#don't remember any other canon colours
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love the colour scheme in death note. basing on sense of justice more than individuality or personality, but both come up.
L is blue, because he's detached and analytical when it comes to right and wrong. Light is red, because he's more rash/hot tempered and a strong believer in extreme punishment (plus the literal blood on his hands but L has that too). Red/blue is also common for opponents in anime, and they're almost opposite (contrasting colours) on the colour wheel.
Misa and Matsuda are both yellow, which is the third primary colour, meaning they're not really like either L or Light. Sure, Matsuda has a sense of justice but it's not subjective or selfish. He's a literal ray of sunshine and positivity in the grey Task Force. Sure, Misa is a Kira and in love with Light but her character's actually very different to him (it's such a shame she's never developed). She wants to bring sunshine - yellow - to people, even if it comes out only after a storm. That's why she's Kira. To help people, not to punish them.
Aizawa is green iirc and he has a sense of justice that's more sympathetic, like Matsuda and Misa, but also doesn't question that Kira needs to be destroyed like Matsuda does, in which sense he's more detached and b&w sense of justice like L. Y + B = G
Also OC wise, Rie is purple because she can see both Kira and L's version of justice, yet she's neither blue nor red because she doesn't believe fully in either. I have a problem with making my OCs morally complex fencesitters. R + B = P
#don't remember any other canon colours#yk the ones that come up when they're monologuing#analysis#colour theory#l lawliet#light yagami#misa amane#touta matsuda#death note#desunorie#shower thoughts#lei chats#death note headcanons#lei's death note
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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader
summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.
tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people
note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡
word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)
You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.
You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.
He evidently does not.
“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.
You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”
“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”
“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”
He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.
It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.
There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.
That decides it. Flotsam still floats.
Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine.
…It’s just that he’s insufferable.
The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.
Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones.
“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.
You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”
“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”
In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.
I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.
You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.
It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.
Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.
You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.
When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.
You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.
Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary.
Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.
You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.
For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly.
You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.
It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.
Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.
You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.
Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.
Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.
“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”
“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”
“I wonder why.”
He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.
“What, Tom?”
He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”
You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile?
It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.
“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”
“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”
“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”
All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up.
Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.
Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about?
You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers.
For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.
He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)
Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.
You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession.
They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.
You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.
“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.
He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”
“Curiosity—”
“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”
He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.
You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.
But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.
“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”
“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”
This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary.
“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”
He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure?
It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.
The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning.
The worst of the world has impeccable timing.
A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.
So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.
And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.
BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES
DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN
All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.
The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.
It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.
In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with.
You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.
Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.
But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge.
He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.
You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books.
You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.
“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.
Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.
He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”
“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”
You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls.
“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”
“An altercation.”
“Very good, that is what I said.”
You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin.
“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.
You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.
You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated.
But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again.
She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.
For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.
Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)
Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.
“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.
“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.
“What? Malfoy?”
You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.
But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”
Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —
“A professor?”
“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.
He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.
It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.
He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.
Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.
You consider it a warning.
Tom does not.
“Just give it up,�� you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”
His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.
“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”
“So?”
It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.
“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”
He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.
“Are you stupid, Tom?”
You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.
“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”
Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.
Tom acts stupid.
Dumbledore knows.
It all happens very fast.
You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.
You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.
You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.
“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”
Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”
You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.
“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”
“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”
“I —”
“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”
You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.
“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”
“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”
“So nothing novel then.”
“D’you want me to blast you again?”
His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.
You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”
That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.
“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.
“Tom.”
“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”
“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”
Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”
“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”
And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.
It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.
The day everything changes starts the same as any.
You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now.
Tom has cracked the book.
It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.
“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.
He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.
“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”
“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”
You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”
“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”
“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”
“I have no need.”
You frown. “You… you already know it.”
“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —
“You’re not muggle-born.”
“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”
“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”
“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”
You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.
“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”
He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.
“Are you trying to murder me?”
“I might.”
“You’d be the first suspect.”
“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”
Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.
He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice.
It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.
“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all. You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.
There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.
“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”
You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”
The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.
“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.
He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else.
“Should I?”
And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”
It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.
Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”
The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.
You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.
Summer blisters when it comes.
Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them.
And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.
A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.
Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.
But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.
It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?
You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.
“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.
“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”
And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.
He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.
Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.
You always are.
The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten.
Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.
He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.
And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.
Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.
You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.
You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.
You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.
Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.)
You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.
So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true.
It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.
It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.
Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.
The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer.
You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.
Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t.
But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.
“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.
Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.
“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”
He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.
You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”
“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.
“You’ll get sick.”
His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”
Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.
Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.
When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid.
What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.
You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.
Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.
You are regardless.
It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.
A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.
Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.
It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.
You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.
And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.
“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.
He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”
“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”
“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”
“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”
“Why?” he deadpans.
You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”
“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”
Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.
To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.
“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”
You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.
You are not his keeper. You know that.
“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.
He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.
And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.
What? Sorry. What’s going on?
He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”
You’re almost positive you did not.
Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.
You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.
Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.
Your contentment is remedied quickly.
Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.
You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.
Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.
“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.
You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”
He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.
You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”
“How’s that?”
“No one would be senseless enough to try.”
And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.
One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.
It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.
You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.
It happens again.
Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.
There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.
You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.
This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.
You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.
You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)
He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately.
And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.
Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.
And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.
The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.
The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.
That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.
One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.
The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?
You take to the library.
Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.
The third sign is the end.
You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.
He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight.
And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.
So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.
Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.
He’s something else entirely.
What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.
You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.
His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes.
You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand.
“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.
You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.
“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.
Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”
“I’ve been good at it.”
His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.
His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.
“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.
You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.
You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.
He sees all of you.
Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.
“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.
“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."
He stares at you. There’s nothing there.
“Tell me, Tom.”
Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.
“I cannot.”
Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.
It’s late winter and it’s too cold.
“You killed her,” you say quietly.
“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”
“What are you… so it was an accident?”
“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”
“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.
He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.
“You told me to change things —”
“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”
“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”
“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”
“Do you want me to lie?”
“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”
“Her death is the first step to —”
“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”
“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.
All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.
“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."
You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.
“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."
“...What?"
“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”
You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”
“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.
“How lucky for you.”
“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”
“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”
His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.
“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."
“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain, a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”
And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him.
You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love.
“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock.
Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly.
Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.
“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it.
He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.
After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"
“I thought I would have time.”
“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”
He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”
Fuck him. “Fuck you.”
“Very cogent.”
“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."
He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”
You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.
“You have lost me, Tom."
He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.
You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.)
You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish.
There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.
You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.
Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.
That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same.
You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.
And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.
You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.
It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.
Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.
Be well.
You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —
You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.
Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.
Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.
It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.
You find that to be true.
Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.
Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much.
“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.
You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition.
Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.
Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.
Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.
Due February.
It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”
Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”
Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.
You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”
Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”
And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.
Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.
You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.
You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.
In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.
Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.
You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.
But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.
You drink, and don’t look away.
By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.
There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.
You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal.
An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.
You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it.
You’re better than them. You can do it forever.
The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.
The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.
“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.
You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.
You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.
The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.
He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.
You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.
Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)
“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.
You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.
Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”
You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.
“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”
“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”
“I take that back.”
She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”
Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.
You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.
It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.
On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.
There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.
Indifferent it is.
“Can I help you?”
“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.
You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.
“Am I?”
“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”
“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”
Indifference effaced. You’re angry.
He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”
Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.
It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.
“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”
Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.
He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.
He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”
You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.
“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.
Where is Mari?
“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”
You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?
“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.
You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.
“Well then —”
Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.
His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.
“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —
“That would be wise.”
He’s still looking at your lips.
No one else is looking at you at all.
It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.
Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.
“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.
“I haven’t protested.”
But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.
“But you will.”
His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”
You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.
The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)
You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”
“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.
“You still lost me.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
He pauses for a moment. “I know.”
You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.
“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”
You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.
He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.
“My door is always open,” he says.
He lets you go.
You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.
Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.
If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.
It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?
You think of him often. You think of his offer.
My door is always open.
Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?
Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.
It’s a tempting door.
The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.
You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.
The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.
Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.
The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.
It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.
But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor.
A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.
My door is always open.
Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.
Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.
She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.
When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.
It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.
A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.
“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.
“Renauld?”
He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.
“Well, yeah —”
You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”
“But McCormack sent him.”
“Where is it?”
“I… McCormack said that —”
“Where is it, Flack?”
“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”
That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.
The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.
But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.
“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”
You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”
“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”
You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.
It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.
“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.
Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”
“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”
“Who authorised you?” he hisses.
“I did.”
In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.
But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.
You were completely out of line and utterly right.
It isn’t something people like you are allotted.
Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.
And… he does.
With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.
It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.
There’s really no choice but to promote you.
Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.
By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.
The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.
Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.
After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.
“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”
“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”
Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.
“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.
“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”
“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”
“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.
“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”
“Alves, I’ll have you know —”
You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”
She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”
You roll your eyes, taking a drink.
That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.
But something about it itches.
You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.
You are green, through and through.
Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.
You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.
You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.
And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.
That makes it much worse when you sleep together.
There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.
“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”
“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”
“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”
You’re incredibly daft about it.
There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident.
The itch exacerbates.
You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.
You wake up and he isn’t there.
It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.
The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.
And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.
You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.
You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.
All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.
R.R
It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.
You return to Hogwarts posthaste.
It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.
The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be.
You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.
“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.
Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.
“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”
“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”
And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.
Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.
There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.
But you do, because he told you.
You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.
It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop.
It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.
You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.
The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece.
It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.
You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.
He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.
“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.
“I thought your door was always open.”
You see his posture change from just his silhouette.
“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that."
He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.
“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.
You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.
You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.
“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."
“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”
“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."
His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"
“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval.
Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.
“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”
“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will."
You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"
“Yes."
You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.
“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”
“I earned this,” you hiss.
“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiles. “There you are.”
“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”
The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.
“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”
“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.
You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’d need a Vow for that.”
You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”
“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”
“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”
“A Vow.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Tea, then? Biscuits?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”
“Hm. Terrible shame.”
Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”
He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”
“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”
“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”
Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis.
“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain.
He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.
“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.”
You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”
Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.
“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.
“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”
He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.
He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.
“I should have killed you,” he repeats.
It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.
“Yes,” you agree.
It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.
Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.
There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.
He was your first in everything but this.
You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.
You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.
“How long?” he asks thickly.
You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back.
“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."
You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"
You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"
His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake."
You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster.
“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"
“N-no.”
He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."
Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating.
But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself.
You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.
He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.
Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.
His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh.
You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.
He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.
“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.
You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.
“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”
And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.
You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.
He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.
You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…
A finger presses inside and you moan.
“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.
“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.
He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”
Oh, fuck.
He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”
Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.
You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.
Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.
You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.
He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.
But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.
Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.
“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.
“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.
“Will you give me more?”
Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.
He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.
You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.
He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —
“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.
That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.
You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”
A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?
And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.
Maybe you already do.
Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —
He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.
“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”
You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.
“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”
You whimper.
“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.
If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.
“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”
Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.
“You can — uh — you can — ”
"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”
And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.
You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.
“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.
You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”
You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.
He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you.
He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.
You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.
But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.
Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.
“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.
You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.
He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.
You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.
“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.
You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.
#tom riddle#tom riddle x reader#tom riddle x you#tom riddle x y/n#tom riddle fluff#tom riddle smut#tom riddle angst#(the trifecta)#tom marvolo riddle#voldemort#voldemort x reader#tom riddle imagine#tom riddle oneshot#harry potter fanfiction#wizarding world#ftltutbh
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hi i wrote a short little something inspired by this post bc it wouldn't leave my head
season 2 canon divergence, in the aftermath of Steve being taken in by Hopper (don't ask me why it's happened, bc i dont know it's just how the story took shape in my head)
--
Steve was pulling a pizza out of the oven when El drifted into the kitchen, bumping hear head against his arm like one of the Henderson's cats. Her hair was starting to curl at the ends, longer than when he'd met her.
"Can you please tell Hop to go to the store? We are out of Eggo's."
She was already holding the walkie when he turned to give her a look, eyes wide and quietly expectant in that intense way of hers. He rolled his eyes, sucking pizza sauce off his knuckle as he reached for the walkie.
They had a quiet stare-off as he held the button down.
"Hey Hop, you there? Over."
Soft static buzzed through the speaker as El leaned further into him, turning her gaze away to inspect the pizza, before Hopper's voice came through with a crackle.
"I'm working." A pause, and then a reluctant: "Over."
He and Hopper shared a similar opinion on walkie-talkie etiquette, but the kids were insistent so they did their best. El looked from the walkie and back to Steve without blinking. He sighed a short laugh. Pressed the button again.
"Jane needs you to go to the store. Over." Better to use her other name if he was working.
"Eggo's?"
"Eggo's."
Satisfied that her demand request had been passed on, El slipped out of the kitchen and plopped down in front of the tv, crossing her legs underneath her as the screen flickered to life. The remote remained untouched on the bench. She wiped her nose with her sleeve.
"Well, I currently have an 18 year old in the back of my car and I'll have to run him to the station first." Another pause. "-ucks sake, over."
The words fell out of his mouth without any real thought, a years worth of comfort in himself dissolving any filter he might've had. "Is he cute?"
The walkie crackled. Steve wanted to smack himself in the head with it.
"My son wants to know if you're cute."
Oh, he was going to kill him, even if he did feel warm and fuzzy over being called Hops' son.
"Uh, I want to say yes, sir?"
There was a second of loud laughter before the walkie cut off and Steve pressed it to his forehead in silent mortification. From the living area, canned laughter from Happy Days burst out of the speakers like the universe was mocking him.
When he looked up, El was smiling at the screen in bemused wonder, colours flashing across her face.
He cleared his throat, eyes shut as he held down the button again. "Please remember the Eggo's on your way home, we're having pizza. Over and out."
He pressed the antenna down for his own dramatics, before quickly pulling it back out again so he could be reached for emergencies.
It wasn't that big a deal, it's not like he'd ever actually meet whoever had been in the car.
#eddie in the back of the cop car: 'yknow you're meant to say 'over' when you're done talking-'#i might add more to this later bc i had another idea while i was writing but idk#technically this is steddie but idk if i wanna tag it that way bc eddie is BARELY mentioned and it's not even by name#but this is steddie#so#steddie#steve harrington#my writing#stranger things ficlet
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Baraqiel and Azazel
Disclaimer: DO NOT ask Neil Gaiman to confirm or deny any of this. He doesn't want you to ask. I don't want you to ask.
SO DON'T ASK.
Edit: Neil confirmed this theory and it's not my fault: see the reblog
Now, on with the meta.
Thesis and evidence below the cut:
Dominion...
Angel of the Sky...
Hair an eye-burning ginger, eyebrows like grisly slugs, often draped in red…
Occasionally damp...
Most likely singed…
Most likely singed…
Most likely singed…
Most likely singed…
So that's everything from purely within Good Omens canon.
Baraqiel is described, additionally, in the Book of Enoch as:
Lord of Lightning
Who taught the forbidden knowledge of astronomy:
He is also the overseer of the Second Heaven, wherein lies the prison of Fallen Angels. More on that later.
The story of Baraqiel’s ejection from Heaven is contained in the Book of Enoch, but he’s not a main character. In fact, he’s only one of twenty major fallen angels, specifically, the ninth. The tenth is Azazel.
Who, then, is Azazel?
Firstly, Azazel is a fallen angel:
Who is damned because he introduces humans to forbidden knowledge, specifically, the knowledge of swords [and other devices of warfare]:
And also the knowledge of adornment, specifically, “the art of making up the eyes, and of beautifying the eyelids, and the most precious stones, and all kinds of coloured dyes.”
And insofar as Azazel is synonymous with Azzael, he denounces the authority of the Metatron:
In fact, Azazel is given all the blame for revealing the secrets of Heaven: “the whole Earth has been ruined by the teaching of the works of Azazel; and against him write: ALL SIN.”
and God orders Raphael punish Azazel: “And further the Lord said to Raphael: "Bind Azazel by his hands and his feet and throw him into the darkness. And split open the desert, which is in Dudael, and throw him there.””
We never learn in the Book of Enoch that Raphael actually does this (based on my reading), but it was commanded. In fact, Raphael would have had to throw Azazel into that prison which was in the domain of Baraqiel.
This puts Baraqiel!Crowley and Azazel!Aziraphale among the ranks of angels that went to Earth and delighted in Earthly pleasures, which caused them to be “fallen,” that God refused to speak to from then on, that Enoch!Metatron was ordered by God to tell that they were unforgiven and would never be forgiven.
It’s worth noting that there seems to be some disagreement among rabbinical scholars over whether Samyaza, Azza, Azzael, and Azazel are separate entities or if these are different names for the same entity. We should also remember that in the universe of Good Omens, entities change names when they ascend to or fall from Heaven.
Tying this all back to the Metatron: In 3 Enoch, the book which describes the ascent of Enoch the man to Metatron the angel, we learn that the overseer of the Second Heaven is Baraqiel, angel of lightning. The description of the prison in the Second Heaven and the angels trapped within it is terrifying, but not more than Enoch’s own actions when he is there.
At this point Enoch has not been transfigured into the Metatron yet, but when he passes by, the angels ask him to pray for them to the Lord; and he refuses, for “who am I, a mortal man, that I may pray for angels?” He is told about them again in the Fifth Heaven, about their sins, how they followed Satan, and that they will be punished on Judgment Day.
So we have a lot of reasons here to see that there would be enmity directly between the Metatron and Azazel, for questioning his authority before God, and between Baraqiel and Enoch!Metatron, for either Baraqiel was guarding the prison or already in it when the human who would become Metatron was supplicated for prayers of redemption and refused. Either way, the Metatron is responsible for Baraqiel’s fall, most directly because he refused to take the petition of the fallen angels before God and instead relied on his interpretation of a dream.
There’s been a lot of implication and even exposition throughout S2 that memory is vulnerable to erasure. We’ve gotten some direct hints that Crowley doesn’t remember all of his past, but I would venture to propose that Aziraphale has a very troubled past that he does not remember, that the Metatron (and possibly Crowley) does, and that further, because his memory was [partially] removed, his name was changed to Aziraphale, for which we see precedent in Jimbriel and all the demons.
My absolutely unhinged, unsubstantiated S3 prediction is that Angel!Crowley sacrificed himself to rescue Azazel from damnation, and the price of Azazel remaining an angel was losing the memories of his transgressions, including (and especially) those he formed with Angel!Crowley. That at the Garden of Eden, Crawley!Crowley knew that these things had been erased, and that he was probably talking to a husk of his former friend, the way that Jim was a husk of Gabriel, but that when he learned that Aziraphale had given away the sword, realized that the soul of the person he loved was still in there.
Partner post: For a meta on why we should believe that Enoch!Metatron aka Human!Metatron is a possibility, go here.
Edit: I read the Book of Enoch from front to back, twice, but if you want to check my work (or write a response meta!) you can find the source material here and here.
If you liked this husbands-centric meta, you may like A Nightingale Sang in 1941
If you liked this historic event speculation, you may like Sodom and Gomorrah
#good omens#good omens 2#good omens meta#ineffable husbands#aziraphale#crowley#metatron#good omens theory#baraqiel#azazel#book of enoch#this took a really long time you guys so please leave a note <3#ivoc#erasure theory
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Woe, doodles be upon ye
HC's below the cut if you're absolutely interested in my Spiderverse Noir HC's + his world 👉👈
First the ones I agree with that I've seen a shit ton of people mention >:33
- He is a fatherly figure to Peni. I can imagine when they see each other again, she'd run to him and give him the biggest fucking hug ever. She experienced her Canon Event between ITSV and ATSV too, right? So I can see her needing comfort so badly, and the only ones she ever truly grew close to were Noir and Ham.
- He'd 10000/10 get along so well with Hobie. Along with Hobie legit mentioning his hatred for the AM, PM and fuckin NAZIS IN THE COMIC ,
he'd be rambling so much with Noir about common interests and get along so well with him. Imagine he badazzles him in punk attire and based on this image:
(I'll link where I found the image tomorrow when I'm on my laptop lol if I remember) but based on this image, he teaches Noir how to play the guitar and shit and OUYGG I WANNA SEE THEM INTERACT (they're my fave Spiderverse characters so 👉👈)
- OHOHOHO He loves the colour purple. So much. He can't see it, ofc but he has such a love for the colour that he sees any beautiful colour- or well, of what he can see of colours, and thinks every pretty colour is Purple.
- MJ see's Noir/Peter as a brother and he see's MJ as a sister in turn. There is no romantic attraction at all. Yeah, this means MJ see's Aunt May as a nice Aunt Figure she can go to and talk to about things.
Now onto some of my own headcanons- or some that I don't see mentioned a ton. These have probably been said before but oh well, these are just what I like and my brain go BRRR
- Felicia is taller then Noir. (For those unfamiliar, Felicia is a character from the comic.) Yes that'd probably make her freakishly tall based on how tall Noir is in the movie, but that comic panel of when he first meets her rots in my brain.
- Felicia still has her mask from her ordeals. However, unlike how she pushes away Peter, they actually become friends again. Comfort each other. They swore they'd never be in a relationship again.
- Noir is a combo of both his OG comics personality and 2020's comics personality. I see movie noir as anywhere between 19 - 21. He's learning and developing as a human still. He's calmer and kinder and resembles how his personality is in the newer comics, however, based on this deleted scene LOL, makes me think he looses his shit easily and goes actually feral.
(here's the link to where I found the video BC I actually saved the link lol yeah it's reblogged by yours truly, but the full post is there.)
- Oh yeah, Noir most definitely adopted Ding Ding btw. He probably is nearly at the newer comics stage of his life, being a private eye and such, drinking his fucking egg creams like newer comics noir SBSBBS So he found and adopted Ding Ding.
- Despite being young (19 - 21) he has serious eyebags man, dudes sleep deprived 😔 I'm also heavy on the Spiderverse portrait of him unmasked that I don't really draw/see him with facial scars but he could totally have them after the shit he went through 💀
- Noir is a part-time singer. I will not elaborate.
There's so many other things I wrote down that I want to share, but they're on my computer 😭 so you get these for now hhhh
Sorry if they're half-assed, it's 10:30 pm, I am tired
#spider noir#spiderman noir#peni parker#felicia hardy#ding ding#spiderman noir ding ding#marvel#doodles#headcanon#random thought...#hobie brown#rip hobie i forgot to include you up with the others#anyways yeah theres might be edits#my art#my spidernoir au art
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Random ass headcanons for the Outsiders
(Angst Warning lmao)
Ponyboy Curtis
-Eventually had to quit smoking because he got bronchitis from it, that lead to him having to quit track n' feild
-He kept that note from Johnny for the rest of his life, at one point he cut out Johnny's signature and put the paper in a locket necklace
-For a long time Dallas' last word being "Pony" made him cry whenever he remembered it (Ik this is only movie canon but I just love it"
-He hung out at the empty lot a ton more after everything because it somehow made him feel closer to Johnny and Dally
-Has accidentally called Darry "Dad" more
-He can speak french almost fluently
Johnny Cade
-He hated when people compared him to a puppy because he was a cat person and dogs legit scared him
-He actually really wanted to tell Ponyboy that he loved him in his last words (That doesn't have to be romantically, I think it's more platonic but at the same time to each their own)
-The note Johnny had written to Ponyboy and left in the book was written in purple crayon, he wanted it to be red since that's Ponyboy's favourite colour but the nurse didn't have any red crayons
-The doctor who was keeping Mrs. Cade back and the nurse who told Johnny his mom was there were both "Considering calling CPS on that crazy lady if that kid survives,"
Dallas Winston
-When Dallas said "Pony..." right before he died, he was trying to tell him to stay alive. In a "Dont be like me" sense
-He was actually a really good boyfriend to Sylvia, almost to simping degrees, he doesn't get a lot of affection so he was starved for whatever Sylvia was giving him. It was totally toxic for him, and Johnny was always worried about it
-His skull ring was stolen from a thrift store, he stole it when he was 12
-Drunk cryer
Two-Bit Matthews
-His dad was italian-american
-His mom is actually from Canada, she moved to Olkahoma with her parents when she was in highschool, making Two-Bit Canadian but not a Canadian citizen
-He played a lot of hockey and baseball up until he turned 12
-Sometimes he gets super drunk and starts flirting with any of the greasers except for Ponyboy because; "If I'm going to jail it's not gonna be for charges of pedophilia."
Sodapop Curtis
-Definitely had Steve help him write the note to Ponyboy because his handwriting is barely legible.
-He's dyslexic.
-When Ponyboy had run off with Johnny he actually tried to confide in Sandy, but she couldn't stand to talk to him except over the phone so the only person Soda trusted to talk to was Steve
-Soda is a terrible cook
-When Soda is sitting down with Darry and Ponyboy before he ran out he was trying to discreetly cover his ears, and if Pony and Darry were paying attention to anything other than their own fighting they'd see Soda's about-to-cry eyes
-Can't fix a car to save his life, at least not like Steve can. He can door minor stuff but that's it.
-His first kiss was Steve by complete accident, the two were quite literally butting heads in the 6th grade. Nobody knows except them and they had this whole oath to never tell anybody
Steve Randle
-His parents split up, he has a step-dad and a step-mom and his bio parents are still on good terms. They aren't even legally divorced because neither of them could afford it
-He's actually pretty good friends with Buck like Dallas is because Buck brings his T-Bird to the DX whenever he needs something done with it, Buck is Steve's best-paying customer
-Steve's favourite pass-time is throwing glass bottles at Soc cars and ditching
-Steve favours his step-dad to his step-mom because he thinks his step-mom is taking advantage of his dad
-He actually has a step-sister but she's like 22 and in college
Darry Curtis
-Darry does indeed cry when Ponyboy calls him dad
-He genuinely had panic attacks before going to bed the whole week Ponyboy was gone
-Man has anxiety problems but wasn't actually diagnosed until the late 80's when he finally stopped being an "I don't need any help" man and decided to go to therapy... in his forties.
-Darry fucking loves dogs
-He would carry Johnny around like a doll if he needed to (if Johnny was in his way or needed to be pulled away from something)
#the outsiders ponyboy#the outsiders johnny#the outsiders sodapop#the outsiders steve#the outsiders#the outsiders dallas#the outsiders darry#ponyboy curtis#darry curtis#sodapop curtis#steve randle#two bit mathews#the outsiders two-bit matthews#johnny cade#dallas winston#the outsiders headcanons
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It's taken me two weeks but I finally finished all of my qsmp egg human designs!!!
I have a lot to say about the design choices I made, so I'll put those under the read more if you want to hear my headcanons!!
• Click for better quality (17/07/2023)
_____
Some general headcanons:
• In order of shortest to tallest it goes: Bobby, Richalyson, Gegg, Tallulah, Tilín, Trump, JuanaFlippa, Pomme, Chayanne, Leonarda, Ramón, and Dapper.
• All of the eggs when found were wearing the same white vest/t-shirt and black shorts combination; along with their unique accessories. Any clothes that they're currently wearing, were gifted to them by the player characters.
• All of the eggs are the same age, and are all related (pretty sure that's canon tho).
• The eggs take on physical features from their parents, as an survival instinct. This includes basics such as hair and eye colour. But also includes things such as height and hair type.
• Eggs who's parents are avian/have bird-like features (such as wings), will adapt to have the same wing type as them. This also applies to other eggs, who are taken care of by avian players (see: Tallulah has dragon wings, but is growing black and golden feathers on them).
• The lower half of the eggs are dragon-esque; with scaley legs and clawed feet. The colour of their scales and number of toes that they posses are fixed and cannot be changed. Their ears and horn are a unique shape and colour, depending on the egg. The horns will continue to grow into adulthood.
They also have more naturally sharpened nails (like claws (but not sharp enough to hurt)).
_____
Tallulah
• Wears one of Wilbur's yellow sweaters, the sleeves often hanging over her hands. The red dress she wears is actually meant to be a pinafor, which is a staple part of a primary school uniform, here in the UK. They're most commonly grey, which I originally coloured it but it didn't look right, so I changed it.
• Has a freckle under her right eye (to her) that matches Wilbur, but also has a reverse freckle pattern of Quackity (I'm a tntduo-er (sue me)).
• Due to being cared for by Phil, she has begun growing small, black feathers on her wings. She also has a few golden ones, which started appering whilst trying to get Quackity to confess to Wilbur.
___
Chayanne
• Takes after Phil the most, due to Missa's absence. This includes his wings becoming feathered crow ones, growing feathers on his face and tail, and has a hair and an eye colour to match Phil's. He also has a matching mole.
• Sometimes wears a helmet made from a large eggshell, painted to look like a skull (a nod to Missa and the fact that the eggs are... well, eggs). The skull on his t-shirt is also a nod to Missa (but he defo got it from Phil).
• His duck floaty has been replaced by a yellow hoodie, tied around his waist.
___
Tilín
• Remember how I said that the clothes they wear were given to them by their parents? I like the idea (and think it's very in-character for him) that Quackity basically said, "I don't have any clothes for you, so just wear this until I find some", giving Tilín one of his jackets, and then they Tilín passed away before he could get him something else.
• He and Tallulah are the same height (again, I'm a tntduo-er (yes I am aware that Tilín's other parent has been confirmed to be Luzu, but this is my post so SHUSH). Also, similar to Tallulah, they have the same freckle pattern as Quackity, and an opposite placed freckle (under their left eye) to Wilbur.
• Has golden wings and feathers on face. Doesn't has a tail, due to low placement of their wings.
___
JunaFlippa
• Wears one of Slime's white t-shirts with the three red hearts. Also owns a pair of Mariana's red gloves (not included in the drawing).
• Her wings have small holes in them, due to going to hell and coming back again.
• Gun.
• Her hair colour is closest to Slimecicle's, but it's unknown why her eyes are green (not brown like Mariana or blue like Slime).
___
Bobby
• The smallest of all the eggs.
• From Jaiden he has her wings, bang and hair sprout pattern and colour. From Roier he has his multiple eyes (bc spider), eye colour, and wears one of his bandanas like him.
(I forgot to include the paint stains on his clothes, but he has those too).
___
Leonarda
• Has small, rainbow mushrooms growing from their horns.
• From Foolish she has wings of gold (yes, you heard me. Leo's wings aren't like Tilín's with golden feathers, but are literally made from gold (yes she can still fly with them)). From Vegetta they have his hair and eye colour.
___
Trump
• Was given one of Dan's turtlenecks and jackets, which were never replaced because, 1) Dan went "missing", 2) he [Trump] died before getting anything else.
(On another note, it was so wild for me to draw that jacket. I used to be a HUGE DanTDM fan, and the last time I drew fanart relating to him was in 2016/17)).
• Took after Maxo in hair and eye colour.
___
Dapper
• The tallest egg (bc qBBH is one tall motherfucker).
• Obviously, all of his features come from BBH, including the shape of his horns and the shape of his tail.
(if you were to put Dapper and BBH next to each other, Dapper would literally just look like a tiny BBH).
___
Pomme
• Her beret isn't all black like her egg model, but looks like a red apple.
• Has split-coloured scales (one side blue, the other red) to match the placement of the markings on her egg model.
• Has golden duck wings to match Baghera. I went back and forth on whether to give her those or the butterfly wings she wears in-game. But I like the idea that those are more simialr to those fancy-dress type ones you can buy.
• The bottom of her dress has an apple stiched onto it.
___
Ramón
• Second tallest egg.
• Yes he has hair under the hat (I haven't made him bald, don't worry). The hat itself is a nod to Spreen, who is his other parent but hasn't logged on in a while. His general outfit is also mean to have belonged to Spreen, as his Minecraft skin is just a bear in Steve's clothes.
I changed the pants, and added a white shirt and monocle because I like the idea that he's a bit of a fancy boy.
• The moustache on his egg model is represented in his hair, which you can see sticking out from under the hat (bc, like Chayanne, I had no idea how to get it to work in a logical sense).
___
Richarlyson
• The second shortest egg.
• I'll be completely honest, I have no idea where the prosthetic leg headcanon came from for him, but I liked it so I included it. The leg I gave him is a running blade, as he is a fairly active kid.
• His hair covers his eyes, but underneath they are brown.
___
Gegg
(Yes I'm including Gegg, shush)
• His whole body is green goop. This is how qSlime would also look, but it's easier for him to have his skin appear human, when at his "correct" size. When he [Slime] becomes over emotional/damged, his skin becomes more slime like.
Gegg is qSlime's way of coping with both his own daughter's loss and also his own self image. Because of this, he is always in a state of hurt, and this is refelected in Gegg's physical appearance.
• Has sticks sticking out of him, as well as visible bones, rocks, and other debris within his body. They get stuck in his him, in moments where he has a hard time controling the stickiness/consistency of his body.
• Doesn't have horns, wings, or a tail like the other eggs. Instead, he wears a pair of green, fancy-dress, dragon wings. It's obvious to other players/eggs- because they're on the outside of his clothes- but no points it out.
• Jorts.
• His t-shirt says "gegg" upside down, because he wrote it on himself, whilst wearing the shirt.
• No nose. His eyes also hover inconsistently over where his hair should cover them. His glasses are also just qSlime's.
• Gegg for president.
Here's the full lineup, for anyone who read alllll of that :D
#It's painfully obvious which eggs are my favourites#based upon how much I wrote abt them#qsmp#qsmp fanart#qsmp eggs#qsmp headcanon#qsmp bobby#qsmp tallulah#qsmp tilin#qsmp trump#qsmp juanaflippa#qsmp chayanne#qsmp leonarda#qsmp ramon#qsmp dapper#qsmp pomme#qsmp richarlyson#qsmp gegg#gegg fanart#art#digital art
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hi! love your blog. I was wondering if you have any fic recs? I’m especially looking for royjamiekeely but I’m flexible :) thank you!!
Hi! I have read a lot of the R/J/K tag, and gosh, there is seriously so much incredible stuff in there. It sort of depends on what kind of vibe you're going for, but here are a few* to get you started.
Note: many of these are rated M or E, so please check the actual warnings and ratings and summaries before reading :)
Start with author inlovewithnight and literally just read everything they've ever written, it is all completely brilliant and there is something for all tastes. My personal favorites are the blood in my mouth, I wish it was mine and they threw me a whirlwind and I spat back the sea, but do be aware those are definitely darker/heavier fics and heed the tags!!! (the first has quite bit of noncon [not between RJK] and the second involves physical abuse initiated by James Sr.). For a lighter option I recommend Follow the Hearts and You Can't Go Wrong which is a lovely future R/J/K fic about the end of Jamie's career
from there move along to @valonia47 (Ao3) and @belmottetower (Ao3) and Mixtape Star (Ao3) and also read everything they've written :) I wanted to single out favorites for you but how could I when it's all so very good?
our bodies touch and the angels cry by lennynards: R/J/K that starts out with Roy & Jamie having to stay within 10 feet of each other at all times after both accidentally drinking a weird tea Jane brewed up for Beard. Yes it sounds like a completely ridiculous premise but it is one of my favorite RJK fics ever, 12/10
In Colour series by lyricl: this one feels so very true to canon and it just gets them all so right, I don't know how else to describe it. It's not a complete series though and nobody has actually gotten together as of yet, fyi. They're all far too busy having a lot of complex (& horny) feelings about each other from afar.
This might be a long shot that's not quite what you're looking for but, For Now series by Wild Wren. It's actually mostly a Roy/Keeley series, and I started reading it on a whim because I literally ran out of new things to read in the R/J/K and Jamie tags at one point, lol. Then it ended up being some of my favorite fanfic of all time. It's Roy/Keeley but like, in a not normative and also very kinky way that does a great deep dive into their respective ~issues~. Also Wild Wren had them break up even before the show had them break up, and in a much better and far more detailed way, just saying!! Part 4 is pre-ot3 in the messiest possible way. What a brilliant series, I cannot recommend it enough.
Outgrow the shoes of expectations by @destinationtoast : Brilliant on the ot3 side of it and even better on the character study of each individual within the ot3. Sooo so good. I think about it all the time.
another box with a question mark by irishmizzy: going to be completely honest when I say I don't fully remember this one, but I do know it was very funny and excellent and it is also rated T which makes it different from a lot of the others on my list, so i wanted to include!! It is in my bookmarks and I'm going to be rereading it asap now :)
something that's so close by @ohlafraise : s3 outtake that is very funny and perfect and lovely and also happens to be rated T :) also check out one night upon the shore by the same author. It's Jamie/Keeley, but don't worry Roy's there in spirit. You'll see. That one is very much not T though, lol
by any other name by renecdote: Jamie accidentally wears a Kent jersey instead of his own jersey on the pitch and the internet thinks they're dating (spoiler: they are dating). Who cares if it's not realistic because it's so hilarious and wonderful, amen.
Oh Lord, You've Never Been so in Love by asexual-fandom-queen. I literally just read this one, it's hot off the presses and it is so sexy and tender and also just gets these three so very right. the perfect anecdote to the end of s3.
Anddd of course I have to self promo a little and recommend you Waterfalls (between seasons 1&2 canon divergence), The Full Picture (s3: Jamie attempting to parent-trap RoyKeeley while avoiding his feelings for both of them) and my new one Confetti (ot3 fluff where they celebrate Phoebe's favorite holidays)
*I said I'd give a few and then proceeded to be really long about it, but like, what else is new? For that reason I've tried to stick to strictly R/J/K fics, but if you'd like Roy/Jamie or gen fic/Jamie fic recs also let me know because I could totally make a whole separate post about those, lol.
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Burning Desire
Warnings: Stalking, Obsessive Behaviour, Smut (Consensual, I don't fuck with non-con), Mentions of Murder, Mentions of Harassment (nothing explicit), Smut
You were cute, he could admit that.
You wore bright colours, laughed with your friends, flirted with guys you were interested in, and went about your day as if nothing was happening. Nothing out of the ordinary, no broken locks or open windows. No missing shirts or lost jewellery. You were oblivious, and that was a good thing.
You didn’t need to know anything.
You didn’t need to know when he first met you, it was a small, meaningless moment. You bumped into him in the store, apologising profusely for the mistake. He doubted you’d even remember him after that, but he’d always remember you. You were so fucking cute he couldn’t resist the urge to follow you home. He watched you for days without you knowing a damn thing, and he was adamant to keep it that way. You didn’t need to know he watched you for months, doing your everyday mundane little tasks. Chores, work, having friends over, showering, touching yourself, he was there for every second. It was for safety reasons of course. He needed to make sure you were safe. Especially if you were being stupid and making silly little decisions.
But that was okay, even if you made those dumb decisions, Dabi would be there to clean it up for you.
You could stay oblivious.
You didn’t need to know when he killed that guy bothering you at the bar, much less any of the men you were actually interested in. You never questioned it when you were never called back after dates. You didn’t even bat an eye when the police questioned you about the disappearance of one of your nasty co-workers.
You were cute.
You were cute, and he wanted you.
He wanted you all to himself.
So, he introduced himself to you.
You barely recognised him as the man you ran into that fateful day at the convenient store, and that was a good thing. He was through the moon when you gave him your number, acting cool of course. You became quick friends, and you admired his blunt-ness. Hell, you wished you could be more like him, telling people exactly how you felt all the time. You told him a lot about yourself, your childhood, your hopes and dreams, your fears and nightmares… He did the same for you. Obviously he couldn’t tell you everything, it was to keep you safe. But he told you a lot of vague details about his life, his own childhood, his mother… He confided in you as you did for him, and he loved that about you. You were as honest with him as he was with you, and that just made him… Ecstatic.
This little obsession over you was… Burning.
It made him feel warm inside for reasons aside from his quirk. It made him feel happy to be in your very presence, to be cared for, to be someone other than the murderous villain known as-
Dabi was a man many knew to be cold, emotionless, stone-faced. He was those things, absolutely. He would never deny it to anyone, especially when it came to people he considered canon-fodder.
But not to you.
Never to you.
For you, and only ever for you, he was Touya.
Your best friend, your shoulder to cry on, your confidant, your sweet, reliable, Touya. He was always the one to help you through anything, dropping everything whenever you called, and he never asked anything from you. He always replaced your missing jewellery, got you new makeup, new clothes, always teased you about how often you lost your things, but he’d always get you something better.
Was he marking you with the things he’d get for you? Not at all. Did he feel a sense of pride when you’d show it off to your male friends who were just a little too close to you? Maybe a little. Would he ever admit to you that he was the one who stole those things from you? Absolutely not. Would he ever disclose to you that he slept with your clothes so he could feel like he was close to you? Never.
Was he ever enraged when someone tried to one up him?
…
You were cute. Especially with how loyal you were to him. You’d make plans with him, and turn down anyone who wanted to either join or take you away. You always put him above anyone else around you. You let him sleep over, which was something you never let any of your other friends do. You’d take him to bars to dance with you, which was something your other friends have tried to get out of you, but you only ever did that with him. You always came running if he ever got hurt, always scolding him about the fights he gets into for you. He doesn’t listen, of course, he’d do anything he wanted to, especially if he had to prove to someone who you belonged to.
You never seemed to mind it either.
He admired that about you, how carefree you were, how dense you were, and just how much you truly trusted him. Dabi, a villain, a murderer, someone known and feared by hundreds- Thousands even. But not you. You were never afraid of him, because he’s your Touya.
Yes, he was your Touya, and yours alone.
You were cute, but you were a lot smarter than you led on. Touya must’ve thought you to be dumb, but you’d let him keep thinking that if he wanted. You remembered him, how could you not? His eyes were stunning, a strikingly beautiful colour. You knew from day one when he followed you home, after all, you took a different route to get there.
Just for him.
You felt special when he watched over you, keeping you safe the way he did. You knew he picked your lock, left your windows open for easy access, stole your clothes and jewellery. You were so happy when he introduced himself to you, and even happier when he took your number with little to no hesitation! You texted him almost daily, knowing he was still watching, and you didn’t even care. You knew when he came into your house without express permission, knew when he stole something from you, knew what he was doing when he got you new things.
You were cute, but you weren’t dumb.
He was cute like that, thinking he had one ahead of you every time he scared off some rando, or killed someone giving you problems. You had to try your hardest to hide just how happy it made you to have such a good guard dog around. But then again, you didn’t want to seem easy for him. You liked to play hard to get.
But, that was a bit of an issue when it came to Touya.
He was cute.
Far too cute for his own good. Women and men all over the world drooled over him whenever he was on the news, every scrap of skin they could get their eyes on made them go nearly feral. As much as you agreed, you didn’t share. Was it a bit odd when you’d falsely report someone for villain activity? Not at all! Was it strange to get other people fired from their jobs for being villain sympathisers? Nope! It was never out of place to find a reason to have Touya kill them for you.
He was so cute, just for you!
He did anything for you, if you asked. Especially if you asked with that pretty smile and little pout you did, just for him. A bat of your eyelashes had him weak in the knees, nodding along to anything you’d ask of him. He’d burn down the world for you if you asked, and you knew that. A few fangirls here and there? They were pests anyway, he’d gladly do away with them if it made you happy.
And happy it made you.
So happy you were, lying beneath him as he slammed into you, over and over again. Your praise rang through his ears as you threw your head back for him, giving him perfect access to bite your neck and mark you up. Your beautiful voice singing his name over and over and over again. Your nails digging into his skin, making him hiss at the feeling of pain he oh so craved from you, pleading with whatever was up there for you to break the skin and leave marks on him. Your moaning, your squealing, your whining, it drove him up the walls as he drove his hips further into you. He loved the way you begged for him, how you wanted every part of him, how you wanted him to fill you up. He didn’t even care if he got you pregnant, he just wanted to make you happy, and if cumming in your tight little hole would make you happy, he’d do it over and over and over again.
You were so cute, how could he refuse? He’ll do whatever you want him to do, just please keep making those sounds…
He was so cute as he grunted into your ear about how well you took him, how wet and warm you are, and just how crazy you make him feel. He moved your legs easily to pin them to your chest, laying above you in a mating press, hitting into you deeper and deeper. He swore under his breath as his hips shuddered, filling you to the brim, just like you asked. Dabi chuckled, smirking at how some of it even spilled out of you.
Now, he didn’t need the jewellery and clothes to mark you. You were his from the beginning, even when you didn’t know it.
Now, you didn’t need to worry about little fangirls getting in the way or possibly taking him from you.
You had each other, and that was more than enough.
Tags: @slayersins @shadowsandshapes @dabislittlemouse @dabislittlebeaniebaby @malewifetouya @the-milk-anon @shockinglysubmissive @elias-fable @starstruck-flames @daniidil @223princess
#bnha x reader#mha x reader#dabi x reader#bnha smut#dabi x you#dabi#dabi smut#mha touya#touya todoroki x reader#touya x reader#touya todoroki#bnha x you#bnha touya#enjoy you FREAKS
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Raphael - Archduke of Asexuals
Welcome to another essay from Tavylia! We need some words about the handsome devil himself now, darlings, do we not? Because there's something very Ace about him - and I don't just mean "what a nifty guy", strap in (but not on) because we're going on a deep dive on...
Why Is Raphael the King of Asexuals and What Is It About Him That Draws So Many Of Us To Him Like He Is Made Of Garlic Bread: Another "Short" Essay by TavyliaSin (Who Frankly Rebels Against The Idea Of A Concise Title) ((Because This Is More Fun)) (((I Might Have Some Volo In My Family Tree)))
((Side Note - Ended up discussing more of Asexuality in fandom in general, but that's cool, right?...Right, well, the sections are marked, read as you so wish~))
Alright, this time we're not going to go too heavy into any darker topics, but there will be a deep examination of character, lore, asexuality, and a large heap of headcanons. There will also be a lot of microlabels, so I'll pop a short glossary at the end and some resources.
Also, please remember that no headcanon of mine is ever intended to override canon, or anyone else's HC - each HC is true and valid to the head it lives within~ that's the beauty of them, they are ours, and even when shared they remain our own to enjoy too.
What in the Hells is Asexuality Anyway? Aka, is Lia really trying to say the man she writes so much smut for is not sexual at all? (A brief overview of Asexuality)
Asexuality, in the most basic definition, means quite simply:
"Experiencing limited or no sexual attraction."
Now, look very closely. Some Asexuals, or Aces as we are sometimes called (and will be in this essay) experience absolute 0 sexual attraction. Some experience a very limited amount, or only under specific circumstances. It's also about Sexual Attraction and does not necessarily include feelings towards Action.
I find this is best explained by the Split Attraction Model:
Sexual Attraction - Attraction with a sexual component.
Romantic Attraction - Attraction with a romantic component.
Libido - Arousal, physical desire to act on arousal whether alone or partnered.
Sex Drive - The desire to engage in partnered sexual activity, with or without arousal.
A lot of people might look at those criteria and think "but those are the same thing", and for many that would be a fair assumption if they tend to be experienced simultaneously. But many among us only experience some parts, or they're not connected.
The key is that whilst some Asexuals may experience little or none of any of those four, the only one relevant is the first, and an asexual with high libido or sex drive is no less asexual than any other, there's just no person attached to that libido or drive. So there are asexuals who enjoy sex, who have sexual relationships, and there are also asexuals who have no interest in any of that - the best part is, we're all valid!
Alright, But What Does This Have To Do With Raphael? The Devil Who Seduces In Every Other Sentence?
Right, see, here's the thing. He does flirt, but it never goes further. Seduction is just another tool that he uses, the same way he uses intimidation, promises, and bargains.
It would be foolish of him to ignore the potential to bend someone to his schemes when he notices the colour rise to their cheeks when he talks, his goals need a lot of pieces to fall into place. None of it feels genuine. Raphael simply needs people to agree to his terms, and if the promise of sex secures a signature then so be it - besides, he has a hungry incubus at home who can fulfil that side of the deal without him ever having to lift a finger~
It isn't uncommon either for asexual people to make innuendo, lewd jokes, or to flirt without intention - some may even find that it's very easy to do this when there's no attraction or expectation.
So for that... He reads as very Ace to me, it's all a part of the manipulation and the grand scheme. There's no actual attraction there. Interest? Certainly, the player character can be a very useful tool in his needs.
What About Haarlep? How Do They Fit In If Raphael Is Asexual?
Haarlep is an extremely sexual being, by their very nature they feed on sex and sexual energy, and we know by what they say that Raphael does indeed sleep with them.
The canon would lead one to a logical microlabel when looking at Raphael and Haarlep together:
Autosexual - This means experiencing more sexual attraction to yourself than to anyone else.
This is a rarer microlabel, but still under the Ace umbrella as "limited sexual attraction" which can mean "attraction is very infrequent" and/or "attraction is only experienced under specific circumstances".
And, of course, the HC territory can veer into Haarlep feeling like a safe enough option to deal with Libido and Sex Drive without having to find another partner or worry about attraction. You can also, if you really want to, bring in the canon that so many Anti-Raphael people love to scream about, "Haarlep says Raphael is bad in bed". Perhaps he is, perhaps he's just not into it beyond the simple release of tension and need. I'm not judging him for that, even if my HC is wildly different.
Why Is It Asexuals Like Him So Much? Is It Just Because He's Ace Too?
Well here come the deeper theories, based more on my own personal angle than anyone else's, so please do not assume this is the "only correct interpretation" nor the only way an ace may adore him.
Plenty of aces don't feel any sexual or romantic attraction to Raphael, they're simply very fond of him as a character. He's interesting, oddly non-threatening because that flirtation is never pushed too far, never acted on, it's just there, a part of his clear interest in the player character (and he is obsessed, in his way, those diaries read like self-insert fan-fiction Raphael, my love, I see you). There's depth, intrigue, and the same things I've talked about before with villain fandom. So we can look deeper.
Flirtation can be nice for anyone to feel, and oddly enough as an Ace I have often preferred characters who are open and overt in their attempts to seduce. This isn't necessarily true in life, real people and fiction are very different (hello, fellow FictoSexuals, good to have you here darlings~) but there is something appealing in the casual manner and clear tone. We also might have more of a draw to villains in general, but I've covered some of that in my last little ramble~
Reciprosexuals may also feel more for Raphael as he's initiating the flirtation, expressing potential attraction.
Demisexuals are also likely to find that getting to know him is what draws them in.
There's an element of "Forbidden Fruit" at play here too, in the way there isn't a romance for him (Haarlep does not count, they are their own being, a different personality).
Then, of course we have kink.
Aces In Kinky Spaces
Here's the controversial one, loves, but I do ask that you approach this with understanding and compassion~
Not all aces are kinky. But there are a good portion who are.
Kink is not always sexual, although it very much can be there are some people who enjoy, for example, "subspace" in BDSM - this is where a submissive reaches a kind of blissful inner peace as a result of being made to submit, their senses brought to focus on bondage, pain, or following orders. It varies from person to person, but it often described as a floaty feeling, freeing, relaxing, deeply satisfying without necessarily including anything sexual at all.
Of course, kink can be sexual too, which you will find in a whole lot of my writing, don't think about it too hard darling let me have this one~ This can be helpful for someone not experiencing sexual attraction, but instead finding sex drive and libido from kink instead, allowing them to engage in sexual relationships and activity in a manner they are comfortable with and enjoy.
There is also the safety of trust and rules with kink play. So the obvious reminder goes here:
Consent is key
Safe words and signals are binding and must be instantly respected when used
Nobody should be shamed for safe word/signal use
Aftercare is important and not optional
Negotiation needs to happen before a scenario, not during/after
When I write with Raphael, there's almost always the kink angle because he so naturally falls into D/s and Power Play tropes. On the surface you have a very Dominant personality, so it's easy to see him continuing that role in the bedroom. But then there's the other side, Raphael as a sub, not only because of what Haarlep says (and do remember "sub" and "bottom" are not the same thing), but because people who are often in control and making decisions in their daily life find freedom and enjoyment in giving over that control to someone else, not having to worry about anything but enjoying the situation while another takes on all those decisions.
So he fits very well with plenty of kinky ace themes, and I quite like that feeling of "he's not just going to get into bed with someone who is pretty, there's going to be a genuine interest and desire there that's beyond the surface, a deeper need and longing for who they are". That's rather nice, honestly.
Aces and Spicy FanWorks
Alright going to draw this in to a close now loves we are running long with this one!
FictoSexuals will be more aware of this than most, but fictional characters and works often have more draw because there's a layer of disconnection to it. There's no actual partner with expectations or needs, you can step away from fiction at any moment. You can close the app/browser, scroll past the art, stop reading, save and exit the game - there is complete control in how and when you engage with the content, whether consuming it or making it.
So there are a fair few of us, playing around with those fantasies in art and writing, things that are fun and comfortable in our own ways, and I'm grateful that we have this space to do so~ I've met more than one fellow ace in the creative side of fandom and I'm simply never surprised by it. We aren't defined by our attractions, and we are collectively rather talented at this little hobby of ours~
The fun theory there is that when we don't experience much (or any) sexual attraction, we are looking that much closer when writing about it. We don't tend to skip it, we analyse what is attractive, where it comes from, how it might feel, why it feels that way, and that can present itself as deeper and more detailed fictional works. Whether that's in the posing and expressions of visual arts, or in the narration and dialogue of writing, we are paying attention to trying to get it right, whether it's an experience we can ever relate to personally or not.
Alright, Is This Thing Ever Ending?
It really should, you're so right~ Raphael Fandom, and other more niche characters, do have a fair amount of Asexuals for all the reasons above and likely a whole lot more too. I love that for us, and I love talking about it because there is so little Asexual visibility sometimes that people take many many years to even know they're ace because it's simply not an option they're aware of.
So hello to all of you who slid down the OverCompensating Bisexual/Pansexual -> Asexual pipeline because you thought "feeling the same way towards any gender" was all that meant and didn't realise "feeling nothing towards any gender" is actually different and its own thing, oops. We're here now, and that's just fine~
Take care, beloved Aces, regardless where you are under the Asexual Umbrella, or what microlabels you wear.
You are valid, seen, heard, and loved.
^ Raphael realising he's not Bi/Pan, he's Ace and owning it, like the king he is. Or perhaps not king... Archduke of Asexuality~
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ASEXUAL RESOURCES AND MICROLABEL DEFINITIONS
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Asexual - Experiences little to no sexual attraction
Greysexual/Grey Asexual - Experiences limited sexual attraction
Demisexual - Only experiences attraction after an emotional bond has formed or knowing the individual well on a personal level
Fraysexual - Sexual attraction is brief and does not last once an emotional bond is formed
Fictosexual - Experiences sexual attraction towards fictional characters (art, writing, film, games, other media, but not real people)
Autosexual - Attraction is towards the self more than to other people
Reciprosexual - Only experiences attraction after attraction towards them has been clearly expressed
--- This is not a full or comprehensive list of microlabels! Nor should people feel a need to use them. They are there to help us understand ourselves and to relate to others in the community. None have to be strict, and it is perfectly valid for your sexuality to shift during your lifetime for any reason. ---
For more information and resources on Asexuality, I strongly recommend seeking out Ace communities, even on places like Reddit, and this website:
Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) Website
#baldurs gate 3#fanfic#bg3 raphael#haarlep#asexuality#asexuality in fiction#asexuality in fanfiction#raphael the archduke of asexuality#aces in kink spaces#asexuality and kink#asexual#acespec#bg3#bg3 fanfiction#let's talk about asexuality because it's damn near invisible sometimes#asexual microlabels#aven#please feel free to discuss this in comments etc#we are all valid
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Congrats for your 100 followers! I want to request Hobie Brown with a Shy!Reader who's aesthetically opposite to him ("he was a punk, she did ballet" kind of vibe lol).
I was thinking something like Reader is about meet Hobie's punk friends but is feeling all shy and worried because she's afraid they're not going to like her for being so different and make her feel like she doesn't belong, but Hobie comforts and reassures her that everything will be fine and he's so sweet to her the whole time. In the end all his friends end up adoring her and thinking she's really cool in her own way.
Opposites—Hobie Brown
genre: fluff
tags: shy!ballerina!fem!reader × Hobie Brown
a.n: took the phrase "He was punk, she did ballet." a little too seriously. Hope this was good enough <3
No one expected a relationship to bloom between you and Hobie Brown when they put you on your first mission together.
You were complete and utter opposites. He was outspoken, with loud opinions and a 'in-your-face' fighting style. You were queit, you didn't speak very often, rather preferred to be a listener. You were stealthy, preferring sneak attacks before actually engaging in a fight.
Other than your complete opposing personalities, the way you chose to appear was different as well. Hobie and his rather spiked design, his darker colours of red and blue, his studded belts and various peircings. You and your light coloured suit of baby blue, white and a shade of rose. The pointe shoes on your feet alluding to your skill as a dancer, before you were ever a spider–person at all.
The two of you couldn't be any different. So when you started to date, everyone was quite surprised. "Opposite attract, can't you all see! The tension was there from the start!" Pavitr would say excitedly to anyone who asked. But no one really minded your relationship, not even Miguel, who was so hellbent over anything that could threaten the canon of events.
Hobie doesn't remember a time where he laughed this much with someone else. You brought out all the best things in him. You listened to him ramble on and on about everything he dislikes about the spider-society, occasionally nodding your head or rubbing his shoulder whenever he got too worked up. He found himself feeling comforted by your presence, he found himself listening to you when you got all prissy and asked him to do something for you, even though he took orders from no one. Almost no one. He smiled alot around you, and was a much less agitated by everything when you were near him. There was always a pink hue around his frame whenever you were around.
And he brought out a side to you that you never knew you had. You spoke up more often, sometimes going lengths as to disagreeing with Miguel on some things. You allowed yourself to loosen up and speak freely, to be less shy and interact with others. He encouraged you to be the version of yourself that you wanted to be, letting you break some rules here and there, pushing you out of your comfort zone so you could have more experiences.
And today was one of those days.
Hobie had asked you earlier that day if you wanted to go back to his universe to meet his band mates, who were queit curious to whom he was dating and spending almost all of his time with. You agreed, although you couldn't deny how nervous you felt. You were different from Hobie, but he loved you. You don't know if that will apply to his friends.
And now you were holding onto his arm as he led you down the street to the pub they preform at. You were silent for most of the walk, and Hobie took notice.
"Hey." His voice intruppted your thoughts, that were mostly you trying to figure out how to introduce yourself without seeming lame. "You're quiet."
"I'm always queit." You replied, giving him a lopsided smile, "It's nothing, Hobie–"
"You're nervous. Have been since I asked you to come with." He chuckled, stopping the both of you in your tracks. The pub was just a few meters ahead of you, "What is it?" Hobie asked, taking his hands out of his pockets, wrapping them around your waist. You set your head on his chest, sighing.
"I'm worried they won't like me, think I'm too different for you."
The words hung in the air for a moment, then his chest rumbled and you heard him laugh. You looked up at him, pouting a little. "Hey, I'm serious!"
"I know, I know." He chuckled, "But there isn't anything to worry about." He left a kiss at the top of your head, squeezing your side. "They're the ones that should be worried, frankly—"
"No, no, it's.." You took a deep breath, intrupting him. "It's not going to be like when everyone in HQ was cool with it."
"Eh? Why not?"
"At HQ, they've seen much more stranger things than people like us getting together, and..." You sighed, closing your eyes. "They've seen how we are together, you know? I don't know if your friends will understand it, I just don't want to embaress you or—"
"Embaress me? Bloody hell, love, what goes on in that pretty head of yours?" Hobie moved one of his hands and cupped your cheek instead, tilting your head up so you'd be looking at him. You blushed at the gesture, a little sheepish at how silly you sounded.
Hobie sighed, seemingly collecting his words. "You being so different from me never embarrassed me, and never will. And my friends would be daft if they disliked you at all, not just because you and I aren't into the same things. You've got nothing to worry about, Mm'kay?"
"Okay." You nodded. Hobie leaned down, pressing his lips against yours gently, his hands wandering to finally end up wrapping tightly around your waist. Your chest felt much more lighter now, but that pit in your stomach never truly left you. "I'll be beside you all night, make sure you're all snug." You heard him say as he pulled away.
And that was that. His hands didn't leave your waist as he led you down the stairs to the door of the pub. Once you were inside, you were immediately overwhelmed by the deafening sound of drums and booming guitar riffs. The sound of people dancing and singing reverberated across the small space. It was queit busy for a thursday evening, the place was so crowded that you would've lost Hobie right away if he wasn't holding you by the waist, leading you to the bar. You put your arm around his own waist, holding tightly onto his vest.
"Oi, Hobes, over here!"
Your clutch tightened around the fabric, as Hobie made way for both of you to pass through. Once you made it to his friends, he high-fived the three of them then stood by your side once again.
They weren't too unfamiliar to you. They were his universe's Harry Osborn, Ned Leeds and Mary Jane. Maybe it was the fact that they were familiar faces to you, and maybe it was the fact that Hobie's thumb was running up and down your side in a soothing manner, but you felt a bit more at ease. You introduced yourself to them, and they all were pretty welcoming. You couldn't deny the fact that they did a double take seeing you on Hobie's arm, but it was just for a split second.
You grabbed your drinks and sat down at a booth. Hobie's arm was slung around your shoulder, pulling you closer to him. "So, how'd you two meet?" Harry asked, downing his shot almost immediately.
"Work. We're...like partners."
"Yeah, we always got assignments together."
"You work at that dodgy, shady secret business Hobie refuses to tell us about too? What's it like?" MJ asked, surprised. Hobie groaned, rolling his eyes. "Can we stop talking about work, I don't think that's what you want to spend the rest of the night talking about."
The three of them agreed, and you glanced at him, smiling, mentally thanking him for the diversion. "Well, what do you do outside of work? Are you in a band too?" Ned asked. "Oh, no, no, I.." You paused a little, before looking up at them. "I dance."
"Ooh, dance, eh? Didn't take you'd be into moshing, but I get that—"
"Nah, she's a ballerina." Hobie intrupted casually, sipping on his drink. "Bloody good one too." You laughed nervously, fiddling with your hands, unable to look up. You wouldn't be able to handle it if you saw them looking at you strangly. "I'm okay at best, Hobie—"
"Ballet? That's wicked!" MJ's voice made you look up. The three of them were leaning over the table now, attentively waiting for you to elaborate further. "Tell us more, do you get on big stages?"
You feel Hobie's hand intertwining with yours, giving you a light encouraging squeeze. The loving look in his eye, his constant reassurance of you, and the pride in his voice when he spoke of what you do all encouraged you to speak. So you did. You told them all about your hobbies, and they were queit interested in listening to you. One conversation led to another, and you found yourself flowing smoothly with them, even realised you have common interests the more you spoke.
Hobie never intruppted you, only filling in when you started to get a little tense or just to clarify a slang word you were unfamiliar with. His hand didn't leave yours for one second, he occasionally squeezed it to remind you he's there. Watching you operate and glide through the conversation by yourself filled him with a sense of warmth and pride, he was glad he could ease you into this.
A few hours pass, then his friends get up, saying they're going to go dancing before they leave. They asked Hobie and you if you wanted to come, even encouraged you to try rocking with them to the music, but the both of you said you'll sit this one out. Before they left, Harry leaned down and whispered something in his ear.
Once they were out of sight, Hobie turned to you, a grin on his face. You smiled back, tilting your head at him. "What is it?"
"You're cute when you get all excited and talk about what you like doing."
Even under low light, he could see your cheeks darken. "Did I speak too much? I hope they didn't think I'm too self cent—" He intruppted you pretty quickly, pulling you close to him that you almost ended up on his lap, and crashing his lips on yours. You squealed, but quickly adjusted yourself and wrapped your arms around him, kissing him back. His lips were soft and tender but the kiss was anything but. For a moment you forgot what you were talking about. Hobie didn't pull back for a bit, and when he did, you were left dizzy.
"They didn't. They think you're brilliant. Just like I do." He mumbled against your lips. "And if you ever think like that again, I'm going to kiss you till you can't conjure up a coherent thought."
"Mm, are you sure they didn't think I'm annoying?"
"Oh, now you're just asking for it, aren't you?"
#across the spiderverse#into the spider verse#hobie brown#hobie fluff#hobie x y/n#astv hobie#hobie spiderverse#hobie x reader#hobie my beloved#atsv hobie#marvel#gwen stacy#mary jane parker#ned leeds#harry osborn#spider punk#spider person#reader is female
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Hello! Welcome to the Blue and Violet Ask Blog!
As you might have guessed, this is an ask blog where you can ask the Mayor (Blue) and Macaque (Violet) from LMK questions! However, before anything else, there are a few things that you need to know.
General Things:
First things first, if you are not aware already, this blog is not based 'completely' on LMK canon! Instead, it is directly based and linked to the Blue and Violet Fanfiction series on AO3. Written by yours truly, me (haha!). Link to the fic series is in the bio/under the header. If you want to ask questions, please make sure you are up to date with all the chapters in ALL the fics in the series. (Also by the way YES THIS IS SHADOWPUPPET >:DDDD. If you don't like it and have a desire to assert your opinion regarding that? Then please, I kindly ask that you do not interact with this blog for your sake, my sake, and for the sake of everyone else who might want to enjoy this. Thank you :))).)
What this means is that the only things that Macaque and Mayor have experienced is within the context of this fanfiction series (which contains lots of establishment of how they know each other and their perspectives during seasons 1-3). Therefore, you definitely cannot ask these two about season four related things, because it hasn't happened to them yet!
Due to this, this blog will follow the timeline and events of what happens in the newest instalment of the series, 'Winter Mornings, Summer Nights' (previously, it was 'Colours'). After every chapter is posted, you will be able to ask Macaque and Mayor questions relating to what had happened to them in that chapter or any events prior in the fic series.
IMPORTANT: Whatever happens in this ask blog is NOT canon to the fic series. However, what happens in the fic series directly affects this blog. This means that nothing you ask or say on this blog will affect the Blue and Violet storyline.
Rules (or just... things to remember?) Regarding Asks:
I think I will be able to answer every question that you all submit. However, if I find a question too offensive, too uncomfortable, too strange (meaning I just don't understand it :'D) or something that will potentially spoil the future events of the fic series, then I will have to unfortunately ignore the ask. Either that, or I simply answer the ask with a silly picture of some sorts. On that note, please don't ask any character or me what will happen next! They probably don't know either! You'll all just have to wait and see ;D.
You can ask both Macaque and Mayor any questions you desire. However, I would highly recommend with each chapter posted, we stick to asking questions to whomever the new chapter's POV is in!
At some point, I may decide to only let you ask questions for certain characters when certain chapters are published. Completely blocking you from asking questions to other characters (due to plot reasons perhaps?)
Also, if you wanted, you could also ask side characters any questions you wanted! Like Baihe, or any one of my OC's for Mayor's side of the story. But, keep in mind that this is technically a Shadowpuppet ask blog XDDD thus, they should be the main focus.
Not only can you ask the characters questions, but you can also just ask me questions about the series in general? Or just... Say something I guess? I've had people do that on my main blog, and it always makes me happy to see that people like what I am writing!
I will be honest, I am not expecting many asks to come to this blog. But, on the off chance I am overloaded with asks, please know that I can only work so fast! If it really does get too much I will temporarily shut the ask box, but I will make sure that every ask is answered to the best of my ability (Update: I look back on this statement and I realise oh how so very naive I had been)!
IMPORTANT: As of right now, it seems I should be able to answer one-two questions per day (although it could be less frequent due to potential circumstances in the future) so keep that in mind!
After experimenting with the ask box I have decided that the box will be open for 24 hours whenever it opens! This is just so that people from different time zones can like, have an equal chance to get something in if they want, haha. No cap limit on the box for now, just go wild!
Master List of Asks :D (WIP)
Colours
Chapter One Asks 💜
Chapter Two Asks 💙
Chapter Three Asks
Chapter Four Asks
Chapter Five Asks
Chapter Six Asks
Chapter Seven Asks
Chapter Eight Asks
Chapter Nine Asks
Chapter Ten Asks💙
Chapter Eleven Asks💜
Chapter Twelve Asks💙
Chapter Thirteen Asks💙💜
Winter Mornings, Summer Nights
Chapter One Asks💜
Chapter Two Asks💙 (but 💜 is here too)
Chapter Three Asks💙
Chapter Four Asks💙(but 💜 is here too)
Chapter Five Asks💜
AND THAT'S IT! I... think? This post will update as time goes on the more and more I learn how to help this blog function to the best of its ability. So please check this pinned post every time before you ask a question :DDD.
#lego monkie kid#monkie kid#lmk#lmk mayor#monkie kid mayor#lmk macaque#monkie kid macaque#I'm ngl I'm kinda scared to do this#but the worst thing that can happen is if nobody asks questions lmao#that to be fair thats okay#I don't mind#its just less work for me to do haha#ask blog#blue and violet
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all your loving (all or nothing) pt. 2 - a. sharp x reader
for the longest time, aesop sharp was absolutely certain that he must have eradicated an entire civilisation in his past life, as there was no other possible explanation for the sheer torture in found himself in. but as the months went on and the weather became warmer, and the flowers were blooming again, he found himself believing that reprieve was possible – even for someone like him.
or: aesop sharp is an idiot in love with a breeding kink and this escalated in ways i can never speak of – part two baby!
A/N: Part Two of what was supposed to be a single, short and smutty one shot of my recent fictional obsession: Professor Sharp. Part two is where the breeding kink 'finally' hits – apologies in advance. I haven't written smut in quite a while and I shockingly have never published any before. The depravity was strong with this one and I sincerely hope my mother never finds this. I may be in my twenties but she'd still ship me off to a convent if she did.
Please remember that this takes place during Victorian Times – Women were not nearly as educated as we are today on Sex and Pleasure. MC is a virgin – so she might come off as slightly naive/dumb at times. It's all consensual tho, don't worry.
Thank you again to @legacygirlingreen for enabling me & being my number one supporter on the road to hell. I couldn't have done this without you (seriously, you were a saint) 🤪💚
This one is for you 💚
To everyone reading this; I have never written 'x Reader' before, so please give me some grace for trying 🙏🏻 This was a first.
Part Two is the 'final' (as if this wasn't supposed to be a one shot either way lol) - however if someone enables me enough, part three is always a possibility.
That said; please don't enable me 💀
Onwards now; I have promised @fizzlewick a Regency/Pride and Prejudice AU! with our favourite Potions Professor as Mr. Darcy.
FYI: (Y/N) - Your Name (Y/L/N) - Your Last Name (Y/E/C) - Your Eye Colour (Y/H/C) - Your Hair Colour
CW (here we go): Fluff, Romance, Idiots in Love, Miscommunication, Pining, Age Difference (Aged up Main Character), Canon Divergence (bc I can't stand to kill Fig off), Spoiler Alert for Hogwarts Legacy, Implied Hufflepuff MC (not specified), Porn with Plot, Victorian attitudes towards Sex, Smut (18+, MDNI - lord, forgive me): Loss of Virginity, Breeding Kink, Impregnation, Overstimulation, Praise Kink, Size Kink, Oral Sex (fem receiving), Cockwarming, Accidental Virginity Kink
Word Count (Part 2): 15.5k (again - this escalated)
AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48482581/chapters/123361243
Part One: Click here
For the longest time, Aesop Sharp was absolutely certain that he must have eradicated an entire civilisation in his past life, as there was no other possible explanation for the sheer torture in found himself in. But as the months went on and the weather became warmer, and the flowers were blooming again, he found himself believing that reprieve was possible even for someone like him.
She loved him.
She. Loved. HIM.
It was a mantra that he found himself repeating over and over again, never quite believing that this wasn't some sick and twisted dream he would wake up from. But it wasn't a dream, and the extraordinary woman he had fallen in love with, had fallen for him too. He fell asleep with her in his arms every night since that night, his room practically vacant, only for him to return to in the early morning to get dressed and prepare himself for the day ahead, and each morning he fell in love all over again – her face aglow in the morning light. It was bliss. Pure and delicious bliss.
They had kept their newfound romance largely private, restricted to lingering touches when nobody could see and the small reprieve her hut could offer, though Aesop suspected that their colleagues knew. At the very least, they presumed their dynamic had shifted, even if they did not know to which extent. His love hadn't even told Eleazar, which surprised Aesop, given that the man truly was like a father to her (and a much better one at that, too), but it made their love all the more sacred. If ever Aesop paid Dinah any attention over dinner, he could spot her knowing smirk, carefully hidden behind her goblet, but it was there even if she never outright said anything.
His mood had much improved, no longer weighed down by the constant nagging feeling of unrequited love and the lingering 'What if?' – her smile and scent no longer torturous but a source of comfort and longing. He still wondered what she saw in him, but the devotion she looked at him with let him believe that this could be forever. Selfishly he let himself dream of days in the English countryside, hidden away in cottages from the prying eyes of the rest of the world, but if selfishness was what this yearning was, Aesop would let himself be a greedy glutton, for he never wished to miss her presence in his life again.
"You think too much," she mumbled, curled into his chest as the sun was slowly starting to rise on the horizon, filling her hut with a glowing orange light.
"I think too much?" he smiled down at her, her eyes still closed in bliss, his masculine scent of firewhiskey and sandalwood enveloping her senses. He had heard that one before.
"Mhm," she hummed, opening her tired eyes to look up at his, his hair still dishevelled and unkempt. "I can almost hear your brooding."
"Apologies, my lady," he jested. "I will be careful to not disturb your beauty sleep any further."
"I will hold you to it", she sighed, falling into his warm embrace, wholly content. "A gentleman should stay true to his word."
"I'm hardly a gentleman," Aesop chuckled lowly. "For if I was, I would not be in your bed without a ring on your finger and a shared last name."
He could see a blush spreading on her cheeks, a timid look of amusement gracing her gentle features. "Perhaps not," she expressed, "but I recall you calling yourself my husband a while ago."
"To defend your honour," the potions master retorted lowly, still enraged whenever someone brought up her unfortunate family. Her father was as equally exasperating as Phineas Black – a herculean task in Aesop's mind, and he had only met the guy for but a single moment.
"How gallant of you," (Y/N) snickered, peering up at him through her eyelashes. "I have been irredeemable in his eyes the very second I boarded the carriage to Hogwarts."
"Hm..." Aesop mumbled, pushing a stray hair behind her ear, feeling the soft lock between his calloused fingers. "Forgive my sharp tongue, but I do not believe I give a single fuck as to what that poor excuse of a man thinks. And neither should you, my love."
"Aesop Cyril Sharp!" his beloved gasped, accompanied by a light slap on his chest. "What a poor choice of words in front of a lady."
Aesop's chest rumbled with laughter, his arms tightening around (Y/N) as she grinned up at him, his heart jumping with glee. They held each other, content as the world around them slowly awoke from its slumber – a new day signalling its commencement. It was a moment of serenity, a place nobody but them existed before they would soon go about their days again, following their routines as they needed to, sharing the glances of secret lovers before their rather clandestine encounters at night would reunite them once more – and Aesop was already counting down the hours, waiting until his love was in his arms again.
"You'll have to sneak back to the castle soon," the young woman in his arms sighed, a dejected pout on her lips.
"I feel like a whippersnapper," Aesop groaned. "Surreptitiously wandering about the grounds."
She giggled gleefully again, pressing herself into his chest. "You are my whippersnapper then."
Aesop's heart jumped again, overfilling with love and boastful pride at the determinative she had used— My whippersnapper.
"Indeed I am," he sighed contently, pressing a kiss atop her head, inhaling her saccharine scent as her hair tickled his nose.
Wistfully Aesop rose from his comforting and warm position on the bed, hissing as his leg protested the movement. Some days it hurt worse than others – today looked to be a rather grim day, even if the days had become warmer again. She was at his side in a second, her arms wrapped around his middle in comfort.
"Do you need me to get you your potion? Or anything else?"
"No," Aesop pressed out, clenching his teeth for a second before he released a shuddering breath, massaging his leg with disdain. He felt as if a perfectly fine morning had been ruined – another reminder that he was wholly inadequate when the woman behind him was not. She only hummed, letting her nimble small hands trace his arms in a soothing motion before pressing a kiss at the nape of his neck. He stood up with careful steps after a while, avoiding too much pressure on his blasted leg.
As he swiftly exchanged his nightshirt for the suit he had worn yesterday, he could hear (Y/N) bustling in the main room of her hut, likely preparing a cup of tea for him as she usually did before he left. The fragrant aroma of Earl Grey fills his nose; the cup appearing in front of him with a tiredly smiling (Y/N) as he gratefully took the cup from her, perfectly warm and not too hot. She traced patterns on his arm as he greedily drank from the cup, the warmth filling his body and providing a strange relief to his leg, reducing the pain to a bearable thrumming.
"Did you put something in here?" Aesop asked, his eyebrow raised.
"Perhaps," she tilted her head with a sly grin. "Did it help?"
"It...did," He avowed, placing the cup on the nightstand before pulling her into his arms.
"Whenever I had a second to spare, I tried to brew on my own," her fingertips still danced over his arms. "You do not have to do this alone anymore, Aesop."
"I do not need your pity," he frowned, though he kept his arms around her waist in a protective embrace. Humiliation coursed through him at her admittance – he was incomplete, crippled. Whatever did she want with him? Surely someone more capable would be able to give her much more, even if the mere thought of her in the arms of someone else asphyxiated him like –
"I know you do not," she smiled, interrupting his train of thought. "Would you let me suffer if I were in pain from a curse?"
"Of course not," Aesop brisked, incensed at the mere thought. "I would not want you suffering needlessly."
"Then do not expect me to sit by idly for you," she whispered, pulling him down by the lapel of his coat. "My foolish whippersnapper."
His lips met hers with a pleased hum, his beard scratching her soft skin, undoubtedly leaving a slight burn.
Perhaps Aesop could truly be selfish – because if the gods above blessed him with the celestial woman in his arms, nothing but believing that reprieve was possible for someone like him was imaginable.
When the weather got even warmer, and June approached them, final exams were soon to be held – as they were every year. Aesop and (Y/N) found themselves busier than ever; their time spent together dwindled to a minimum, which left Aesop rather frustrated most days. More often than not, Aesop had to spend his nights preparing odd brews his students would need to identify, never mind the endless amounts of Invigoration and Calming Draughts Madam Blainey requested at an alarming rate. In any case, Aesop felt like he was drowning in work – a common occurrence towards the end of the school – so it was a welcome distraction when he was forced to leave the dungeons for just a day, even if the trip he needed to take was all but a requirement for him to continue his brewing in the first place.
Aesop's potion supplies were dwindling at a quick pace, and neither his love nor Mirabel were able to keep up with the demand; thus, he found himself forced to take a trip to Feldcroft. Bernard Ndiaye was able to provide Aesop with a few of the missing ingredients, so on a sunny Saturday afternoon, his love and he took the short trip to Feldcroft, a village she had unfortunately only gotten to know under less than cheerful circumstances. Ever since she had successfully fought Ranrok and his rebellion, the hamlet, which had nearly been in ruins once, had been rebuilt and was now a flourishing and quaint place filled with life and many small families.
"I used to think this place was right out of a storybook," she chirped next to him, their arms intertwined as they walked through the Scottish Highlands, approaching Feldcroft with idle steps. The warm weather and the potion (Y/N) had brewed provided enough alleviation for Aesop to promenade for a short while – it was not a cure, nor a long-term solution to his predicament, but like their newfound romance, it was a new dawn.
"Is that so?" Aesop asked, looking down at her. "Well, they certainly owe you for their...liberation."
"I can hardly take all the credit," she waved him off, rosy blush on her cheeks. "They have done exceptionally well ever since Ranrok's loyalists have all but fled."
"Yes, well, and who is to credit for that? Remind me?"
"I do not know what you are talking about?" she grinned at him now, aware of how much her stories from her fifth year rattled him. Or, in Aesop's words, how much they would 'turn him grey before his time'.
"I believe the Order of Merlin that has been bestowed upon your name would beg to differ," he grunted.
"And it is rotting away in Eleazar's home – I have washed my hands of it a long time ago."
"Proudly displayed, no doubt."
"On the mantle of the fireplace," she affirmed with a desolate groan. "I have tried to convince him to burn it – his efforts have been largely in vain."
"He is exceptionally proud of you," Aesop explained with newfound kindness. "After Miriam died, he was... in a rather dark place. The rest of us staff were worried, which is why Matilda persuaded Black to send Eleazar your way when the Book spat out your name."
"Oh," she mumbled. "I never knew."
"You do know they never had children. To him, you are like his own."
"As he is like my father," she nodded absentmindedly. "I owe everything to him."
"A notion I'm confident he shares. So let him display that blasted Order – you are his greatest joy."
She did not argue with him; a slight nod was her only agreement. Aesop once again noticed how much smaller than him she was; the top of her head did not even reach his shoulders. In his mind, she fit into his side like a perfect puzzle piece.
Ndiaye now had a small shop instead the cart (Y/N) remembered from years ago, the place flourishing with the various plants and beast products that littered the business. Ndiaye, much like everyone else, recognised (Y/N) immediately, and Aesop was yet another step closer to grey hair upon hearing the story of how she recklessly risked her life – all for two crates of Chomping Cabbages. Mirabel would have been proud; Aesop was convinced of it.
When they exited his shop, by-products in hand and arms intertwined again, they were intercepted by none other than Sebastian Sallow himself.
"(Y/N)? Professor Sharp?!" the former Slytherin resident troublemaker exclaimed, bewildered, jogging up to the trio with large steps. His eyes did not leave their joined arms – looking at the couple like they had grown an extra head. He had grown up, no longer a chubby-faced teenager but a man with a sharp jawline, a full beard and broad shoulders; the only boyish thing remaining his flocculant and unkempt hair. Aesop still towered over him, unsurprisingly. He was exceptionally tall, after all.
"Sebastian!" his love exclaimed, freeing herself from Aesop's side to happily hug her closest friend – even if she seemed slightly surprised to see him. "What are you doing here? I thought you had moved to the Cotswolds?"
"I could ask you the same thing," Sebastian teased with a sly grin, his eyes going back and forth between Aesop and her. "But truthfully, we're here because Anne wanted to meet Estelle."
'We're'? 'Estelle'? Aesop thought, befuddled – a sentiment his paramour did not share.
"Oh, I am so sorry I haven't come to visit!" she apologised profusely. "But Exams have been utterly crazy – we've hardly had any time to do much aside from grading and preparing."
Sebastian only waved her off with a content smile. "Don't fret – we used the time to acclimate to our lives now."
"I can only imagine," she chuckled. "Who would have thought? You, Mr Capital R Rake, Sebastian Sallow, would be the first of our group of misfits to marry and father a child?"
Ah, so this was what their conversation had been about. Of course – Aesop remembered now. (Y/N) had been quite affronted, if not downright disappointed, when Sebastian had kept his marriage and impending fatherhood a secret for months. When he timely announced the birth of his daughter, a child they had named Estelle, his love was over the moon for him and his wife and wouldn't stop talking about visiting the two.
Sebastian chuckled, his smile proud as he puffed out his chest. "Not me, that I'm sure of. Would you like to meet her? I'm confident Megan wouldn't mind."
"I would love to," she agreed, turning around to face Aesop. "Would you mind?"
"No, of course not," Aesop shook his head. "Shall I head back to the castle then?"
"Such a silly man," she giggled, grabbing his hand and masterfully ignoring the comically wide-eyed stare of Sebastian. "You must beat Ominis at his game of being the favourite uncle."
"When did this happen?!" he finally asked, looking as if he were ready to burst.
"February," (Y/N) admitted bashfully, wrapping her arm around Aesop's with a rosy smile. "We've been keeping it under our hats mostly."
"And you were mad I kept my marriage a secret?!" Sebastian sounded affronted, evidently not believing what he was witnessing.
"That's different. We're courting. Unlike someone here, I would not keep my marriage or motherhood a secret."
"That's not – Merlin, he's our old potions professor."
"I may be handicapped, Mr Sallow, but I can assure you, I can hear quite well," Aesop interjected, though he could not deny the happiness that surged in his heart upon his sweetheart admitting that they were courting to one of her dearest friends. She wasn't ashamed of him.
"We are colleagues, Sebastian. Equals," (Y/N) added, her tone leaving no room for any argument to be made. "In any case, you should be showing me, my niece, right now."
"This isn't over," Sebastian mumbled as he led them towards his aged childhood home, which his twin had settled in with her own partner, a travelling merchant from a nearby hamlet.
Aesop hadn't seen Anne Sallow for years, not since she had been cursed. He remembered her to be the ringleader of trouble before she left Hogwarts due to her unfortunate ailment, and while she had never found a cure for it, (Y/N) ending the reign of terror and life of Victor Rookwood – the man who had cursed her – enabled her to live a without day to day debilitating pain.
She was just as stunned as Sebastian had been upon hearing of their relationship, but she still chatted with her former professor, even if the conversation was entirely awkward. Aesop endured for her sake mostly, and it was worth it – nothing would ever make him forget the sheer and utter joy on his love's face when she held her tiny 'niece' in her arms.
Aesop was astonished at how such a wee little thing was able to tear such a starstruck and enchanted smile from a person – he was sure (Y/N) had never smiled as big. He watched as she cooed over little Estelle, her smile blinding as she cradled the tiny thing in her arms, carefully supporting her back and neck. She looked like she had done this a million times, positively natural, and Aesop didn't know whether it was her or him, but his mind was suddenly filled with pictures of her doing precisely this with their kids. When he was younger, he hadn't ever thought of kids, perhaps only as a natural consequence of marriage and marital relations and after his accident, he had written the prospect off entirely. No woman wanted a cripple, much less one as a father to possible children. Now, though, he had a woman who wanted him just as much as he wanted her, and she was young and had even admitted to wanting children. Perhaps they were a possibility after all?
"Aesop?" his beloved turned her attention towards him. "Isn't she just precious?"
"Certainly," Aesop agreed though he did not mean the baby – which was bound to be precious nonetheless. He could not help the smirk that graced his face upon catching Sebastian Sallow's indignant expression.
"You should hold her too," Megan, Sebastian's wife, suddenly suggested, a curious glance on her face.
"I really think I shouldn't," he chuckled upon seeing Sebastian Sallow's face contort strangely. Poor lad would likely never get used to it.
"No, please do," Megan, the wife of Sallow, smiled at him. "Ignore my husband - he's a little thickheaded."
"A little?!" Anne and (Y/N) giggled in unison, promptly ignoring the sound of indignance Sebastian let out.
"Excuse me for being confused over this...," he waved around wildly with his hands, "situation."
"Oh, please. Get over it," Megan rolled her eyes, a teasing grin on her face. "Besides, if our daughter is anything like us, having teachers in her corner will be a godsend when she inevitably gets into trouble at Hogwarts."
"Oh, so this is where it's coming from," Aesop shook his head. "I'm afraid I don't play favourites."
"You will," Megan winked conspiratorially, beckoning him to introduce little Estelle. With her delicate arms and gentle touch, (Y/N) placed the little girl in his arms, smiling at him as he held her; though he was not quite as natural as she was, the tiny thing held awkwardly in his arms. The baby was asleep, so he couldn't view her eyes, but if he had to, Aesop reckoned Estelle resembled her father far more than she did her mother. It made him stop and think about what his children would look like, and instantly, he wished, prayed, they would look like her.
"Not so bad after all, am I right, Bash?" Megan playfully jested, watching the disdain on her husband's face. "Even if our daughter looks positively tiny in those arms."
"She is tiny," Sebastian remarked. "And in any case, this is weird. (Y/N) you do know I thought him to be a git?"
"Sebastian!" Megan and (Y/N) gasped simultaneously, though Aesop could only snort in amusement.
"I wholeheartedly believed you to be one of my more promising students, Mister Sallow," Aesop admitted, his eyebrow raised as Sebastian looked at him with surprise. "If you had applied yourself a little more instead of recklessly breaking the rules and surging into things without even considering any consequence, I might have been less...stern with you."
"I do not surge into things without considering the consequences," Sebastian retorted with affronted indignance – the woman in the room now chortling with mirth.
"Oh no," Megan giggled. "That is precisely why you were cursed in that blasted tomb of the two lovers and thus experienced...ehem... heightened...carnal pleasure."
If Aesop had been a man to blush, he likely would have. Sebastian Sallow undoubtedly was. His love was, too, averting her gaze from anyone and anything – a ferocious blush on her cheeks.
"That was one time," he yapped, his arms crossed in front of him.
"Of course," Megan rolled her eyes, turning her attention to the woman beside her. "He was ready to deflower me in that very same tomb. We undoubtedly have to devise a sweeter story about our first meeting if Estelle ever asks."
"Agreed," Sebastian cleared his throat.
"That's really Sebastian, though," his love chuckled, blush still on her cheeks as she focused on the little babe in Aesop's arms, gently stroking her head in a motherly fashion. "I, for one, can recall a very similar event involving a goblin mine."
Aesop was certain his old heart would give out soon, for this was bound to be yet another tale of her recklessly, foolishly risking her life. She had an affinity for it, no doubt. The words 'goblin mine' were enough to fill him with terror and astonishment – He did not understand how she had survived this long.
"Do I want to know?" Aesop asked with a groan, eliciting a giggle from her.
"No," she shook her head with a wink. "No, you really don't."
"I, for one, agree," Sebastian shuddered. "I am not keen on getting slaughtered by an ex-auror today."
"Oh, Aesop is not that sinister," his love giggled.
"Oh no, I am," Aesop interjected with a threatening smile. "I may have been out of the field for over a decade, but best believe I can still make it look like an accident. I promised your...father," the word spat from his tongue, "as much."
"Your father?" Sebastian asked, his tone worried and, dare Aesop say, alarmed? "What..."
"I don't wish to talk about it," (Y/N) waved him off hurriedly. "Aesop dealt with him more than I did."
"Did he now?" Sebastian mused, a thoughtful look on his face. Suddenly he regarded Aesop with a little less disdain and horror.
Aesop did not count the minutes or hours they stayed at the former Sallow residence. It had been a pleasant change from the frenzied and fully engulfing pre-examination environment at the castle, the atmosphere joyful with little Estelle, even when she had briefly awoken and promptly shown off her impressively large lung. When he and his love were finally leaving, the sun was setting on the horizon, casting a beautifully orange glow over the Scottish Highlands, a warm summer breeze carrying the slightly salty air from the sea.
"Sharp?" Sebastian Sallow lowly called out to him as Megan and (Y/N) said their goodbyes, the latter cooing at the tiny baby in Megan's arms, seemingly not wishing to part from her at all.
"Yes?" Aesop sighed, his leg starting to ache and his mood souring as he remembered how much he would have to brew throughout the night.
"Did you truly meet her father?"
Aesop was surprised, though he tried not to let it show. Sebastian had been her friend for many years; perhaps he knew more than Aesop did, the issue of her father still one she avoided most days – not even considering the simple fact that she saw Eleazar as hers in any case.
"We did," he affirmed with a curt nod. "Dratted meater if you'd ask me."
"I can't say I ever had the displeasure of meeting the man," Sebastian scoffed. "But if you truly took care of him in her place, then...I suppose I should thank you.
Aesop only raised his eyebrow.
"She is akin to family for me and wholly responsible for me standing here at all. For being able to have a family – my daughter. What I am trying to convey, I suppose, is please take care of her."
"You have my word."
A week passed and then another, both in a similar manner as the others before had; their time largely spent apart during the days as they prepared their students for their final exams and OWLs and NEWTS. Yet when the sun had gone down, and the stars were glittering like a million diamonds over the castle, Aesop found himself precisely where he longed to be: in her home, her in his arms or next to him on the comfortable armchairs, the world around them away far enough for just a while. When in her hut, surrounded by warmth and the feeling of 'home', his thoughts cleared miraculously, no longer filled with exams and potions and students that likely would never achieve anything beyond a 'poor'.
Megan Sallow had, as Aesop continued to realise, been right: Little Estelle Sallow would enable him to play favourites – if he was still a Professor by then, of course. More notably, though, seeing his love hold the small child and holding her himself filled him with more and more dreams and desires for his own children, the dreams of days hidden in the English countryside now vividly brighter as tiny feet ran around his mind endlessly echoing as if he were stuck in an everlasting pensive memory. It was ludicrous, foolish even – just a mere year ago, Aesop had believed himself to be resigned to forever Bachelorhood, his fate of living alone and forlorn for the rest of his days not likely to ever change. But it had – for fate had steered a most exquisite and extraordinary woman on his path, and perhaps, just perhaps, she would be inclined to share more than just a life with him.
The very picture of her holding little Estelle was etched into his mind, creating a desire he hadn't thought possible. Aesop did not understand how something so small could hold such power over him. But it did. He wondered if –
"Sickle for your thoughts?" his lover's sweet voice pulled him from his thoughts as she placed her lesson plans for the following week on the small coffee table before she stood up and walked to her small stove.
"I was just reminiscing," he answered truthfully.
"Oh?" She looked at him with her soft gaze, her head titled in genuine interest. "What of?"
"Estelle," Aesop sighed. "I fear her mother may be right, and I will be playing favourites in a few years. Do not let Sallow know I said that, though."
"We both will," she chuckled, preparing another kettle to make more tea, the warm light of the fireplace painting her in an ethereal glow. Though the summer was comfortably mild, the evenings and nights still got cold; thus, Aesop was thankful she continued to light the fireplace. "She was just a darling little thing."
"Not as adorable as ours would be," Aesop let slip out, his tone even as he was only half joking as the thought continued manifesting in his mind. Their children would be more adorable - Aesop was sure of it. Especially because they would be hers – tiny, perfect replicas of her, with her wonderfully bright and loving eyes, her warm persona and exceptional talent.
"I am not certain where this is coming from all of a sudden, but," she shook her head. "You are not half as shocking as you think you are," giggling quietly as she helped herself to another cup of tea, the fragrant, flowery aroma of rooibos filling the space.
"Oh?" Aesop couldn't help but raise his eyebrow as he watched her. Her beautiful hair was shimmering in the low light of her cabin, her (Y/H/C) waves cascading down her shoulders just like Aesop adored, a shift from the elaborate updos and styles she commonly wore – her hair soft and full, likely smelling of citrus and hyacinth, her skin tingling with spring. In short: She was utterly irresistible.
He could almost feel his manhood straining against his breeches, observing her hum lowly as her hips swayed in an unfamiliar rhythm, her face content, complete with a dainty smile. The atmosphere felt domestic, and Aesop found himself pulled into visions of the English countryside again, the images becoming more vivid with each second that time passed them by. He wanted, needed, more.
"Your bark is far worse than your bite," she continued, her tone teasing as she shot him a grin before returning her attention to the stove.
Is that what she truly believed? That his bark was worse than his bite? Had she forgotten that he had been an Auror? That, realistically, he could crush her tiny body between two fingers?
Before Aesop could stop himself, he had risen from his position in front of the fireplace, stalking toward her like a predator seeking its prey – a fitting description in Aesop's mind. She did not notice him, and it was far too easy for him to slowly wrap his arms around her tiny waist and pull himself against her. He could feel her warm body tense below his fingers, her breath hitching as he towered over her. His hair fanned out against her cheeks when he leaned forward, his mouth brushing against her ear. Goosebumps were rising on her body, and he could make out the slightest shiver the closer he leaned into her.
He revelled in the way her body responded to his. So pliant. So... submissive.
"I can assure you, my love," he breathed out against her ear, "that my bite is just as bad."
An audible gasp escaped her as she fidgetted in his arms and turned around, though he kept his arms tightly locked around her waist – trapping her between the stove and himself. She stared up at him, her (Y/E/C) eyes wide as they met his blown-out pupils that bore into hers.
"A-Aesop," she stuttered out. He watched as her cheeks turned rosy, her mouth slightly open. Though their touches had lingered over the past weeks, and their nights had been spent in the embrace of one another, Aesop hadn't been particularly bold or forthcoming beyond precisely that – their romance sweet and innocent and virtuous. He knew of her inexperience, but ever so carefully, he moved his hand upwards, his touch a mere ghost against her body before reaching her face and cupping her chin below his finger. His thumb moved against her lips. They were plump and soft - as was the rest of her.
His self-control was slipping, his manhood straining, and he felt like a juvenile delinquent. Aesop didn't want or ask for many things in life, but at this moment, he desired her.
"Tell me, Y/N," he breathed out, "Do you truly believe that yourself?"
"I-"
His hands moved back to her hips, his hold somewhere between a tight grip and a gentle caress. He wanted to caress her, hold her, love her. And he was unable to suppress his desires any longer. He pressed his front against hers, letting her feel what she did to him, her audible gasp and rosy cheeks sending another jolt down his spine. Her cheeks were burning deliciously, and she simply stared at him.
"Aesop," she whimpered helplessly. He was all-consuming. His deliciously musky scent of sandalwood and firewhiskey enveloped her until all her senses were inhabited by him and only him. His body surrounded her, and the warmth he emitted was nearly suffocating, but it was Aesop, after all.
Aesop.
The same man she had grown to love as much as she had. A man she would entrust her entire life with, knowing that he would do the same. A man who loved her wholeheartedly by his own admittance, who had defended her honour against a man he had never known when she had not even been his. His beard was rough against her cheeks, his head slowly moving down as he pressed feather-light kisses on her jaw and neck. He deeply inhaled her scent, never getting enough, relishing in the slight tremors that shook his love and the whimpers that fell from her lips.
"My love," he mumbled as he continued to kiss her neck, bent down awkwardly to her much smaller height and frame, caressing her sides as he held her close. "You would be the most stunning mother." His hands found her hips, one of them reaching to carefully touch her lower stomach, the very place that would swell with their children, where she would safely carry them until they were ready to come earthside. His voice was gentle, scarcely above a whisper, yet its rough rumbling sound resonated within the air.
"Is that something you could wish for?" he mumbled, looking at her before he placed his lips upon hers, savouring her saccharine taste as they moved in sync; him much more dominating. "For me to make you a mother?"
Her eyes bulged, looking at him, shell-shocked with her mouth still open. "Ae-Aesop," she stuttered lowly, "where is this coming from?"
He smirked at her, his caramel eyes meeting hers with a piercing gaze – a heated shiver tumbling down her spine. "I have not stopped thinking about it ever since you have held Estelle. You were captivating."
His lips met hers again, a blazing fire of desire and want behind the kiss that swallowed her whole.
"Aesop we," she gasped. "We can't. We're not even wedded."
He couldn't help the laugh that escaped his mouth. If this was her only problem, it could easily be rectified. More so, Aesop wanted to rectify it. "You think I would want to fuck my children into some random woman?" His voice was several tones deeper, still pressed into her as she took in his unusually forthright and vulgar words with wide eyes. "If it were up to me, my love, we could be married on the morrow and expedite our wedding night."
"Y-you – you want to marry me?"
"Let me reiterate," Aesop whispered against her lips. "I will not fuck my children into anyone but my wife. Anything you yearn for, it's yours."
He observed her face carefully – meticulously. His love wore her heart on her sleeve, conflicting emotions clouding her features. This was her decision and hers alone; she would carry and birth their children, after all. Just before he could pull away and express to her that she had all the time in the world that she needed, her quiet, breathless voice reached his.
"Will it...hurt?" she asked with uncertainty, biting her lip as she stared up into Aesop's eyes. She knew very little of marital relations, her mother telling her just enough to understand what needed to happen for her to conceive. Beasts were luckily quite the same, but in any case, the act did not sound or seem pleasant – but for Aesop and a chance at a family with him, she could endure.
"For a second," he spoke truthfully. "Just a second."
"Okay," she whispered, wrapping her arms around his broad shoulders, letting him place his lips against hers. His mouth felt dominating, his beard coarse against her soft skin, lightly distracting her from his manhood pressing into her lower stomach. Arousal, excitement, anxiousness... they coursed through her as she let herself be enveloped and cared for by him.
Aesop slowly guided her towards the bedroom, his lips never leaving hers, leaving him in a rather awkward position bent down to her height with his leg thrumming away lowly, but the sheer yearning was enough to make him forget the lingering pain, his sense zeroing in on her and the way her body felt beneath his fingertips. His arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her body flush against his as he kept pressing himself into her, his manhood finding purchase and a torturous relief; before, reluctantly, he moved his lips from hers, both of them breathing deeply.
Ever so carefully, with Aesop's eyes never leaving hers, his fingers moved to her front, carefully unbuttoning her bodice, her chest rapidly moving up and down.
"You do not have to lay with me if you don't wish to," Aesop mumbled, his hands ceasing their careful administrations though he held them at her chest.
"I want to," she breathed out, her voice barely above a whisper. "I trust you."
Aesop nodded with a smile, leaning in to kiss her again as his hands removed her bodice, his hands moving around her waist again to carefully unwrap her overskirt; before long, the delicate fabric joined her bodice on the floor, leaving her in her corset and bloomers. Their lips moved in unison, passionately filling his and her soul before they became one, and Aesop could feel her delicate, diminutive hands working to liberate him of his vest. He smiled contently into the kiss, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest at her rather ungainly movements of opening the buttons but allowing her to feel him just as he felt her. Aesop's hand trailed a line against the bone of her hip, his other hand holding her waist steady as the warmth of her body slowly seeped through the thick material of the corset. Pulling away, Aesop could see the peak of her breasts pressing against the corset, barely spilling over – teasing him deliciously.
Her delicate hands tugged at his vest before Aesop let it fall to the ground alongside her garb, leaving him in his breeches and a cotton blouse, some chest hair peeking through at the top. She smiled at him – shyly, nervously, but Aesop could not glimpse a flicker of uncertainty. Carefully, he reached around her, ably loosening the laces of her corset, before the torturous thing joined the rest of her garments and his vest on the floor. She gasped, a sudden sensation of vulnerability as Aesop saw her chest in all its glory, her peaks hardening against the sudden air that kissed them in a welcoming embrace. Before she could cover herself, Aesop tenderly grabbed her wrists, holding them in his much larger hands, his eyes never leaving hers – warm and comforting.
"You are exquisite," he whispered, pulling her close. His larger body enveloped hers, her peaks chafing against the cotton with delicious friction before he kissed her fervently again, his hands roaming across her body as hers found his waist.
Though his body had significantly changed ever since he had left the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Aesop remained lean and well-muscled, his shoulders still broad and strong – the assertive air around him never leaving. She could feel it between her fingertips, his shirt leaving little to the imagination as it clung to his body like a second skin.
She gasped into him when his hands suddenly touched her breasts, his hands fondling, fondling them gently, effortlessly cupping them in his large hands. Two fingers slowly swirled around her hardened peaks, teasing her with a gentle, loving caress, swallowing her soft moans as he put forth all his longing and desire into the kiss. Against his mouth, Aesop could feel her soft whining; his manhood twitching as desire unlike he's ever felt before rushing through him.
"Get on the bed," Aesop growled lowly, eyes half-lidded in eros. She pulled away shakily, her eyes trained on him as he guided her towards the bed, letting herself lower down on the mattress when the back of her knees met the edge. Aesop stepped closer, looking down at her with an untamed gaze that sent shivers of craving and a newfound feeling she couldn't describe through her body. His fingers trailed below her chin, tilting it up slightly as he took her in. He felt like a young gentleman again, brimming with ferocious, carnal appetite when he had scarcely even touched her yet. Merlin knew he needed to be gentle – her inexperience and what Aesop suspected was a grand dearth of knowledge were bound to make this…interesting enough.
"And you are entirely certain you want this?" his voice unrecognisable.
"Yes," she whimpered, her nerves alight. For so long, it had been ingrained into her that she was not to lay with a man unless he was her husband, her very existence at Hogwarts having brought shame upon her family. And yet, as Aesop's presence enveloped her, she could not deny herself the sheer wanting and craving with the lasciviousness the moment brought.
He moved to his knees, his leg thrumming as he unhurriedly removed her bloomers, the tips of his fingers grazing her sides before she was as naked as the day she was born. The blaze of arousal that ran through him was as intense as the sun, and he has to remind himself like a chant that this is a first for her. He has to be gentle.
"Lay back," Aesop rasped out, rising to his feet again to remove his boots before he joined her on the bed, leaning over her with one arm supporting his upper body.
His eyes bore into hers as he slowly let his hand trail a sweet caress down her body. His touch was feather-light, the tips of his fingers scantily making contact with her heated skin, but it was enough to perceive the goosebumps that littered it. Her mouth was slightly open, though her eyes were wide - filled with anticipation, wonder and the lingering fear of the unknown.
His hand travelled lower, perhaps slightly clumsily, until it finally reached her hip and then the apex of her thighs. Her breath sped up slightly, but her eyes held onto his and Aesop revelled in the trust she was giving him. She had offered herself on a silver plate, and he would not stop until he had devoured her whole.
Ever so slowly, he manoeuvred her legs open, settling himself between them before his hand travelled lower and finally reached the place he wanted to absolutely wreck.
Aesop felt the small wet tuft, his touch teasing as he carefully slid his finger up and down her slit.
"Oh," she gasped, surprised, her breath speeding up as her thighs clenched around him.
"So responsive," Aesop chuckled lowly, "and I have barely even touched you."
She only whined when his touch became bolder, his middle finger pressing down on her womanhood as his thumb searched for her clit. If he wanted to fuck her - if she wanted him to take her, he would need to prepare her in every way conceivable.
"Is this good?" he breathed out, his eyes still not leaving hers as he leant down, peppering her face in soft and gentle kisses. His fingers, at last, found her little nub – small and hard, peeking out like a treasured secret, his thumb simply pressing down on, whilst his middle finger caressed up and down, and she gasped out, her back rising from the bed.
"Yes," she finally found her words and nodded meekly. "I - Ah!"
Aesop chuckled as he pressed down harder, slowly drawing precise circles on her clit as her womanhood gradually became more and more damp beneath his ministrations. He littered small kisses along her cheeks and jaw – barely tangible – as she whined and squirmed underneath him, her breath reduced to erratic pants that only fuelled his own arousal. His breeches were confining, but witnessing her descent into bliss was nothing if not a blessing. This was his personal Eden - Aesop was sure of it.
He could feel her hole, tight and searing and oh so enticing, as his index finger joined his middle finger and touched her with newfound vigour. His thumb increased the pressure on her clit, and she keened.
"Aesop!"
"Yes?" he mumbled, his mouth on her throat, suckling tiny precious bruises all over. He could feel her heartbeat when his lips trailed her jugular vein, and it beat in the rhythm of his own. Her whining and squirming made him growl, but he would have been lying if it didn't excite him all the same.
"I- Ah!"
"Use your words, my sweet girl," Aesop drew back, his eyes finding her face again – her eyes shut in unadulterated bliss.
"Look at me," he bade her, "I want you to look at me when I make you come. When you unravel on my fingers."
Obediently she obliged, her frantic eyes finding his as she let out desperate pants and arched up into him.
"Please," she begged him.
"Please, what?" He teased her with a wolfish grin.
"More."
She felt so utterly overwhelmed and treasured as he made her feel things she had never felt before. Aesop was all-consuming, and she lost herself in the pleasure he gave her. Pleasure she had never thought would even exist.
Between her legs, Aesop let his middle finger wander closer to her heat, pressing deeper as he went, feeling her wetness seeping out of her. Ever so carefully, almost curiously, he inserted his finger, coaxing a kittenish trill from her.
"Oh, oh," she squirmed under him, the sensation foreign and not entirely pleasant. His finger was easily the size of two of hers, a burning feeling accompanying its breaching entrance.
"Shh," he shushed her, littering kisses over her face once more. "I have to, my love. I have to. Just... let me feel you."
A soothing exhale let her refocus on the circles he drew on her clit and the pleasure shooting through her. His movements were meticulous, calculated and more pleasing than anything she had ever tried on herself.
Against his own thighs, Aesop could feel hers tensing and flexing, and he gave her a moment's reprieve before he could sense her settling, and he steadily began moving his finger in and out. She was tight, expectedly so, which only meant he would have to put in a substantial amount of work if she were to take him. To divert her attention further, he descended his head until his mouth found her erect nipples, enveloping one as she flexed into him.
"Aesop," she moaned lowly. He hummed in response – the vibrations a delightful sensation.
Though her hut had been comfortably warm before, it felt like it was positively ablaze now, the heat flickering away at her exposed skin, arousal running through her like a Graphorn untamed. The hand that had previously held him up now moved downwards, cupping her other breast, caressing it with teasing strokes that drove her mad.
"So tight," Aesop mumbled against her breast, his finger still dragging through her heat gently and slowly. "My perfect girl. So tight and warm..."
Her breathing quickened – chest rising against Aesop's face, his beard prickly against her delicate skin. Moans escaped her mouth; his thumb steadily increased its pressure on her as he worked her open. Delicately, he slipped in a second finger, pausing as she tensed up and before her tight and warm body opened up to him, welcoming his fingers as she groaned in rhapsody.
"Aesop..."
She trembled, overwhelmed by the very emotion and intimacy of the moment, a warm heat gathering in her lower abdomen as his motions slowly sped up, the delicious pressure of his fingers on her nub bringing her closer to the edge of delirium.
"That's it," Aesop mumbled against her, slowly rising up to look at her face. "That's it, my love."
Fervently, Aesop placed his lips upon hers again, consuming her cries of bliss as her body arched into his, her nipples brushing against the cotton of his blouse. One of her hands travelled from her sides to his waist whilst the other found his hair tangling itself in it as his movements quickened. Expertly, Aesop curled his two fingers inside her, uncovering the bundle of pleasure that made her keen under him. She broke the kiss, turning her head to the side as she moaned vociferously – panting as she got closer and closer to ecstasy.
"Aesop, I –" she gasped, looking right into her lover's eyes, her pupils blown and cheeks rosy the closer he brought her to completion.
"I've got you," he promised lowly, speeding up his movements as he felt her womanhood tighten up around his fingers. "Let go, my love. I've got you."
She felt like she was burning. From the way his fingers felt on her – in her – making her sweat and drip on the sheets as she writhed beneath him, the heat burning from between her legs before it spread in every little part of her body – an all-consuming inferno.
"I – Ah!"
"That's it, my love," Aesop cooed, curling his fingers against her spot, watching as she unravelled beneath him. Her eyes clenched, her hips wriggled underneath him, canting upwards – as she chased the foreign sensation that built up inside of her. Aesop fondled her clit a little faster, flicking it with animalistic precision as his fingers mercilessly assailed that tenderly sweet spot inside of her; before long, her womanhood clenched violently, and her first orgasm swept over her. Aesop watched, enthralled and utterly bewitched, as she cried out in pleasure, her thighs clenching around his hips and her tiny hands tightening, finding his shoulders and digging into them.
"Oh! Aesop!"
He could only groan, his manhood twitching at the thought of finally settling himself inside her tight, dripping warmth. Aesop continued to move his fingers – in, out – the movement lazy, helping her ride out the crashing waves of her orgasm before her tremble ceased and her moans shifted into paltry whines. He retracted his fingers, bringing them to his mouth as he sucked on them like a man starved, tasting her ambrosial wetness. She tasted like she smelled – saccharinely sweet like honey, entirely addicting. When he opened his eyes once more, he found his love staring at him with wide eyes, her cheeks flushed, and her hair spread around her head like a glowing halo. She was sweaty, her chest still heaving against the swelting heat of the hut – Aesop could feel his eyes darken in desire.
His lips met hers with another bruising kiss, his prickly beard scratching against her delicate skin. She could taste the remnants of herself on him – an odd taste if one were to ask her – but she was left utterly breathless from the sheer overwhelming intensity of emotions surging through her, her very soul intertwining with his. To love someone as deeply as she loved Aesop had been one thing, but to feel the love reciprocated and returned tenfold was another dizzying reality entirely.
"I love you," Aesop breathed out. "Fuck – I love you."
"Aesop," her eyes widened, though her heart overfilled with love at his proclamation, and her eyes filled with tears. "I love you too."
He smiled at her – how could he not? Whenever did he get this lucky?! Perhaps he had saved a nation once – there was no perspicuous reason for this love otherwise.
His hands found her sides again, feeling her curves with a reverent worshipping touch, relishing the soft skin of her much smaller body beneath the callouses of his fingers. She shivered lightly, keeping her eyes trained on his. No matter the trepidation coursing through her veins, she was safe and cared for in Aesop's arms and beneath his much larger body – enveloping her as the world around blurred outside her focus. With quivering hands, she reached out to his waist, pulling at his shirt with a subtle whine.
Aesop chuckled lowly, pulling his shirt from his breeches before he allowed her to help him pull his blouse over his head as it promptly joined the rest of their garments on the floor. His love glanced at him, a demure gaze as she followed the lines of his scars littering his torso, though most of them were hidden by the ample amount of hair that covered it.
"And you say I'm exquisite," she whispered bashfully.
Carefully, she reached out to the largest one by his ribs, following the line with the ghost of a touch into the thick fur in the middle of his chest. Her fingertips danced over his pectorals, causing Aesop to release a shuddering breath before he leaned down again to find her lips. Her hands pawed at him hungrily, almost boldly, as he devoured her lips in a searingly hot kiss.
"May I try something?" he asked breathlessly.
"I trust you."
A wolfish grin spread across his face, sending a jolt of desire down her spine, unsure of what to expect. For one last second, he drank in her gaze upon his body, watching as she took in his broad shoulders and tapered waist before he bent down again, pressing kisses along her neck and collarbones, his hot breath fanning against her bosom.
"It'll be good, I promise," he mumbled, grin still on his face as he attended to her erect nipples with two kittenish licks before he went lower. His beard scratched against her belly, the delicious friction sure to leave a slight burn on her the following day, but her eyes widened again when he went even lower.
"Stop thinking," Aesop muttered, feeling her tensing lightly beneath him as he kissed down her torso. "Just let yourself feel."
He ceased again for just a second when his lips reached her lower stomach – a moment to relish her sweet scent with blissfully closed eyes. Lovingly, tenderly, he pressed a kiss down right where her womb would be – a silent prayer, a wish, sent up to whichever God had sent her his way to ensure this would be fruitful. He knew his love was utterly magical, but this secret place of hers was capable of creating wonders he yearned for – possessively, wholly and greedy in ways he hadn't known.
"A-Aesop, what are you –?" she asked with a stutter when he went even lower, spreading her legs further, placing himself between them as he held them in his arms.
"Push me away if you wish for me to stop, my love," a grin still on his face as he lowered his body to level with her womanhood. He gazed at her – right at the place he was hoping to ravage – whimpering with desire. He wasn't sure if he had ever expected anything, but if he did, it exceeded his expectations, for she looked oh so beautiful and alluring. Unable to stop himself, he bent down, brushing his nose up and down her mound, his beard leaving a deliciously sweet burn against the skin of her thighs as she started to shake and gasp in his hold. She smelled even better than he had dreamed, and without forewarning, his lips closed around her nub and sucked.
Aesop was silently thankful her hut was nearly off grounds; the absolute wail of pleasure she let out would've been heard by the entire castle otherwise. Her hips canted upwards, her legs sealing around him, and her arms flailing around until they found Aesop's hair. She didn't push him away, but her grasp was tight, holding onto him like he was her lifeline.
"Aesop!"
He hummed lowly in response, his eyes closed at the delectable taste, pulling and suckling at her most sensitive part.
"Aesop it – Ah! 's too much I – "
Her hips moved desperately beneath him – up, down; left, right – wriggling; trying to elude his succour and moving closer simultaneously. Determined to make her stay, Aesop wrapped one of his arms around her hip, pressing her down into the mattress as the other held open her legs. There was not a single thing on earth that could have impeded Aesop's ministrations, her yelps and incoherent pleas falling on deaf ears as his tongue swirled around her clit, pressing circles into her. He desperately osculated her ambrosial wetness – wanting, craving, needing her to come undone once more, his grip on her tightening.
"'sop – Please, I – Ah!"
His name fell from her lips like a reverent prayer, her upper body thrashing around and her breath uneven as she gulped in the air between her cries of pleasure. Her quim was positively dripping – her fluids spreading against her thighs and onto the sheets of her bed. Aesop's own groans of desire sunk into her, breathing in heavy pants as he devoured her whole. His fingers found her hole again, this time easily inserting two as her womanhood clenched periodically around them. The bed jerked with her movements, the wooden frame clattering against the stone walls as the room continued to heat up.
"I – Oh, Merlin – I... Ahhh!"
Aesop chuckled, his fingers curling and hitting the same precious spot over and over again. She tasted so sweet; her womanhood frail and warm against his tongue as he lapped at her rapaciously.
"Good girl," he rasped out somewhere in between. "Doing so well for me."
Her spluttering cries filled him with wicked pride as her head thrashed against the pillows – him holding down the rest of her, leaving her entirely at his mercy – unable to do anything but take what he gave her. It was riveting to know he would be the first man to bed her, that he was the first to introduce her to the endless fields of pleasure, as much as it thrilled Aesop to know he would also be her last. His fingers dallied their movements, his tongue ceasing its assault in place of kittenish licks, wishing to draw out her ecstasy before he decided to enter a third finger. Her eyes scrunched up with the discomfort she was suddenly feeling, his tongue scarcely enough to make it decently pleasing.
"Aesop," she groaned lowly, pushing her hip into her mattress in a futile attempt to escape him – his iron grip did not relent. "It's too much."
"Shh..." he soothed her, his fingers moving in and out, curling inside her, opening her and making her all the more pliant for him. "Shh... there you go, my love. You can take it."
His arm held her hips pertinaciously as his fingers worked deeper inside with each thrust – a little further each time they moved. She yelped, pleasure and pain intermingling when his tongue curled around her bundle of nerves, holding the highly sensitised part of her on the unforgiving, warm cushion of his own flesh before he sucked, the violent waves of ecstasy creeping up on her once more. Her wetness seeped out of her, dripping down the knuckles of his fingers, dirtying her thighs and the sheets below. The sounds he drew from her were utterly obscene, filling the air, which likely reeked of their activities, and he wasn't even close to being done with her. Her thighs trembled under his hold, her upper body thrashing around.
She wished for it to stop, yet she prayed this would never end.
"Aesop...Aesop... Merlin, I – Oh, OH."
"It's alright," Aesop mumbled. "You're doing so good for me. My perfect girl."
Her second orgasm collided with her very soul – violently, fiercely, drowning her in the waves of ecstasy as the world around her shifted into a blinding white, turning her blissfully boneless. Her cries echoed in her hut, bouncing off the walls like sweet singing. Aesop groaned, his being awash with desire as his stiff manhood strained against his breeches – so much that it almost hurt. His fingers moved lazily, a few languid strokes helping her through the aftershocks of her peak, heat consuming her as she lay sapless beneath him. Aesop hastily unbuckled his breeches, pushing them down along with his underpants, letting his sizable erection spring free though his gaze did not wander from her.
His love looked downright sinful.
She swallowed in greedy, deep breaths, her chest heaving as the electrifying feeling of her ecstasy continued to tingle through her, the world still spinning – she hardly even realised that Aesop was now naked too. Some hair clung to the nape of her neck, the rest fanned out around her as beads of sweat covered her lithe little body. It was as if she glowed from within – Aesop was sure he had never seen anything so beautiful.
He slowly made his way back up to her, his arms on either side of her body, holding him up and relieving most of the pressure from his leg, though it barely hurt as it stood. His eyes didn't leave hers, though they were still hazy in the afterglow. Aesop's hand lovingly caressed her face, pushing back a stray hair or two, waiting until her eyes found his again. His shaft twitched anxiously, resting between her body and his – warm and soft and waiting.
When she glimpsed at him – her eyes truly finding his – her eyes widened at the sight of him. Aesop hair was dishevelled, the hairline littered with beads of sweat as his dark eyes feasted upon her state. He was the very picture of depravity – his face drenched in her release from his nose to his lips, clinging to his stubble. She blushed fiercely at the view above her, almost averting her gaze had his fingers not caressed her cheeks. For the first time, she could feel the weight of his manhood against her stomach, the naked skin of his large body enveloping hers, but she didn't dare look down. It felt massive, though a large man like Aesop would likely be rather well...endowed. Dread filled her at the thought of him actually entering her, her breath picking up again – unable to hide the nature of her feelings.
Aesop's sweet and gentle caress steered her focus back to him, his smile just as soft.
"I will be as gentle as I can," he promised, his voice low and placating. "It will hurt for a second, and if you need me to stop, you can tell me."
He was so honest, so loving – so gentle and kind; her Aesop – that she could only nod, allowing his lips to fall upon hers as he shifted between her legs. She tried to remember what her mother had told her about the marital act – that she would simply need to endure – but it did little to subdue the tension she felt when she could feel him pressing against her folds. A pitiful whine escaped her lips, and she desperately tried to focus on anything else.
"I've got you," Aesop gentled her, his eyes now looking down between their bodies. He was unable to see much, but his heart thumped erratically at the sight of his manhood, hard and pulsating with need, right at her entrance. It had been a while for him, too; most carnal encounters after Scarborough were merely transactional (if at all), and Aesop wasn't sure if he had ever felt desire and need as intensely as he had at this moment.
"I've got you," he reiterated quietly, frowning a little as he eased the tip of him inside. She gasped for a second before holding her breath altogether, clenching her eyes shut upon feeling pure pressure.
"There you go, my love," he whispered against her ear, curling his large body over hers, trying to hold himself back as he felt the tip of his manhood enveloped by the tight heat of her – entering her with a torturously slow pace.
"I love you. You're doing so well, my love… So well. My good girl."
Light kisses and a gentle caress kept her with her, her contorted face strained as Aesop gently and slowly worked himself into her – he hated that this even needed to be unpleasant in the first place. Another gasp escaped her abruptly, deep and greedy breaths filling her lungs with the parching air surrounding them. Her sweaty chest stuck to his, her erect buds teased by the hair on his chest. The symphony of sensations was wholly overwhelming as she struggled to contain both him and herself.
Pressure. Agony. Desire. Want. Aesop – inside her.
Aesop let himself rest, her womanhood pulsating around him as it struggled to contain what little of his length he had inserted. Her small, near inaudible whimpers tore at his heartstrings – enough to distract his mind off the perfectly mindblowing sensation of feeling enveloped by her, his entire being aching with need as she leaked around him and he around her – easing the tight passage with their bodies aflame and hearts beating as one.
"Breathe, my love," Aesop cooed, his hand caressing the sides of her body in gentle strokes as he tried to ease more of himself inside of her, unable to stop a slight moan from escaping his lips.
"Aaaahh – " she grit out between her teeth, feeling overwhelmingly full. It was too big – feeling like it was tearing her apart at the seams, and she felt utterly pathetic beneath him. However, was she meant to fit that?
"Aesop!"
"Look at me," Aesop whispered, his breath mere inches away from her face. "Come, my love. Look at me. I've got you, okay?"
Whimpering, she opened her eyes, the caramel warmth of Aesop's finding hers as he was brimming with overwhelming love and adoration – enough to bring down an entire army. He gently placed a kiss upon her forehead as his hand moved lower again, resolved to make this pleasurable for her. If it had simply been about his own pleasure, he would have come undone within but a second.
"Try to relax, my love," he gentled, his hand finding her hardened nub again, smirking when she moaned in bliss as he gently put pressure on it, drawing light circles and cajoling more wetness from the depths of her core. She was feverishly warm, enveloping him with a vice grip – soft, warm, dripping the further he went. The arm holding him above her was tense, straining with the effort to keep him upright when she felt so good around him as he moaned himself with the warmth surrounding him. Slowly, gently, he eased more of himself inside, pressing his hips forward as his manhood fought against the tight clenches of her channel. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears – but they did not leave his.
"Ahh – Aesop!"
"That's it, my love. My beautiful girl...I love you," he gentled. "You are doing so well. So very well for me."
"I…I…"
"What is it, my love?" he asked, his hip pressing forward another excruciating inch, their bodies aching for the other as he leaked around her the way she did around him – easing the passage and helping her stretch against him. Her breathing was erratic, her cheeks glaringly red as pleasure and pain intermingled once more. "What do you feel?"
"It..mhm..." A tender moan spilt from her, her womanhood slowly loosening around him. "–sop."
"Yes, my love?" He whispered, kissing the corner of her mouth as he felt her shivering beneath him. He rubbed her clitoris with messy and soft strokes, relishing her low moans as her eyes fluttered shut – this time in pleasure. Aesop could not help the small smile that placed itself upon his lips, for she was breathtaking. Another inch pressed into her, the discomfort returning and a choked little sob spilling from her plush lips – a stray tear spilling from her eye.
"Do you wish for me to stop?" Aesop asked her gently, halting all his movements as he awaited her answer. She did not answer him, though she shook her head furiously from side to side.
"Look at me," he bade her again, his hand cupping her face as he gentled her with a soothing touch. "You do not have to endure if you cannot."
Her teary eyes met his as she gulped before another sharp intake of breath filled her lungs. "I don't want you to stop," she whimpered miserably. "Please just..." she bit her lip, her gaze averting in shame.
"Please, what, my love?" he asked. "You can tell me anything. You need to tell me if you want this."
"What you've been doing with your fingers..." she gulped. "I want…I need…"
"Do you need me to…" he slowly pressed his fingers on her clitoris again – a little more pressure than before – his voice fading as she gasped and arched into him.
"Yes…" she sighed contently, the furrow of her brow decreasing, and her eyes closed again. "A–Ae–Aesop," she shakily moaned, her hips canting upwards to meet his.
His self-control was admirable, the strain on his own body and mind evident by the strain in his arm and his own panting breaths. Her womanhood parted for him, the tight muscle easing as she relaxed into his touch – clenching hard then parting like a greedy mouth. His shaft was leaking a trail inside her with each small push forward – she did not believe he could go any further, for it already felt like he was beyond anywhere he should be. Before long, Aesop pushed forward one more time – burying himself with one long and stubborn thrust, reaching all the way inside her.
She wailed and burst into tears at the sensation, Aesop's own head dropping between the valley of her breasts as he groaned deeply at the sheer feeling.
"Aesop!"
"Fuck," he groaned lowly, the hand next to her head gripping the sheets – his hand surely turning white with force. He had stilled inside her, allowing both him and her to adjust to the foreign feeling. Her chest was rising violently, pushing against his as he fully enveloped her beneath him.
"A-Aesop," she whimpered, a twinging pain still lingering in her lower body, her legs sapless on either side of him. "It - ah…hurts."
"I know, my love," Aesop breathed out, his eyes clenched in focus. "You're so – ah...tight."
His hands found her sides again, tracing delicate patterns across her heated skin – all whilst he lingered inside her; unmoving. Slowly, but surely, he felt her settle, her breath evening out and her core loosening. The pain that had pierced her and lingered in her womanhood slowly dwindled away, leaving nothing but a sensation of overwhelming fullness in its wake. His weight upon hers felt strangely comforting, a familiar feeling among the symphony of vast and earth-shattering novelties. Aesop was scalding against her, his broad and heavy and burly body encasing her protectively – shielding her from the world around her, though if she had to describe her world now, there would only be Aesop anyway. She said nothing – much like he did – allowing his panting breath to fan over her bosom as her tears dried. Her fingers, as she now began to realise, had pressed into his sides, leaving red marks on his tough skin.
"Oh," she whispered as she loosened her tight grip.
"Hm?" Aesop mumbled, the vibrations hitting her bosom. "What is it, my love?"
Her voice was trembling and quiet when she answered him – plagued by the shame of what she had done. "I fear I might have hurt you..."
She could feel Aesop's chest rumbling with a low chuckle, the action sparking…something unknown between the folds of her quim before he rose to meet her eyes again, a lopsided smirk on his flushed face.
"My love," he mumbled, a stray hair pushed from her tear-streaked face. "My beautiful, beautiful love...You have cried, certainly not from ecstasy this time, and you worry about me?" Another low chuckle vibrated through them. "Fear not – you haven't hurt me. I have endured far worse."
He watched as she bit her lip, evading his piercing gaze in shame, more tears gathering in her eyes.
"None of that," Aesop chided lovingly, pushing her face to meet his, placing a chaste kiss on her lips. "You're doing so well for me," he whispered, eyes closed in bliss as he felt her walls pulsate around him. He embraced her lips in a loving kiss once more, their tongues mingling as he continued to lead her. "How do you feel?"
"Full," she whimpered lowly. "So… ah – full, Aesop."
A deep groan left his lips upon her admission. Call it male pride or call it unnaturally developed self-conceit, but Aesop could not help the blaze of arousal that burst through him at her admittance. He knew he was charitably blessed, more so than most men – not that she had any way of knowing – but his love took him perfectly, doing so well for him – only him.
"Fuck," he rasped out, straining above her as her warm heat continued to envelop him in a vice grip.
She looked entrancing beneath him, eyes shut, with bitten lips – her chest rising against his, body flushed beautifully as it lay against the pillows. And she was all his. Eternally and entirely his.
"You are doing so well," he praised her in a low tone once more, his hands tracing placating patterns on her skin as they descended towards her hips. He could feel her tension under his fingers, her body shivering – so far removed from the ecstatic state she had been in before.
"Do you trust me?" Aesop whispered, almost inaudible.
"Yes." Her voice was squeaky, and she did not open her eyes, but the word spilt from her lips with no hesitation – and that was enough for Aesop.
He firmly took hold of her hips, angling himself above her – rubbing comforting circles into her hips. Gently, he eased a few inches out, her quim clinging to him before he eased himself back inside with the same familiar gentleness. A breathless gasp escaped her, her eyes opening to meet his as he meticulously took in her body's every response, his eyes hazy with desire and wanting – it sent a shiver down her spine. It was a peculiar feeling, entirely recondite but not unpleasant altogether. Each slow thrust which met her allowed his pubic bone to grace her clit with delicious friction, his manhood gradually opening her up with every thrust – battering away any clenching as her womanhood took him. Her arms were wrapped around his torso; fingers pressed into the blades of his shoulders as Aesop rhythmically moved, a little more each and every time.
She watched as his head dropped between his shoulders, a deep groan escaping him as her warmth circled him. Merlin, Aesop could truly not recall ever feeling even close to this – She was so tight for him, so warm, and so delicate beneath him that it took every atom of his being not to rush himself into climax; he felt like a dratted schoolboy again. Thank Merlin, he was adept at concocting Bruisewort Balm as he knew with absolute certainty that his grip on her hips would leave bruises.
His grinding movements gradually turned pleasant – no longer pressurising.
"Aesop," she groaned, her tone entreating. "I – ah…"
"You feel so perfect, my love," he groaned, allowing his face to move downwards so his mouth could envelop one of her hardened peaks once more, his tongue swirling around despairingly, his hair tickling against her heated skin. "– Doing so well for me. Taking me so perfectly."
He could feel her womanhood dampening around him, easing his motions further – a dark chuckle escaped him.
"You like that, my love? Being told that you're my good – ah," Aesop grunted as he ground his pelvis deeper, her lower body pushed into the mattress. "– my good, good, girl? All for me?"
"Yes," she sighed contently, her eyes closing in bliss.
He cooed against her breasts, deep, breathless, his grinding slowly turning into gentle thrusts – still careful not to hurt her. The hands he held on her hips relaxed, one moving lower to angle her hips differently as he moved his own. Each thrust inwards left her closer to being utterly sapless, unable to do anything but take what he gave, his generous length and girth aiming to brush against the soft spot above her entrance that made her way to wail out in pleasure.
Aesop's head shot up in astonishment when her womanhood tightened around him violently, her rear and head rising from where she lay as she wailed.
"Aesop! Oh…Oh!"
His length brushed against her spot mercilessly, teasing her deliciously when she was very much sated from the two peaks of ecstasy before – the sensation both aching and sending her closer to delirium.
"There you go," Aesop rasped, his shallow thrusts gaining momentum. "Is that good?" he asked, groaning, teasingly pushing his length to deliberately beat away at that tender spot.
"Yes!" his love cried out beneath him, scarcely believing the sheer pleasure she was suddenly feeling – never having felt such an intense cacophony of feelings aimed at her before. With a growl through clenched teeth, Aesop moved his hands to her breasts, fondling them tenderly as he rose up to look down upon the ethereal form of his beloved. The guttural moan he released when he took in the very picture of sin beneath him shook him to his core, the familiar sensation of his impending peak quelling in his lower region. He had to slow down, fearing he would finish before she did, though he could feel her peak approaching.
She looked like a sacred piece of art – sweaty, moaning, and blissfully boneless, her hair spread out like a halo, cheeks flushed, and eyes closed – his own groans of pleasure hastening her voracity.
"You're doing so well for me," Aesop groaned. "So fucking well. All for me. My beautiful girl."
"Yes!" she chanted affirmatively. "All for you."
His thrusts were slow, tempered - reaching parts of her she never thought anyone would reach. His hips canted against her, pushing her further into the mattress, pressing deep, so very deep, into her, the tip of his manhood pressing against her cervix with the sheer force of his thrusts, her womanhood stretched open. She was utterly vulnerable – her legs shook with the intensity of emotions coursing through her, shaking her to her very soul.
"Fuck," Aesop hissed hotly. "I love you. I love you so much. My good – ah, girl. Doing so well for me. My lovely woman… So warm, so… ah....good."
"Aesop!" she cried out, her grip on his shoulders tightening as the familiar coil of eros bubbled beneath her skin again, the flames of desire licking their way up from her womanhood and spreading through her body mercilessly. "I – oh god. I –"
"I've got you," Aesop rasped reassuringly, his touch a temperate anchor in the endless sea of ardour she was drowning in. She cried out once more, a stray tear spilling from the corner of her eye, which Aesop gently wiped from her cheek before he reached down and pressed a soft kiss into the crown of her hair.
"I've got you," he promised once more with a sweet sigh, "You're ah – doing so well for me. I love you so much. Ah – taking me so well. Fuck – I'm so...so proud of you… It's alright... let go for me."
She felt his soft, groping hand, helplessly desirous touching along her body and face, caressing her softly - oh so softly – with infinite soothing and assurance. It was so much and never enough, the staccato building and building confronting her with the innermost parts of herself. Never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own forlornness, yet embraced in Aesop's arms, she knew she would never feel forlorn again. She was his, and he was hers. She had reached the peak twice before that night, but this was so greatly different that she wondered if she had truly reached it after all. He was turgid and quivering inside her, the strange thrills rippling through her like burning embers – dashing to points of brilliant exquisiteness. She lay near unconscious of the frenzied cries she emitted, unaware of his gaze upon her trembling body as she was consumed entirely. She clung to him in her burning passion, his rhythms flushing up into her, filling her entire, cleaving consciousness until she was nothing but a burning flame.
Aesop nearly came apart at the sight and feeling of her, the sight celestial, but he craved, needed, more.
"Fuck," he groaned. Though his movements slowed, they did not cease altogether, his eyes closing in bliss as his thick manhood scraped against her tender, clenching walls. His thrusts were gentle as he helped her through the throes of her peak, lidded eyes, observing her every tremble. When his love came to, noting his continued movements, her eyes shot open, their hazy gaze blurry.
Stuttering, his name left her lips, the burning molten between her legs never ceasing. "A-A-Aesop."
He continued to rock inside; out. It was a moment of pure peace for Aesop, the entry into the body of her so very pleasurable – his hips meeting hers. Her legs tensed, and her womb clenched, unsure if it was pleasure or pain this time around. The sound of skin meeting skin echoed in the hut, the room hot and humid amidst their moans and groans and her cries.
"Aesop 's too much," her speech slurred, struggling to keep her eyes on his.
"You are doing so well," he grunted, adjusting the grip he held on her, snapping his hips up violently, his antecedent restraint and control dwindling. His arms circled her, Aesop's body on hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. "You can give me one more."
His thrusts pushed the literal air from her lungs, gasps and moans spilling from her bitten lips – his name sometimes in between like a prayer. Aesop's hands caressed down her sides until he bent forward, lifting her kneed to wrap her leg around his waist, holding it there – the new angle leaving her vulnerably open. Their eyes met one another – hazy with lust and wanting and need and earth-shattering love and devotion simmering below the surface.
"I love you," the young woman sobbed out, his manhood hitting the deepest parts of her, the tip of it pressing against the entry to her womb. Her back arched into him, his scalding chest resting over hers, rough hairs chafing against her tight and tender nipples. She loved him beyond anything - adored him till her knees were weak as she walked and her heart could no longer survive without him. He was her air, her warmth, her very reason for being.
Something gave way, and the potions master above her precipitously, violently, thrust his hips into hers, held up only by his bruising grip as the remains of her lay sapless beneath him. Aesop slid his hands down her body, his callouses leaving goosebumps in their wake as he caressed her soft stomach before his fingers found her erect clit above her entrance. Her wails were the sweetest song Aesop had ever heard, the vicious grip on his shoulders sure to leave imprints for days to come.
"I love you too – fuck," Aesop hissed, allowing himself to close his eyes as he battered away, his movements forceful and erratic. His mind filled with the reason they were engaging in the first place – a vivid image conjured in his mind of her swollen and rounded body.
"You will look so beautiful," he murmured breathlessly. "So stunningly beautiful. Whole with my children – ah, fuck."
Her womanhood clenched, flowing and alive and vulnerable as the image filled her too – helpless with adoration of him and what she wanted him to do – before it opened, ready to be filled with new life all for him – with him.
Both her and his yearning adoration for one another was fearful, leaving them helpless in each other's embrace and so different from what had been their relationship – a new dawn blooming. It was sinking into them as his manhood sunk into her, deep into their being to the centre of all creation. Aesop had not known yearning like this – possibly even feared it his entire life, lest if he adored too much, he would be vulnerable; a slave to his emotions which he certainly had never wished to be. Yet as he moved into her, enveloped tightly and loved, he would no longer fight it. It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown – yet he surrendered, just as she had.
"Aesop!" she cried out.
"Your womb will be full with me," Aesop groaned nonsensically. "So filled with life that everyone shall see."
Her hips canted upwards to meet his thrusts, his finger pressing wildly into her bud as ecstasy drew near – for both of them. Her wails of pleasure filled the room around them, his lowly groans swirling between. Her legs had wrapped around his hips, holding him close in her vices, and her womanhood felt perfectly satisfied – the female inside her never more loved and cared for than it had been in this very moment. His phallus was forcing her to take every sensation, and she no longer felt ashamed to want it all.
"Take it," Aesop growled. "Take my seed, and I shall ensure you will be a mother."
"Yes, yes, please, I – " she begged through pleasured sobs, wishing he would finally fill her. The yearning with which she realised the difference between wanting a child and wanting his was discordant, even if it seemed ordinary enough. But to be filled with Aesop's child, and his alone, made her feel like a woman reborn.
One final, forceful thrust before Aesop's lips fell upon hers, his ecstasy intermingling with hers, their souls intertwining as Aesop swelled and swelled, pushing his seed inside her – pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling through them until they were one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, his life springing into her.
They gasped into each other as the waves of pleasure ebbed through them, laying utterly still as they knew nothing but each other and warmth. Carefully, Aesop wrapped his arms around his lover's waist and turned them onto their sides, limbs entangled and his manhood still resting deep inside her, not allowing a single drop of his seed to spill. Their eyes were closed blissfully, her head nestled into his chest with his arms encasing her protectively. It was done – she had chosen him, and he had chosen her, his duty now forever protecting and shielding the woman in his arms, a duty he would fill with all his honour. A duty, which, in due time, would be extended to life growing inside her – a life Aesop was looking forward to protecting with all he had.
"I love you," Aesop mumbled into the crown of her hair. "I love you most ardently. You are an incomparable gift, my love."
He felt her tears before he saw them, undue panic rising in his chest as he bade her to look at him. He held her cheek against his hand, warm and flushed after their proclivities.
"What is it, my love?" he asked in hushed tones. "Have I hurt you?"
"No," she shook her head. "No, you have not I –"
"Then please tell me what –"
"Nothing," she sobbed, a shy smile on her face as she burrowed herself into his hand. "I could have never thought these relations to be so... liberating."
"…liberating?" Aesop asked after a breath of silence. He did not understand.
"Yes," she nodded into his hand, before she smiled up at him. "My mother had told me that...when it happens, I should lie back and think of England. That I would have to endure until my husband had his heir. She did not mention that it could be… that it would be a mere hitch of pain before an endless field of pleasure."
His heart both shattered and thumped upon hearing her admission, his strokes against her back so soft and gentle, barely discernable if her wet and battered body was not as sensitive as it had been.
"You let me bed you thinking it would be something to endure?" he inquired, praying that he had heard – understood – wrong.
"Yes," she replied with no hesitation in her voice. "If it meant that you would father my children – our children – I would have endured a thousand times over. But…this?" Her cheeks glowed in the aftermath, unable to speak of their activities even after what had transpired. "This was nothing to endure."
"And you never have to endure it," Aesop resolutely told her, pressing a chaste kiss upon her lips. "I will not stand for it. This was your choice and yours alone. And should you ever –"
"Shhh," she gently interrupted him with a smile upon her lips. "I do not know what it felt like to you but to me? I do not believe a woman could ever be…happier. Or more loved."
Aesop returned her smile tiredly – relieved and triumphantly proud. "I do not believe a man could ever find more happiness either."
For the longest time, Aesop Sharp was absolutely certain that he must have eradicated an entire civilisation in his past life, as there was no other possible explanation for the sheer torture in found himself in. But as his beloved lay in his arms, falling asleep, burrowed safely in his chest away from the world, having chosen him as he had chosen her, he truly could allow himself to dream of forever.
Aesop Sharp now knew that reprieve was possible – even for someone like him, the living proof of it in his strong arms.
#professor sharp#aesop sharp#professor aesop sharp#aesop sharp x reader#aesop sharp x mc#hogwarts legacy#hogwarts legacy fic#hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry#sebastian sallow#professor fig#professor weasley#fanfiction#ao3 fanfic#idiots in love#fluff#romance#communication is key but these idiots can't find it so the door is bashed in instead#i wrote this instead of my thesis and various job applications and honestly? i have MANY regrets#i hope my mum never finds this#still can't believe i wrote this#hogwarts legacy mc#garreth weasley#ominis gaunt#anne sallow#dinah hecat#professor hecat#victorian era#1800#late 1800s#victorian
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my persona 5 ocs: the crow's nest (aka a glorified pthieves hate club)
warning!!!!!
this post contains spoilers, as well as every other post related to this one.
by clicking the "read more" button, you are agreeing to spend a good few minutes reading my walls of text and thus giving your soul to me forever and being forced to read even more text in the future.
will you sign the contract?
cool, thanks.
the crow's nest is an au of mine featuring my (very cool!) ocs about our favourite goro akechi creating and leading his own ragtag group of outcasted teenagers to help take down the phantom thieves! through a bit of online chatting and human experimentation, akechi manages to gather SIX whole allies!
let's start with the first one, who isn't actually an adolescent outsider, but akechi's cute coworker.
that's right. a robot cat. with cannons built into his arms. akechi felt the same way, don't worry.
his name is lysander. like akechi, he was made to be a hitman sneaking around in the metaverse. but unlike akechi, he was made by rich people. then he was given to even richer people to turn him into a killing machine that makes snide comments every now and then.
as you might expect from a robot, lysander is very robotic. unemotive, dedicated to his routine, unable to grasp concepts like wordplay and human phrases, starts speaking in a southern american accent when magnets are brought near him-- that's just a lysander thing, actually.
akechi's not the biggest fan of his new coworker. he's a great assassin, so akechi's just a bit jealous of him. he's not a very good conversation partner, so akechi's rather bored of him. but he's a cute kitty, and you wouldn't hurt one of those, would you?
lysander uses both weapons and a persona in the metaverse, and for the people who have absolutely no clue as to how a robot could have a persona (probably because they haven't played the earlier games. no shame to you), i have an explanation.
but i don't remember it. whoops. maybe when i make the post about the infodump about their deal in the metaverse, i'll have recalled it. for now, just trust me, there is canon lore that supports this possibility.
it's not like they're ALL robots anyway. onto our next—fleshy—ally!
this is roxy okanoue. the witty and playful yet formal and intellectual girl akechi met on a forum, the leader of the Official Phantom Investigation Team (the lame OLD name), and the most passive aggressive asswad you will ever meet.
roxy puts up the front of a fun-loving, good-natured girl who's just living out her youth, but it's a little too late for that to be her truth. around her team, which she considers private time, she's much more jaded and quick to irritate. she really values her role as a leader, but any criticism towards her, genuine or not, will get a "haha, you're so funny" or a slight jab at your self-image.
her and akechi verbally agreed that they would both lead the crow's nest, but neither of them actually do. it's a subtle back-and-forth consisting of backhanded comments and not-really-compliments that tend to derail the serious group discussions.
meet bunki kuboyama, the shujin academy newspaper club member so unpleasant that the only other member considers him dead to her.
bunki is the one with all the attitude. where roxy is subtly malicious, he will not hold back on ranting to you about just how unflattering those colours are on you. he's very keen on voicing every thought of his, actually, which means he expresses a lot of—frankly, unwanted—opinions. it doesn't even matter if he wasn't in the conversation before, because he is now. and god he will not shut up.
akechi isn't fond of bunki's nosy nature, and especially not how much he insists he tells him about his private life outside . but bunki's failure to grasp the concept of fun makes him good for serious discussions where he brings in his actually good ideas, and he's within literal inches of the real phantom thieves, so akechi won't curbstomp him. not today, at least.
another one of bunki's good traits is that he's observant with a good eye for details, which makes him a plausible navigator in the metaverse. but that's another post for another day.
next is chifuyu oishi. he was born in a back alley dumpster and raised by feral dogs.
okay, not actually, but it would explain a lot about him. chifuyu is loud, aggressive, and his temper is as foul as spoiled milk. however, if you're trustworthy in his eyes, he'll have an undying and unconditional loyalty to you, as well as the impression that you'll always answer his pleas when he pesters you about his latest big bang burger craving.
unfortunately, akechi turns out to be the main target of said pestering because he's a "rich, famous celebrity or some shit like that, yeah?", and thus has to pay for his meals. akechi feels like he could really be doing something better with his time, but... whatever stops the bomb from going off, i guess.
chifuyu's fixation on combat makes him a useful asset in battle, at least. he's good at following commands, except for the ones telling him to take it easy, meaning he gets injured. a lot. nothing he's not used to, though.
introducing the girl who would probably be very upset to learn that she needs an introduction since she expects everyone to know her already, kiyoe hino!
kiyoe comes from a family of old wealth. you can tell, because she brings it up in every sentence. she's excessively prideful with lots of badges and trophies and medals in all kind of competitions to justify it. kiyoe likes to believe that she's composed and elegant like a princess would be, but if one dares to question her she will become extremely upset and petty.
akechi finds that she's rather hard to work with, seeing she has a tendency to follow commands from nobody but herself, but all it takes is a bit of bargaining and boot-kissing and she's willing to help out. it's not something akechi wants to do, but he has to, otherwise he's lost an ally. and knowing kiyoe, if she's not in the crow's nest, she'll probably try to find some way to take the phantom thieves down herself, disrupting the others' plans in the process.
that said, she definitely could if she tried hard enough. kiyoe isn't the best at managing her emotions, but she is cunning, calculated, and a good strategist. her intelligence is a great weapon if used correctly.
and last, but not least, is etsumi fukunaga. she's an ex-ballerina with a personality as fragile as a flower, making you wonder how she wound up with these guys in the first place.
well... "fragile" can mean two things in her case. either delicate, dainty, and precious... or very, very unstable.
etsumi is a sweet girl, sure. she's soft-spoken and a good listener and an obedient teammate. but put any pressure on her, and she will crack. it's difficult to have a productive conversation with her because it can never be her fault, she's the victim, and she only ever does good. etsumi also has a tendency to think aloud, and her thoughts are... violent. graphically so.
but akechi actually likes her. her crying can be annoying at times, but she's extremely dedicated to eradicating the phantom thieves, follows orders without resistance, and it's quite obvious she looks up to him.
etsumi's previous experience in the art of dance makes her a capable fighter (and an elegant one, at that) as well. she also offers good morale, seeing as she's the only one on the team without a stick up her ass.
if you've read this far, it means you gave me enough time to suck your soul from your body. it's mine now, and now you have to read more oc posts in the future.
i sure hope that's not something you'll complain about. i hope you enjoyed learning about them, and thank you for your time! bye now
#persona 5#p5#persona 5 oc#p5 oc#persona#persona oc#goro akechi#he is the star of the show here!#oc: lysander#oc: roxy okanoue#oc: bunki kuboyama#oc: chifuyu oishi#oc: kiyoe hino#oc: etsumi fukunaga#the crows nest au#so many tags... hghabd...#koto.txt#koto.png
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hi gorgeous!! i just found your blog not too long ago and i’m obsessed with ur writing! i love how you write adam it’s soooo <33
but i will say that in the oneshot where adam met with lucifer there were a lot of descriptions of the readers skin as pale/white, and as a poc it did kind of make me feel a little strange. i understand if it’s an old habit and we all make mistakes!! im 100% sure you had no bad intentions bc that sort of thing just tends to slip your mind when you’re in the heat of writing (i definitely would know lol)
i don’t know if you fixed this in your more recent oneshots but it’s just something i noticed!! once again, i adore your writing and can’t wait to see what you write in the future my love!! 🩷
Hi! Thank you!!
I should probably address this - I actually did this purposefully in that oneshot because all of the angels in heaven (from what I could remember) had a certain pallor/grey-ness to their skin, even the Seraphims were grey despite being canonically POC. I haven't described skin colour in any of my other demon!reader one-shots (I don't think? I may have slipped up I'm not sure). Doesn't excuse it if it made you uncomfortable (and I'm sorry if it did), but I just thought I should kinda explain why I made that choice 😅
Now you've brought it to my attention, I'll definitely avoid any sort of skin-tone descriptors in future :)
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I don't know if most of you know this or not but I've been a marichat stan for 5+ years (around as long as I've been miraculous ladybug and Chat noir obsessed) so since I did a Ladynoir head canon post I want to do one for marichat. Because this was what kept me up at night at 12 years old reading fanfiction omg so much fanfiction (and writing some too but we don't talk about that).
I think just like Ladynoir I prefer an older more mature head canon with them.
They don't meet on purpose. Like they hardly ever meet on purpose especially as adults. Maybe they had a few of those nights on the balcony when they were 14-15 or one too many missions where they teamed up but as adults it's hardly ever on purpose.
That doesn't mean they aren't friends or that they don't meet. Every once in a while Marinette would be chased by a akuma and chat will save her. Within those dragged out a couple of minutes where he gets her somewhere save they chat, they insult each other, exchange funny stories, make jokes. And after the akuma he checks on her where he left her, hardly ever expecting her to be there but always finding her.
They have the kind of friendship which is just EASY. It's fun, there's no expectations, they never have to wonder whether they need to call the other or if it's weird the other hasn't reached out. It's mostly coincidence (that at times doesn't seem like it)
They don't talk about their feelings, they talk shit about people that piss them off, situations that make them wanna commit crimes, jokes around. Chat knows Marinette has more to her life than she tells him but it's okay because so does he.
They can tell each other things they don't think they can ever say out loud, not because they're their "true selves" but because who's going to hear the hopes and dreams that might never be accomplished? A boy who she doesn't even know the name of? A girl who'll probably never know who he is?
They don't imagine their life with each other in it, it's the kind of friendship you have with an exchange student in your school, a person just visiting town, they talk about their future but never imagine each other in it, because that'll break down the comfort they feel knowing that they have no major significant with another. (At least that's what they tell themselves)
It's always "I'll tell my friends I used to know the famous fashion designer before she was famous"
"I'll tell my kids I used to be friends with the great Chat noir"
And that's okay, it's what gives them the freedom to say whatever they think, say out loud the things they would never have anyways because that's the core of their friendship. It's not the kind where you plan hangouts, where you know each other's favorite colours, where you fear that saying something will affect your next conversation. Not one where you even know the others birthday, one where to get each other serious or any gifts at all
Sure Marinette gives him a sweater for winter patrol once only for him to find out that the back has a paragraph not so different to the "no protection, no lube..." comment when ladybug starts laughing uncontrollably.
They both have an addiction to murder podcasts. They plan the most precise murders in the middle of the night and switch to talking shit about murderers because they got caught.
They don't see each other as a life long friend but definitely one they don't plan to forget. They don't spend many nights together but the ones spend are all they will remember.
Their meeting aren't always the most convenient but they are also never boring. They don't have a normal friendship but that's also what's so special about their friendship. They might not know everything about one another or even close but they will be each other's murder alibi and that's what matters.
#okay then#i do have to sya this is definitely not my only head canon#probably not even my main one#its one that takes place during my other ship centeic head canons#but i like it#anyways thanks for coming to my ted talk#I'm really just huggung my inner miraculous fan with these#because I've mostly been reading/seekng posts not making them#these are just making me go back to all my head canons#anyways#here it is#marichat#miraculous#mlb#chat noir#marinette#ship#ladybug#adrien#ladybug and chat noir#chat#ladynoir#miraculous marinette#marinette x chat noir#chat noir x Marinette#☯︎ Ramen head-canons ☯︎
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