#job still intact
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I think about this constantly! How did Mulder not get fired for this?! He punched his boss in an LSD fueled rage for goodness sakes!
#fox mulder#txf#x files#the xfiles#mulder#he hit his boss#job still intact#you would get fired in the real world#you punched your boss#ad skinner#skinner#walter skinner#how
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i think if michael managed to get Any sleep between the sister location nights it was on the couch
#if we’re under the assumption that he’s staying in the afton home again Which I Am#returning from ALMOST getting away for a couple years he’s not only in his hometown but his Childhood Home#already having the worst week… so much trauma being dug up… he is NOT falling asleep in his CHILDHOOD BEDROOM#if he’s getting any rest that week it’s in the living room while daytime reruns of immortal and the restless play💀#michael vc: can’t believe i have to do all this AND my joints hurt#(also the afton house can still be abandoned and intact and something michaels able to access bc i said so and they do that with henry’s#house in the novels i have an excuse now)#anyway i have to go to work. unfortunate i am in a writing mood that will no doubt disappear when i get home KDKFJ#⁂ ･ﾟ: i was looking for a job‚ and then i found a job‚ and heaven knows i’m miserable now ➛ ooc
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wait, I actually thought you were 23 or 24 from your pictures, how old are you????
mouhaha that's my baby face appearance, I don't look that old xD
I'm gonna be 30 in July 3rd....ouch x')
#time passes...but I still ship like crazy lol#I feel more tired though since I have my job since 4 years#I'm always like *kids how do you have that much energy* XDD#at least I keep my baby voice and baby face intact for now#ask#anon#personal
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Dc x Dp #42
Danny raising both de-aged Dan and Dani in Gotham and a small apartment. Everything seemed to be fine for the most part. Though he was tired of how many different jobs he had to keep taking because of all the rogues running around and trashing the place. He came home and complained everytime about the stupid rogues that was causing trouble. The latest was the Joker with his bombs blowing up the coffee shop he worked at.
He complained as he made his way into the kitchen to prepare dinner, missing the look that was shared between Dani and Dan.
Because while they were physically regressed to the ages of toddlers, their powers still stayed intact. Of course, the most Danny had to deal with was the two occasionally floated when they were sleepy or excited. Which he could handle. He didn't know how much the two were holding back in his presence to appear on their best behavior.
Which lead to Red Hood standing over said toddlers in the middle of the night. Dan holding a bloodied Joker by his hair. And by the faint trail of blood behind him, they were obviously dragging him somewhere.
Now, he's dealt with kids with superpowers before, but he didn't think he would have to deal with literal babies.
"So, what do you kids got there?" He asked, voice inquisitive yet static-like due to the voice modulator in his mask.
"We got a bad clown!" The girl chirped, blue eyes piercing with a proudness that no toddler should have about beating up someone. Though, he'll give it to her, he was a bad clown.
"And why do you have the bad clown?" He asked, ignoring the pained groan said clown let out that was muffled due to him being face down on the concrete.
Hearing the sound, the young boy that had him lifted his head and slammed it down on the ground with a strength that startled Jason for a moment. His hand reflectively going for one of his pistols before settling.
Well, that answered the question of whether or not the kids did it themselves. Sparing a glance between two, he noticed the boy was a bit more roughed up
"He upset mama." The boy answered plainly, frowning as if upsetting his mother was the most unforgivable thing there was. Though, what kid didn't think that way?
"He made mama job go boom!" She said, spreading her arms in an exaggerated manner to imitate an explosion.
Ah, Jason did remember Joker did blow up a few buildings the other day. He guessed their mother was working at one of them. Did that mean that she was a meta on the run, a civilian with two meta children, or some sick handler of child soldiers?
"Well, we better bring him to mama, shouldn't we? Bet she'd be really surprised to see what you two did." He offered, curious to see their reactions.
Both children suddenly looked up at him with matching blue eyes that sparkled with excitement. Probably because he wasn't going to stop them from what they were doing.
"Let's go see mama!" The young girl cheered, the boy giving a nod in affirmative before the two began walking down in a direction that was no doubt their home. The boys grip on the Joker's hair unfaltering as he continued to drag him through the pavement.
Jason followed the strange group, hands nestled in his pockets as he couldn't wait to see the reaction of their mother when the group returned home.
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although we have mouth to feed, we should still keep our dignity intact... if the company didn't call you back and apologize while explaining the reason behind it, dun bother to regretting your decision to walk away... if they can't value your time, unlikely they will value u..
A viral Reddit post has left viewers conflicted over how long is too long to wait for a job interview.
#Social media divided over man ditching job interview after long wait#although we have mouth to feed#we should still keep our dignity intact... if the company didn't call you back and apologize while explaining the reason behind it#dun bother to regretting your decision to walk away... if they can't value your time#unlikely they will value u..
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✧˚ · . 7 minutes in heaven
Pairing: RE2!Leon x Fem!Reader
Summary: Leon gave his girlfriend the best gift ever - his virginity ❤
Tags: Smut; fluff; p in v; oral (f); loss of virginity; leon is desperate; they are in love your honor
Notes: IM BAAAAAACK! Had to take a week off to focus on my studies, but now im free! Was supposed to post this earlier, but i got lazy!
Minors do not interact!!
After dating for quite a while, it was visible that Leon was a great boyfriend, he was confident in everything he did, he paid attention to the little details and was always surprising her. That’s why, on her birthday, he decided to give her something much more special - his virginity.
At first, it was weird talking about it, he was a grown adult, with a job and everything, and he still had his v-card intact. He was so focused on his career that things like that never really mattered to him. That’s until she came along, and he knew that he wanted to share something so personal with her, and only her.
Setting the mood, he woke her up with a nice bouquet of her favorite flowers and a warm breakfast, the meal eaten while they shared sweet kisses and sweet nothings. He hated that both needed to go to work, the day passing slower in his mind since he was anxious for the night.
When the night fell, both felt giddy - Leon because he was finally getting a taste of sex - something his colleagues always boasted about - and her because the man was making her day so perfect, she had no idea how it could get any better.
At dinner, she noticed him more fidgety, as if he had something on his mind. At first, Leon wanted to play it cool, being a gentleman and serving her for the entire night, but the moment he saw her red inviting dress, his dick decided that he wanted to do the thinking, not his actual head. The slit on her dress showed her soft thighs, and he could only wonder how good they would feel wrapped around his head as he fucked her with his ton-gosh, he needed to focus.
“Baby, you seem worried. Is something the matter?” She quietly asked him, worried that something might have happened.
“No, it's fine, love. Just thinking how pretty you look” he half lied, smiling sincerely at her as he caressed her hand, looking completely smitten by the woman sitting in front of him.
She blushed at his comment, he was always an expert in making her feel so loved.
For now, she chose to drop the matter, just wanting to enjoy the evening with him.
'•.¸♡ ♡¸.•'︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵'•.¸♡ ♡¸.•'
Dinner was amazing, the food was spot on. They walked around a park nearby, enjoying the flowers falling and making the scenery movie-like. They talked and laughed, now filling their hearts after filling their stomach.
As they headed home, Leon felt his heartbeat quickening, but took deep breaths- the night wasn't over yet.
He softly guided her near him, wrapping his arms around her as they shared a deep and passionate kiss, moving his hands all over her body and tightening his grip around her hips.
“Love, want to go to our bedroom? Don't want this night to finish yet” he whispered against her lips, their saliva making everything more wet and intimate.
She looked surprised at him, since she knew from the beginning that he was still a virgin, and was always supportive and patient with the man, never wanting to rush things. The woman nodded, being guided to their room as they still didn't break their hold and deep kisses.
Feeling a rush, Leon pushed her into their bed making her yelp a bit, earning a sorry look from him. God, she was not a ragdoll Leon, stop thinking about porn!
“Baby, we don't need to do this, you know that, right?” She asked him with a smile, watching as he moved to hover her body
“Really want to… I’ll be good to you, baby” he whispered as he pressed kisses to her neck, clumsily pushing her dress up
If it wasn’t such an intimate moment, she would’ve laughed as he tried to push her dress out without even realizing that it had a zipper on the back. Ending his misery, she gently pulled him back and zipped the clothing down, laying on their bed in her black underwear (thank god she decided to wear matching ones today!).
Like a poor and desperate horny boy, the first thing he did was press his face against her tits, wanting to suffocate himself on her chest. She giggled at his eagerness, watching as he mouthed and pressed open mouthed kisses on her cleavage, as his hands kneaded them.
Not waiting anymore, his hands traveled to her back, reaching her bra clasp. He grunted in dissatisfaction as that task proved to be harder than it looked - god, are those things indestructible? Once again, pitying him, she simply reached back and undid her bra in a swift moment, making Leon look at her dumb founded “How the fuck did you do that?”
“Practice” she giggled “you’ll get to be as good as I am the more you do it”, and then gave him a wink
He chuckled, but turned his focus back to the task at hand, and threw her bra somewhere along their room (he genuinely had no idea where it went). He tried not to be a creep, but he couldn’t help but stare at her boobs for a long time, only breaking the spell when she giggled at his hungry eyes. Her chest on show, his mouth worked directly on her nipples, sucking and wetting awkwardly. The man was just too eager to try to get a taste of her, and the soft feeling of her buds on his tongue made his hips twitch, desperate from any friction.
Even if it was messy, she could only moan and tug his hair in pleasure - even if uncoordinated, his tongue felt so delicious, her cunt gathering arousal quickly. “F-fuck, baby… more” she moaned as her hands didnt leave his blonde locks.
He was completely in ecstasy as he heard her needy voice, nodding as he kissed his way down her body, playing with the lace on her underwear. He softly kissed the fabric and pulled it down, almost ripping it because of how excited he was. He looked at her wet cunt and gaped, as if he was seeing paradise for the first time.Quickly, he fumbled as he removed his shirt, opening his belt and laying on his front, putting her legs on his shoulders.
What now?
'•.¸♡ ♡¸.•'︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵'•.¸♡ ♡¸.•'
Well, Leon had to think of every porn he has ever watched - not that those were accurate and all, but he could at least mimic the movements. But as he watched her wet cunt throb, everything flew away from his mind, he just craved her, and her taste. Before she could say anything, his face moved forward and he licked her clit wantonly - he wasn't even timid about it, his tongue was firm and sure, making her body arch from the bed, her gentle hands moving down to tug his hair.
“Fuck, Leon!” she whined, sensitive from his eager muscle moving against her bundle of nerves
“Wanna make you feel good, baby… need you to drench my face” he said in muffled words, as he still ate her out, his hands holding her hips and thighs tightly.
The only thing guiding Leon was her reactions at where his tongue passed, her moans getting especially louder when he rolled and sucked the little button above her cunt lips, so he kept his work there. If Leon died now, he would die as a happy man. Her pussy tasted sweeter than his favorite candy, and the wet sounds caused by the suctioning sounded so, so sinful, he just couldn’t stop.
He was so focused on the sensation that he didn’t even realize when her legs started shaking around him and the grip on his hair grew tighter. “B-baby, G-gonna cum!” she moaned desperately, looking down at him and biting her lips, her cheeks being fully flushed.
“Please, cum on my tongue, need it, need to taste it…” he rambled as he sucked and rolled his tongue viciously, his rough hands holding her hips down, not letting her squirm away from his grasp.
Soon, she saw fireworks and exploded against his mouth - of course that man made a woman cum on his first time, he was Leon S. Kennedy after all. She laid shaking on the bed, pushing his head away and closing her legs for the moment, as Leon had to lower his pants and underwear, watching her explode almost made him cum in his pants, he needed to feel her now.
He gently parted her legs again, his hands caressing and feeling up her body as he was addicted to the feeling of her skin, as they shared soft kisses. When they felt she was ready, he slowly rubbed his head against her entrance and clit, making both moan - Leon had to think about very disgusting things, otherwise he would cum like a horny teen and he wouldn’t even be inside her.
“Are you ready, baby? We can back down if you want to” she assured him once again, caressing his face lovingly as both looked at each other with a shared and intense passion.
He shook his head, smiling and kissing her forehead “love, I adore when you are sweet, but I need to fuck your brains out or i’ll go insane” he chuckled, and his hand guided just his tip in.
Just the tip, and she swallowed him with vigor, making Leon let out a choked out moan. It was only the head, and yet, he felt his cock throbbing and twitching, he really needed to hold back, otherwise this would end sooner than he would’ve liked.
Slowly, his entire shaft was inside her, and Leon swore he was seeing stars, just like those old cartoons. Holy shit, is that what sex was like? Now he gets it. He should call off work this week and spend with her in bed, fucking and working up his stamina.
“You can move, baby” she whined impatiently. God dammit, woman, mind your tone! If she kept talking to him like that, he would absolutely blow in his first thrust.
He nodded and began moving, and if he wasn’t hitting that gummy spot, she would be laughing, the sight adorable - his face was red as if he was holding his breath, and his mouth was hanging open as he watched his cock slide in and out, getting creamier and creamier with her cunt juices.
Wrapping her legs around him, she pulled the man into a kiss, making his knees buckle and his hips move in a grinding motion, his hair ticking her puffy pussy as their moans were drowned in their kisses. Her nails scratched his back, being enough to create red lines but not really hurt him.
While both were losing their minds, the only sounds in the room were loud moans, some bed rattling and their skin slapping. His hips - thankfully - met a more pleasurable rhythm, not too fast or slow. Enough to make him feel his cock on her cunt, while she felt her wet pussy molding into his dick.
“Fuuuuck, can’t hold it, can’t hold it” he moaned in almost unintelligible moans, holding their hands together as his hips started to falter and her thighs went more rigid as the pleasure waves flowed through them.
“Come inside, baby, mark me, let it all go” she said aiding him
Soon, like her words casted a spell on him, he filled her up as her walls closed on him, thankfully cuming together. Both laid there regaining their breaths, Leon resting his head right against her heart beat - the best song he has ever heard. She guided him for another gentle kiss, both smiling like idiots in satisfaction.
Leon was a full man now! And he didn't even embarrass himself, knowing he made her come and fucked her properly! He looked at the wall on the nightstand to verify how long he managed to go and… wait, what the fuck? Only seven minutes? No, no, he needed to do better!
Pulling him away from his paranoia, she looked at him with heart eyes and whispered “That was the best birthday ever. Thank you for making all of this special. it was perfect”
For the first time in the night, he blushed and nuzzled into her neck, whispering back “It really was. Couldn’t imagine doing this without you. Thank you for being so patient and staying”
“Would wait forever if it meant being with you” she simply answered, making his heart soar.
Leon was fine with the seven minutes now, after all, they had a lifetime to make up for it.
#leon kennedy#leon s kennedy#leon kennedy x reader#leon kennedy smut#leon s kennedy x reader#leon s kennedy smut#resident evil#resident evil x reader#resident evil smut#re2#re2 leon#resident evil 2#re2 remake#re2make#leon x reader#leon smut#leon kennedy imagine#leon kennedy fanfic#leon kennedy x you#leon kennedy x y/n
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🌟 Lucidrien 🌟
Reverse Crowley or angel Crowley. I made my first version of Lucidrien in 2019 and I still love him SO much so I wanted to give his reference sheet a little update. His counterpart Forneus is still in the works 💕
My Patreon | Shop
Have some backstory:
Before he got his new job as "field agent" on earth, Lucidrien was a formless but vaguely long, wobbly entity of light and sparkly stardust, spreading himself out in space to do his job as the protector of dreams, watching over every being in the universe and making sure to keep the balance between good dreams and nightmares intact. He never really heard of any war or rebellion in Heaven, the other angels had sort of forgotten about him anyway. He was feeling best when nobody bothered him.
When one day Gabriel popped up and stuffed him into a tiny human corporation and pushed him towards the edge of Heaven, Lucidrien wasn't sure whether he was tangled up in some angel's dream or if he was experiencing Reality for the first time in a long time. When he is looking back nowadays, he remembers that Gabriel told him that they were short-staffed in Eden and needed Lucidrien to back up the guardians of the Wall because somewhere inside of Eden, there was a massive demon spreading Evil. Lucidrien hadn't fully managed to put his conscious thoughts in order yet to know what demons were and especially not how to use a corporation with wings(he had never gone through training in the first place) so when Gabriel gave him one last push on the back, he started falling and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He fully lost consciousness before he hit the ground(water, actually, but he'd never know) and the first thing he saw when he woke up, were two big blue eyes and a dark wing shielding him from the sunlight. ⭐️
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Btw i think citrus is also in the JLI bc when they were recruiting people Red decided he would rather fight crime occasionally after almost dying during the starro arc. So citrus is like I'll do it if you'll accept me bc he didn't want Red to feel obligated to.
#red is like id like to focus on my day job instead and also on my family and citrus is like Let him get some rest. i cant come back home#wondering if my husband is still intact#cornado#self insert#📡 incoming transmission 📡
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DC x DP fic idea: Cave Boy
Danny Fenton is a lot of things, but good under pressure is not one of them. He didn't mean to be stranded in an unknown universe after playing around with his parents' Specter Speeder in the Ghost Zone and losing control of it. He didn't mean to find shelter in the strange cave systems under the city Danny crashlanded in. He didn't mean to step on any bat and bird costume-wearing toes.
All he was trying to do was fix the ship he arrived in with stolen and repurposed technology from all across the city. He also didn't take anything that wasn't in a garbage can so he couldn't even be acussed of thief.
Danny barely even allowed himself to be spotted, only going out at night to avoid regular citizens. Danny was a very considerate dimensional visitor compared to the Ghosts that came to Amity Park.
He spent hours exploring the caves as a human, but whenever he felt like it was time to go back, he shifted into his ghost form and floated upwards until he was above the ground. Sometimes he find himself far away from city limits othertimes he be right under a bank or a apparement complex.
It was an exciting, if a little rough, life. He occasionally found food in the garbage, and while it was disgusting, it was better than nothing. Thankfully, his halfa status allowed him to go longer without meals, sleep, and even breathing. It's just a bit hard to keep track of time since he rarely sees the sun, and he doesn't exactly have a clock nearby, but he sure it's been at least three months when he finds the bat and bird costume wearing people.
Danny is minding his own business, having just found a primarily intact toaster that would have the perfect wiring for the Speeder's temperature-controlling unit, when he mistakenly take a right on the third turn instead of a left.
It wouldn't usually be a problem, as he could just float to the topside and find his way to his little shelter/shop, but he had unknowingly tripped motion detectors. Danny had continued on his merry way, just starting to realize he was lost, when out of the shadows a man in a gaint bat costume leaped at him.
He yelp, barely dropping out of a nasty-looking jab, bending his back from the elbow aimed at his face and only through his ghost reflexes able to jump over the leg swipe.
"Who are you!?" The man growled "how did you find this place?"
"Dude, I live here!" Danny gasped, throwing himself to the ground to avoid what he knew was a jujitsu grab. "What you doing here?!"
He doesn't get a answering seeing as a bo staff of all things slams into the back of his head. He hits the ground just as his attacker says.
"Good job Red Robbin"
"Yummmmm" Danny mutters word association too strong not to.
When he wakes, he finds himself tucked in a medical cot inside a glass cell. He is still inside the caves but somewhere he's never seen. It's filled with technological advances that has his mouth watering just looking at them.
His hands twitch with the urge to break everything apart and tinker. He's a Fenton through and through.
He would have enjoyed the scenery- especially the gaint computer that was just calling his name- except various people in costumes were standing around his cell studying him like a animal in a zoo.
"Oh, ugh, hi," Danny says to the man in the giant red helmet. He gets no response so he tries to get a reaction from the others. It yields the same results. "Okay. So ugh is this a cult thing? Cause I really don't want to be part of whatever is happening here"
"What is your name?" The man dressed like a Bat demands and well crude if this is a cult thing Danny doesn't want them knowing his name. Either as human or as a ghost.
So he thinks of the most boring name he can think of, wrestling his ghost to make his body language as human as possible as he says "my name is Bruce"
There is a sharp intake of breath to his left, which causes Danny to look at a man wearing blue. That man has his face pressed against the glass, staring at Danny with a wide, manic smile. Even though the white lens of the blue man's mask hides his eyes, he knows they are drinking in Danny's features.
"look at him! He's adorable!" The blue man gushes and the other teenagers all nod in agreement.
"Super cute," the girl in purple agrees stepping closer to peer at Danny.
"A bit odd to see so much emotion on that face but he really is cute." the one holding a bo staff adds.
"He is weak." A boy sneers, "Hardly deserving of the blood in his veins."
"Lay off Demon Brat" The guy with the red helmet says, "He's just a civilian."
Now, Danny did not like those comments.
What if this is a cult thing but not a ghost cult like he orginally thought? What if it's a creepy sex thing? Or Cannibals? Or a secret fight club where they would force him to partake in death battles?
Whatever the case may be, they could not know he's from a different dimension.
"Bruce," the man dressed as a Bat cuts into the chatter. He levels a hard stare at Danny, who flinches away from it. The man's face softens just a bit. "We know that you from a different dimension"
"We tested your blood and have means to detect travelers from alternate universes" a guy in yellow helpfully says. "We also sort of figured who you were before that"
Seriously how?
"What?" Danny asks and the man in the Bat costume removes his masks. He's left staring at someone who look oddly familar but for the life of him he can't place it.
"Ughhhhh"
"Bruce, I'm also Bruce Wayne and in this universe I'm Batman" He says
Who?
"We will help you get home" Bruce tells Danny unlocking his cell. "I'm sorry about the ambush"
Now, this is where Danny should come clean and tell this man the truth, but he panics because he is not good under pressure and instead says, "Okay,"
And that's how Danny is mistaken for Bruce Wayne's civilian dimension traveling counterpart. He tries to roll with it, he does, but it's a little hard to when he's surrounded by weirdos who dress up like clowns to fight crime.
What even is his life.
#dcxdpdabbles#dc x dp crossover#Cave Boy#Danny is flying by the seat of his pants#the Bats are losing thier minds over “civilian teenage Bruce”
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Oh you know John’s hair gets pulled by Brian. It’s a running joke that when John puts his hair up before sex, Brian just looks at him-- “you know that’s gonna be undone in like, a minute right?”
To which John leaves it down and Brian’s like “no~ put it up~ I want something to grab~”
“Make up your mind! Grab my tiddies or something-- hey!”
“Honk honk~”
#the very first time brian did it it was on accident.... it was honestly a reflex#john made a *noise*#it wasn't a hard pull it was enough to be like 👀?#as john puts it if the bun is still intact he didn't do his job#a text post#non sims#oc things
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◇ Fixated ◇
Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female Reader
Summary: You're determined to keep both your job and your relationship intact when there are rules against dating your coworkers. Your boyfriend is more determined to keep his tongue on certain parts of you he enjoys very much.
Warnings: Day 24 of Kinktober - Oral Sex, Munch!Spencer, multiple orgasms, face sitting, begging, slight BDSM themes, Spencer is a dom if you squint, reader calls herself a whore idk man this one just got me feeling some feelings.
A/N: I'm loving being back on track with posting now, and I'm hoping to get through a lot more of these tomorrow to finish up all the posts this week! Sorry again for all the late kinktober posts, but i hope you're enjoying them now that they're here 🥰
Months into your wonderful job in the BAU, and your possibly more wonderful relationship with Spencer Reid, you were all too aware of the horror stories of office relationships.
You'd spent enough time around a tipsy and lamenting David Rossi to know that there were some serious rules against office fraternisation, and every time those conversations happened, you felt a chill run down your spine at the thought of losing your job, or losing Spencer or both.
Spencer didn't seem to have such qualms. And recently, he was getting loud about his indifference to such rules.
From early into your relationship (read: since you'd first fucked and then decided you had feelings too), Spencer had been open about just how much he enjoyed pleasuring you. Before he'd even put a finger on your clit he'd fallen to his knees, and you'd somehow gasped out a sarcastic "so it's safer to kiss down there, too?" at him as he glared at you from his place between your legs.
You'd joked about his oral fixation many a time, catching him licking his lips as he stared at you like he wanted to eat you, or the way he enjoyed watching you with his fingers in your own mouth too.
Fact of the matter was, you could count the number of times you'd had sex without him spreading your legs and eating you out like a man starved on one hand. But that had always been with you on your back, in your own home, on your own bed.
Now, he wanted more.
He wanted your entire cunt and ass sat on his face, and he wanted it in the shitty motel you were staying in while on a case.
"Y/N, please, want to taste you so bad." He whispered into your ear as you poured yourself some shitty precinct coffee, waiting for the end of the day as you wrapped up your recent case.
You had one night left in the motel until you could be back at home
Honestly, you were going to give in, but there was something about his desperation that had you on edge, so sure that you were about to get caught because he wanted to make you cum so badly, and suffocate himself in the process.
"Spencer, not the time or place. What if someone hears you?"
"I don't care who hears, I just want you."
The words sent shivers up your spine and you were about to reply when Hotch walked in and dismissed you to your motel rooms, telling you to rest up for the night before the flight home in the morning.
Before Spencer could open his mouth again and say something incriminating, you had to beat him to the punch.
"Spencer, you can finally read that book I was going to lend you. It's in my room, you know the one I did the oral exam on in college." It was giving in, but you were still going to enjoy it as much as you possibly could, starting with teasing him the entire way there.
"Sure. Can I come pick it up now? We're driving back together anyway, right?" You nodded, and the two of you shuffled back to the car, trying to contain yourselves and walk a normal pace to not betray your obvious excitement.
The minute you're inside the motel room, he practically jumps you, pressing his lips to yours between small gasps for breath.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you, can't wait to taste you again." He can barely keep his lips off you while he straps you down, and you barely protest him taking such control, his eagerness doing a lot to dispel any hesitancy you may have had about seating yourself on his face.
"Are you sure?" You stutter out trying to ignore the shivers he's sending down your spine as his hands ghost over your clit, making sure your body wants this and is prepped for his tongue.
"I've never been so desperate for something in my entire life." Sitting himself on the bed, he greedily pulled you over him, wrapping his arms around your thighs and pulling you suddenly into his mouth.
Shocked by his fast motions, you gasped out, grasping the rickety bedpost at first, trying to keep your breathing steady and your weight mostly off of him as he began assaulting your dripping cunt.
You'd been aroused before, now you were damn near feverish with want.
"Fuck Spencer," you whispered, hearing the sound of voices in the next room. It sounded like Hotch calling Beth and Jack to tell them he'd be returning soon. Wrapping a hand around your mouth to suppress the moans your thighs squeezed together quickly before you tried to relax as he continued.
He didn't respond but simply yanked you down further into him, slapping your ass to let you know he could take more of you, that he needed more.
You tried to fight it, but with his tongue so expertly working its way along all your sensitive spots and his nose wedged up towards your clit, you couldn't help but settle deeper onto him.
Panting like a whore, you began rocking yourself against him even as he worked you through your first orgasm, not showing any signs of slowing anytime soon.
Usually he'd mollified himself with one oral orgasm and then pushed into your cunt to spend himself inside you, but this time, he obviously wasn't finished yet.
Your entire body twitched in over stimulation, trying to pull away from his lavishing tongue, but his grip was strong, and your legs like jelly. You couldn't move as he pushed you over the edge with his tongue and mouth a second, third, and fourth time, enjoying how you gushed into his mouth across the hours.
You really had to collapse that last time, though, finally prying your lips open and using your safe word to ensure that he knew to stop.
"Good girl, baby, well done. You made me very happy, baby, you know that, right?"
You smiled faintly as you noticed the tent in his boxers, rolling over onto your back and spreading your legs.
"If you're done with your head between my legs, I can think of something else I want there."
He smiled like a kid in a candy shop and rolled back over you, ready to deal with the ache in his cock, kissing you with your own juices staining his lips.
#spencer reid#criminal minds#spencer reid x reader#spencer reid fanfic#spencer reid smut#criminal minds fanfiction#mgg#criminal minds fandom#spencer reid x self insert#spencer reid x reader smut#spencer reid x y/n#spencer reid x you#spencer reid fanfiction#spencer reid kinktober#criminal minds kinktober#kinktober 23
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vampire x reader one-shot | 16.1k
story summary; you're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. the ultimate package. right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. the spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure.
story warnings; bloodplay, extreme dubcon, explicit noncon, cigarette burns, wounds inflicted on mc, implied masochism, extreme sexual sadism, hypnotism, graphic violence, gun violence, body gore, graphic details, heavy prose, unreliable narrator, religious themes, exploration of morality, obsessive + possessive behaviors, implied stalking, choking, murder, graphic depictions of crime scenes, manipulation/emotional manipulation, this entire oneshot is an allegory.
read the warnings! mdni under any circumstances! the events within this one-shot are not indicative of my personal viewpoints
thank you, @ceruleansol for the excellent proofreading.
this is a repost from my deleted blog, cardeneiv. please reblog/interact with this piece!
Another internet search bore fruit.
The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.
That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there.
Tonight was a Chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands.
You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.
There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.
Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.
"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."
"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."
Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.
"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."
You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"
"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."
Again, odd, but it was his house.
"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"
He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."
"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."
The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"
"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."
With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.
You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"
"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."
What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.
"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."
He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."
Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.
"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"
Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."
Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.
Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.
The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!
Why did he act so much differently with them than you?
He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.
You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.
Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.
You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.
Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.
Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.
"What–" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.
She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.
A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose.
You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.
Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light.
The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.
Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."
You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.
Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.
The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.
You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.
"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."
Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.
"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."
The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."
"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."
His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."
You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.
"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.
"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."
He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.
"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."
"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.
He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"
"The police," you said.
Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"
Your nod was weak.
"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work���to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"
You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."
"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let rip you apart.
"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."
You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow.
No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.
"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."
The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.
He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."
You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."
༺ ♰ ༻
A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway.
The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.
You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight.
Montague had moved her body but to where?
For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.
Where did he take her?
Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.
You weren't sure you could stomach it.
As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.
You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.
To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.
By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.
"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."
"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.
You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.
He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.
"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."
"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.
Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”
But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."
You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.
It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”
Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."
Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.
"I have class in six hours." You finished the job by tying off the bag. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."
"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."
༺ ♰ ༻
Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.
Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.
One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.
"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.
You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.
Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood.
An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.
It wasn't fucking fair.
Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.
"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.
"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”
"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."
As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.
It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.
"Welcome home!" Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.
He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."
"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.
He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"
You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.
Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.
"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.
"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."
Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."
These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach.
A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.
You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"
The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.
His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."
Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles as Montague stepped into your proximity.
You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.
His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.
And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.
An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.
It didn't sound like you.
It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body.
The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.
"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.
Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.
His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.
The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.
He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.
"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.
Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.
The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.
"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"
You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.
༺ ♰ ༻
Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.
Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.
The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.
Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom.
These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?
Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?
What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?
That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.
"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."
It was a normal joke.
You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.
The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.
"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"
From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.
"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."
"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."
T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."
For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.
༺ ♰ ༻
It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself.
Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.
Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"
"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air.
The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.
Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.
In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.
You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."
Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do.
He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.
To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.
"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.
Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.
It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.
You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.
Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself.
A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.
All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.
Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.
"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."
And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering.
"Clean it up."
You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.
Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.
He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.
"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon.
Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him.
"A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."
He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.
"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."
There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.
"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"
"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes.
Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.
He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway.
You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.
There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.
"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you.
The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.
Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.
Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough.
It wasn't loud enough.
He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.
"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."
His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips.
All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.
"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.
He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.
"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that.
"Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."
Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.
"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe.
You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.
Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.
"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."
He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.
Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.
"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.
"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"
"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."
Oh, now you were begging.
This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."
The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.
Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.
For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.
"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."
You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.
If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.
He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.
The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.
It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."
He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.
"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."
All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.
This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.
Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."
He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.
"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"
Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.
"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"
You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"
A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.
"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.
You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.
But you still felt everything he was doing.
His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.
At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"
"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."
His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.
And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.
To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.
"I don't think you should go to work today."
You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.
༺ ♰ ༻
A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.
It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.
"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."
"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."
"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."
The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.
It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.
But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.
You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.
And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.
"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."
He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.
"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."
"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.
The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.
"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."
"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."
He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."
"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."
"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."
You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—
And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.
"Ignore it." you said.
"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."
Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.
I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.
You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.
But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—
The air exploded.
Just once.
A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.
Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.
"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."
You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.
This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.
"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."
You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"
Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"
"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"
He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."
"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."
Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."
Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."
He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."
"He doesn't mean that."
Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in.
The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."
Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.
Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.
Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.
"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"
The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.
And then, you saw bodies.
Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light.
A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.
You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.
"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead.
The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"
Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.
The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.
"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."
That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.
"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."
You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."
"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."
Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"
Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.
"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."
You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"
Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."
"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."
Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"
You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.
The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.
It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.
"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"
He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."
You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—
Just like Montague said you would be.
And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.
It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.
You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back. He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.
The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.
Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.
And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.
You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"
No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.
"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"
It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.
The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.
"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.
There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.
You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.
Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.
You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.
"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."
The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.
You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.
You regretted all of it.
The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.
Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.
You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.
"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."
He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.
a/n; I hope this scratched some awful itch for you. onto the story notes:
on montague: what he is exactly is open to interpretation. tell me your theories! his character has been around in my arsenal for a very long time, but as a human cannibal in those days. he's been resurrected into something worse imo. he exists in my vampire universe more as a side-character, and, surprisingly, is not the central antagonist. he is meant to more or less be the embodiment of depravity and the consequence of a being without internal moral compass.
on mc: represents the fallacy of man and how unreliable the narrative of morality actually is, and how we as people have tendencies to twist and turn the meaning of it for our own benefit. mc in this story is not meant to be a good person, but did they deserve condemnation to a personal purgatory?
so, while this is a monster story, I wanted to parallel the treatment mc endures + mindset to the horrors of trying to escape abuse. I wanted to explore this through the lens of a monster story, though. if you suspect you are in an abusive relationship, please reach out to people to help get you out.
what's funny is that this story was originally supposed to be a dark comedy that moved towards something a little darker, and eventually turned into this. montague was initially going to just be a nuisance to mc by inserting himself into friend hangouts because "it's my house".
divider by; @/anlian-aishang
dc divider by; @/benkei-bear
if you read and enjoyed it, please share your thoughts and reblog!!
#vampire#vampire romance#vampire story#vampire x reader#vampire x you#vampire x human#monster x reader#monster fiction#monster fic#monster x human#monster story#tw monsterfucking#monsterfkr#monster fucker#eldrich horror#origonal character#original writing#original work#2k writes#monsterfucking nsft#monster romance
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Ranking New Vegas companions by their alcohol tolerance
Arcade - 6/10: Hear me out, Arcade is a fairly big guy and between his genetics and the work he does, he’s bound to have some weight behind him. Do I think he’s going toe to toe with the average Wrangler patron? No, but I do think you could sit him down with a bottle of wine and by the end he’d be juuuuust tipsy enough to follow you into that Nightstalker cave with minimal complaints.
Boone - 4/10: Despite being a miserable boot boy with a dead wife, I think Boone is on the lower end of alcohol tolerance solely because he’s a sniper; I feel as though the job description means that you can’t exactly be swaying with your shots, so his tolerance would be piss poor. You could probably get him to drink a 12 pack with you, but just watch out: he might start showing a human emotion, and that’ll be uncomfortable for both of you.
Cass - 8/10: There’s something to be said about the fact that you need at least 8 Endurance to be able to beat her at the drinking contest to recruit her. Obviously she can hold her liquor, but I WILL dock points for being sloppy about it. (Girl how did you manage to wake up with a random soldier after the battle??? Don’t you know what your mailman looks like???) Share the whiskey but make sure you loop her belt around a pipe or something so she doesn’t run off.
Veronica - 3/10: I love Veronica. I love her so much. I don’t think she can hold her liquor to save her life. I think Ronnie is a ‘3 drinks and she’s out’ kind of girl. That being said, I also think that she could probably get through most of a box of hard seltzers before she starts feeling it, and I think she’d shotgun them with her Power Fist to be funny.
Raul - 10/10: He’s a ghoul, he’s old, and he’s miserable 95% of the time. I think if you handed him a bottle of Dubious Liquid he wouldn’t even hesitate to drink it. I think he’s drank rubbing alcohol just to see what would happen. I think if you give him a totally intact, unopened, top shelf bottle of tequila, he’d have to excuse himself to the other room for a minute. Definitely the one I’d want to go drinking with.
Lily - 15/10: Mamaw’s 7 feet tall and 500 pounds of sheer muscle with a super mutant metabolism, I don’t even think conventional liquor would affect her tbh. I think she’s drinking that Jacobstown Moonshine that melts spoons and eats through glass. I think she could drink a can of turpentine and it would be like a White Claw. Go grandma, but for the love of god not to the bar. I do NOT have the caps for that.
Rex - 6/10: Okay hear me out (again). He’s an old as hell cyber dog who went through multiple owners, he’s probably got more metal than organs, and the last guys who had him were Elvis impersonators who do fuckall all day but day drink and watch each other do cabaret. You look me in the face and tell me that dog hasn’t had more booze pass through his system than the average wastelander. It’s still only a 6/10 because he shouldn’t be getting it, but are you gonna tell him no? Look at that face. And lower your glass.
ED-E - 0/10: Please do not pour liquor into the orb.
#yeah dude#fallout#fnv#new vegas#arcade gannon#craig boone#rose of sharon cassidy#veronica santangelo#raul tejada#lily bowen#rex fallout new vegas#ed e
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Uptown Girl
pairing: fashion designer!harry x younger!fashion designer!reader
summary: you’re working in a designer boutique, and just so happen to have a late entrance when world-renowned designer harry styles visits for a collaboration. he seems to take a liking to you, and you aren’t sure if that makes you relieved or more anxious
warnings: some cursing, not edited as usual
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harry styles was a well-known name. ceo and founder of pleasing, a nail polish and perfume company. he also owned many other companies, but really, there were too many to keep track of. he was also, most importantly, one of the biggest fashion icons.
you were very familiar with him— had saved up every penny when you were younger to buy a pleasing perfume and now owned a very small collection of their nail polishes.
so, of course, you lost your shit when you found out he’d be coming into your job.
you were a fashion design major at nyu, and had gotten a job at a very esteemed designer (not one of the name brands, but still). although you did expect the job to have more opportunities to.. actually design fashion, you were still grateful nonetheless.
it was just your luck that the day that harry styles was coming in, you were late. it wasn’t your fault! really, it wasn’t! you were always on time because you got anxious at the mere thought of being late.
by the time you parked, you practically ran to the store, silently praying you wouldn’t break a leg as you were running in heels.
“i’m not late am i?” you ask breathlessly as you finally enter the store, fixing your hair and outfit.
you had curled your hair the night before, so they were still pretty much intact. your outfit consisted of black heels, brown dress pants, and a black, tight-fitting turtleneck.
“yes, y/n. you are late,” your boss gave you a look, and you knew you’d be in trouble. “mr. styles, i am so sorry. our employs are.. usually punctual.”
your head snaps over to look in the direction she was talking, and your heart drops when you make eye contact with harry styles.
great.
“mr. styles, i am so sorry,” you apologize.
“it’s perfectly alright,” he gives a kind smile.
that makes you feel a bit better.
“y/n, a word in my office please.”
you deflate as you look back to your boss and follow her to her office
the second the door is closed, she’s chewing you out.
“how unprofessional can you be? i know you are in college, but jesus christ!”
“i’m sorry! there was so much traffic, and my car is so old it stops working if i go faster than 50, and—“
“i don’t need excuses,” she cuts you off. “i need you to be more professional.”
you inhale, “i am sorry, but it was not my fault. i have never once been late before, and you know that. it was a one-time mistake.”
“it better be.”
she walks out and slams the door to the office, leaving you alone in there.
you look up to the ceiling as you bite your lip and try not to cry.
after taking a few minutes to collect yourself, you walk back out into the otherwise empty store and slap a smile on your face.
you do your usual tasks of tidying the store and fixing the mannequins.
mr. styles, his team, and your boss (her name was diane but she was more like satan) were all working on sketching designs and throwing some fabrics onto the mannequins to get a rough idea of what they wanted.
“i don’t know if i like it,” mr. styles murmurs, staring at the mannequin. you glace over at it and have to force yourself to not make a face.
no shit, he didn’t like it. it was bad.
the sketch was good, but the color combination was all wrong and the whole thing was too.. chunky. in the way that everything was flowy and baggy, so it had no shape.
“well, what do you not like about it?” diane asks.
“i’m not sure. it doesn’t look quite right.”
“you have to fix the shape,” you say to yourself as you fix the files of custom orders to be done.
“what was that?”
your head snaps up, and you realize he heard you.
“oh. uh.. i was just—“
“talking to herself,” diane interrupts, glaring at you. “she’s an intern. don’t mind her.”
“no, i’d like to hear what she has to say. might have the answer to our issue. let’s hear it— what was your name again?”
“y/n l/n,” you squeak out.
“well, y/n, what do you think is wrong?”
you hesitantly walk over, “well.. i can see the idea. but it’s just not.. executed well. the whole thing is too flowy.”
“isn’t the point for it to flow?” he asks, raising a brow.”
“it is,” you answer quickly, “but.. there has to be something that isn’t as.. baggy, i suppose. something has to be tight-fitting. it doesn’t have any shape. it just kinda.. looks like a box.”
he stares at you for a moment, and diane clears her throat.
“y/n, this is time for the professionals. get back to—“
“no, diane. she is.. she’s right. it does need shape.”
at his words, the people around him begin to pin it differently.
“and the colors,” you rush out. “the colors don’t.. it’s supposed to be a statement piece, right?”
“that’s the goal,” he nods.
“well.. the colors are too.. light. they’re more pastel, which is fine, but for it to really be a statement, it’s better to use brighter ones. or at least make one of them brighter. i would.. i think make the base the brighter one.”
diane looks ready to kill you.
mr. styles laughs, “well, don’t you know a lot? diane, where did you find her? wish my interns knew half as much as her.”
your face grows hot.
“she’s a student,” diane sighs.
“a student?” he asks.
“i… uh.. i study fashion at nyu. fashion design— i’m in my last year.”
he seems to sense that you're damn near about to shit your pants, because he grins at you (slightly patronizing, but also kind), before turning back to diane.
"i'd like her to be with me for the rest of the project. y/n, darling, how much are y'makin' here?"
your stutter, "uh--... $15 an hour."
he tuts his tongue like that's horrible, "i'll pay.. ten times that while y'workin' with me."
your eyes widen, "wh-- that's not-- you don't have to--"
"nonsense. it's what most people i work with start with. i'll up it if needed, of course. and you obviously don't have to, but i'd love your insight."
"i-- no, i-- i'd love to, i.."
"great," he grins, and you're extremely dizzy. what the hell was going on?
"uh.. mr. styles, if i may give my opinion," diane pipes up.
"you may," he eyes her skeptically.
"y/n is a student. she's still learning, and she's never worked on anything here. it's very risky to--"
he cuts her off by asking you a question, "have you designed things? sketched 'em out and all that?"
you nod.
"i'd hope you've also done the whole... actually sewing things together and really making them?"
you nod again.
he turns back to diane, "seems like she's got experience," he looks back to you, "do y'have photos of any of those?"
"yeah-- they're.. i think i left them in my car. i have photos on my phone."
"we'll meet later to look at all that, then. i'll give you my number later. for now.. i'd like your input on our other ideas."
-
for the rest of the day, you follow harry around, and you sort of feel like a lost puppy just following him around and answering when he asks something of you.
after a while, you got more comfortable giving your input without being prompted, but you always tiptoed around what you were really trying to get at in fear that you'd anger him.
at the end of day, he put your number in his phone with the promise that he'd text you later about more details.
-
the text came three days later.
From: (Maybe): Harry
Hello, Y/N. This is Harry. Would you be free to meet tomorrow at noon to discuss the details of the project? Please bring your sketches and any photos of designs you've done, and anything else you feel necessary.
To: Harry Styles
Hi! I should be free tomorrow, yeah. Where do you want to go?
From: Harry Styles
I'll let you decide.
To: Harry Styles
There is this one coffee shop named Maman?
Sent Location: 239 Centre St, New York, NY
From: Harry Styles
Alright. I'll see you tomorrow, Y/N. Have a nice rest of your day.
To: Harry Styles
You too!
-
you spend the rest of your night fretting about what to wear. you were stuck in between classy but not too fancy, but also not too casual. comfy, but not so comfy that you looked like you didn't give a shit. but also not so uncomfortable that you were, well, uncomfortable, and looked like you were trying too hard.
you'd eventually settled for something simple. long, light-wash denim skirt, a plain black top, and some mary janes. you tied some of your hair back with a white ribbon, did some natural makeup, and called it a day.
you got to the coffee shop at 11:45 and ordered your drink, as well as a chocolate croissant.
harry walked in at exactly 12:00, and grinned when he saw you sitting at a table, scrolling on your phone with a manilla folder and sketchbook beside you.
-
really, you can't blame him! you were pretty, he'd have to be blind to not know that. and really, you weren't that much younger than him.
he's 29, and you're 23. he's not a stalker, he just did a background check like any good business person would do.
so what he finds you cute? the relationship would be strictly professional. besides, you deserved a break from your horrible boss. contrary to what diane thought, the walls were not soundproof, and he could hear her chewing you out.
sure, he'd done that to one of his employees once or twice, but it was always deserved, and never on the first time of being late. that was ridiculous.
"good morning, y/n," he greets. your head snaps up to make eye contact and he has to force himself to not laugh. he wasn't laughing at you, per se. it was more so the fact that he found it amusing how jumpy you seemed around him.
"good morning. did you order?"
"not yet. never been here, so i've got no clue what's good."
you open your mouth to respond, but the barista calls out, "large iced honey lavender latte with a pain au chocolat for y/n!"
you give a sheepish smile and run up to retrieve your food and drink. when you come back, you take a sip of your drink and set what looks to be a chocolate croissant down on the table.
"well, i'm more of an iced coffee girl. and i also don't really like the taste of coffee, so i've got a bunch of sugar in mine. what do you usually drink?"
"'m more of a black coffee, to be honest. iced is fine, but hot's better."
you wrinkle your nose, "i don't know how you stand the taste of coffee. it's so bitter."
"better than what you've got!" he laughs, "might as well just down a sugar packet."
you giggle at his teasing, "only psychos drink plain black coffee. this," you hold up your drink, "is so much better."
"oh, is it now?"
"yes, it is," you cross your arms proudly.
"lemme have a taste."
you hand over the drink, and he takes a small sip before coughing, "christ, y/n! that cannot be good for your health!"
"hey, i'm still alive, aren't i?" you shrug.
“that you are.”
“well… just ask for an americano, i guess. the rest of their drinks are kinda sugary and fun.”
he got his drink, and once the both of you were sat down, he got to business.
“so, how long have you been designing?”
“i’ve been doing it since middle school. i.. uh.. i saw that one american girl doll movie. where she was a designer. and i just got obsessed. obviously they weren’t good, but…”
“so you’ve got a lot of experience then?”
you nod. he grins.
“may i see the sketches?”
you grab the folder off the top of the sketchbook and pass it over to him.
he flips through it in silence for a few minutes, and you anxiously nibble at the skin around your fingernails.
“..so?” you ask.
“they’re great. really, you’ve got talent. i can’t draw for shit, so you’ve got me beat,” he laughs.
you laugh with him, “most of those are just ideas, i’ve never made them. but i have photos of the ones i have made. i printed them so it’s easier.”
you pass over the manilla folder, and he opens it to look at all the photos you’d printed out. there was around fifty— those were just the ones you actually liked and were confident showing.
he holds one up, and your cheeks flush. “why’s this the only one where you’re the model?” he asks.
“that was.. uh.. that’s my senior prom dress.”
his eyes widen, giving you an impressed look, “you made your own prom dress?”
you nod, “i just wanted something very specific, so.. i figured i’d just make it myself.”
“y’look great— the dress looks great,” he coughs. “you’re very talented.”
“thank you,” you blush.
“so tell me why someone as talented as you is working in diane’s shop not designing a single thing?”
“i didn’t realize that was the job. i just got excited when my professor told me they were interested in my work, so i took the job. i thought i’d at least do a little designing, but.. it pays.. decent, though.”
he scoffs, “darling, 15 bucks an hour is not decent pay. that’s what you make being a hostess. you’re an artist. someone would pay thousands of dollars for just your sketches.”
“i don’t think i’m that good—“
“you are,” he’s firm. resolute. there is no room for argument with him. “i think you’ll be a great asset to the project. i could use your… talent. i’ll send you an email with the nitty gritty details. i’ll see you soon, y/n.”
and with that, he stands and leaves, leaving you to sit there, dumbfounded, confused, and grinning.
-
a/n: guys i have too many series going on 😭😭
#harry styles#harry styles x reader#harry styles oneshot#harry styles one shot#harry styles imagine#harry styles fic#harry#harry fic#harry styles au#harry styles fluff#designer!harry styles#designer!harry styles x reader#harry styles x designer!reader#harry styles x fem!reader
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More interesting melatonin dreams: I still had my old car, and I went to a job interview. It was in a completely normal office building, except when I was brought into the interview room itself, which was furnished exactly like a fine restaurant, and the meal I was supposed to share with the interviewer was already hot on the table: a big snake in clear broth. Served whole and with the skin intact and everything.
And I internally went "ah shit, I've never eaten snake before. I don't even know how to eat a lobster" and tried my best to just play it cool and hope the interviewer doesn't notice. So we sat down and the interviewer started cutting and skinning the snake to get to the meat while I watched keenly to make sure I could do the same from here on, and the interview continued. The snake tasted pretty good, the meat didn't taste like anything that I had tasted before and neither did the sauce, but they clearly went well together.
I don't even remember what the job was or what kind of details we went through, but at the later half of the interview the interviewer mentioned that I've done a good job so far - the job involves a lot of getting randomly tossed into completely new and unfamiliar situations and being expected to play it cool while you figure out exactly what is going on. They weren't looking for someone who already knows how to correctly eat a fucking python. They needed someone with enough pokerface to act like they'd done it before.
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a/n: jjk 236 spoilers, mentions of suicide from reader’s side, no comfort, cry. around 1.4k. tagging @jabamin @hyomagiri @saiki-enthusiast @arminsumi @shotorus @satohruu so yall can suffer w me
the first signs of grief manifests in you when there’s a bright light that signifies gojo’s disperse of cursed energy, the familiar hollow purple that obliterates half the buildings around the two strongest sorcerers — one from the heian and the other one from our times. surely, your lover wouldn’t do something as foolish as involving himself with the blast, but gojo satoru is always one to take risks.
when he took up the job of taking care of megumi and tsumiki at just eighteen years old and providing all the things they needed to fluorish. gojo is risky as he convinces a kid with a terrifying curse to make some friends and learn about cursed energy. he sometimes puts himself in danger when he takes up more missions he can shoulder just to show the higher-ups that he can kill them any time.
gojo satoru has the world of jujutsu in his hands; how his birth had changed the trajectory of the society, altered the balance of the world and now—
“satoru!” you call out once the smoke clears and he’s still there, intact, smiling a sick smile like the many times you’ve seen him done at megumi and after burning french toast. you brief a sigh of relief and the pounding of your heart calms down momentarily before sukuna emerges and he’s missing a hand and a leg and your heart pulls lower and lower seeing the kid you raised be such a ragdoll for sukuna’s entertainment. but there was always the hope to isolate the king of curses’ soul and save megumi somehow. shoko and you had discussed it, you know it to be true, it has to be true, until there’s a sharp noise that cuts through your ear drums.
it’s high-pitched, like a flash of light that shines in your eyes too abruptly and you have to cover them. but it blinds you as much as it deafens; an attack from god knows which end and you swear you hear the reaper’s scythe.
gojo thinks you look beautiful like this; hand on your cheek and head in your hand as you watch him and the melodic sounds of the knife hitting the cutting board. you’re so concerned about him cutting his hand again that you’ve dragged your chair all the way into the kitchen to watch him closely, which was counterintuitive; the whole reason why he had bled in the first place was because he was looking at you so much.
he admires the way you curl into yourself on the beanbag in the apartment, a book on your lap on how to get to know your teenager better, hair falling over your eyes and the reading lamp not even helping that much in illuminating the words. gojo skims over your features and the way your chest breathes slowly, like everything good in the world. he hopes he’s able to get that with you in this life, for as long as he lives.
you feel it before you see it in the screens that the fight is broadcasted from — something is missing. a light has switched off, satoru has stolen the blanket at night and left you freezing again, seeing your favourite snack missing from the fridge. and you run. past the students you’ve raised, past the bright blinding screens and into the battlefield, past the debris and each crunch of cement under your feet brings a fresh bout of tears to your eyes. the tokyo winter is cool, snow starting to slowly fall upon you and the saltiness on your face seem to crystallise and harden and you’re not even sure any more. there’s a tingling feeling in your feet, in your finger tips and a pull of your heart. you know where gojo is before you see him.
“s— satoru…” you mumble, eyes welling up with more tears when his bottom half stays standing, baggy pants stained with red, red and more red and you’ve never hated a colour like you do now. you hate it, you hate it, you hate it even when he’s proposed to you with a red velvet box and gotten you valentine’s day chocolates in that same darker red and there is just too much blood.
and then it’s like the hierarchy of grief doesn’t matter any more. all those articles you’ve read preparing yourself after gojo’s fated meeting with death at sixteen, and then after shibuya — you think you can’t handle any more of the collecting and patching up and crying and headaches and holding a finger up to your chest and hoping you’d kill yourself with your own technique. the only time you’d accept the absence of the bright blue on his face is when he was sleeping and his chest moved with even breaths, not like this.
not like this.
“satoru—” your voice cracks and you cannot even see. tears and tears and mucus and the fresh crunch of snow under your feet as you step closer to his severed body.
“baby…” he mumbles, barely above a whisper, hand twitching and reaching out in the direction of your voice because this is infinitely worse than getting stabbed in the neck by toji fushiguro, perhaps a little worse than seeing your best friend of your high school life get manipulated by a cursed user. satoru wants to demote all of that and say that seeing you stumble to your knees in front of him while you hyperventilate and sob hurts the most.
“d-don’t move, ’toru, we— we’re going to get you b-back, okay?” you’re playing with god now. “shoko!” the doctor stifles a sob at your cry, broken up by the feedback of the sound system. she knows you’re trying to defy god.
“i don’t think—” the light is slowly dying. the world’s light, the student’s light, your dawn and dusk. “m-my love, everything is…”
“satoru, please, you need to—!” they say the last sense to go is touch and hearing. you crouch to his face to see him react to your warmth, eyes moving an inch to where he thinks you were and puts all of his cursed energy into one hand just so he could hold your cheek. you, warm as always as the sun and everything good in the world, a new rush of warmth overtaking his hand when your tears flow over his battered, tired hands, the same hands that has drawn over his love time and time again over your body and you are a canvas made of gojo satoru’s endless, unconditional ardour.
“i-i’m…” it fades out, his voice box is almost gone and you wail again and the snow from below wets your knees. his name is all that leaves your lips and you think if you can’t play god, you can only beg, even if your religion is solely gojo satoru.
“no, no, no no nono, satoru, c’mon, baby, stop it!” you scream in his face, words all mushed together when you feel the breath of life leave his chest, the blues die out in his eyes, “i love you, i love you, darling, i love you—” your lover barely manages to muster a small smile and you scramble all over his chest, clutching at the tattered black t-shirt and his hand that is starting to go cold and he has the energy to mutter out a stupid remark like gojo satoru always does.
“i’m sorry i got y-your favourite outfit stained with red, princess…” satoru whispers and that breaks the dam fully. you sob and groan and cry and wail until your voice is hoarse and you cannot speak any more and gojo wants nothing but to full heal himself again just so he could stop your crying. perhaps hold your face in his hands and kiss your forehead and nose and lips and embrace you until you couldn’t breathe. perhaps even to tell you he loved you more than anything and everything; more than poems and that foolish line he just had to say at the end and kikufuku and waking up next to you.
but in what world will gojo satoru ever get repose and a normal life? you hope for every other universe to have him be a preschool teacher, or maybe a florist, or even a superstar. but not in this one, no.
the hand that caressed your cheek is replenished again with cursed energy.
satoru gives you three squeezes.
#rest well satoru 💟#you fought well really#shucks this shit got me emotional like u rlly didnt deserve to be fighting so hard alone#be the strongest and get the burden of being untouchable 😭#and having no one to turn to .... sigh :( he deserves everything & more#at least hes together with his friends up there. he deserves all the rest he can get for fighting so hard 😞#jujutsu kaisen x reader#jjk x reader#jujutsu kaisen gojo#jjk spoilers#jjk 236#gojo satoru imagine#gojo satoru x reader#gojo angst#gojo satoru angst#gojo fluff#jujutsu kaisen angst#jjk scenarios#jjk drabbles#jjk x you#jujutsu kaisen x you#gojo x you#gojo satoru#gojo x reader#gojou satoru x reader#jjk gojo#jujutsu kaisen fluff
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