a soft smile, though Joel could see the thoughts running through his little brother's mind.
Tommy hadn’t seen Joel this way in a long, long time. Even back in the day when he saw the two of you together in the QZ, it was never like this. It seemed to be a jarring sight for the younger Miller, seeing his hardened older brother—the same brother that killed, tortured, hell, fucking maimed people—be so gentle with a person. Ellie was one thing, but to see him this way with a partner? He never would’ve expected it.
“How about some chicken?” you asked, still weak.
“We got chicken,” Tommy chuckled. “I’ll go let Maria know. We can all have dinner…like a family.”
“Yeah,” Joel puffed out what you both knew to be a chuckle. “One fucked up family.”
“Ain’t we always been that way, though?” Tommy asked, smiling at his brother. Joel nodded his head, but his eyes couldn’t take much more contact with Tommy’s. He turned back to you, smoothing over your forehead like you were the most precious thing in the world to him.
By the time they’d finished getting your leg in the cast, you were exhausted. In retrospect, you should have just taken your opportunity for some pain relief because it seemed like you weren’t going to remain conscious anyways.
As soon as Joel got you back to the house Tommy and Maria kindly set the two of you and Ellie up in, he carried you upstairs bridal style and set you up in bed. He carefully undressed you until you were in just your undershirt and your underwear, before surprising you by undressing to just his briefs. Your heavy eyes tried to blink away your exhaustion to take in the sight of his body after having gone so many days without so much as a peek, but as soon as Joel realized you were watching him instead of resting, he shook his head.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he warned with a smirk as he climbed in beside you and cozied up to your form. “You need some sleep.”
“I need you,” you croaked, reaching for his chest to pull him closer to you. Joel mumbled a soft rejection but pulled your body into his, spooning you tightly from behind.
“Sleep,” he commanded. “Then maybe later on we can see about the other stuff.”
“Such a prude,” you teased, his warmth crowding you making you feel even more tired than before. With a soft yawn, you cozied into the pillow beneath your head and held his hand as it rested just below your breasts. “Wake me up for dinner.”
“I will,” he promised.
Downstairs, Ellie and Maria worked on stocking the pantry for you given that you were going to be staying here for a while.
“So,” Maria started with a smile. “What’s the history with those two?”
“Not completely sure. Complicated, whatever it is,” she replied as she placed a few cans of beans onto the shelf while Maria stocked the fridge with milk and eggs.
“Tommy said the same thing.”
“What did I say?” Tommy walked in and strutted over to his wife, placing a kiss upon her cheek.
“That whatever those two upstairs have going on is complicated,” she answered.
“Well, I used to think it was, but you should’a seen Joel at the clinic,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Like…like I went back in time. He hasn’t been that way with anybody since before everything went to hell.”
“What about that one girlfriend of his you were telling me about…Tess?” Maria asked and Ellie tensed.
“She, uh…she died,” Ellie muttered quietly, as if bringing it up was forbidden. As far as Joel was concerned, it was.
“Joel didn’t tell me any of that.” Tommy stared at his wife with a crease in his brow. “When did that—“
Ellie’s pointed look stopped him from finishing his question.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Am I missing something?” Maria asked, looking between the pair. Tommy quickly shook his head and forced a smile onto his face.
“Nope.”
The smell of mashed potatoes and roasted chicken stirred you awake, your stomach rumbling like an alarm. You turned your head a bit to find Joel still fast asleep, his cheek pressed against your back as if he was trying to burrow into you. You shuffled, turning a bit, careful not to scratch his leg with the stiff plaster of your cast as you faced him. He didn’t stir and you were glad, taking advantage of the moment to simply study him. He always woke before you, leaving you no time to admire the softness of his features as he dreamed.
His upper lip twitched as you grazed his cheekbone with your fingertips, his skin smooth aside from a few scars. His eyelashes were so long. How did you never notice it before? And his nose, god, his nose. You ran your fingertip along the bridge of it, causing him to twitch, his eyes batting as he finally woke. When they settled on you, your breath hitched, the richness of his brown irises so much softer than they were when he was on guard. You liked him this way. You liked him every way.
“How long have you been starin’ at me?” he asked, voice hoarse and deep from sleep.
“Not long enough,” you replied. Joel huffed out a soft chuckle and sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Dinner smells good.”
“Yeah,” he agreed with a grunt as he climbed out of bed and redressed. “You ready to go down and socialize?”
“I’m ready to go down and eat,” you replied, still too tired and in pain to get excited about having company tonight. Joel chuckled and nodded in understanding as he walked to your side of the bed and helped you up onto your feet.
“Alright, come here,” he ordered, moving to carry you but you stopped him.
“As much as I love being carried around like a princess, it is a little bit of a dramatic entrance, don’t you think?” Joel shook his head. “How about you just—“
“How about you hush and let me carry you so you don’t hurt yourself again?” His eyebrow was raised, daring you to challenge him. You smiled to yourself, amused by his way of declaring his love for you.
“Alright,” you agreed with a shrug and a smile. “But I want you to make it known that this was your choice. Don’t want them thinking I order you around.”
“Anythin’ you say, my queen,” he sassed with a smirk of his own as he scooped you up into his arms with a huff that worried you.
“Don’t drop me.”
“I might if you keep up this attitude.” Despite his words, he was all smiles, as relaxed as you’d seen him since…well, ever. You wanted to freeze time, to keep him locked away in this house. To keep him locked away from everything bad that touched him and turned him cruel. If only.
“There she is.” Tommy greeted you with a friendly smile as Joel made his way down the stairs with you cradled safely in his arms. “Miss America.”
“Miss Apocalypse,” Ellie corrected with a playful smirk, forcing a chuckle out of you.
“Miss fucking starving,” you chimed in as Joel set you down in a chair at the dining table. “The food smells great.”
As Maria plated the food, Joel got himself situated beside you. He lifted your cast to rest over his lap so that it could remained elevated, but the gentle hand he rested over it, this thumb stroking over the rough material, made you think it was less for your benefit and more for his.
“So,” Tommy sat down at the head of the table beside his brother. “How was the trip?”
Joel let out a breath of a chuckle and shook his head, reaching for the glass of whiskey Tommy had set down in front of him.
“Wasn’t too bad,” he replied. “Until this one went wanderin’ off and broke her ankle.”
“Yeah, how’d that happen? I expect a good war story, now,” Tommy smiled at you and you forced one back.
“Just wanted to rinse off in the creek,” you manage, keeping your eyes on your fingertip as it traced the pattern of the table cloth. You could feel everyone’s eyes on you, the worry in them, and it forced you to chirp up. “Or maybe I just couldn’t wait to get back here to paradise.”
“Thought that might be it,” Tommy replied, his smile returning as he took a sip of his drink.
You’re soon eating—or devouring, more accurately. Maria and Ellie update you on the state of the pantry and fridge, but truthfully you weren’t paying much attention. Maria had said something that struck you, “I’ll be in and out all day to help you out since you’re gonna be all alone in this big ole house for a while.”
Yes. Alone. The one thing you never, ever wanted to be again. You’d come too close to the edge the last time he was taken from you—the last time he left. Could you survive it again?
You reasoned that this goodbye was only temporary, that he wasn’t leaving you, he was just leaving to come right back. But who could promise that? Not you, not Joel, not God or whatever cruel form it took. The minute he and Ellie leave these walls…they’re in danger of leaving you forever.
“Hey,” Ellie spoke in a whisper, reaching over to rest her hand on top of yours. “You okay?”
You nodded your head and fixed a smile onto your face. She didn’t buy it.
“Hey,” she turned to the table and called attention. “What do you say we play a game? I got a deck of cards?”
“Spoons?” Maria suggested, bringing a smile to your face.
“Sounds like fun,” you nodded, thankful for the distraction.
For the first time in a long time, it felt like the world was back to normal. You weren’t a survivor, you were just at home with family, having dinner, playing a silly game next to the man you loved.
You stole sips of his whiskey throughout the night, enough to feel fuzzy and warm instead of fearful and so, so cold. Joel’s hand wandered from where it started the evening, creeping up your cast until he was touching the soft denim over your knee, working you up and making you needier with each stroke of his thumb.
“Well, we should be gettin’ to bed,” Tommy announced, stretching as he stood up and wrapped an arm around his wife. “I’ll see y’all off tomorrow mornin’, alright? Say around nine?”
“A late start,” Joel noted, voice raspy and deep from exhaustion.
“Well, we had a late night,” Tommy argued. “Sleep in, old man. Lord knows you need it.”
“Guess I’ll be going to bed, too.” Ellie stood up and grabbed her glass, walking it to the sink and filling it up. “Night. See you in the morning.”
“See you,” you managed, melancholy creeping back in through the cracks of your slowly dwindling buzz.
Joel turned to look at you, his hand now sliding up to knead at your thigh, pulling your eyes to his. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he replied, cracking a half smile. “You feelin’ alright?”
“No,” you confessed, albeit lightheartedly as you plucked his glass from his free hand and lifted it to your lips. “I’m losing everyone I love tomorrow.”
“No—“
“Don’t you dare try and convince me not to worry,” you interrupted in a soft, vulnerable whisper. “You can’t promise me you’ll come back. Or that she’ll come back.”
“I can promise you—” He leaned in, close enough for you to smell the liquor on his breath. “We’re comin’ back.”
“Yeah,” you huffed a chuckle and looked down at the amber liquor you were swirling around the glass. Joel plucked it from your fingers and set it down on the table before bringing your hand to his cheek, letting it rest there. His eyes were so round as he looked at you, pleading with you to forgive him for what you knew he had to do—for this mission he had to finish, and for the fact that you couldn’t be there with him to do it.
“You ready to go to bed?” he asked, the question taking the place of a more sentimental one: will you let me love you while I can? The answer was the same for both.
“Yeah,” you nodded. “Take me to bed.”
Joel wasted no time in getting you picked up into his strong arms, your mind fuzzy enough from the whiskey that you didn’t complain this time around. You actually enjoyed being held by him so carefully and reliably. You knew that as long as he was this close to you, as long as these arms were holding you, everything would be alright. Another wave of sadness washed over you as you realized come morning, he’d be gone, and instead of everything being alright, everything would now be uncertain.
“Stop thinkin’,” he whispered as he ascended the steps of the staircase.
“Sorry,” you replied, even softer. Joel looked at you carefully as he stilled at the top of the stairs, his eyes darting across your features. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s gonna be the last time. Like you’re trying to remember me.” Joel’s chest tightened at the sound of your voice, vulnerable and fearful.
He didn’t want to leave you anymore than you wanted him to leave, but…after everything it took to get here? All the danger, all the close calls…after what Tess sacrificed for this little girl Joel now came to see as a daughter. He had to leave, had to get Ellie to these goddamn Fireflies, and then, he could come back. He could love you right and never leave you again. You two could have a second shot at this thing he always wanted to have with you but never could allow himself to while in the QZ.
“I love you.” His confession was soft, almost missable to anyone who wasn’t focused on every single breath he made. You swallowed thickly, those words bittersweet in the moment, but you knew they’d be a balm later on, soothing your anxious heart when he was out on the road.
“Love you,” you managed, weak and cracking. Joel walked down the hall past Ellie’s bedroom and into yours. Carefully, he set you down on your good foot to help you undress, peeling your jeans and underwear off first before slipping your thermal long sleeve over your head. “Can you help me wash up first?”
He chuckled and nodded. “Ain’t that what got you in this mess in the first place?”
“Yeah,” you breathed a laugh through your nostrils. “Should at least get clean since I already paid the price for it.”
“Gotta find you somethin’ for the cast, hold on. Sit right there,” he ordered, placing you on the edge of the bed while he hurried downstairs to find a trash bag or something to wrap your leg in. He returned a minute later with a bit of duct tape and a black trash bag. “Ya know, I broke my leg back in high school. Ended my football career.”
“Oh, your promising football career, huh?” you smiled, the domesticity of the moment helping to alleviate both the ache in your chest and in your ankle.
“Nah, Tommy was always the superstar. I had more fun bein’ stuck at home playin’ my guitar all day,” he replied, flashing you that winning smile of his. “While he was out practicin’ in the hot sun, I was inside in the cool air, practicin’ pluckin’ my strings.”
“That what they called it back then? Pluckin’ your strings?” you teased, making him chuckle.
“No need to practice that, I’d already mastered it.”
“And you didn’t go blind or grow hair on your palms?” you continued, earning another laugh and a glimpse of that dimple.
“Nope,” he assured, still wearing that grin as he taped the trash bag closed around your knee. “Alright, enough of you teasin’ me, let’s get you cleaned, baby.”
“Calling me baby again,” you mumbled to yourself but he caught it.
“Don’t like it?”
“No,” you urgently shook your head. “I really like it.”
“Good,” he nodded and helped walk you into the en-suite. “Can you keep yourself upright while I get undressed?”
“Yeah,” you replied, watching him as he leaned over the tub to turn the water on—the hot water, you quickly remembered.
Joel stood up and turned to face you as he undressed, a cocky smile on his face as he watched your eyes follow his fingertips as they moved to unbutton his flannel. He smirked as your tongue swept over your bottom lip as he shrugged the fabric off and moved to unbutton his jeans. He lowered his eyes to watch your fingers twitch against the counter as you used it to balance yourself, fighting the urge to let you reach out and help him with his zipper.
“You really need it that bad, baby?” he husked, surprising you with his voice as you’d been lost in a trance watching him slowly expose his body one article of clothing at a time. Lifting your eyes to meet his, you let out an embarrassed chuckle.
“Guess so,” you replied. Joel shucked his jeans and briefs off in one clean motion before walking to you, crowding you against the counter with one hand on your face, the other gripping your hip.
“I need it that bad, too,” he whispered against your lips as he brushed his across yours, pressing his hardening length against your stomach.
“You’re better at hiding it than me,” you replied, drunk on him now rather than the whiskey. “Barely made it tonight with your hand on my thigh.”
“Trust me,” he started, pausing to give you a kiss. “Thought about tellin’ everyone to fuck off so I could lay you out on that table and have you for dessert.”
“Joel,” you sighed, desperate for more of him. He seemed to know what you were asking for, nodding at you before helping you into the tub.
“Keep your cast propped over the edge,” he reminded as he helped you sink into the hot water.
“Is it a coincidence that now I’m spread eagle, or was that the plan all along?” you asked with a smile, watching as Joel shrugged playfully.
“We may never know.” Climbing in behind you, he let you rest against his chest in the cramped space, his body feeling like a warm brick wall against your back. His hands wandered, fingertips grazing your skin and trailing droplets of water across the skin of your stomach. You hummed contentedly at the contact, your head falling back to rest against his collarbone. He took the opportunity as it was presented to him and pressed soft, so fucking soft, kisses down the side of your face and jaw, causing you to open your neck up to him.
Water splashed across your skin as he moved to grab the bar of soap on the edge of the tub, dipping it into the water before lathering it in his hands. He didn’t leave your neck the entire time, leaving sweet love bites that had you pushing back against him in search of more while he lathered the soap across your chest, stomach and arms.
“Should get you to bathe me more often,” you purred softly as he rinsed the soap off your body and flattened his palm over the swell of your lower belly. You smiled as he nipped at your jaw and slid his hand lower and lower until he was cupping your center, the heel of his palm grinding against your clit just enough to make you keen for him. “Don’t tease,” you whined. “You promised.”
“Mm-hm,” he hummed in your ear and you could feel his smile grow as he nuzzled his cheek against yours, both of your eyes fixing on where his hand rested between your thighs just below the surface of the water. “You want my fingers, baby?”
“I want anything you’ll give me,” you replied, desperate and needy. Joel didn’t make you wait long, bringing two of his fingers to circle over your clit for a while, lighting you up and soothing you all at once. Your hands clawed at his thighs that bracketed your hips as he moved his fingers round and round, round and round before he slid them lower and carefully slid into your eager entrance. Your head fell back as he curled his fingers inside of you, finding that gummy spot that made your toes curl. “So good…your fingers are s-so good.”
“Yeah?” he hummed the question into your ear almost patronizingly as he sped up his thrusts, adding his thumb back to your clit. “That feel good, baby?”
“So good,” you confirmed, squeezing his thighs and letting a choked moan slip from your lips. “Want more of you. Want everything.”
“You have me,” he promised, kissing your cheek. “You always have me, baby.”
You reached back between your bodies to find him hard and throbbing in your fist, a groan slipping from his lips as he kept them pressed to the side of your face.
“Can’t fuck you in here,” he husked. “Gotta get you in bed.”
After quickly washing and rinsing the rest of your bodies clean, Joel helped you out of the tub and wrapped a towel around you before hanging one low around his waist. He lowered himself to unwrap your cast before standing with you at the sink as the two of you took the all-too rare opportunity to thoroughly brush your teeth and rinse with mouthwash.
After you were both as fresh as you had been in the last twenty years, he walked you to the bed and helped you onto the sheets, laying you down in the middle of the bed before slotting his hips between your thighs. He smiled down at you, so timid and soft and nothing like the man that you knew at the beginning of this journey. You liked him better this way, but not more.
“I want to take my time,” he whispered as his eyes lowered to watch his hand move up and down your side before cupping the weight of your breast. “But everytime I get you like this…can’t help myself.”
“Well,” you started, tipping his chin up with two fingers to bring his eyes back to yours. “Since you’re coming back to me…we’ll have all the time in the world.”
“Yeah,” he nodded, a flicker of a smile growing on his face as he searched your eyes. “I am comin’ back. You believe me when I say that?”
“I want to,” you replied. “I’m trying to.”
He waited a beat before accepting this was the best he could convince you of his promise. “Okay.”
Casting aside all the fear and worry and sadness and loneliness that already threatened to seep into the moment, you pulled Joel down to crash your lips against his. He moaned, his hands gripping your hips as they rested there, his tongue swiping into your mouth as he grinded the length of his cock against your seam.
“Please,” you breathed out the demand against his lips, your hips lifting to meet his. Joel groaned and nodded, letting go of his firm grip on your hip to fist his length against your entrance, pumping his already reddened and throbbing girth. “Please, please, plea—“
He cut you off with the slick glide of his head into your heat, a strangled groan bursting from his chest as the tight fit.
“Goddamn,” he stilled, trying not to finish before he could even get started. A red flush of embarrassment grew on his neck and chest as he met your eyes. “I should’a made you cum on my tongue first, baby. Don’t know if I can last long enough—“
“No,” you shook your head and reached a hand up to cup his face. “I just want you. Don’t worry about anything, I just…this isn’t about getting off, s’just about feeling you.”
“Baby,” he shivered as his cock slid further into your heat, your back arching as he stroked against your favorite spot. He lowered himself to rest over you, his elbows propping him up on either side of your head. He looked deep into your eyes as his girth stretched you open, your lips parted in a silent cry.
“Joel, it feels so good,” you whispered, brows furrowed as though you were in pain. He nodded in agreement as he leaned in to kiss you slowly, deeply, taking care to keep his thrusts as languid as his kisses to prolong this moment for as long as he could manage. One of your hands slipped between your bodies to work at your clit, causing you to squeeze him as he withdrew his length only to press back in even deeper. Your head pressed hard into the pillow, your eyes squeezing shut as you tried not to cum yet, knowing that as soon as you did, Joel would follow and then this would be over for the night.
“Baby,” he whined, raspy and needy. “Can feel you holdin’ back…don’t hold back. Wanna feel you.”
“Don’t want—“ You paused as his cock targeted something devastating inside you, a cry sounding from somewhere deep and broken inside of you that Joel was fixing just by being with you. “God, you feel so good, I don’t want it to stop.”
“We have all night,” he promised. “I’m not choosin’ sleep over you.”
“Fuck,” you moaned, your climax becoming harder and harder to fight off. “Joel—“
“I know, baby.” He pressed his lips against your cheek. “Let go.”
You were shoved off the cliffs of euphoria by his command, white-hot bliss paralyzing you for a moment before settling into that familiar fuzzy warmth you always looked forward to. Joel carved his hips into yours three more times—as though he was carving a promise, an I love you into your flesh—before letting go, allowing himself the rare and reckless act of emptying inside you. He didn’t have it in him to part from you, even if it was a risky move.
“Fuck,” he huffed, his face buried in the crook of your neck. “Gimme a second, I’ll go down and get ya some water.”
“Stay,” you commanded while scratching lightly at the nape of his neck. “For as long as you can, tomorrow.”
“I will,” he promised, lifting his head to look into your eyes. “Not leavin’ ‘til we have to.”
“Promise?” you asked, eyes full with vulnerability.
“I promise.”
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#pedro pascal#pedro pascal fic#pedro pascal fanfiction#pedro pascal smut#pedro pascal fluff#joel miller#joel miller fic#joel miller x reader#joel miller reader insert#joel miller fluff#joel miller x y/n#joel miller x you#joel miller angst#joel miller smut#joel miller x reader smut#breaking up slowly
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I had a thought earlier: What if Ezio was Desmond's Sage?
Basically, the usual setup with Desmond using the eye to contact Ezio in the library and offering to send him back in time to save his family, but due to the damage he's sustained from the Eye, he can't come with. Once this moment in the Grey is over, he would die. Ezio begs him to come with him, through any means possible. He refuses to leave behind the divine being he is the chosen Prophet for. The being who is going against Fate itself to give him his family back. Desmond just can't say no to Ezio and tries to see if there's anyway he could come with Ezio. He doesn't want to die if he can avoid it. It's then, through the connection with the Eye and the Apple, that he learns about Sages. With a few modifications for Ezio's safety, that could work. Instead of consuming Ezio's mind to take over, he would just live alongside him. When he tells Ezio of it, Ezio accepts.
.
.
When Ezio wakes up, it is to his childhood bedroom. Everything is how it was when he was 17. Is 17. It worked! His family is alive and well! Did the Sage thing work?
"Desmond, are you here?"
'Yes Ezio, i am.'
.
Just a thought i had. I imagine that Ezio could let Desmond have control of his body, but Desmond is pretty chill with just watching though Ezio's eyes.
Ezio would have mind conversations with Desmond, which worries his family a lot when they catch him just staring emptily though the air. That and his complete switch in behaviour.
There's probably so many routes to go here, but i'm too sleep deprived to think atm. XD
It doesn’t take long before Desmond realized that all the modifications he made for his consciousness to become part of Ezio had turned him to be the least invasive Bleed to ever be conceived.
Did this count as possession?
Was Ezio even a Sage or was Desmond simply a sentient Bleed?
Wait.
Did that mean that the Bleeding Effect mimicked the experiences a Sage goes through when they start ‘getting’ the Isu’s memories.
Didn’t that mean that there was a possibility that the Animus was based on the research the Isus made to create the-
“Desmond, as interesting as your thoughts are about this subject, I’d prefer it if you were to. Focus!” Ezio was unable to stop himself from raising his voice as he punched one of Vieri’s hired muscles as Desmond liked to call them. The man staggered as he took a few steps back and Ezio swiped his feet before stomping on his groin.
There was a few scandalous looks thrown his way at that attack and Ezio just shrugged.
It wasn’t his fault that Desmond’s skills in unarmed combat bled through to him during these situations and Desmond fought shamelessly dirty.
‘In my defense…’ Desmond quipped from his mind, ‘I was taught that honor and shame have no place when you’re getting ganged up by Templars.’
Ezio grunted as he dodged a punch aimed for his chest, quickly grabbing the wrist and pulling him forward to unbalance him before delivering a high knee strike, making the man gasp as Ezio kneed him on the throat.
Okay, that one was from one of Desmond’s Bleed, not Desmond himself.
But then again…
Desmond was his Bleeds and his Bleeds were him. When he thinks about it that way…
“Desmond…” Ezio gritted as he smacked an incoming kick from another man, quickly jabbing the man’s side before suckerpunching him.
‘Sorry, sorry. My brain’s wacky at the moment.’ Desmond said.
That was an understatement.
Desmond had been in Ezio’s body for only a few hours. They had went outside to try and get a lay of the land and found out the date by Vieri throwing a rock at Ezio and giving Ezio the scar on his lips.
So yeah…
Desmond was still not used to being this… entity inside Ezio’s mind.
“Don’t think too hard.” Ezio backhanded a goon’s cheek hard and fast enough that he was able to topple the surprised and hurt goon with his mind quickly making it known that it was a common technique Altaïr used to do. Ezio tried to focus as he said, “Let’s just get this over with then we can have our mental breakdown in our room, okay?”
‘Yeah, okay.’ Desmond answered and Ezio felt Desmond focus.
It was like his senses became clearer.
His body became lighter.
And…
He could predict everyone’s next move.
To borrow Desmond’s expression at the moment.
Holy shit.
(Desmond doesn’t know it but because he made Ezio his Sage, he is technically a being that has access to Isu senses which he can pass down to Ezio. Ezio’s human body can’t take much of it though so there’s a time limit and that is how Federico comes in and save them because Ezio and Desmond starts getting a headache after using it too much.)
#desmond’s mind is a bit… scattered atm#because he did just transfer his consciousness to ezio#but making sure ezio would not be negatively affected#am i saying the sages’ isu memories are like the bleeding effect?#yes yes i am#i haven’t seen how it appears with basim#haven’t played mirage yet#i promise to play it before the end of the year#i just need to clear the latest event of hsr#ask and answer#assassin's creed#desmond miles#ezio auditore#teecup writes/has a plot#fic idea: assassin's creed
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It feels like people were wanting the trust exercises in Critical Role c3 E79 and E80 to be research-supported therapy from a licensed practitioner where they all work together to get a good grade in therapy, a thing that's normal to want and possible to achieve.
Not A HAG fucking with them per her nature feeding off juicy drama and cringe who wants to shake them around until all their secrets come out for her to watch and realize that they're so scared of failure they're locking into the sort of inaction that will actually make them fail. (I love Nana Mori. She was exactly the sort of fucked up punk rock street wise woman they needed.)
It's BORING if they just talk about all their problems. It's BORING if they just jump to trusting each other (when the exercise was started that they can't trust each other). It's BORING if they're like "actually that power that's been set in front of me could possibly have a bad effect so I'm just going to keep ignoring it. It's BORING to be safe. Go back to your coffee shop AUs if you want everything to be soft and safe. That's not the point of the source material.
The CR cast have REPEATEDLY said they have more fun pushing the big red button than playing it safe because you spend all of real life trying to avoid the consequences of risky decisions and it's FUN to get to explore what can go wrong.
Bell's Hells succeeded because they concluded they are in a moment were inaction and hesitation will get everyone killed and they just need to push all the big red buttons and take the risks because it's now or never. They need to check in enough to keep each other in line, but they also need to imagine a scenario where none of them are traitors. (Like they had to restrain FCG from murder-bot mode, but they risked getting to murder-bot mode because the benefit outweighed the personal risk.)
This party is not OSHA approved. They literally couldn't do the job if they were. People like Allura and Keyleth are relying on them to take monumentally stupid risks while holding on by their fingernails so that other people can be safe.
Fearne came to the conclusion that she wasn't taking the shard because she was afraid of Dark!Fearne. But her friends will pull her out of that if she drifts. She also wasn't taking it because she thought Ashton was supposed to have it and that didn't work out well. If she'd put her hoof down her friends would probably have accepted her decision even if they disagreed with it. (It's actually like normal and healthy to disagree with your friends choices and not yes-man them all the time.) But she decided with her own free will that she was just being scared and actually she did want to try. (But also if they hadn't gone through the shard hurting and rejecting Ashton, Fearne might have thought her taking damage meant she wasn't supposed to have it, not just part of the trial of absorbing it.)
There's no binary where pressuring your friends is always bad. Sometimes your friends pressure you into doing things they believe will benefit you that you're reluctant to do and then you do it and are like "no actually that was the right call and I needed that." Or you conclude "No actually that was bad and I wish I didn't listen." There's actually no way to know ahead of time. My relationship with one of my best friends of like 20 years consists heavily of us battling each other's depression by pressuring each other into things we don't want to do but need to and that's healthy for us. But also other people in our lives pressured us into things we didn't want to do and should not have done and it turned out bad. It turns out that life is made up of shades of grey and not hard and fast rules. There's no way of knowing if you're fucking up ahead of time.
Imogen admitted in the Truth or Die session that she was upset that Fearne didn't take the shard. She probably would not have told Fearne that in normal circumstances. And she was probably feeling that way because part of her was upset at herself for not giving into the Predothos powers. Admitting that to Fearne gave her the courage to talk about the possibility of doing that. Which like, could be a terrible idea. But also this is a D&D game with predetermined character class powers that grow as you level and there has to be an in-game justification for getting powers like Revelation in Flesh at 14th level. Like, either she leans into these powers or they're forced on her or she stops leveling and goes home. Leaning in is way more fun. Don't you want to see what batshit thing Matt has planned for that? That's FUN. Ignoring the dark powers is boring.
Like first and foremost this is A GAME that involves yes-anding and taking risks. It's about characters who have spent their entire lives burying and ignoring their problems and getting worse because of it. It isn't REAL for them to have one revelation and be like, "Whelp I'm fixed now and will fall into none of my old patterns and just bare my soul to everyone forever now." People aren't actually like that and if that's what they need to do to be measurably better for you you'll have a lifetime of disappointments. This is an adult story for adults about how adults really behave.
Anyway I can't wait for them to schlep all their baggage and new fucked up powers to the moon with them where they're make irresponsible decisions based on a martyr complex while their friends yell at them to stop being stupid and selfish and let them help. It's going to be a disaster but hopefully they snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (or defeat from the jaws of victory) and tell an entertaining story about the fuckups who tried to stop the next Calamity. Maybe they will and they get to be heroes. Maybe it comes at a terrible cost. Maybe they totally fuck it up and it's a Ring of Brass situation. But it'll be FUN.
#critical role#critical role spoilers#critical role meta#critical role discourse#critical role campaign 3#Bell's Hells#There's a reason many fans of this show would be totally incapable of making a compelling AP on their own#Maybe a fun home game but not a compelling narrative for other people#long post
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Why?: Volo x Reader
After everything you've been through, you can't help but be kind to him. But why?
Spoilers for post-post-game.
You were hardly aware of the tall grass crunching under your feet as you hiked along the cliffside. You had searched every nook and cranny for the slightest hint of the man who betrayed you. Why were you looking for him? Why did you care? After hours of trekking and months of searching, you didn't have enough energy to ponder them.
You turned a jagged corner and ducked under an overhang when suddenly you saw it: a hole in the rock face that was just big enough for a large person to squeeze through. You impulsively stuck your head in the gap and let out a gasp.
The cave was decorated with various artifacts that you had never seen before. If that wasn't obvious enough, a yellow and white bedroll was spread across the floor. This had to be it.
"Hello."
You turned around and instinctively threw your arms over your face, cowering from a blow that didn't come. You slowly lowered your arms to see a frustratingly beautiful man staring down at you.
Time had not been kind to Volo. His hair was unkept and knotted, and his once-white tunic was streaked with dirt and grime. It was almost... pitiful.
As if reading your thoughts, he looked down and cringed at his own appearance. "The wilderness was- easier to traverse in my Ginko Guild uniform."
You were shocked by his lack of aggression, but more than that you were shocked by your own. It was by pure instinct that you sought out this man, this man who had tried everything to strike you down. Did time alone in the wilderness make you placid? Did it make him placid?
You searched your pockets and pulled out a haircomb made of finely carved Magikarp bone.
Volo's expression shifted as you offered it to him. He was always hard to read, but now that you know what he's capable of, his true emotions were even more unknown. "Why." he finally said.
You looked down at your feet, not knowing the answer to his question. To his thousand unspoken questions. Because you were my friend? Because I learned a lot from you?Because even though you tried to strike me down I somehow kind of respect you?
"Because your hair is messy."
Volo snatched the comb from your hand and gingerly attempted to run it through his once-beautiful hair, but the teeth quickly got stuck in a matted section.
"Let me help," you offered.
He tried in vain to break up the tangled blond mass before finally tossing the comb at you and sitting down on a rock with a huff.
You gently took his hair between your fingers, assessing the damage. It was clear that he had at least bathed during his exile, but river water could only do so much. It would take hours to detangle it all.
Volo fidgeted under the heat of your gaze and the touch of your hands. He looked like he wanted to speak, but the two of you were locked in an inescapable silence as you began slowly fixing his hair. He knew you wouldn't fall for his usual charms. You knew he wouldn't respond well to talk of redemption. You worked in silence until you gently draped a freshly detangled lock over Volo's shoulder.
"Thank you."
You both spoke the words at the exact same time. Volo turned to see you stifling a laugh with one hand loosely placed over your smile.
"You're welcome." You both quipped simultaneously.
Now Volo was laughing. Oh Almighty Sinnoh how you missed that laugh. It reminded you of your adventures together seeking out legendary pokemon. Before Spear Pillar. You sighed and looked at him wistfully. His round face and sharp chin, his half-lidded grey eyes that squinted a little when he smiled, his strong arms that you could finally appreciate through his threadbare tunic. In that moment you realized you were finally seeing the real Volo.
"Why?" Volo asked again, as soft as a song.
As you searched for the right words you suddenly felt the weight of your pack dig into your shoulders. You dropped it in front of you and held out the comb again.
"Because your hair could have been messy."
You reached into your pack and pulled out a set of fine clothes woven with threads of gold.
"Because your clothes could have been dirty."
You reached in again and pulled out a set of tinctures and bandages.
"Because you could have been hurt."
Again and again you pulled countless gifts from your pack. Sweet-smelling soaps, a collection of leather-bound novels, a set of hand-drawn illustrations of each of his Pokemon, warm woolen socks. Each gift with a sentiment. A worry. A prayer.
Volo gazed at you as you spilled your heart onto the rocks by his feet. The chosen vessel of his silent god was here, worrying for him. Seeking him out. Spending months of time and wages just to ensure his well-being. A few months ago he would have called you foolish. Before that, he would have shoved down his emotions and thought of you as a useful tool. But now? All of the feelings he desperately tried to ignore since the day you met came flooding back.
In an instant you were in his arms. You hadn't even registered that he stood up, yet here you were swallowed up by his mass. Your head pressed against his chest as he cradled your body with ease. You melted into each other's touch, breathing in the mountain air.
You gazed up at him, noticing the soft intensity in his eyes as he stared back. His arms shifted slightly, tightening his grip around you. Unkempt as he was, Volo was still beautiful.
"Why?" You asked.
You could feel Volo's chuckle vibrate through his body before trailing off into little hums. He removed one hand from your embrace and ran his fingers along the combed section of his golden hair. It was his turn to lay his heart bare to you.
With every chance encounter, Volo had grown to admire your love for Pokemon. With every legendary pokemon and plate you tracked down together he began to grow fond of your presence. The world was so unfair, and yet over the past months Volo found himself yearning for the company of its protector.
"Because... I love you."
Volo said it with certainty. No smirk on his face or humor in his expression. A few months ago he considered you proof that life was nothing but unfair to him. Now, you were proof that the world was kind.
You squeezed him even tighter and buried your face in his chest. It was only after catching the sound of Volo's racing heartbeat that you realized you never gave him an answer.
"I love you too."
Volo smiled his signature toothy grin and suddenly your feet were off the ground. The both of you laughed as he spun you around with adrenaline-filled joy.
The two of you collapsed onto the rock with you in his lap, enjoying each other's warmth. You reached to run your fingers through his hair when you remembered. You pulled the comb from your pocket and began untangling a second lock of hair. You could stare directly at his face now. You liked this smile much better than the smirk he used to wear. This one crinkled his eyes into a warm expression and rounded his cheeks. The more you stared, the more you noticed a pink blush creep across his face.
"May I kiss you?" You found yourself asking.
"Are you sure?" Volo's smile faltered. Another set of unspoken questions. Are you sure you want to trust me again? Are you sure I'm worthy? Are you sure you want to love me?
"Yes." You breathed.
Volo's lips crashed into yours with surprising intensity. His grip on your body tightened as he poured every ounce of passion he had ever had right into your lips. You let out a squeak of surprise as he leaned you further down until your head was parallel to the ground. His hand cushioned your head against the rock as you felt his whole torso pressing on your body.
Every moment you thought he'd break away he didn't. You were locked in your embrace as the sun began to set and the heavens began to unfurl. Finally, when you thought you'd fall asleep with your lips against his, Volo slowly pulled back and searched your expression. Was that too much?
"I- wasn't expecting that."
"I've waited a long time." Volo said simply.
You suddenly became aware that the gifts you bought were still scattered at your feet. "It's getting dark. May I stay the night and care for you?"
"It would be an honor."
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okay, we know how Branch found the feral things and started a grey troll village in your nomads au. And how Creek ended up in the village. BUT, how did the rest of the occupants come to be? Did they willing leave their kingdoms? Were they abandoned? Did they get lost and lose hope of anyone ever coming for them before they met the feral creatures and the others? I really wanna know some backstories.
Oooooo-This is a tough one.
Everyone in the village has there own story for why there their. These are a few examples I thought up of how they got there.
Pop: There are very few Pop trolls in the grey village (mostly due to their toxic positivity of always looking on the bright side for normal Pop trolls ) they basically were separated from the main tribe and didn’t find the putt putt trolls on there way out when escaping. Soon they lost all hope of finding the tribe and went to live in the wood (it went reeeeaaallly bad) a few were eaten and the rest went grey, they were kinda just wandering around for a few years till the (very few) nomads and feral (trolls?) showed up. They were taken in and found Branch there too. The grey pop trolls also were told were the village was but they didn’t go back because they were too ashamed about being grey.
Funk: There is a group of funk trolls in the village who all came in at the same time. They were researchers who were left behind by vibe city and had no hope of getting back to the always moving ship, so they went grey and were later found by a small hunting team and Branch while trying to create some traps to keep them safe (there are more funk trolls I’m just showing off random examples of how trolls got here)
Classical: There are a few classical trolls who can’t fly in the village due to wing injuries. The injuries go from difficult to stay in the air, to broken beyond repair, and looking at how there body is shaped (they have the bodies of LITERAL babies can they walk?) I don’t think it’s easy for them to get around since symphony vill is probably mostly made to fly around. It got too difficult for them and just left going grey in the process. 
Techno: There once was a dead techno troll who had some troll eggs with them beached on a nearby river to the village, they took in the techno eggs (The eggs HAVE to look like fish eggs right.. RIGHT?!) the trolling when they hatched just sorta knew there mother was gone and were born grey. they grew up in the village which didn’t…really help them get better and just sorta caused them more issues.(there have been a few lost techno trolls who had damaged fins to the point of not even being able to go back)
Rock: A lot more rock trolls live in the village then the other genres, mostly cause of their more feral and aggressive personalities (they look like biters) so some just had bad experiences in there lives that it just became too much and they just ended up Leaving volcano rock city. There is a rock troll who can’t hear in the village, and due to his deafness he felt like a freak to troll kind since he couldn’t even listen to music (which is kinda a big deal) he left and turned grey wandering the woods until he was found by some feral(trolls?) who have done the same routine of taking in grey trolls a lot at that point.
Country: There aren’t to many country (I feel like it would be harder for them to turn grey since they show how sad it can get in Lonesome flats) but the some who do show up have tons of kids, a while back a couple of country trolls were deemed criminals for liking another genre of music and playing it too loud, to which they were promptly kicked out of town, who later turned grey from getting forced to leave there only home. They were found fighting predators by a hunting team. (this was way before world tour so a lot less tolerance for other music)
Subgenres: There are some subgenre groups running around, like indie trolls, steam punk trolls, some grunge too (and many more) they usually are abandoned or just turn grey from living a isolated lonely life or some other reason like family was killed or taken by huge predators or what not.
Honestly most of them stay grey or go darker in color because they live in the village. It isn’t really going out of its way to help them get their color back but is really just a home for them. Growing up there influences many of the kids born there to turn grey or go grey later in their lives.
There are many other reasons why any of the trolls would be here these are just random scenariosthat I thought up to show as examples
#dreamworks trolls#trolls brainrot#trolls#trolls branch#trolls band together#nomads au#trolls au#au idea#grey tribe#trolls movie#funk trolls#trolls headcanons#trolls the movie#trolls fandom#troll oc#country trolls#pop trolls#techno trolls#classical trolls#rock trolls#grey trolls
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Revenant!Jazz ideas:
Continuing from this DPxDC prompt of mine, I’ve had some more thoughts about Jasmine Fenton and Revenants, especially where it concerns DC lore and Jason Todd in particular.
———————-
In my original post, @starlightcat04 asked whether or not Jazz’s eyes would glow toxic green too. I propose that, no, they wouldn’t.
While it’s a common head canon that Ectoplasm is heavily influenced by emotions, Jazz’s Ecto-contamination is bone deep and pure, unlike Jason’s. So no, I don’t believe her eyes would glow green.
They turn from the teal she had in life to a smoldering green that reflects light just like a feline, with a heavily damaged sclera that is perceived as black in low lighting, with ash grey veins spreading from her eye sockets down to her jaw like tears.
Her once bright hair turns from a lively orange-ish red to the color of cooling embers.
That which caused her death, a punctured artery is half-way healed by the time Jazz reanimates in the crematorium, so not only is she supposed to be dead still, she also has to be very careful with her movements otherwise she could very well bleed out again before she is fully healed.
What else changes with Revenant!Jazz?
In exchange for a higher mental processing and the high damage absorption of Revenants, Jazz loses most (almost all) of her memories of her life. What she does remember is thankfully not her death, but rather Danny’s, his death scream and ghostly wail overlap in her mind, at times causing severe headaches and nausea.
(According to his wiki page, Jason spent a year in a coma and as an amnesiac vagrant, therefore it’s not entirely without precedent that Jazz wouldn’t keep hers.)
Her Ecto-contamination has to factor in a lot though.
Jason was revived by Superboy-Prime’s Reality Shattering Punch. Jazz was reanimated by her own willpower, aided by Ecto to allow her body to heal and regress the stages of rigor mortis.
———//:///////———-
What does Jazz need to accomplish as a Revenant?
In the original prompt I wrote that Jazz returned to keep Danny safe- broad enough for a prompt, but what exactly does “safe” for a halfa entail?
Let’s list the major threats to Danny’s health, beginning with the obvious: the Ghost Investigation Ward and The Fenton Parents.
The Fentons are capable of tracking Phantom by his Ecto-signature, creating and having created weaponry specifically designed to target the ghost in question, to which they pass that tech on to the GIW.
If Danny remains in Gotham, the ambient Ecto will scramble the tech over enough of a distance, but if Danny were in a line up of three people right next to a GIW agent he’d be clocked almost immediately.
So, the Fentons and the GIW have to go. How does this happen?
The greatest irony I could possibly inflict on these anti-ghosters- becoming ghosts themselves. I won’t go into detail about what my brain jumped to when I thought about that outcome, but let’s just say it was pretty dark.
(And karmically well-deserved.)
#3 on the list depends on where Danny is when Jazz is finished with numbers 1 & 2 on her list.
If Danny is is Gotham and staying there for the long haul, then I believe this girl would take one look at Batman’s rogue gallery and nope them so hard everyone in Gotham gets the sense of their world about to be rocked, but the ones she gunning for the most?
(Joker, Bane, Manbat, Firefly, Madhatter, Riddler…)
They get the sensation that someone just walked over their non-existent graves.
(I got a little gleeful demented imagining Jazz just straight up ripping Manbat’s wings clean off, burning Firefly alive and throwing a detoxed Bane into a crowd of vengeful Gothamites.)
(Jazz learns that Joker killed a young hero with a crowbar and a bomb. She’s fully onboard with turnabout being fair play when it comes to that Pennywise reject.)
(I can’t even begin to list every rogue Jazz cuts down, it she doesn’t kill all of them, just most of their number.)
(Gotham celebrates for weeks.)
(I’m not sure whether or not Jazz kills the four mentioned previously in a couple of nights, one night or over a a few months, but it doesn’t take as long as one might think.)
/://:///////:::/::::///////
What’s next for Revenant!Jazz?
I’m still writing The Regent series, so I doubt I’ll come back to this for a while, but I’ll still be posting ideas and whatnot about Revenant!Jazz. There’s still plenty to explore here, and I have a pretty angst/bittersweet ending for Jazz in mind I want to talk about later.
If you have any ideas to add, please feel free to comment! If anyone does write this, please let me know so I can read it!
#dp x dc#dp x dc au#dpxdc#dc x dp crossover#jazz fenton#dp x dc prompt#Revenant!Jazz#talking about Jason’s death like it wasn’t by fan request#did they choose his coffin by fan request too?#ramblings#ramblings of an insomniac Danny Phantom Phan#Apparently I have more marvel comics lore in my head than I do DC#I REALLY NEED TO STOP READING WIKIS#it’s a micro aggression against my need to sleep
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BRF Reading - 6th of December, 2023
This is speculation only
Cards drawn on the 6th of December, 2023
Question: What does the Universe want King Charles to do in this situation (the mess of accusations in the book EndGame and the fallout from those accusations)? What advice does it have for King Charles?
Interpretation: Realise that Harry is only out for himself and end the relationship between Harry (and Meghan) and the BRF in a clear and unmistakeable manner.
Card One: The Page of Cups.
Pages are children, and messages, and in the suit of Cups the message is going to be about emotions. However, the energy from this card is all related to the image on the card. The image shows the youth Narcissus, gazing at his reflection in a cup of water - an artificial construct - and not in the natural pond behind him.
The energy of this card is all about Narcissism The message for King Charles is to accept that his son is (currently) all about himself and has no care or concern for any other person (like all Narcissists). Like Narcissus in the image, Harry is looking at an image of himself that is constructed in an artificial bubble with little to no relation to reality, and he is acting out of that self image (I am the victim, my cause is just, I am owed security and money, I am the most popular royal etc). Again like the image, Harry is totally absorbed in himself, his woes (real and imagined), his image, his thoughts, his feelings, and he is not spending an iota of energy considering anybody else or the damage he is doing to them by his behaviour.
The suit of Cups tells me that the universe knows that this will be an emotional situation for King Charles, and one that he will not find it easy to accept. If he does accept the message, then dealing with Harry will become easier, as he will not have the emotional expectation that Harry will behave in a way that shows care or concern for another human being other than himself.
Card Two: The Eight of Wands in reverse.
The Eight of Wands is a card of communication, of very swift communication, and possibly (as the suit is wands) of communication via the media/PR pieces. This card is in the reverse. The message from the universe is for King Charles to cut all communication with Harry. Do not contact him, do not write him letters or phone him, and (most strongly) do not send him messages using PR pieces. Continue with the grey-rocking and do not get drawn into any sort of exchange of messages with Harry (and not definitely not with Meghan).
The other meaning of the Eight of Wands is a period of swift progress, of clear sailing after some obstacles have been overcome or removed. In the reverse, that swift progress does not happen. You are stuck in one spot and not going forward. The universe is telling King Charles not to help Harry (and Meghan) in their progress forwards. Let them remain stuck. Let them fumble around and make very slow progress by themselves. Do not assist them in any way, do not make things easier for them in any way. This includes things like giving them any sort of official standing or status as part of the BRF (and if you are screaming 'take them off the website so they can't use that to say they are royal', then I am with you screaming the same thing).
Card Three: The Two of Cups in reverse.
We have the suit of Cups again, so this is going to be something else that King Charles will find it emotionally difficult to do.
The Two of Cups is all about relationships - family, romantic, business, any sort of relationship or partnership. Upright, it suggests either a new partnership or one that is deepening. Reversed, the message is to cut the relationship off. Step away, distance yourself, let the emotional bonds cool. King Charles is being asked to at least distance himself from his second son (and his wife and their children). If he wants to go further, he can cut off the relationship entirely. This includes the relationship that Harry has with the BRF/'The Firm" as well as any relationship that he has left with his family. Harry must be seen to have no partnership with The Firm in any way, shape or form. The family should also distance themselves from him emotionally if they do not want to be abused and manipulated by him, and that includes his father.
The image on the card is of Eros rescuing Psyche from a monster. As the card is in the reverse, the message to King Charles is not to rush in and rescue Harry from his problems, especially his emotional issues (Cups is the suit of emotions). Harry has to rescue himself, or show signs of wanting to do the work to rescue himself, and then his father can help him. Otherwise it will be just another instance of his father protecting Harry from the consequences of his actions, and Harry will both not learn anything from the situation and be likely to repeat it in the future (as Pa will always come to his rescue).
Underlying Energy: The Hierophant
The Hierophant is institutions and authorities, and here it stands, very strongly, for the monarchy. The message for King Charles is that his job is to look after the monarchy first and his wayward son second. He can not continue to expose the monarchy to reputational damage because he doesn't want to take action against his second son. In this situation, the monarchy comes first and King Charles must do everything he can to protect it. His son, Harry, comes second to this duty and responsibility.
Conclusion:
The universe has some hard messages for King Charles, ones that he may find it very difficult to accept emotionally. The King must act to protect the monarchy. This includes recognising that his son Harry is only concerned about himself and will act out of the artificial image of himself that he has in his mind, without concern for anybody else; to stop communicating with Harry, especially through the media, and to stop assisting him with his progress through life by smoothing the path in front of him by continuing to recognise his royal status; and finally, to cut the relationship between Harry and the BRF, or at the very least to distance Harry from the BRF in a clear and unmistakable manner, and to stop rescuing Harry - let Harry bear the consequences of his actions for once in his life.
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Rodimus' Prime Boobs
summary: Rodimus invites you to indulge in his refineries and have a drink.
pairing: Rodimus/Reader
fandom: Transformers
rating: Explicit
warnings: None
tags: Robot Boobs, Lactation, Coitus Interruptus.
Ao3 link is HERE.
“So, what’d you think?”
Rodimus asked, proudly showing off his refineries. They weren’t huge, but they weren’t small, either. About the size of your servos. They were perky, the nozzles slowly hardening in the slightly cool air of his habsuite. The protoform flesh was soft, light grey coloured, his nozzles a faint red. There was a faint glow from his spark beneath the flesh, almost entirely hidden away.
“They’re cute.”
“Eh? Cute?”
Rodimus looked at you with a slight frown. You bit back a small grin as his spoiler drooped, no doubt from disappointment.
“Come on! They’re sexy! Look how perky they are! Look at the way they lightly bounce every time I move!”
And he was right- as he gestured and pointed to them, there was a slight bounce from them. You smiled. Gulping, you bashfully looked at Rodimus and asked the burning question.
“Am I allowed to-”
“Hell yes you are! I’ve been waiting for you to grab ‘em!”
Rodimus leaned forward, pushing his open chestplate towards you with an eager grin. Shuffling forward on the berth, you gently cupped one of his refineries. He made a small noise, not quite a moan, more like a squeak.
“C-careful, they’re- they’re sensitive…”
“I’ll be gentle, Roddy. Tell me if I hurt you.”
The refinery was as soft as it looked. It filled your servo quite nicely, and it felt light. Rodimus bit his derma to stifle another noise as your thumb grazed over the nozzle.
“I’m surprised you didn’t try getting these pierced.”
“I wanted to!” Rodimus said, indignation laced his words as he rolled his optics. You chuckled at the young captain as he continued, “Ratchet said it might cause damage. And that it’d look foolish.”
“I dunno…” Trailing off, you looked back down at the nozzle, once again lightly rubbing your thumb over it. You hummed in appreciation as it hardened at your touch, in your processor you could picture a straight barbell piercing. “I bet you could rock the look, and I imagine it’d be nice to pinch them when they’re pierced.”
“They’re nice to pinch now.”
A loud rev was heard from him as he finished speaking. Looking at Rodimus, you could see a light blue luminescent blush on his faceplate, his optics were dark with need.
“Oh, I bet they are.”
You purred out, grinning. Rodimus shuffled closer to you, smirking at you..
“Well? Go on…”
Rodimus urged you softly, once again jutting out his refineries towards you. They were certainly inviting. Gently, almost unsure of yourself, you lightly pinched the nozzle, tugging it. Rodimus sighed.
“That’s nice… You can pinch harder though, they’re not fragile. They, uh, they leak energon if you do.”
You looked at Rodimus with a quirked browplate and a silent question on your glossa. Rodimus picked up on it, and answered without needing you to ask it.
“It’s a Prime thing.”
Rodimus shrugged, grinning. You nodded, accepting the somewhat lame answer. But it also made sense, somewhat. Just another Prime thing.
“I see.”
Looking back at his chest, you tugged at his nozzles again, this time more firmer. Rodimus’ engine was actively purring now, his spoiler twitching. You brought your other servo up and fondled the other refinery, humming in delight.
“These are nice. Wish my frame had these, they look nice to play with while self servicing.”
“They- they are.”
Rodimus breathed out, his glossa darting out to wet his derma. You weren’t surprised that Rodimus knew- honestly, it’d be surprising if he didn’t know since he was so adventurous. Rolling his nozzles between your thumb and digits, you tugged once more- and a drizzle of energon leaked out.
“Oh wow.”
The sight did something to you- seeing the bright pink liquid contrast with the light grey colouring of his protoform flesh and red nozzles caused your fans to click on the lowest setting.
“Like what you see?”
Rodimus’ tone was smug as he arched his back further into your touch. Gulping, you nodded.
“Y-yeah. Primus, yeah.”
“You can, you know. I’ve been told my energon is the best tasting ever.”
By Drift, no doubt.
You thought to yourself. Now it was your turn to wet your derma with glossa, suddenly finding yourself with a dry intake. The offer was tempting as you watched the small leak drip down your servo.
“I’d love to.” You croaked out, feeling both excited and nervous. Sensing your nervousness, Rodimus shuffled closer, climbing onto your lap and all but shoving the refineries into your face, the nozzles catching onto your derma. You placed your servos on his hips and held onto him tightly.
“Come on, drink up.”
Who were you to deny your Captain? Greedily, you latched onto his nozzles and gave a soft, experimental suckle. A small burst of energon met your glossa, the taste shocking you. Lapping at the leaking nozzle, you pulled away and looked up at Rodimus, wide optics staring at the young prime.
“That’s- you weren’t kidding. This is… the best energon I’ve ever drank. Wow!”
You latched back onto the nozzle, sucking harder. One servo left his hip to fondle the other, lightly pinching the ignored nozzle. Rodimus moaned lowly, his fans now turning on to a low setting. The quiet combined whirr of both of your fans filled the room, along with the quiet gasps and moans of Rodimus and your soft suckling noises.
“Primus, yes…”
Rodimus gripped your helm, keeping you from moving away from his chest- not like you wanted to. Sucking and lapping at his nozzle continuously, you drank the energon like you were starving and the noises Rodimus was making was egging you on, almost making you delirious.
“Fr-frag, you- I think the one’s empty.”
Rodimus' voice was strained, breathless. Pulling away, you looked up and grinned- Rodimus’ faceplate was flushed blue, optics unfocused and watery, his derma parted and his spoiler was quivering behind him- all clear indications of what you were doing to him. Of what you were making him feel.
Primus above and Pits below, he looked gorgeous.
Quickly, you dipped your back helm down and grabbed onto the other refinery, sucking on the nozzle long and hard. Rodimus threw his helm back, choking out a moan. He began to grind his hips against you, your modesty panels bumping against each other. You began to nibble on the nozzle lightly.
“Oh fuck- yes! Yes, keep doing that!”
I’m barely doing anything- they have got to be really sensitive…
You thought to yourself with a grin as you swallowed another mouthful of energon. Rodimus mewled at your suckling, at how your servo fondled his refinery, tugging at the nozzle. You sucked again, Rodimus’ moaning getting louder-
The door opened.
You jumped at the sudden sound of the habsuite door opening. Rodimus’ nozzle left your derma as you turned your helm and looked at the unannounced visitor- Megatron. You were suddenly filled with dread as you realised that your captain, your boss, had walked in on your fraternising with your other boss. You still had a dribble of energon down your chin as you choked out your word.
“C-Captain.”
“Oh, uh- hey Megs.”
Megatron said nothing, at first- only looking at you, then Rodimus with a frown and a disapproving glare.
“You’re late for the meeting, Captain Rodimus.”
“Oh! Oh, that meeting- That’s today? Wow! Um-”
“You got five kliks.”
With that, the door closed shut, leaving both you and Rodimus alone. Rodimus coughed into his servo, blushing- now out of embarrassment, rather than arousal. You cleared your own intake. Rodimus was the first to talk.
“S-so, uh- you free tonight?”
“Yeah- yeah, I am. Uh, drink at Swerve’s or- or back here? Or mine?”
Rodimus grinned. He shuffled away from your lap and closed his chestplate, putting his refineries away from view.
“Swerve’s sounds good, would love to share a drink.”
“You already did.”
You glanced at his chestplate with knowing optics. Rodimus smirked.
“You perv.”
#fanfiction#transformers#valveplug#Rodimus/Reader#RodimusxReader#Rodimus x Reader#Reader Fic#writing#transformers fanfic#fanfic
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sewis batman au
Seb is Not Happy about it.
Mark says, “You like cars,” like that’s any consolation.
“It’d be fine if you were sending me there to watch cars, I do like that,” Seb says. “But you’re sending me there to babysit.”
“You’re talking about the world champion,” Mark says, as if Seb doesn’t know. “World champion seven times.”
“Yes, I’m quite aware of who Lewis Hamilton is, Mark.”
“So we’re all on the same page.” Mark claps his hands together, the way Seb’s science teacher used to do when she’d go Pencils down! at the end of a test. Seb’s pencil was usually already down, the lead broken into two then four then eight pieces because he’d grown bored waiting for the time to run up. Even now it feels like he’s waiting for the world to catch up. “I’m counting on you. Don’t fuck it up.”
Seb opens his mouth to argue, then slams it back shut. Guilt gnaws at him when he sees the stack of reports languishing on Mark’s desk. He’d heard the Chief bellowing at Mark yesterday; everyone had. Gotham Gazette had gotten some very incriminating pictures of Seb letting the Batman into the Royal Hotel.
Police seek help from MASKED VIGILANTE on mayor’s abduction
Jenson slid the paper silently across the desk, only after Seb had his morning coffee in his hands. One look, and Seb knew the damage control would be severe. He hadn’t thought it would involve Gotham’s about-as-interesting-as-a-rock billionaire. The guy’s good at driving fast. Great. That’s about all the personality Seb’s partial to.
“I’d actually take a suspension over this,” Seb says wearily.
“How much does it speak about our sad state of affairs if I tell you I can’t afford that?” Mark sounds equally as tired. The Force is wearing thin with the spate of crime ratcheting at an all-time high. Sometimes Seb steps foot out of his front door and half-expects the pavement to cave away from under him. The city’s running on its own fumes. “You know I can’t afford that.”
“I know,” Seb says. “I’m sorry for what I did.”
“No you’re not.”
No, he’s not. Not twenty minutes in and the Batman had pointed out evidence under the carpet and behind the safe and within the mayor’s pet dog that they would have taken two weeks to find, if they had adhered to proper protocol. Proper protocol! the Chief yelled, and everyone in the bullpen had turned to glare at Seb.
Seb offers his most apologetic smile. Mark rolls his eyes.
“If you’re done complaining, kindly fuck off now.” Mark scrubs a hand through his hair. The grey glinting off his temples makes Seb want to toss a match to the powder keg hiding under the foundations. Just be done with it. If they lose Mark, they lose Seb. If they lose Seb, they lose the Batman. If they lose the Batman, the city is as good as gone. “I’ve got twenty-one complaints to field because of the stunt you pulled yesterday.”
“Yessir,” Seb says. With a little bit of heart injected into it.
--
“Commissioner Vettel,” Hamilton purrs. Seb fights to keep his expression neutral. Hamilton’s arm is heavy around him. He’s dressed in a sleeveless mesh garb for the driver’s parade, even though the weather’s crisp at best. It looks… irritatingly good on him. “I see the Force sent their brightest.”
“Only the best for the city’s elite,” Seb says through a smile pulled so comically across his face it feels like stitches.
“And for the city’s masked avengers, as well.”
The smile drops from Seb’s face. The one on Hamilton’s merely grows. “Hanging out with him when you could be in so much better company, Commissioner,” Hamilton says easily. He pushes close into Seb’s space, and Seb, who prides himself in reading people well, blinks twice at the gates shuttered behind Hamilton’s eyes. “I’d advise you to pick your partners more wisely.”
There’s a split second where Seb hears Mark’s voice—Don’t fuck it up—before all that precaution washes away like rain down a drainpipe. A week ago the Batman had pulled Seb into the protective circle of his arm and chest plate as Alonso’s guards opened fire on them. There was nothing Seb’s Glock could do against three assault rifles. The Batman had taken every single bullet. Then, visibly injured, he’d proceeded to step in front of Seb, and knock the assailants out with their own weapons.
Alonso had escaped. Seb couldn’t have cared less at the moment. “You’re hurt,” he’d cried out, dismayed. The Batman was swaying on his feet. “Let me see, let me see—”
And for the wildest moment, the Batman had almost moved to remove his armour, leaning into Seb, before he stumbled away as if burned. He grappled up a building and disappeared into the night, with Seb calling helplessly after him.
No care allocated for himself. Seb could have hardly picked a better partner. One who's constantly putting himself in the line of fire.
His lips are moving before he can stop himself. “I’m hardly billionaire circle-jerk material, Mr. Hamilton.”
Hamilton’s mouth drops open.
The grin’s back on, stretched out like a Glasgow smile. “Look at this jacket I’m wearing! It’s ten years old, can you believe that? Look at this watch. Complete with blood splatter on its strap, from when I tried but failed to stop a colleague from bleeding out. Why do I keep this still? Maybe I’ve been too lazy to get it changed.”
“Commissioner—”
“And look at these shoes! You won’t believe the shit I’ve waded through in them. Can’t even afford to buy new ones. Do you know what a public servant makes a year?”
Hamilton opens his mouth, almost as if to say yes.
Seb scoffs. “So you see, I’m far more suited to the lowly creatures of society. They've done more for this hellhole than people like you." The urge to defend is so great. "And I dare say the bats in the alleys might even enjoy my company.”
“I dare say they would,” Hamilton says quietly. Seb flicks his gaze up at Hamilton to glare, but Hamilton’s looking at him with the most open expression he’s seen since they were within three feet of each other. They glance away, like chastised children at the principal’s office told to get along.
“So,” Hamilton clears his throat. “If you hate my guts this much, why are you here?”
Seb can recognize an olive branch, even when dangled from the bejeweled fingers of a billionaire. He shrugs. “I like cars.”
“Alright man,” Hamilton says, bumping their shoulders together. He keeps a respectful distance this time. “I buy that.”
--
The five lights go on. Seb doesn’t want to admit he’s standing on his tip toes, trying to peer over a tall mechanic’s shoulder. Hamilton had insisted he be in the Mercedes garage, even after Seb had gone flapping his mouth like a loose carton box. He’d made Seb tea—made it himself, no personal assistant involved. Mixed in sugar and oat milk like he knew exactly what he was doing, which Seb didn’t want to question why he could guess at. Billionaires are weird.
Seb waits for the final beep like the sound of a safety clicking off.
Hamilton gets the best start. Of course he does. Seb unclenches his pumped fist hastily. No one spares him a second glance. Hamilton takes the first corner with Leclerc right on his tail, and then—
Not everyone notices the shots at first. There’s too much noise from the track, and most of them are wearing headphones. But Seb flinches, having come to recognize the sound from daily acquaintance.
“Get down,” he yells. Around him, the crew just looks at him weird. “Get down, someone’s firing—”
Pop pop pop
Now they get the memo. The screams start. Seb grabs at one confused mechanic and pulls him to the ground, points at the entrance, shouts Go, go! They’re sitting ducks here.
Pop pop pop
Seb’s ears are ringing. Two assailants, three? Fuck, four. Seb chances a glance at the monitors, anything to give him a hint as to what’s going on. The race is still going, amid bewildered radios from the drivers. The shots must have been audible in their comms. Seb squints. You notice the silliest things when your life’s in danger. Hamilton’s car is no longer in the lead. He must have been overtaken in the chaos.
He swallows down the oddest sense of disappointment and pulls his eyes away from the screen. Pop, and something bursts into pieces barely two feet from him. Seb scrambles behind some machinery, drawing his Glock from his hip. He’s got no idea where they’re firing from, though he’s never pulled out of a game of chicken.
Deep breath. He peeks out from behind the dented equipment. Pop, it glances close enough for Seb to count that as one of his nine lives gone. He aims in the direction the shot came from, fires one off.
A muffled yell. One down. Seb’s back behind the life-saving machinery. He spots one of the pit crew frozen on his knees in the middle of the floor, stranded like an unprotected island. Seb allows himself a moment of hesitation, and then he’s barrelling for the quaking man, while more shots go off around him, and hauling him behind some tires.
“Stay back—”
He’ll never get used to bullets hitting his vest. They hurt like a motherfucker, tactical lining be damned. Three successive shots to his chest, and the wind gets knocked out of him. He drops to the ground, the debris left over from a hurricane. Alive, he clocks himself. Alive, so get up. Get up, get up—
They never did invent proper bulletproofing for legs. When he gets out of here—if, he gets out of here, Seb is going to make Mark dedicate an entire R&D faction to bulletproofing legs. The pain punches through him, and he collapses on his wounded leg.
Blood’s pouring out. Hold on. Blood’s pouring out at a speed reminiscent of that time when Seb couldn’t stop the bleeding.
More yelling, and the rain of bullets stops. That's good, because Seb can't hope to do a blessed thing at the moment.
“Your femoral artery’s been hit,” someone says. “Hang on, Sebastian. I need to tie this off.”
Seb must be dreaming, because Lewis Hamilton is looming above him. Wasn't he just in a car? When did he get here? When did he get so tall? Oh. Seb’s on the ground, that’s why. Seb’s on the ground bleeding out, and his leg is on fucking fire.
“Hurts,” he gasps. “Hurts like hell.”
“I know, you’re alright,” Hamilton says. “You’re alright, Seb.” He sounds like—like he’s on the brink. Like Seb is standing on the thinnest ice surface, and Hamilton is right there, ready to break through. Seb’s not sure he understands. Hamilton can’t possibly care about him this much; he can’t possibly care at all.
Hamilton’s found some wire in the garage, and he pulls it around the highest part of Seb’s thigh, right up against his groin.
“Ask a man out first, Jesus,” Seb mumbles. He’s not sure he likes the look on Hamilton’s face. Devastation doesn’t suit a billionaire, and maybe some part of Seb still wants to preserve the sanctity of the institutions that run the city. Is it wrong to desire a life where he doesn’t tread from one landmine to the next every other week? Is it wrong? God, what kind of man does that make him?
“I would’ve,” Hamilton says. He’s yanking the wire tight, causing Seb to jerk and scream. Hamilton’s fingers are feather light on Seb’s face. His eyes are raw earth, freshly torn apart by a rake. “I would’ve, baby.”
“Can’t afford dinner with you,” Seb manages. “My yearly salary is—”
“Sixty-eight grand,” Hamilton finishes for him, hauling Seb up. Fuck, the guy’s strong. If he wasn’t about to die this would be such a turn on.
As it stands, dying sucks. The pain is close to unbearable.
“How—” Seb’s eyelids are flickering shut. Trying to keep them open is not working. The ground is moving beneath him. Ah. The ground is moving very quickly beneath him. Seb’s going to throw up. Or pass out. He hopes it’s the latter.
Hamilton’s chest feels familiar. Seb’s cheek is smushed up against it, and he swears he can hear the thudding of Hamilton’s heart. Don’t Formula 1 drivers have some of the lowest resting heart rates?
With the last of his consciousness, “How do you know how I take my tea?”
“Stay alive,” Hamilton says, far and getting further away from him, “and I’ll tell you when you wake.”
--
Seb throws up on the pillow covers twice before he can force his eyes open. He half expects to see a sleeveless meshed figure by his bed.
He doesn’t know what to feel when it’s the Batman’s situated at the hospital window, watching him. Seb’s sleep hasn’t been the smoothest, and in his most lucid moments he remembers a shadow in the room. Not a bad one. A safe one, a guardian angel. The Batman’s been there for awhile. Standing still as a statue like he’ll stay until the pillars of the city come crumbling down.
“Alonso’s taken care of,” the Batman says. His voice doesn’t have its usual gravelly bite. He just sounds exhausted. “And I saw to it that the guns they were trafficking—”
“You have the worst bedside manners,” Seb says.
The Batman falls silent. He’s cradling something reverently in his gloves. Ah, it’s Seb’s watch. It looks so delicate in his hands. Infuriating, how he never allows himself to touch. How he could have walked two steps to the side of Seb’s bed but instead positions himself far away, stealing one of Seb’s belongings for makeshift comfort.
If he wasn’t so high on meds Seb supposes he would be angry. All he has is the strength to stare at the Batman’s gloved hands.
The reason why Seb’s pencils were always down in science class before the teacher could even announce it: he loves evidence. It’s the cornerstone of everything he does. It’s truth, it’s judgement for those who deserve it, it’s justice. It’s the utter satisfaction when an experiment succeeds, when Phenolphthalein changes colour as an indicator that the acid and base have cancelled each other out.
The Batman’s fingering a spot on the strap of his watch. Not many people would notice that spot. It’s just the tiniest drop of blood.
“Lewis,” Seb says.
The watch slips from the Batman’s fingers. He catches it with lightning-quick reflexes. And then he stands rooted to the ground, every muscle pulled painfully taut. Seb can see right through the mask now, Lewis’ face dissolving in a riot of emotion.
“Come here,” Seb says, and Lewis comes. Silent and obedient like Seb could ask anything of him. The most terrifying entity of Gotham, the only thing the dark’s afraid of, and he’s hunched by the side of Seb’s bed like a sinner in a confession booth. “I’m bang on the money, aren’t I?”
“I said you were the Force’s brightest,” the Batman—no, Lewis, says.
“The most begrudging of compliments,” Seb says.
“I meant it, but you didn’t like it the first time I said it.”
“I didn’t like you then.”
“But,” Lewis swallows. “You do now?”
“You saved my life.” Many, many times. “Kinda hard not to.”
The gloves are brushing against Seb’s hair, with the lightest hint of pressure. Lewis doesn't say, Don't tell anyone. Seb adores him for it.
“Take those off,” Seb complains. He’s bedridden; he’s allowed to be petulant.
A beat, and Lewis strips the gauntlets off. The hand’s back on Seb’s head, stroking, petting. Lewis is looking at him like he’s something the Batman could never be allowed to have. Lewis is touching him like he’s something more precious than the heart of this rotting city. Seb’s eyes are slipping shut. He reminds himself to have a chat with Lewis about this. Mark is going to have to field twenty-one times twenty-one complaints. This will be exceedling complicated. But he doesn’t think the Commissioner of Gotham, or the Bat of Gotham, ever got off with easy.
“About dinner.”
“Might be some time,” Seb slurs.
“I can wait,” Lewis says. “Have done, for awhile now. But I’ve got an open table at the Ocelot.”
“Prick.”
“You like it.”
The hand stays on his head. Seb closes his eyes to the shadows.
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