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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 2 years

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oh do tell us more about grima and eomer pre canon

Oh fun! I do love some Grima and Eomer head-canons <3 <3

I know I’ve touched on some of this stuff before in previous asks, so apologies for repeats.

other head-canon/general thoughts stuff: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ... I think that's a good start. I may be a bit...single minded.

classic, of course: no matter what iteration of Grima I’m writing, no matter what canon-divergence is happening, I always head-canon that he spent time in Gondor working for a merchant when he was roughly eighteen into his early twenties. Enough time that he’s fluent in Westron, picked up Sindarin, and learned how to read/write (or became more at ease with it, if it’s a story where he semi-literate as a child).

another classic: Eomer is a morning person and has been since he was a teenager. Making him an anomaly. I feel like this is a hilariously across-the-board headcanon for him. But I mean, look at the guy. He’s absolutely up at 5am doing god(s) know what.

Grima: the gods may, but I don’t.

For most iterations of them, I headcanon that they could function together in pre-war years in the sense that Theoden didn’t have to threaten them too much with the “get along shirt”. This is because Eomer, for all his fiestyness, his temper, his brashness, he does care about doing his job right. He cares about being a Good Thirds Marshal and Living Up to Expectations. Which means he’ll put up with the weird, slimy thing his uncle hired who seems spookily good at his job.

Therefore, until Grima’s treason/oath-breaking became known to Eomer (circa 2 to 3 years before the war, so around 3016/3017), they could make-shift well enough. Did they particularly enjoy each other’s company? Not really. Could they make small talk about the weather and the state of the roads to pass the time? Yes. Could they solve problems together and work as a team? Begrudgingly, but yes. Eomer out of a sense of doing it for the greater good, Grima because he was told he had to and Theoden was like “behave, my weird little goth snake” and Grima was like ‘ugh I guess”.

In some iterations, I do have it that Grima discovers—one long, cold, dark winter—that Eomer is very good at strategy games and positively jumps on this. Eomer will attest that he has never seen Grima so excited before, or since, that first discovery. So they play all sorts of table games (backgammon/tabula, chess, checkers, Middle Earth version of Go etc.) and card games (middle earth versions of hearts, bridge, whist, tarrochi, vingt-un etc.).

They have been known to play spoof upon occasion but Grima is too good at the game so everyone always loses (Eomer suspects Grima cheats. Eomer isn’t wrong. But it’s the only game he cheats in, all the rest he’ll play (relatively) honestly).

Again, this is for most iterations but I head-canon that Grima has a complicated relationship with Theoden but Theoden didn’t know this until post-possession/leechcraft. There’s a lot of love that became resentment and admiration that’s also pity and disgust. It’s a bit all over the place and Grima is just like “What does a person do with emotions? Run away from them.”

Eomer: no.

Grima: too late.

I know I shoot myself in the foot with be not afraid on this one, but I really love leaving Grima’s views and feelings re: Eowyn more ambiguous. (Be not afraid is what happens when you write a future fic without having finished large portions of the bits that come before i.e., ROTK/Cycles of Song.)

Ok, the thing I can’t settle on for pre-war head-canon is what the fuck went down between Grima and Gandalf. Their animosity is personal, petty, and spiteful. Gandalf especially—yes, we can have pity and empathy for Gollum but not Grima. One of these two ate babies and it’s not Grima (he just ate a hobbit, maybe, and that wasn’t until later). Don’t get me wrong, I’m Team Gollum too, I’m just saying Gandalf, my man, there’s a reason for this double standard.

I do suspect Gandalf gives Gollum more slack because his whole descent is Ring related and not wholly of his own choice, unlike Grima who was like “fuckity bye” and joined Saruman. Granted, the power of Saruman’s voice is so rarely talked about with Grima which I think is interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m wholly here for Grima making his choices 100% on his own without Saruman’s malign voice-influence (just his malign non-voice-related influence)--because that is the more interesting story. However, the reality of Saruman’s Voice and its power is still something that, when we engage with the text outside of head-canons and fics, we should take into consideration.

From Voice of Saruman chapter: “Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it.

For many the sound of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.”

Sounds somewhat similar to the power of another object and another lord but who am I to suggest such things?

I head-canon that Grima very much likes being adjacent to power. Oh, that man loves, loves power. But he doesn’t want to be in a seat that could topple—so he prefers being the advisor to the king, not the king himself. Though, he has thought a lot about what would happen if he were king. From like day one as advisor/law-speaker/whatever fucking role it is he has at court, he was thinking about what he’d do if he had the crown. Despite his many self-esteem issues, he is very arrogant in some ways and firmly believes he is smarter than most people in a room.

Based purely on the fact that Denethor invokes the Oath of Eorl with a red arrow (which was traditional, to be fair), alongside the verbal invoking of the oath, I suspect there was minimal written correspondence between Gondor and Rohan. What little that was written was generally handled by Theoden until Grima came along.

Eomer can read. He’s just not good at it, or comfortable with it. Can he write? Good question. His name, probably. Maybe a few other things. But anytime Eomer does send written missives or letters (a rare thing indeed), he dictates it to whoever is around who can write well and this being Rohan means it’s like Grima and maybe two other people.

Eomer asking Grima to take down a dictation is a hilarious mental image I have just given myself. After this event occurs, for the first time, Eomer is like “right, I need to procure myself someone who can write. Uncle, where did you find the snake man?”

And Theoden is like, “No idea, he just appeared one day.”

Eomer: not helpful.

I do head-canon that there are plenty of people in Rohan who aren’t blond. Because if we’re going for realism, and not a film where you’re working in a visual medium so these sorts of distinctions are material, it makes no sense for everyone to be blond, let alone the same kind of blond.

In my head, I flip-flop on Grima’s appearance from something adjacent to the films, to something that’s more likely based on the books—dark eyes, hair colour unknown (likely on the lighter brown into the blond side, though it’s never stated. His eyes, however, are described as being dark).

I am a sucker for dark eyes, as anyone who has read any of my Downey stuff can attest.

Regardless his appearance, I do like having his mother be foriegn. However, the flack he and his siblings get for it is less to do with appearance and more to do with them living in a tiny ass small town in the north and foreigners just generally being viewed with distrust. (It is noted in the books that the Rohirrim are super warry/untrusting of people from outside their land. Which isn’t xenophobic, or something adjacent to xenophobic, at all.)

When Grima is in Edoras, there’s no like “oh man he’s clearly foreign, ew!” It’s more like “oh man, he’s an asshole. What’s his deal?” then later “oh man, he’s acting super sus, what’s up with that?” However, Grima is the way he is in part because of how he was treated growing up.

I head-canon that Eomer has an ear for accents and can mimic Grima’s northern twang, whenever it comes out, and Grima finds this mortifying. Eomer’s fine with languages—he speaks Rohirrim and Westron of course, also Sindarin likely, but I head-canon that he has picked up a few skoltse words from Grima. The days when Grima is in a good mood, and they’re on tolerable speaking terms, he might teach Eomer a few. They’re all dirty curse words of course.

Eomer: How do you say ‘fuck’?

Theoden: really, Eomer?

Eomer: oh-oh, cunt!

Grima: that one’s fun to say.

Theoden: p l e a s e.

Eomer: asshole! Fucking asshole!

Theoden: you are a prince of the house of Eorl and Grima, you’re my chief advisor and law-speaker of Eomarc. I expect better from you both for fuck’s sake.

Grima cackles and walks off.

Pre-war, and depending the iteration I have going of how much magic Grima actually has and how much was power of suggestion + potions and poisons, if it’s Old God territory then Eomer knows Grima can do little magics. These aren’t things Grima does publicly or really lets people know about, because he likes keeping them to himself as they’re more useful if they’re secret. However, Eomer’s seen him use them from time to time, mostly the fire-lighting one where Grima will pinch a candle wick and it catches alight, or he’ll start a fire without kindling.

Grima has caught Eomer watching him do it and keeps waiting for Eomer to bring it up or spread whacky rumours and neither happens and Grima doesn’t understand. But that’s because he operates in a selfish capacity whereas Eomer doesn’t.

Even pre-saruman, Grima was ambitious and ruthless and very much out for himself. That’s just a fundamental part of who he is. Saruman just capitalised on it.

Oh, in every version Grima very much doubts Theodred’s ability to be a useful, efficient or strong king. A nice king, sure, but not what Rohan needs in this dark hour. It is also something Eomer comes to start seeing in his cousin as he got older. Theodred is about 40/41 in the books and Eomer 27, so he had many years of idolizing his cousin and seeing him as this golden, older brother who could do no wrong. But then as he got older, started taking up his duties as third marshal, he started seeing more of his cousin’s faults. Still loved him, of course, but the veil fell from his eyes and he definitely had moments when Grima made sly commentary of thinking “I hate it, but Grima’s not wrong”. Eomer would never betray his cousin or uncle, of course. Absofuckinglutely not. But he does start seeing things as they are, not as he wished them to be. He mitigates wherever he can, which is an exhausting thing.

Grima has gone to Eomer and been like, ‘You know none of this is tenable, right? You’re going to hit burn-out. Your uncle is going to die at some point. Your cousin doesn’t have the wherewithal to lead our people in a strong, unified way. Gondor’s barely holding on by the skin of their teeth. And you can’t fix that fundamental truth of your cousin’s lack of gumption and having-what-it-takes, no matter how much you prop Theodred up. At some point, the centre will not hold. At some point, things will fall apart. What will you do then, my lord?’

Which is, coincidentally, Eomer’s moment of ‘your words are poison.’

But, also like with Eowyn, there’s much truth in Grima’ words, even if the motivation for his saying them is to cause harm. In fact, it is the slices of truth that make the venom all that much more potent.

Grima’s peak tactic really is just laying truths on the table, but twisted in a way that benefits his aim, and then he leaves them there and he departs the room and you’re left looking at something you might not want to look at. He makes people hear things they can’t unhear; make them know things they can’t unknow.

This isn’t to say that man isn’t full of bullshit. Of course he is. Why do you think his robes are so big? They’re full of lies. But when we see him sliding a verbal blade into someone’s ribcage, it’s almost always couched within something that is true.

Eowyn was alone, in many ways. Theoden was getting on and past his prime. Eomer was seeking war with Saruman. But obviously, things are more complicated than that and nothing is ever quite how Grima frames it. And I think this is a skillset he’s always had.

ANYWAY.

Grima would go hawking with Theoden, in pre-war days! Grima likes hunting. It’s one of the few things he likes that falls into the slot of “typical masculine activities”. He is a decent shot with an arrow and has out-done Eomer on hitting birbs out of the sky. Every-year when there are midsummer solstice festivities and games, Eomer ropes Grima onto his team purely for the hand-eye coordination.

(the only reason he missed saruman and/or gandalf was because he didn’t know who he wanted to murder more, and also he was in Peak Feral mode so not doing anything to the best of his abilities.)

Obviously, I’ve said this one before, but on 21 June 3017, Eomer and Grima were utterly tanked at a summer solstice festival and they hate-snogged each other and may have had some angry fucking in some deserted room or broomcloset while everyone was dancing around a bonfire. Once done, they walked in opposite directions and never talked about it again.

It may have recurred in 3018. 3019 it didn’t but that’s because Grima was weird and self-aware of Things post-war so avoided Eomer like the plague.

One time, during Winter Jol, Eomer was trying to demonstrate his largesse as newly minted Third Marshal of the Marc, he’s like twenty at most, and so he went and bought everyone in his household gifts and his uncle’s household as well. It was mostly alcohol. But for the Formal Officers and various high up positions he got proper presents but had no idea what to get Grima because what the fuck to get a guy like that? Anyway, he was just like “fuck it, he can write, right? That’s a … thing? He can do? I guess? I think?” and so he got him a little travelbox for penknives and quills and all that. Grima has used it on up through the war and, provided no one nicked it after he got chucked out of Meduseld, he will return to using it.

Eomer feels weird about this.

Grima is just like, “it was a useful gift. Why wouldn’t I make use of it??”

Eomer, “ok but we were rivals and nemesis or something for so long, and you had so much money, why didn’t you get a new one?”

Grima, “...I don’t know.”

Eomer, “so you pulled that out every time my uncle was like ‘Grima go thither and yon’ and you trundled off and brought that with you.”

Grima, “...yes.”

Eomer, “and never once you were like ‘this thing reminds me of this obnoxious twat who keeps roughing me up and threatening to kill me if I look at his sister, maybe I should get a new one’?”

Grima, “...evidently not.”

Eomer, “you see how that’s weird, right?”

Grima, “well I didn’t think it was weird until you made it weird. Anyway, you’re my lord’s nephew, of course I had to use it. It’s sort of obligated.”

Eomer, “For a little while.”

Grima, “well I can get a new one.”

Eomer, “I mean at this point it’d be weird if you did because now we’re fucking or something.”

Grima, “I’m so confused about why you brought this up.”

Eomer, “so am I. Fuck it, I’m going to go drink with Eothain and bemoan the state of the world.”

I hope you enjoyed! I know not all were strictly pre-canon and I'm not sure if you were looking for anything in particular, but there you go.

#ask #reply #grima wormtongue #anon #eomer #griomer #lotr #lord of the rings #grima thoughts #i need a tag to easily find all these things

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kilannad · 2 years

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Fanfiction Masterlist

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As the Stars Burn On

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As you can probably tell, I'm heavy ADHD and struggle with keeping on one fandom, much less one fic. I post as I write and have a complicated real life, so apologies if something doesn't get updated as fast as you'd like. Please remember I do this as a hobby and only receive payments when you are kind enough to tip/kofi.

#my writing #masterlist #fanfiction

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cophene · 8 months

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05 || * • ° a simple game of croquet

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pairing : ohshc x gn reader summary : perhaps no one at ouran is more qualified to deal with a broken heart than the host club. with a student’s heartbreak painfully obvious to everyone but themself, the host club takes it upon themselves to remedy that. all against that student’s better judgement. notes : multi-chapter fic, sfw, doesn’t follow canon plot word count : 2.8k+

Even though there were a million reasons why you shouldn’t, you couldn’t stop yourself from going to his profile when the last bell of the day chimed. It was a sign of weakness, and you felt terrible for succumbing to it, but you hadn’t been able to rid the thought from your head the entire day. All of a sudden, you just had to see him again, look at his face, find out if you were remembering him right. It didn’t seem right that he could still exist if you weren’t there anymore.

It was a very, very bad idea. You followed the stream of purple blazers out of the classroom, barely aware of anything but your phone in front of you. He was still there. The same as ever, yet not somehow. His eyes were different. Wide and more animated. You stared at his careless hands, the way they slung over railings and shoulders and hips. His smile looked like a foreign entity. It didn’t belong on his face, but it beamed out at you like it did.

Why was he so happy?

You never used the word, but his profile genuinely made you feel wretched. An addicting kind of misery that you couldn’t get out of. Picture after picture after picture. You stared hungrily at everyone he posed with, trying to figure out who they were. Was it possible that someone could have taken your place? All of these people, who didn’t have a clue who you were. Him being the only thing you had common.

Except the him in your head and the him looking back at you were two different people.

He’d posted a video recently. At some kind of event with muted lighting and narrow black ties. You told yourself that you knew better and tapped play anyway.

Someone had recorded him giving a brief introductory speech. His hair was carefully styled and his suit was perfectly fitted, as always. He was calm. Confident. Self-assured. He smiled often and easily. It was more like he was talking to a friend than a room of over two hundred people. You were surprised at how much it hurt, seeing the small movements of his hands, the way they accented his sentences and helped them along.

“Do you like giving speeches?” You remembered asking him once. He’d wrinkled his nose.

“Of course not. Why would you think that?”

“You’re so good at it. You never seem nervous about talking to anyone.”

“I’m just good at hiding things. I think I’m too good at that for my own good.”

“You could never hide anything from me,” you said archly. “I know you too well.”

He smiled then. “You’re right about that.”

So many things to regret, you realized. You shouldn’t have said anything to him. You couldn’t think back on any of your conversations together without shrivelling up.

You couldn’t bring yourself to wish you’d never met, though. You weren’t sorry about that. You didn’t think you could ever be.

“Hello? I didn’t know being heartbroken made you deaf too.”

Someone was snapping their fingers in front of your face. You hoped against hope that it wasn’t who you thought it was, but of course the universe would never be so kind to you as that.

“Hello to you too, Renge.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I was just on my way to the Host Club,” you replied feebly. You noticed that Renge wasn’t wearing the usual Ouran uniform. Instead, Renge had on a light dress with a brimmed hat and matching parasol. It looked faintly twentieth-century. Renge dug her fingernails into your arm and started dragging you—not upstairs, but outside.

“We’re changing things up today. The Host Club has a variety of events that they cycle through for their guests’ enjoyment. You’ll be lucky enough to witness one such event at present.”

“Events? What is that supposed to mean?”

You quickly found out. The Host Club had relocated to one of the lawns outside, tables and chairs set off to the side for the guests. Finger sandwiches and cool glasses of lemonade were served underneath wide blue umbrellas pitched for shade. The main spectacle seemed to be whatever game the hosts were involved in. You squinted at the multi-coloured balls and what looked to be hoops stuck in the grass. What the hell was this supposed to be?

“Ah, so glad you could join us, my poor heartbroken angel.”

Tamaki approached you then, tipping the brim of his hat in greeting. He was dressed in a white linen suit and spotless leather shoes. You wondered if the red ribbon in his hat and his red argyle socks was supposed to mean something.

“What’s going on?” you asked.

“Have you ever played croquet? It’s a delightful game, especially when the weather is so warm.”

“Never heard of it,” you said flatly. “I thought I was supposed to do my other trial appointments.”

“You would be correct. I see no reason why that can’t happen over a game of croquet.” Tamaki extended his elbow. You stared until Renge hissed at you to take it. She gave you a pointed look before melting uncannily into the shadows of the surrounding trees.

The rest of the Host Club was dressed in similarly old-fashioned clothes. Honey looked absolutely adorable in white khaki shorts and a plaid sweater vest. Kyoya and Mori were wearing similar linen suits to Tamaki, only with blue and green, respectively. To your dismay, the twins were dressed identically in white polos, slacks and caps. The only thing marking them apart were their different coloured bow ties.

You looked around for Haruhi to see what her outfit was. You managed to find her chatting with a trio of girls, wearing a white blazer and striped trousers. She waved when she saw you, then had to reach up to right her hat when it nearly slipped off. You stifled a grin.

“Yay, you’re here!” Honey exclaimed. He ran over to you with a platter of finger sandwiches. “Do you want one?”

You stooped to take one, then whispered in Honey’s ear, “Is there any way you can get me out of this? I’m not even dressed appropriately.”

“Hikaru and Kaoru can help you with that,” Honey answered immediately. “They came prepared!”

“What do you mean—”

As if by magic, one of the twins pushed out a changing screen and the other a rack of white linen clothes.

“Worry not,” Tamaki said. “We have an entire collection of croquet attire at your disposal. The twins will be happy to assist you.”

Great, except that you weren’t happy to be assisted. Honey pushed you behind the screen where you were disconcerted to find both twins already there. They thrust a hanger into your hands and said together, “Wear this.”

You eyed the clothes, then looked at the twins. For a second, you all just stared at each other. Not that you would ever admit it, but the twins looked surprisingly good in polos.

“You want to take my clothes off for me?” you deadpanned.

With a shrug, the two of them retreated from the changing screen. Aware that you wouldn’t have much choice in the matter, you slipped on the clothes and went outside. At least everything fit pretty well, which made you wonder if that had this entire clothes rack specially tailored.

Tamaki actually started tearing up when he saw you. “You look wonderful,” he said, with a sigh.

“Misery is the best accessory,” one of the twins said, and you had to bite back a swear.

Someone set a hat on top of your head. You glanced up to find Mori trying to set the hat straight.

“Thanks.”

Mori nodded.

For the next little bit, Tamaki painstakingly tried to explain the rules of croquet. There was a specific order to the hoops, the colour of the balls, the direction of striking and the mallets. To you, it seemed like a whole lot of nothing, but Tamaki was being so patient that you tried to humour him. Eventually, it was just easiest to hit your black ball whenever someone told you, scoring be damned.

Small bursts of applause sounded whenever one of the hosts got their ball through a hoop and they would wave and smile like benevolent princes. Unfortunately, the three hosts who should’ve been your fallbacks--Honey, Mori and Haruhi--decided not to participate in the croquet game, and spent the whole time serving lemonade and making small talk with the guests. You tried multiple times to sneak off to join them, but either Tamaki or one of the twins would firmly pull you back toward your mallet.

It turned out there were no trial appointments. It was just you trying to keep up a conversation with four different people and wondering why it was so hard to hit a ball with a mallet.

“So, do you have any hobbies?” Kyoya asked. It was stupid how easy he made croquet look.

“Not croquet,” you muttered.

“It’s not for everyone,” Tamaki said sympathetically. “Are you having trouble? Maybe you’re not holding the mallet right.”

“I’m holding it fine.”

“Honey told us you play volleyball,” the twin you decided was Hikaru said.

“Yeah, but I decided to take a break.”

“How come?” asked the twins.

“People take breaks,” you said evasively. “Is that a crime?”

“Breaks are always refreshing,” Tamaki said. “They can help you see things with new eyes. You might come back and do something you’ve never done before.” Or suddenly become disenchanted and wonder how you’d ever liked such stupid hobbies. That had happened to a lot of things after the break. Nothing had seemed quite as interesting anymore.

People’s interests changed, you told yourself. Nothing wrong with that.

Kyoya leaned on his mallet. “I heard you vacationed in Malta over the break. How was that?”

You narrowed your eyes at him. “And who did you hear that from?”

“Honey.”

Honey was telling everyone your business, wasn’t he?

“It was nice,” you said, the noncommittal answer of everyone ever.

Tamaki’s face brightened. “Ooh, I’ve heard wonderful things about Malta from my father. How was it? You must have met so many gorgeous faces.”

You focused intently on your mallet. “None more than usual.” You had a feeling you knew exactly what bush the hosts were beating around. You had to turn things before they trampled the bush to the ground.

“So, what exactly is this event supposed to cater to? Do people enjoy watching you punt balls around?”

Tamaki looked offended. “This is a croquet party, darling. There’s nothing more refreshing than dressing in light, airy clothes and enjoying a simple game of croquet under the shining sun.” He extended a hand at the various other games going on, the coloured balls clacking against hoops and mallets. How was it that everyone was better at this game than you were?

“And you do stuff like this often?”

“Whenever the opportunity arises,” Kyoya answered. “We like to keep things entertaining. The last thing we want is for the Host Club to become stale. Perhaps a volleyball game would better suit your taste?”

It would. You could just imagine the looks on everyone's faces when you trounced them with a serve.

Kaoru’s next question was about as subtle as a semi truck. “What’s your opinion on physical displays of affection?”

Your ball went in the complete opposite direction you’d intended. Hikaru smothered a laugh and you glared at him.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that. What are you comfortable with?” Kaoru said.

“Do you like hugs?” Tamaki asked eagerly. “I give very good hugs.”

“Or maybe you’re more inclined towards hand-holding?” Kyoya said.

You were suddenly very aware of your hands. You clenched them into fists, embarrassed with yourself. “I would probably be alright with anything if I knew that person well enough.”

“So you’re alright with kisses?” Hikaru said, suddenly next to you.

“On the mouth?” Kaoru added from your other side.

“We met two days ago,” you said, shoving both of them. “Don’t get ahead of yourselves.”

“Oh, Tamaki!” a high-pitched voice trilled. Everyone turned to watch a pretty girl with a billowing white skirt cross the lawn toward you. A pout downturned her mouth and eyebrows. “I can’t get a ball through the hoop for the life of me! I must be too weak. If only there was someone who could show me how to do it!”

The syrupy texture of the girl’s voice made you cringe internally. Tamaki ate it right up, however, drawing the girl towards him with a congenial smile.

“Don’t give up hope, darling. Surely a beautiful girl could win an entire match if you put your heart into it.”

The girl blushed and bashfully led Tamaki off. The pair of them looked like a portrait against the lush grass and blue sky.

You shuddered. “I can’t score either, but you don’t see me moaning about it.”

“Well, since you admitted it yourself, you have been terrible at this croquet thing so far,” Kaoru said.

Hikaru nodded. “Mhm. It’s almost embarrassing how bad you are.”

You glowered at them from under the brim of your hat. “Why don’t I show you where you can shove those mallets?”

The twins only laughed, moving off to mingle with a different croquet game.

Kyoya’s face was carefully neutral. “You’re only doing poorly because you’re not focusing.”

“Are you sure these hoops are even big enough for a ball to pass through?”

“Quite.” All of a sudden, Kyoya was beside you. Not close enough to touch, but closer than you were expecting. Your heartbeat quickened just a little.

“First of all, this isn’t a golf club. You don’t have to swing it so far back.” Kyoya guided the mallet closer to your person. Professionally, you told yourself. Nothing intimate about it.

“Just swing back the mallet gently back like a pendulum, through your legs, and there you go.”

Your croquet ball rolled in a straight line through the grass and through the hoop, so easily it was a little insulting.

“Thanks,” you said, a little sheepishly. “I guess I was overdoing it.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Kyoya said. You turned to find that your faces weren’t so far apart. A tiny smile touched Kyoya’s lips and you liked how the expression looked on him, how unassuming it was. Kyoya’s eyes flickered to yours and he looked a little surprised.

He said, “I was meaning to ask—”

“Woah, heads up!” someone hollered.

You looked up, then nearly soiled your pants to find a croquet ball hurtling straight towards you. You scrambled back, but not fast enough to avoid the ball, which slammed into your forehead and immediately hurt like hell. You accidentally knocked into Kyoya and sent both of you sprawling backwards on the grass. Kyoya swore as your head landed right on his stomach, knocking the breath out of him.

“ARE YOU OKAY?” Hikaru, or maybe Kaoru yelled, running up to you. Both twins leaned over you and Kyoya, their faces identically horrified.

“I’m so sorry,” Hikaru said in a rush. “I didn't mean to hit you!”

Kaoru shoved his twin. “I told you hitting the mallet like a bat was stupid!”

“You’re the one who suggested it!”

“You’re the one who actually did it!”

“What happened?” Tamaki rushed to join the twins. When he looked at you, his face turned dark before he exploded.

“You could have killed them!” he shrieked. “Look at that welt on their forehead! Whose bright idea was this?”

The twins pointed accusingly at each other. Tamaki’s face reddened. He looked between Hikaru and Kaoru, probably deciding on who to beat up first.

“Calm down, Tamaki. No one’s dead.” Haruhi placed a hand on Tamaki’s shoulder and all of the steam went out of him. He sagged against her and ran a hand through his dishevelled hair.

“No, of course not. Please forgive me, Hikaru. Kaoru. I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”

Mori helped you to your feet, Kyoya groaning as you got off of him.

“Are you okay?” Honey said, his eyes wide. “Do you want me to kiss your forehead all better?”

You rubbed your forehead, wincing. “No. I should be fine. I think Kyoya’s the one who needs kissing.”

Kyoya refused Mori’s hand and got up himself, dusting off his suit and readjusting his glasses. If it weren’t for the unfortunate grass stains on his pants and the bits of grass in his hair, you would never have known he’d taken a tumble.

“Sorry about that,” you said.

“It’s quite alright,” Kyoya said, only sounding a little strained. “You didn’t mean to. The twins, however …”

A storm cloud seemed to descend over Kyoya’s brow. He grabbed each twin’s shoulder with one hand and steered them away from you, muttering to them intently. His aura seemed so dark and menacing that a collective shudder went through everyone still present.

“There goes a day,” Tamaki said, swinging his mallet in his hand. He looked at you and smiled. “Now that your trial appointments are over, do you have a second choice for your host?”

You looked straight into his eyes when you said, “I stand by my earlier assessment. If Haruhi’s not here, I’ll just go with Honey or Mori.”

Tamaki’s smile went brittle. “And what if they aren’t here either?”

You grinned. “I guess I just won’t come at all.”

Tamaki fell on his tailbone abruptly, looking shell shocked. “N-not come at all?” He started rocking himself back and forth, whispering to himself.

“I think you might have killed him,” Haruhi said.

“Whoops,” you said.

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#ouran high school host club #ohshc #ohshc x reader #gender neutral reader #disceohshc

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mimbotomy · 11 months

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Tag Game

tagged by the awesome @aeide!

Last song: Zombie Zoo by Tom Petty: Super fun song, maybe some ridiculous lyrics, but I’ve always loved it and it recently cycled to be one of my favorites again. Also it makes me want to make like an A to Z playlist of my favorite songs sometime.

Currently watching: Yellowjackets! I’m not quite sure what it is about the show exactly, but it scratches an itch in my brain that I never knew was there. Unfortunately, it’s been slow going, because I’m watching it with my fiancé and we’ve both been so insanely busy with work and wedding planning. We just finished season one a couple days ago though and I’m so excited for season two.

I’m also rewatching New Girl and Psych, because it’s nice to have something fun to on in the background while I work.

Currently reading: . . . I honestly don’t know - I’ve been so busy that I haven’t read an actual book in a long time, so I kind of have three answers?

I’m pretty sure I’m theoretically in the middle of Daisy Jones and the Six though, except it’s been so long that I’d probably have to start over to know what’s going on.

If you count reading specific myths and chapters for reference as reading a book, then it’s my encyclopedia of worldwide mythology. I last looked up some myths about Hephaistos’ birth and parentage to win a debate with my mom and the death of Orpheus for my fic There is No Escape. . .

And the last book that I KNOW I finished was Joseph Campbell’s the Power of Myth, which I read on a plane almost a year ago. It was fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in mythology and folklore.

Current obsession: Art & fanfic (& AC Odyssey) as per usual 😂 Or two specific projects at least? I’ve never really been around children much in my life - all my cousins are about the same age as me and none have kids yet - but I’ve been working as a math tutor and have been around more kids the past six months than the rest of my life combined. And for some reason, that made me super interested in learning to draw kids and age progression, which worked well with my other two obsessions.

So I did a bunch of sketches of Kassandra (who else) at various stages of her life just for practice and while I’d like to finish and post them all eventually, I’m initially planning to post my favorite three sooner rather than later. I’d like to do Alexios too at some point, and already drew him as like an eleven year old for a study for my future second time travel fix it fic.

That fic is not my current obsession though. My current fic brain rot is my silly Alkibiades time loop fic idea where he keeps reliving the day that Phoibe and Perikles die and tries to save them. It’s just outline right now, with a few tiny snippets, but I just can’t stop thinking about it! Which kinda sucks, because I have so many other WIPs and also a fic that I started posting bc I thought I would be done with the last chapter by now so I could post it in two weeks. Guess what - I’m not 😬

Tagging @auroralykos and @aetosavros and anyone else who wants to do this!

#tag game #For lack of a better tag

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

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She has no throne. Girls without thrones should not have knights, but hers won’t go. Princess Zelda – the girl who killed Calamity – would love to fade into legend, but Link’s bought a house, he’s fighting off monsters, and he’s selling giant horses to strangely familiar Gerudo men. She'll never have any peace now. (ao3)

There’s only one bed in the house at Hateno and the first night there, he tries to give it to her.

It’s very normal of him. Like she’s a visitor. Like she’s just stopping by. Link shows her where she can hang her cloak (his cloak) and stow her shoes (by the door) and where the extra blankets are (in the closet). Zelda isn’t sure how to explain without embarrassing him that she already knows the layout – has ghosted these simple hallways, kept vigil on the blood moons. She knows this modest kitchen, knows the creak in the third step up. She knows the stains in whorls of the table top, which ones are wine and which are blood.

Link smells like clean cotton and grass, which seems strange.

She thought he’d smell of black powder, resins, metal – the hard scent of battle and the road. Strange that it doesn’t stick to him, or maybe he took a special effort to scrub it off before coming back into the house. His hair’s damp. He left his boots by the door. The window’s open and distant thunder almost hides the sound of his breathing. When she listens close, his breath sounds loud in her ears, a disharmonizing with the thump of his heart. If he was uncomfortable with her request to sleep next to him, it never reached his face.

Not that much does. Even at the end of things, a century past, she had trouble reading him when he didn’t try to be read.

Link sleeps for a full two days. On the third, he wakes in a panic. She must pry his fingers from the grip of a broadsword and, for ten minutes straight, convince him that the battle is over. He sleeps for another two days. She gardens, straightens up the house, sweeps, sits in the grass outside and rolls around in the wild flowers. Does laundry. Rolls in the grass again. Does more laundry. She borrows a pair of trousers and a shirt that (to her chagrin) are a little too small for her.

The man at the general store is curious about her.

“So, you came in with Link last week. That so?”

Zelda looks up from the grains in the basket, finger worrying the braid in a single head of wheat. “Oh, yes. I’m from… out of town.”

“Well that’s nice,” he says, thoughtfully stroking the brush of his moustache. “Good to see new faces. When he bought the Bolson house across the bridge, we were wondering if he intended to bring family out here.”

Zelda hesitates, not sure if that means she is family or just that the town, generally, assumed that was why Link might buy a house.

“Nice guy,” continues to shopkeep. “The shepherds on the hill pay him to keep Bobokin off the beaches and grazing lands. You also a swordhand or…?”

She’s flattered he might estimate her a co-worker of Link’s, but also not sure she should start lying without his consult. She says she’s a friend. Link is helping her with a survey she’s conducting. (That is true. They talked about that.) The shopkeeper nods.

“Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Would you do me a favor? Nothing big, I have something for Link.”

“Of course.”

The man ducks behind the counter and stands up with a basket heavy with vegetables and grain. He looks at the basket, then back at her. “Sorry. This might be a bit big for you…”

Zelda loops two arms around the basket, the weave-work creaking as she hefts it up onto her hip. “No. It’s fine. Thank you.”

“You sure?” The shopkeeper appraises her biceps for the task. “Meant to send it along the week before last, but he didn’t come by.”

Zelda pauses. “He was… busy.”

Blood on the atrium floor, ozone and fire, the blue light banked silver in the blade. There’s a window in her head that she can look through and he’s still there in that tomb: armored in ancient metal, breathing magic like heat from a kiln, lightning behind his teeth. He’s also where she left him this morning: snoring gently with terrific bedhead and a quilt tangled in his legs.

This is where she finds him when she returns to the house. She leaves the basket on the table in the living area and pads back up the steps to the loft. She avoids the creak in the third stair. A warm square of sunshine is making its way lazily across the comforter onto Link’s lower back; it sets a glow to his cotton shirt, puts sections of gold in his hair. For a moment looking down at him, Zelda is overwhelmed by a paralyzing weight behind her breast bone, sudden and vicious, taking hold of her so tight the muscles in her throat clench and burn. Then the moment passes and she clears her throat.

“Link,” she whispers, hovering near the bed.

Nothing.

“Link,” she says at regular tones.

Snores.

“Link,” she says rather loudly.

He wrinkles his nose and rolls over, taking the edge of the blankets with him and thus cocooning himself in quilts. It’s… probably the most childish thing she’s ever seen him do in their travels together and she stands there, nonplussed, for a moment.

“Well then,” she says, “I will… just make a proper breakfast without your input.”

It’s ten minutes later as she’s well into burning a trio of speckled eggs that Link – very much awake now – jumps the loft bannister to rush her and snag the smoking skillet from her hands. He gives her a look.

“I tried to wake you up,” she says.

He takes the billowing pan to the door and hucks the contents into the yard.

“I was going to fix it.”

He turns and shows her the charred bottom of the pan and gestures to it with his other hand.

“Okay. Perhaps not.”

Zelda stews over a small mug of tea (provided for her when Link became alarmed by her use of the kettle somehow) and acknowledges that food, of course, was the thing to break Hyrule’s light out of his post-battle catatonia. Obviously. Link scraps the burnt food off the cast iron and sets about making a real breakfast. The small house immediately smells of… burnt egg and aroma of grilling ham, eggs, onion, and mushrooms. The hot scent of spices from a handful of glass bottles. He drops a perfect omelet on a plate in front of her a few minutes later and, yes, there it is, gives her another look.

“I thought I had it,” she says.

He takes a seat, shaking his head.

“Oh. Hush,” she says, picking a mushroom from her plate and flicking it at him.

He eats the mushroom off the back of his knuckles where it landed and Zelda rejoices (silently) the tiny boring familiarity of it. Link dedicates the rest of his attention to eating breakfast.

“I sealed Ganon you know.”

Link looks her straight in the eyes, then rolls them.

“Hush!”

She cleans the dishes. Link goes outside to wash up. When he’s done, she listens to the faint sound of her housemate changing clothes upstairs, glances up to catch him pulling his hair into a fresh knot at the back of his neck, studying the small ritual of muscle memory as he combs his fingers from his forehead and temples and pulls back a few times, gathering it where he can tie it. Link is, according to the housewives of Hantero, ‘So pretty you don’t even want to take him home. That kind of pretty.’ Zelda isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean or why it sounded a little like an insult. He finishes with his hair, then notices her watching and tilts his head at her.

She waves his concern away. “It’s nothing.”

He leans against the banister, looking down at her, one brow arched.

“Honestly. It’s nothing. I’m glad you’re up, is all.”

His expression crinkles a little, apologetic.

“You know,” she says, giving her attention to the dishes, “for one hundred years I didn’t have to eat anything. Or sleep. Its… so strange sitting down to a meal now.” She says this directly to the dish she’s drying. “I didn’t realize I missed it. Can you miss things retroactively? I didn’t think you could, but now it’s as though… I remember all those times I didn’t have breakfast and it makes me sad. How silly!” She stacks the plates. “Ignore me. I’m just… I don’t know…it’s not as though time was linear for me when I was… I don’t know why I’m even talking about it.”

She senses Link’s coming down the stairs to stand near her elbow, like a shadow with weight. She looks over her shoulder.

“There should be a word for that look,” she says.

Link takes the plates from the counter puts them away in a cabinet.

She has no throne.

It goes without saying, but Zelda’s still not sure how to say it. Link saddles a horse for her at the Dueling Peaks Stable – a pure white mare so like her old horse that she momentarily believes her to be that every mount. But it’s a trick of the tableau. Somehow, against all odds, Link has recovered the purple and gold riding accoutrements of her house and a wild horse from Castle Town bloodlines. He outfits the horse for her, murmuring softly to it, and she doesn’t know how to tell him to re-tackle her mount in lesser gear. To take off the colors of Royalty. His gesture is too great. The gift too impossible to refuse.

He smiles, patting the mare’s velvety nose while she gingerly feeds it a sugar cube.

Link’s own steed, a mare as well, is a stocky animal with dark coloring and mottled hide. It snorts and stomps impatiently in her stall. There are chunks missing in the spotted coat of her hind quarters. A Bokokin branding. Link explains, later, that he prefers her for travel because she won’t spook at the scent of Bokokin and is already trained for bridle-less combat. Zelda knows, only because Link told her a century ago, when they were first mounting up for travel, that he only rides horses he can break to take guidance from his knees, not the bridal.

At the time, this had only annoyed her and so… “They don’t teach that in the Guard.”

Link hesitated.

Looking back, she can see now that was a symptom of mutism, not uncertainty, but his silence irked her back then, so she’d raised her voice a little. “Why don’t you ride a stallion? You’re a knight now. They’re bigger. Better for mounted combat. Do you mean to protect me or not?” And at another hesitation, she added, “Never mind. I don’t require an escort for this outing. You should report back to the Guard.”

And then she left him in the stable.

Zelda lies awake thinking of this conversation, one hundred years in the past and still clear as the day it happened. Link dozes by the embers of their fire and the soft nickering of his mare, Epona, keeps off the quiet. She shakes her head. Tries to throw off the memory, the condescension, the slights. Petty moments she knows Link has forgotten but she cannot, even in after the war’s been won. Later, she re-saddles her horse with a sizable saddle blanket and bags. This mostly hides the house colors. If Link notices, he doesn’t comment.

The first trouble arises in Hebra.

They’re settling in for the night at the stable in Tabintha where the locals report six killings this season – the dismembered parts of travelers found by search parties. Consumed by wildlife but killed by much worse. Lizalfos most likely. The arctic air hides their unique method of killing – a nitrogenous breath that freezes the flesh on contact, causing limbs to crack off and shatter. Too tough to be eaten by anything but the biggest mountain wolves.

“I’ve a cantrip for that,” Zelda is saying. “It will stop them even freezing your thermal wear.”

Link, doing an inventory of his combustible arrow-heads by lamp light, nods, chewing a stick of jerky while sorting through the small arsenal on the table. It’s a soothing, kind of meditative routine for him so she can tell he’s only partially listening to her. He hums a little while he does it.

“Give me your hand, I’ll put it on your sword arm.”

He stretches out his arm, absently, then whips it back when he feels her start to push his sleeve up. He gives her a suspicious eye.

“It’s not going to hurt, you big baby.”

He continues to eye her, a long blue glare.

“That was one time and it’s not my fault you didn’t listen when I told you it would sting.”

She’s about to really dig into why, honestly, it won’t even tickle this time when a largish sort of man in a heavy doublet and snow gear moves toward their table. Zelda, facing him, notes that three other men hang back but seem to be with him nonetheless, watching. Link, for his part, gives no sign that he hears the man other than to place one hand in his lap. His lap where his sword rests across his knees. He looks over his shoulder only when the man is close enough to be un-ignorable.

“Hello,” Zelda says.

The man ignores her, staring down at her companion. “You Link?” says the man.

“Yiga?” says Link. The jerky stick is still between his teeth so it’s not with any kind of… fear that he says that.

Zelda tenses, but the man just looks confused, the wind-red skin around his eyes crinkling.

“What?”

“Never mind.” Link does not take his hand from his lap.

“You Link or not?”

Link shrugs. Its kinds of infuriating from an outside perspective.

Zelda pipes up. “Sorry, sir. But what business do you have?”

“None, unless one of you is Link.” His lip curls. “Now that I’m up close, I can’t rightly tell which of you is the woman.”

“Thanks,” says Link, ripping the jerky in half between his teeth and chewing. Zelda gives him a look of her own.

“Okay, smartass, I think you’re Link.”

He shrugs again. It makes her want to laugh. It should not. There is a large person with a threatening demeanor hovering over her partner and he appears to have a large ax strapped to his back. To her younger self, this would be cause for alarm, but to this new version of herself, this situation seems exactly as laughable to her as it must to Link who has the divine blade in his lap and no interest in tavern cock fighting. The man’s friends are beginning to make their way across the room now though. Zelda sighs.

“Sir, you’ve found your man. What is it you want?”

“You always speak for him, girl?”

“No. Just right now. What’s your business?”

“My employer needs to speak with him.”

“We’re here on a task of some importance,” Zelda explains, careful with her tone. “There’s been violence and death in the region. We’re here to remedy that. If there is some specific need your employer has of him, then relay it, and we can make our own way there when our tasks are at a close.” Zelda is on her feet now, hands on the table in front of her. Link, sitting still facing her, is looking up at her through his bangs. His eyebrows are up. Zelda ignores him. “So, sir, what is your business and how does it supersede the needs of the good people here?”

It’s only then the man seems to notice the rest of the room watching. The stable hands and inn keeps and small groups of local trappers and traders all eyeing the confrontation with the idle readiness of people with a stake in the outcome. There are swords now, staves, and casual weaponry suddenly visible, on table tops, by hand where they were previously packed away.

The man hesitates then, appraises her. Link, in his seat – Zelda watches his calm blue stare rove toward the man, a dangerous stillness in his stature. The man doesn’t notice.

“What’s your name, little miss?”

“Unless you tell me your business, I see no reason to tell you.”

The man points a finger. “You’re her.” He takes a step forward. “You the one calling herself Zelda, aren’t you?”

Link hits the man. Zelda doesn’t see him do it. He’s too fast. It’s just the follow through, the aftermath – a man twice Link’s size, flying staggering backward, clutching his gut and Link on his feet. The blade is out. The naked metal one hand, the sheath in the other. He doesn’t move to raise it, only stands there, feet apart, shoulders set, directly between her and the four men sent to find them. The blade doesn’t glow. No. It only does that in the presence of evil. But the light catches in the metal, give it a purposeful shine.

“Leave,” says Link.

He barely says it above a whisper, but into the dead silence it drops like a coin into a pan.

Zelda grabs his shoulder. He glances at her. He does not relax even slightly.

“Tell us who sent you,” she says to the men. “You might as well.”

The man holds up two hands. “No trouble, little miss,” he starts to say, but one of his man blurts, “I’d be careful using that name!”

“It’s my name,” she snaps, but the men are gone into the snow outside.

Later, she will tell Link she wishes he hadn’t done that and he will just shrug. This time, it’s infuriating.

They have a nightmare.

Zelda knows it’s ‘they’ not ‘she’ when the scream cuts out of her and, in the same instant, Link lunges up from his cot and buries a broadsword halfway through a tree. Epona, nearby, just looks up from a small bag of oats, snorts, and goes back to eating. The humans present stare at each other for a very long moment. Link is first to move. He wrenches the blade free, bracing one boot against the trunk and yanking. A sigh. He takes a seat, cross-legged next to her and plants the blade point down in the grass by her sleeping cot. He rubs two hands over his face. Then he just looks, tiredly, into her eyes with a question there.

“I dreamed that we lost,” she says. “I mean… that we lost again.”

Link shudders.

“You too?”

He nods, then kind of absently presses his palm to his throat, cupping the crushable curve of his windpipe like a ghost pain still plagues him. Zelda, watching, feels a cold prickle run up her spine and down her arms, raising the fine hairs all the way down to her aching hands. She stops clenching her fists.

“Calamity killed you in front of me.”

Link stops touching his throat, hand hovering uncertainly for a moment before he drops it in his lap. She can see him working up to saying something. He always mouths a word once or twice before pushing his voice behind it.

“It’s okay,” she says quickly. “It wasn’t real.” She pulls her hair back from her face, re-doing the band “Maybe… maybe it was me. I had a nightmare and I, perhaps, shared it to you. That’s possible. I maintained a certain level of… awareness of you all through my time interned with the Calamity. Those paths are still open to some degree. I apologize –”

He makes a cutting motion, interrupting her. Then he raises two hands and, in terse but fluid hand motions, signs, ‘Maybe it was my nightmare.’

She blinks. If he’s signing, he must be shaken. He hasn’t done that in a while.

He shrugs and goes on, ‘I have nightmares. It was probably mine.’

“Oh… I… I suppose, but I don’t think…”

He shrugs again. She’s not sure how each shrug has a specific meaning but it does.

“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not prophetic, I would tell you if it was.”

He nods.

“Link, we’re safe.”

He looks at her. The moonlight through the trees lays lines of silver across his forehead, misses his eyes.

“I swear it,” she says. This small panic rising… she doesn’t know it’s source but she continues, “I would tell you if we were in danger.”

His eyes widen and, after a moment, he says, “I know that.”

Link’s voice always startles her, even when Zelda has ample time to watch him work up to using it. It’s always both softer and deeper than she expects, usually rough with disuse, faintly kinked with an accent she’s only recently identified as a hybrid of eastern Lanaryian and, interestingly, the grammatical pacing in most Zora-learned Hylian. She’s not sure why, but hearing his voice now does damage to something inside her.

“You’ve done more than enough. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to fight anymore.” She shakes her head. “You know that, right?”

His expression smooths out, softens a little. He stands. Zelda watches him calmly pull the sword from the grass, wipe it on his trousers, then pick up the sheath from his sleeping cot and put it away. Then he comes back to her side, close enough to touch and he touches her shoulder, three fingertips pressed against the fabric for long enough that warmth bleeds through and sets gold lines to the roots of her. Fine wires of heat and regret.

Then, he says, very quietly, “I’m staying.”

She can’t say why that makes her want to hit him. Instead she says, “Thank you.”

When they reach Highland Stable, the inn keep says a Gerudo woman came looking for Link. Not Link specifically, but “the owner of the red and black stallion out back”. The innkeep also mentions, somewhat warily, that they will need to charge extra in boarding fee for an animal of his size and temperament and they would greatly appreciate it if Link would ‘settle him’ before taking off again. Link agrees, pays the fee, and heads back to the stalls.

Zelda, previously unaware of this animal, is stupefied by the size of the beast Link returns with, leading it to the large corral near the front of the inn with nothing but a hand on its massive flank. She can’t say what breed it is. The towering stallion stands a monolith stature beside Link, pure black save for the impossible red of its mane and tail. Broad as a Lynel. The middle of its back so high that Link must take a short running leap to mount. Once seated, the beast is comically too large for him.

The horse tolerates Link’s presence, snorting and stomping, massive hooves cutting deep furrows in the grass.

Zelda comes forward only when Link waves her the all clear. “What’s his name?”

Link just huffs and shrugs.

She lets the huge horse nose her palms. “No name? Are you thinking about turning him loose?”

“He’ll leave if he wants,” Link says, taking a handful of deep red mane.

He clicks his tongue, taps his heels and the great black monster trots out into the corral with the air of an animal that planned to do so all along. Zelda retreats to the fence, ducking outside of the ring so she can climb onto the first horizontal bar and lean against the top most support, watching Link take the giant horse through increasingly aggressive maneuvers around the yard. It’s not a fast animal. But its every move becomes a juggernauting force, unstoppable and uncaring. In motion, Link no longer seems too small for his mount.

“A beautiful animal,” someone murmurs.

Zelda jolts a little, startled because there is a very, very tall person in a traveling cloak and hood standing beside her. She didn’t hear them approach. From this angle, she can’t make out their face beneath the hood, only a sharp line of jaw, dark skin. The road-worn cloak and trousers are patterned in interlocking red and blue right angles along the hem. Gerudo Town make. Zelda re-assesses the person standing beside her – at least seven feet tall, biceps (very visible), broad shouldered, but leaned out by their height, large hands (rough with callouses), one forearm strapped with an archer’s guard. Zelda very carefully leans back a little, still searching…

There’s a scimitar-style sword on their hip.

“Sav’otta,” Zelda says.

The Gerudo standing next to her seems surprised. Then, in very deep Gerudo-tongue, says, “Do you speak the language?”

Zelda hesitates. “I’m a little rusty.”

“You are clear enough and well met, little sister. I am Draga.”

Zelda notes, puzzled, that Draga is using slight variant in conjugation she’s not heard before. “Nice to meet you. I am Zelda. I apologize if my Gerudo is antiquated. I’m out of practice.”

Draga nods, then reaches up and pulls the hood down. Zelda blinks. In the split second between the blink and the shock, Zelda knows it’s too late to hide her surprise. Annoyed with herself, Zelda says firmly, “I love your hair. I’ve thought about cutting it short like that, but I’m too set in my ways, big brother.”

Draga smiles at her.

Zelda realizes now what it was in Draga’s grammar that confused her – not linguistic drift, but male modifiers. She’d learned it, but never heard it used in conversation; before now, she had never met a Gerudo man. Draga’s hair, red as old copper, is short for a Gerudo, braided down against his scalp and clipped with intricate gold rings. Dark complexioned even for a Gerudo, high dramatic features. Now that the hood is off Zelda can see the start of very carefully shaved sideburns only just growing along the sharp line of his jaw, deep cheekbones, a heavy brow. He’s so tall and so broad in shoulder, that he reminds her a bit of Urbosa. His eyes are the same green.

In the distance, Link shouts something and the stallion rears up, then dives back down, hooves slamming into the ground so hard the impact vibrates in the earth. Then horse and rider bolt full speed around the edge of the corral, Link’s body ducked low along the beast’s spine.

“You can speak Hylian. I understand it fine. My accent is the trouble do you know the rider?”

“Yes, we’re friends and he’s the owner, actually.”

“Then I’d like to speak with him. I’d like to propose a sale, if possible.”

“I can flag him down.”

“I am in no rush.”

Across the corral, Link pulls the stallion out of its gallop and into a slowdown rotation. Afterward, he dismounts, patting the giant horse in a congratulatory manner and saying something to him. Zelda wonders what he says. He is always saying things, specifically just to horses. The black giant flicks its ears forward, then bends its head down to forcefully but affectionately push its gigantic head into Link’s chest, knocking him back a few steps.

“Link!” Zelda puts her fingers in her mouth and whistles, a high ribbon of sound. “Can you come here?”

Link leaves the horse to its own devices and jogs over. The giant horse trots close behind, like the biggest dog in existence and loiters intimidatingly behind him. There’s horse hair in Link’s clothes, his bangs are stuck to his forehead, mud splattered on his pants. He wipes his hands on his tunic, eyeing the stranger

“Link. This is Draga. He’s interested in the stallion.”

Link blinks. The giant horse noses the side of his head. He looks doll-sized beside it.

“Zelda, would you mind translating?” Draga says. “I want to be clear.”

“Of course!”

Link, hesitating, taps her arm. When he has her attention, he signs, “I don’t speak Gerudo. Can you…?”

“I was just saying that. I can translate. Of course.”

Draga frowns. “He doesn’t speak?”

“He does, but it’s troublesome for him.” Then in Hylian. “You wanted to ask if the horse is for sale, right?”

Draga nods, looking at Link as he does so.

Link thinks about it, then says, aloud, “Maybe.” He signs, “I’d have to see him ride and how Asshole likes him. He’s a bastard.”

Zelda paraphrases. “Link wants to see you ride and determine how the horse likes you. It’s a very temperamental animal.”

“This is acceptable,” Draga says in warm but carefully enunciated Hylian. He unclasps his cloak from his neck. “I would prefer….” He gestures, says in Gerudo. “No point in wasting sunlight.” Then in Hylian. “Now?”

Link shrugs. “Okay.”

Draga braces one hand against the top of the corral fence and vaults it in a single slow but easy motion. The whole fence groans under the brief weight. He lands heavily, straightening to his improbable height and without the hood, Zelda can see his outfit isn’t Gerudo-made. The leather work – bracer, light armor, and gloves – are Rito despite tooling in Gerudo script. The tunic and under-shirt – Faron Highlands. A series of short blades strapped to his thigh glint Eldin-mined amber, a Goron-styled finish.

Zelda extrapolates from this the gear he left Gerudo town with no longer suits him and he’s been on the road a very long time.

The black stallion snorts at his approach. Draga seems unperturbed. He offers one giant hand for the beast’s inspection. The stallion snorts again, shaking it massive head back and forth. Link seems relaxed, but Zelda can tell he’s primed to jump back in if the monster horse goes berserk. Draga just huffs, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Hello, great king,” he murmurs. Draga’s tone is familiar. “Whoa, whoa.”

The horse eyes him.

“You know me,” he says, for some reason.

Zelda’s nose itches as he says this, her fingers too.

“Settle down. There you go.”

The giant horse picks a cautious path forward, like its navigating unsteady terrain. After another moment, it pushes its nose into Draga’s palm, lipping at his fingers like it does indeed know him. Draga runs his other hand along the beast’s jaw. His face is close enough to the stallion’s nose, that its nostrils flare a little. Zelda thinks he’s still speaking, but she can’t understand the words. Rather, she feels she almost knows the words. Like she’s just forgotten them and is left with just… impressions of what he says.

She thinks, however, he said something like, “You know your nature now.”

Draga climbs onto the stallion’s back and, once seated, looks at his audience. Then he very casually digs his heels slightly into the beast’s flanks and it trots a tight, easy circle in front of them. Then, just for good measure, he takes two handfuls of the beast’s mane and the horse rockets forward at a clip at least twice the speed Link had it moving. Link laughs out loud, startling Zelda who looks at him with wonder.

“This,” Draga says, bringing the horse back around at a trot, “is a Gerudo horse. Certainly.”

Zelda claps. “Astonishing!”

Link gestures in that animated way that means he’s probably mouthing words, illustrating his amazement.

Draga brings the horse to a stop facing them. “If this is satisfactory, should we discuss price?”

Zelda taps Link on the shoulder. “He wants to know if he passes and if you have a price, Link?”

Link shakes his head. “No sale. He’s yours.”

Draga blinks, frowning. “I think I misheard him.”

Zelda laughs. “I don’t think you did. Link, are you sure?”

Link signs in big hyperbolic sweeps, grinning. “It’s his horse. Obviously. Right? Looks like destiny, doesn’t it?”

“He says the horse is obviously yours, Draga. He can’t sell what is not his.”

“I cannot possibly accept,” Draga says. “He should name a fair price.” He looks directly at Link and, in much louder commanding Hylian, says, “You should give a price.” He looks at Zelda. “Does he understand what this horse is worth?”

Zelda smiles. “Yes. He knows what the horse is worth. He just doesn’t care. If you’re concerned about our financial well-being, you needn’t be. And honestly, if you take the horse then we no longer need to worry for his board and care. Knowing he’s found proper ownership is more than enough.” She glances at Link who’s giving her the thumbs up. “Yes. That’s right. He insists.”

“Your friend is mad.”

“Link, he says you’re mad.”

Link laughs. It’s infectious, sending jolts of warmth through her face.

Draga, exasperated, says, “If he will not allow me to pay him for the price of the horse, then will he allow me to buy the both of you a meal tonight?”

“Oh, he will certainly tell you do that. I feel your wallet may regret it, however.”

Later, having watched Link eat an entire pot of stew, a loaf of bread, a bowl of fruit, and a whole mutton, Draga tells Zelda that he sees now where the tiny Hylian might get his impossible energy from. He says this despite the fact Link has folded his arms on their low table, laid his head down on them, and gone fast to sleep. Zelda is taking the opportunity to balance a small loaf of bread on the top of the Hero’s head, placing it painstakingly until she is certain of its stability. Then she reaches for a dinner roll.

“He is either impossibly productive or dead to the world,” Zelda assures Draga, carefully stacking the dinner roll on top of the loaf. “I catch up when he’s unconscious.”

Draga watches her finish her tower of baked goods, then says, “Forgive me, but how old are you, little sister?”

She’s practiced this one. “I’m eighteen now.” She folds her arms on the table top. “I’m not entirely certain about Link. He grew up around Zora and they don’t value annual celebrations of birth so he always forgets.”

His brows arch. “The Zora?” He enunciates it Hylian. “That is… unusual.” And in Gerudo: “You two are… business partners?”

“Yes, but we’re friends. We’ve worked together a long time.”

“What is the nature of your commerce together?”

“We protect each other. Link does most of the jobs to do with hunting and security and I’ve taken up as a healer. Between us, we can relieve all manner of suffering and people pay for that.” She hesitates, then adds in Gerudo. “Link has a wide-spread reputation and people all over this realm trust him implicitly to accomplish what others cannot. We are on our way to handle such a task in the next few days.” She shrugs, picks up cup and pours herself some water. “You’ve caught us in an interim period.”

Draga sits forward. He’s so large, that his doing so blots out a significant part of light from across the room. In Hylian, he asks, “Do you require additional hands in this endeavor?”

Zelda thinks his accent is really not that strong.

“Link and I should be fine. It’s quite straightforward. There’s a Lynel we’re bringing down east of here.”

Draga tilts his head. “You are Lynel-hunting?” He gestures between her and Link. “You two?

“Looks are deceptive, Draga.”

Link, still asleep on the table, mutters and shoves his face deeper into the crook of his elbow. This disturbs the dinner roll which slides off his head, bouncing on his shoulder. The bread loaf just wobbles, then settles. Draga, observing this, looks back at Zelda with some incredulity.

“A dozen Lynels he’s brought down.” Zelda sips her drink. “A dozen.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Draga says in blunt, skeptical Hylian.

“Link exists to defy expectations.”

Draga narrows his eyes slightly and Zelda is, again, struck by the likeness to Urbosa. “Then if I were simply curious how a Hylian the size of my arm brings down Lynels? Would that be reason enough that you might allow me to accompany you?”

Zelda frowns. “You don’t know us well, Draga. I feel I should be up-front about a few aspects of what we do. The jobs we take on are usually quite dangerous and even the missions that are not martial can be unusual. Our methods are somewhat unorthodox…”

“You have Hylia’s Gift,” Draga interrupts.

Zelda frowns. “Hylia’s Gift?”

He frowns back. “Do you not say that in Hylian?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Magic,” Draga says, in Gerudo this time and Zelda can see how that might translate literally, into Hylian. “You worry I will be offended or suspicious of it. I am not. My mothers were all versed in some aspect of spellcasting, rune-craft, or ward-work. It’s not unusual to me.” He jerks his head toward Link. “Even that one, I sense it. A breath of the wild.”

“Breath of the wild?”

Draga sighs. “Do you not say that in Hylian either?”

Zelda grins. “No.”

“Wild magic.” He ponders this. “In Gerudo teachings, magic draws on three elemental kinds – breath, blood, and bone. Your semblance is blood. His is breath. Breath is rawer stuff. Harder to harness, instinctive.” In Hylian he says, “Wilder.”

Zelda considers this. “In… Hylian teachings, the abilities gifted from the Goddess are of three elemental kinds, but we cite wind, water, and earth. All simply being… attitudes of magical practice all under the same divine source. Air is the most rare and volatile. I… supposed I did not categorize Link’s talents that way.”

Draga is tearing a piece of bread in half. He looks at her. “Why not?”

She frowns at her drink. “I don’t know. I guess… I always saw him differently than a… sorcerer.”

“I am surprised you did not see it. You both seem very alike.”

“We’re not related.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Draga uses the bread to wipe stew from the inside of the bowl. “I do not think there is a proper word for it. You seem both like parts of a larger thing.” He shrugs and eats the bread. “I do not know how to explain it. When I look at you with truth, that is how you seem.”

“Do you have Hylia’s Gift, Draga?”

“Yes.” He looks at her, picking an orange from the bowl. “Does that trouble you?”

She begins to say ‘no’, then pauses.

“Why are you trusting me?”

When he doesn’t answer, just peels the fruit in his hand, she elaborates.

“In Gerudo culture, magic is… there are rules about who can use it.” She keeps her tone soft. Concerned, not accusatory. She doesn’t specify in what way he is outside their parameters. She just stares up at him, this giant man who reminds her of Urbosa in ways she can’t quite quantify, who Link gifted a priceless horse for no reason than he felt it was natural. “Why are you so sure I am a friend? If the current Chief, Riju, heard word of it, she would be compelled to act.”

Draga studies her face for a moment. “Do you think Riju should act?”

Zelda lowers her voice. “No, I don’t… but I also just met you.”

Draga’s mouth pulls a little, almost a smile, then he goes back to peeling his orange. In Gerudo, he says, “You should not fret, little sister. The Gerudo are wary of magic, but Urbosa herself commanded thunder and much more besides. I am not outside Law if I return within the year and declare myself.” He levels a very calm look at Zelda. “Hylians don’t regulate that, do they?”

“Magic doesn’t regulate every well. But there were licenses you could obtain like any other business and penalties for practicing without proper credentials.” She pauses. “But that was one hundred years ago. It’s… died off somewhat.”

Draga concedes that with a tilt of his head. “And what kind of craft do you practice, Zelda?”

She thinks of rain.

Hot and impossibly heavy, the mud sucking her sandals under. She thinks of her fingers knotted in Link’s bloody tunic. The fucking sword in his hand. Glowing, but not bright enough to stop ancient machinery running them down, racing across the country to cleave their bones from their bodies. She thinks of her prayer – Goddess, take me instead. Leave the one of us worth anything alive. – and then how the Guardians, in that exact moment, found them.

She thinks of tithing. Alters burnt with fruit and grain. Her family, her kingdom, her champions, her own knight: The blood sacrifice Hylia required. She thinks how it hurt. How hot, how infinite, how indifferent the power that screamed through her skin and how none of it hurt as much as that moment when Link stopped breathing. Her nightmares look like this: The sword never speaks. She kneels there in that field until Calamity comes to crush her from existence.

“Healing and protection,” she says. Zelda reaches across the table for Draga’s wine.

“You’re not old enough for that,” he says conversationally.

“I am,” she says and drinks directly from the bottle.

go to part 2

#botw #legend of zelda #breath of the wild #legend of zelda breath of the wild #loz #lozfic #post game fic where the cycle starts all over again #and ganon just wants to buy that giant horse off link #basically #platonic until its not #the triforce always comes together #interim #rae writes #raewrites

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ontheblock · 3 years

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FUCK you write Patrick so well. Fr I got a really interesting idea for a fic. How about a fic where Patrick meets his MOTHER FUCKEN match? So you know like perhaps Patrick trys to get under her skin one day, but she is just as nasty and he is totally fucking put off by this. Like a reader who is you know also kinda... sadistic, manipulative and.... a little bit psychopathic. So anyway Patty boy stalks her, is super like fucking obsessed, tries to get her attention and fails and its driving him fucking insane cause he doesn't know if he wants to kill or like... u know fuck her. So so so, Patrick confronts her, like isolates her whatever tries to kill her but idk ill let ur imagination take the wheel. And maybe like some smut or something ensues?

stan this anon, this request really pulled me out of the cycle of starting a story but not finishing it. this was lowkey a challenge to write only because i couldn‘t decide what approach to make but holy shit- it was fun. i hope i didn‘t stray too far from your request with making the reader the silent mindfuck kind of psycho that fucked with pat‘s solipsism and really makes him desperate instead of the violent nasty type that would probably make him feral- if some nasty fucker really wants me to attempt a different approach i will probably write it. i‘m that much of a slut for him. mind the tags— i didn‘t beta this, it took me a good 3 days to write just the smut so i just wanted this pOSTED.

steps ahead

•warning: violence/gore, mentions of death, smut, just patrick hockstetter once again, f-slur like once, dubcon/noncon

steps ahead pt ii

The first time he saw her was in a dream. He stood in a pool of dead rats, their fur matted with blood and each other’s filth. There were birds and cats scattered across the mass of rats. Funny how they were each other’s natural enemies- prey for one another but Patrick came out on top. Not as a human who stood at the top of the food chain but as an omnipotence. He stood on top, always.

So why were his feet sinking under the mass of not quiet solid anymore but not yet liquified carcasses? The bones pierced into the soles of his feet - way too sharp, way too hard to be of a decaying rat. He would know, wouldn‘t he? The meat was raw, squishy. It was filthy and the smell was almost real - painfully pungent and nothing one could ever forget. His first was roadkill, the next was his kill. It was special. But this felt off. The rats weren‘t just killed in curious Patrick-fashion. They were cut open with their spine sticking out and their heart‘s missing from their chest. Patrick‘s stomach was hot and cold with a strange sensation, his fingers seeking purchase in the sticky fur that was about to swallow him up to the knee already until he paused when a shadow loomed over him, tall enough to overshadow him and that was the part that made this dream a nightmare through and through. Patrick blinked once, twice, three times. His vision was getting blurry and it felt like last summer all over again when he hotboxed Huggin‘s car with the cheapest weed he could get his hands on that day. It took him a week to air the car out and for Patrick‘s nose to not bleed at the slightest touch.

When Patrick looked up he was met with a tall smudge of shapeless nothing, like a body that hasn‘t taken its shape yet, an unrendered character in a video game. The blur became solid so slowly that Patrick was ready to gauge out his own eyes to wake the fuck up from whatever kind of substance induced fever dream this was. Ironically enough, he went to bed sober that night. The body took shape, tall but blurry around the edges, no real mass as if it was just mist he could glide his hand through. The only thing Patrick could take for real was the face protruding out the head-like mass above him. His breath almost caught in his throat at the face of a girl no older than him staring down at him. An unknown light source showed her features clear as day but while her eyes were bright and only set on him, they felt like placeholders with nothing behind them - like marbles that caught the light brilliantly, able to reflect the prettiest shades of the rainbow but they were still cold balls of glass. Those eyes showed the same emotional depth that he saw in the mirror - none at all - and it was the first time he wanted them out his own skull, or maybe it would be nicer to dig his thumbs into hers and for a moment Patrick thought she could read his mind. A cold stretch of fingers pressed into the pulse point on his neck, delicate thumbs digging into his trachea. She was so close but Patrick couldn‘t remember when the fuck she moved at all. Patrick‘s whole world zeroed in - not on the hands attempting to collapse his windpipe - but on the smile on her face and Patrick realized that the light source glowing into only her face wasn‘t a light source at all. She was the light.

Patrick sat up with a start, delirious from whatever woke him up in the earliest god damn hours of the morning. The room was still dark, just a single strip of mellow moon light crept through the halfway closed curtains, just shy of dipping his bed in its light. Patrick‘s hand formed a loose collar around his neck, gulping down fits of air and searching his bed for the crushed pack of Camel, coming up with nothing but Bower‘s empty pack of Lucky Strikes he stole and his lighter. His eyes were still bleary with sleep, an agitated puff of air rose and sunk in his chest as he pushed it out through his nose. The dream was slowly coming back to him as he rubbed the residue out of his eyes and realization overcame him. He didn’t dream often so it should‘ve unsettled him that the face towering over him stayed in his mind so clearly - should’ve, but it didn’t. He didn’t recognize her, or at least he couldn’t put a name or experience on her. He was shit with remembering faces of women. He stopped going by faces and names long ago and instead went for how eager he was to get them alone. If they squealed or slapped him once he got them cornered their face was stuck in Patrick‘s head - if they cried out and started pleading the moment Patrick grabbed his crotch too close to them their name might come to mind. But thinking about that face? Nothing came up as far as his groggy memory could go other than that she was pretty.

He just wanted to go back to sleep but his heart was still beating in his ears and cold sweat was practically pushing out of ever pore and sticking his shirt to his chest. Patrick‘s head lulled back with a low groan as one hand pushed the blanket off his thighs. He was hard. He wanted to strangle that girl.

“So, you’re telling me about this why?“ Henry Bowers turned in his seat to scowl at Patrick sitting in the backseat. He just shrugged at him, earning a scoff before Henry turned back around to turn the music up. “Thought you‘d know her, stud.“ The comment made Huggins bite back a grin and Vic snorted in his seat next to Patrick. He didn‘t expect Henry to react, getting the silent treatment and a middle finger thrown over the shoulder. Judging from the barely healing cut on Bower‘s chin he was in one of his moods after a run in with Officer Bowers before his duty began. Patrick didn‘t bother holding in his leer as they pulled up by the school entrance.

Patrick was quick to climb through the window, effortlessly ignoring Huggins‘ yelling after him to use the fucking door, you faggot and checking his pockets to make sure he had didn‘t leave anything in the car while Henry finished his cigarette and snuck one from Vic for later. Patrick made a full body stop, one hand in his pocket and the other holding his Camel pack, when he saw a face that looked vaguely like someone he should remember and once he saw those eyes again the blur from last night overcame him like a dip in the Kenduskeag.

“Pat? You coming?“ Vic stood next to him, smacking his palm against his back to get his attention. Patrick just groaned in affirmation before turning to the boys. “See her?“ All six eyes followed the jerk of Patrick‘s thumb. Huggins was the first to ogle whatever girl he saw. “Yeah, nice tits. What about her?“ Henry - usually overeager with lecherously agreeing - just crushed his burned down cigarette under his boot. “Ain‘t that l/n? The bitch is crazy for all I know.“ Huggins pulled a face that screamed back paddling. He just wasn‘t made for psycho chicks - his own words. Vic sized her up with an indifferent shrug but Patrick stared her down in an one sided battle. She hasn‘t looked at them once. “That so?“ Patrick glanced at Henry. The last name definitely sparked something in the back of his mind, even if he couldn‘t grasp what it sparked. So that was you. “‘S bullshit, if you ask me. Look at her, rich bimbo. Gotta be a rumor.“

And - oh - he was looking. Henry wasn‘t wrong. You looked like another Greta with tits for brains, a pretty smile and hair that caught the sunlight like a halo. Your face wasn‘t that special but his interest was piqued.

“Rumors about?“

“Who knows? Pops was shitfaced but said something about a case of bones in their backyard, like a lot of fuckin‘ bones.“

That seemed a lot less odd - people buried their dead animals out back all the time. He shook his head at himself as he followed Henry. He was acting like a spaz over a dream that showed any generic girl he probably hooked up with out of town and forgot about. This was nothing. He just needed to pick a fight with Bowers to screw on his head right.

Or maybe he didn‘t because on his way from attending-half-of-literature to skipping-chem-behind-the-school he walked right into you. Literally walked right into you standing by the locker around the corner as he speed walked away from the creepy janitor huffing and nagging about kids like him littering soda cans and cigarette buds around school grounds. Patrick never liked him and wanted to kiss the ass of the drunk driver that flattened his late wife, letting the old sleaze stay home for a month.

Patrick‘s hands shot out, grabbing onto the next best thing to keep his balance - ultimately clutching at your shoulders and sending you tumbling with your back into his chest. He mentally kicked himself in his own balls for his single thought to be that you used some bullshit floral shampoo from the corner shop until you shoved his hands off your velour jacket and gracefully ripped him back to reality. His eyebrows flew up on his forehead at your frown once you turned around, irritation written in every part of your body language. The initial anger in your features sent a shock up and down his spine, flaring out towards the very tips of his fingers in anticipation. “Hockstetter? What the fuck?“ You shouldered your backpack, the frown on your face making way for a more confused pinch of the brows. “Don‘t you have kids to bully or something?“ A grin spread across his face while he leaned next to your ajar locker, shrugging. “It‘s Thursday, means I bully pretty girls today.“ He would‘ve welcomed any reaction from recoiling to cussing or even cringing in disgust but not you rolling your eyes at him and pushing past him. His palms itched uncomfortably and he dug his bitten nails into the ball of his hand. It was like you peered down at him even now, leering with indifference in your eyes while he stood waist deep in a grave of death. The picture of an empty crib flashed his mind, then a closed casket the size of an infant while his mother wept. It‘s been so long since he felt that itch and now he had to scratch it.

Patrick huffed, peeking into the gap in the locker and realizing that the idiot didn‘t close it. He pushed out a laugh, prying it open and right away there were two crumbled pieces of paper tumbling to the ground. It was a fucking mess if he‘s ever seen one. Among school books and stray pens there were torn and balled up pages upon pages from books and what looked like ripped letters. The inside of the locker door had pictures stuck to it of you and your shallow bimbo friends. Your smile was bright and innocent enough but it left a bitter taste in his mouth as he pulled one picture off to study it. You would definitely notice something like this missing but Patrick wasn‘t one to care about stealing property before and he wasn‘t going to start now. Maybe it was the lack of sleep he got that night, maybe it was the fact that he was short on nicotine this morning but he could‘ve sworn that the flickering hallway lights above illuminated your face as if you soaked up everything around you. The picture looked recent enough - probably from last summer, based on the Kenduskeag behind you and your friend and most importantly, on your dripping hair and soaked shirt clinging to your chest. Your lips were tinted red by the awful cherry slurpee the only decent ice cream parlor in Derry offered. The back had a handwriting on it, most likely yours. ‘y/n + carrie ‘88‘ Patrick folded the photo in half to shove it into his back pocket. It was going to make a great addition to his spank bank in the future.

He shoved the mass of paper back into the locker, exposing about five tubes of squeezable lipglosses from clear to pink to a translucent red and all of them were at a different stage of empty and all of them were fruit scented. Who were you trying to impress? Patrick snorted, picking up a half empty 8 ounce body spray bottle with its cap missing and tossing it back inside after giving it the sniff test. It smelled like his mother used to smell on date night with his father - roses and ginger. He never understood why women bothered. Instead, he fished a pen out from under your mess - he never looked into a girl‘s locker but in movies they were definitely cleaner - and scribbled onto a blank page, sticking it to the spot where the stolen picture hung. It never failed to freak out little girls like you that played tough.

‘i know where you live <3‘

“Hockstetter, where the fuck were you?“ Henry crushed his empty can of soda and tossed it out the passenger window. Vic handed Patrick the last hit of his cigarette before he opened the backseat door to climb in. It‘s been a week since Patrick put that note in your locker and it peeved the fuck out of him that you had the same valley girl smile on your face every time he saw you in the halls. Whenever your eyes met and you applied your cherry lipgloss it was like getting a mean chinese wrist burn but on his whole spine.

“Taking a piss.“ He finished the last inch of the cigarette and came in next to Vic who was scooting over to sit behind Huggins. Henry narrowed his eyes, following his movements in the car mirror. “Whatever. Can we fucking go now?“ Henry’s leg bounced impatiently and Patrick just felt trigger happy today. “I don’t know.“ He gave a little shrug and nodded towards the driver seat. “Can I drive?“ Huggins didn’t even skip a beat as he threw him the most scandalized look anyone has ever seen on him, acting like he just called his mother a whore. “Hell no.“ Patrick just grinned as he looked out the window and twirled his metal lighter in this hand. Huggins finally started the car engine to pull out of Hockstetter‘s driveway for a weekend cruise outside Derry. Mr Huggins just filled the tank yesterday before he told Belch to polish the car and he wouldn‘t stop talking about how the car purred like a horny cat even though it looked exactly the same to Patrick but a free ride was a free ride and a good opportunity to pick up someone while Huggins took his gas station piss break that was inevitable at this point.

They were about thirty minutes past the rusty sign that boldly announced the end of Derry, Maine and on an empty road going way over the speed limit while Huggins tapped his thumb on the steering wheel to his favorite part in Master of Puppets. The music was turned up so loud it vibrated under his feet and pleasantly traveled up his legs but Henry had no problem speaking over it, going on about a girl.

“Speaking of girls.“ Patrick dangled one arm out the window, feeling the side eye of Vic on him because when Patrick started talking girls it had to be something interesting - which was code for insanely hot or insanely disgusting but interesting all the same. “That y/n girl. Think she‘s a queer? Never seen her with a guy before.“ Henry gave him a look over his shoulder before he shrugged the question off. “I heard she had a boyfriend before the fucker went missing. Why the fuck do you care?“ Patrick stared out the window with little engagement. “I don‘t.“ Henry looked him over one last time before he turned back around. “Man, you go for the most psycho chicks out there.“ It made Huggins snort as if he had any room to talk with his three months dry streak. “How crazy can she be? She‘s a girl - all bark, no bite. Let her reject him and he‘ll stop being so pussy-whipped over her.“ Patrick kicked at the drivers seat. “Fuck off. I‘m not pussy-whipped, you fat fuck.“ Henry ended their fight prematurely by telling both of them to shut the fuck up and they drove for another ten minutes.

Patrick bounced his leg to the violent rhythm of the music blasting in his ear - tuning out Vic‘s complains while he was at it - when he sat up straight like a mean wasp stung him right in the neck. He vaguely heard Henry‘s irritated “what the fuck is it now?“ as he slapped at Huggins‘ arm. “Stop the car.“ Huggins wavered, blinking in confusion as if Patrick just asked him the square root of pi. “What?“ He kept his eyes on the road but his attention wasn‘t all there, almost steering them straight into a road sign. “Pull the fuck over. Today, you fuck!“ Belch had just enough time to pull over before Patrick swung the door open wide and stumbling out the car, his aerosol can clattering on the cracked pavement below. His mind was reeling.

“What the fuck was that?!“ Henry slammed the car door behind himself, shoving against Patrick‘s chest hard enough to make him stumble into the closed backseat door. Patrick shot him an angry glower. “I saw it!“ Henry had no problem matching the glare, stepping back into Patrick‘s personal space. “What? We haven‘t passed a fucking car in like fifteen fucking minutes!“ Patrick‘s fingers twitched with the jolting feeling of wanting to punch Bowers‘ yellowing teeth in. “You‘re fucking insane, Hockstetter. What the fuck is wrong with you?“ Henry shoved his finger into Patrick‘s sternum and reality washed over him like the first swim in ice cold water at the start of summer break and a somber voice in the back of his skull reminded him that it was pretty much impossible that you were standing by the road, waiting for him in serene fucking stillness but his spine felt stiff as if someone fixated it with a metal pipe. This was fucked. Whatever part of his mind created you was completely fucked because there was absolutely no way that you were real. This felt nothing like the time with Avery who was just an inconvenience, something that defied his logic and had to be fixed - out of sight out of mind kind of thing. You were like a plague and his own mind was turning on him by making you up. Not even his sleep was his own anymore. Whenever the rare scenario of a dream came up it was just you standing above him and he would wake up at the ass crack of dawn with his dick straining in his boxers. Some dreams left him confused for a minute or two wether or not he was awake yet, wether or not it was a chair with dirty clothes piled on it across the room or you standing in the corner because he was sure he heard someone breathing down his neck a second ago.

Patrick ran a hand down his face before he pulled open the door to slump back in the seat. He closed the door hard enough to startle Vic who was pointedly avoided the whole thing because if there was one person he didn’t want to fight that day it was Patrick in a bad mood.

Patrick wasn‘t the kid to enter the public library - he preferred to loiter around the dingy video store, sneaking behind the beaded curtain to the forbidden adult section. But the manager caught him one time too often and made a point to not leave him unattended during his late shift. So here he was. The teenage part timer behind the counter definitely recognized him, shrinking into himself the moment he walked inside. He recognized your color block sneakers easily since it was weekend and the library wasn‘t the first place kids your age liked to spent time in.

He roamed the aisles until he spotted you in front of another tall bookcase, stretching on the very tips of your toes to reach a book above you, the little shirt you wore riding up your belly. You were just making it too easy for him.

He was behind you before you knew it and his left hand ghosted over the exposed skin. Patrick knew that his hands were cold, the contrast to your warm flesh sent a shiver up his arm and his fingers pressed into the soft part of your stomach. You jumped under the touch, whipped your head around. “What—? You dick!“ Patrick chuckled but his hand didn’t move away. His right hand pulled the book from the shelf, holding it just out of your reach to read the cover. “What? You read about biology for fun?“ He snorted, lowering the book enough to let you snatch it from him. “It‘s a study about cadavers and carcasses. Maybe you should pick up a book once in a while.“

He didn‘t care about the badly delivered insult. He stroked his thumb one last time over your hip before pulling away and gestured to your chest in interest. Your eyes followed until you looked down at the necklace around your neck - a small claw that looked awfully realistic tied to a leather string. “It was my cat‘s claw. I wanted to keep it.“ You shrugged a little, brushing your finger over the edge to the piece of keratin. At that moment Patrick really wanted to slam your head into the bookcase and fuck you raw in front of the elderly customers coming in and out the library. He followed you to the front desk to the bundle of nerves behind the counter who really tried not to look at Patrick. “So you cut up your cat, huh?“ His question hung in the air and you just chuckled like it was a really good joke. Little bitch. You bagged the book and strolled over to the door, Patrick hot on your tail and you left the store as if there wasn‘t a man following you that was trying to decide wether he should violate you before of after bleeding you dry. Hell, maybe you would like that but he wasn‘t sure if he should like that. He wanted to scare you. He wanted solid proof that you were like everyone else around because you just couldn‘t be real. His hand still tingled from before. The sensation was like his hand belonged on your naked skin.

Patrick looked around to see you disappear into a car. “Fuck.“

Patrick stood against the locker across from yours, staring holes in your back as you opened it and slowly - painfully slow - unfolded the piece of paper.

‘4233 West Broadway‘

Excitement mingled with the blood rushing through his veins because it would happen any minute. You would recognize your own address, nervously look around you and meet his gaze. Your eyes would go wide, threatening to fall out as the watery shine of fear glazed them over and- You crumbled the paper in your hand and threw it in the overflowing trash at the end of the hallway. “Fucking- What?“ A junior kid ducked his head at his hushed voice alone as he passed him. Patrick made a mental note to get the ginger fuck later but now he crossed the hall without even looking at any other student that just came short of bumping into him because <i>this wasn‘t how he planned this to go</i> like at all. He was the only bona fucking fides and you were the manifestation of a sick joke he played on himself. How could you of all people play him like a damn fiddle - edge him to the very end of his seat with heat shooting out into his limbs only to run an ice cube over the vein of thrill that pulsed under his skin - unless—

Patrick swallowed nothing, his mouth void of moisture, as his heavy boots sent the trashcan rolling over the ground - trash and old cafeteria food sliding across the hall and before any teachers could ride his ass for it, he already rounded the corner you disappeared behind. It wasn‘t difficult to spot you and it would be just as easy to gain on you - Patrick was a fit boy and you, well, you were unsuspecting as you clutched your little literature book to your chest and twisted the earring stud in your earlobe which he picked up on as a habit of yours when you were bored. You didn‘t even have the right to be fucking bored, not when you stirred Patrick‘s mind like a damn sunday‘s soup. He just kept your pace three and a half feet behind you and with the student body practically parting like the red fucking sea it wasn‘t hard to not lose sight of you. He had to prove himself you weren‘t another anomaly like Avery. Ad nauseam, or whatever.

It was 7pm when Patrick came home. The lights in the kitchen were on and he heard the clattering of metal on porcelain, idle chatter between his parents and his mother‘s obnoxious giggle. He thought that he would be spared as he eased the front door shut and made his way over to the staircase, avoiding the creaking floorboards.

“Patrick? Honey, are you home?“ The distinct sound of his mother‘s voice made him groan, his hand just hovering over the hardwood railing when his body came to a stop to throw his head back.

“Yeah.“ Loud footfalls disturbed the family atmosphere like a bull in a china shop. Patrick loomed in the kitchen doorway. His mother put out a plate for him as always and he could feel the disapproval in his father‘s rubbernecking.

“Come, sit. Patty, you haven‘t told me your little secret.“ Despite her cushy tone, Patrick‘s muscles seized up uncomfortably because she had no idea how that little sentence danced around his skull for a whole minute. It would mean anything from skipping school to beating the puberty out of children to murdering and keeping the carcasses as a trophy in a rotting fridge down at the landfill. His father‘s click of the tongue was like a wake up call and Patrick played it cool by not only bypassing his mother but straight up reversing to avoid whatever she was digging for. “Ma, I have an essay to write.“ He really did, though he didn‘t know what class it was supposed to even be for and his father gave him a look Patrick wanted to punch off his face while his mother ushered him to sit in front of her - he didn‘t take the invitation. “Patty, you don‘t have to be embarrassed. She seems like a proper one.“ And for the first time Patrick was at a loss for words, feeling like a fully grown scolopendridae was writhing underneath his skin and its venom was currently feasting on his nerves. He was annoyed, so annoyed that he wasn‘t at least two steps ahead.

“What?“

“Oh, you know, honey. Y/n. She stopped by to return a study sheet. Patty, mommy‘s really happy that you met such a sweet girl but you‘re still under the eyes of God an—“

Patrick tuned the rest of her fruitless no-sex-before-marriage-talk out as his feet already carried him upstairs, practically bodychecking his door open like a SWAT raid on a kiddie fiddler‘s apartment. Nothing looked out of place. Candy wrappers and crushed up soda cans littering the carpet, Playboy and Hustler magazines hidden underneath his mattress and stacks of papers and baggies he scored scattered across his carved up desk. Even the contents of the wooden tallboy and closet was untouched and Patrick huffed as he kicked at a hairspray can he scratched the label off. A band tee he grew out of undeniably smelt like the ghost of roses as it laid crinkled on a chair. The band posters thumbtacked onto his wall stared back at him, a familiar note stuck to a Mötley Crüe poster by his bed. He recognized that sloppy longhand alright.

‘i know where you live <3‘

A more legible handwriting stood out in pink gel pen underneath. He ripped off the note that obscured frontman Vince Neil‘s visage as a twitch traveled beneath his waistband.

‘me too.‘

“The fuck was that?“ The bell just rang out as Patrick slammed his hand flat against your locker door, closing it with a metallic groan and the cool steel of his silver rings scratched the surface unpleasantly. You frowned - fucking pouted even - with one hand in your school bag. “What‘s what?“ Your tone was casual, audaciously questioning. “Well, fuck. I don‘t know! This maybe?“ He fumbled for the piece of paper in his jean pocket to dangle it in front of you like some kind of legendary reveal. He watched your eyes scan the page, brows furrowing as you looked back into his face. “You started it, Hockstetter.“ You plucked the paper from his lose grip to fold it back up. “Your mother is really nice.“ Patrick stepped back, huffing, unimpressed by the little jab about meeting Mrs Hockstetter.

“Honestly though, I‘m disappointed you didn‘t come visit me through my window with the whole address-thing. I don‘t lock it at night.“

“That‘s what you‘re into?“

“You don‘t know half of it, Patty.“ You patted his cheek before catching up with your friends in the hall.

Patrick couldn‘t for the fucking life of him catch you alone. It began in the morning when your dad dropped you off at school on his way to his generic ass job in his generic ass red car. You two didn‘t share classes. You didn‘t wander the halls by yourself. He would know - he skipped algebra multiple times to maybe catch you going to the girls restroom. On your way home you went the same route as a group of students you laughed with before waving goodbye at your door and well, your mother was always home by that time like a good little housewife.

After the third time he - fully sober - saw you in places you couldn‘t even be it was time for less stalking and more of a head on approach. Your interactions were fleeting at school, none at all in your downtime. It had to look like Patrick chasing a little skirt but if he was honest, he wasn‘t sure if it was that anymore. The lines between lechery and sanguinary bled together with each dream that woke him up like a hot iron to the ass cheek. But you just had to be a bitch even when left in the dark.

It was way past official curfew when he stood in front of your window with the curtains wide open. Your dad’s car was parked in the driveway and the house was dark. It took little effort to slide the unlocked window open and climb inside, smearing fresh mud on your beige cut pile carpet.

Patrick couldn‘t make out a lot of details with your room this devoid of light. There was a shirt and a pair of shorts left by the foot of your bed and a pair of jeans draped over a swivel chair. The vanity table was a mess, products scattered across the wooden surface and tubes left in the open with their lids thrown next to it. But most importantly, your bed was untouched and fucking empty - a last fuck you on your part while you fucked up another plan of his. He strolled over to where you were supposed to be asleep right now. The blanket was thrown over the mattress sloppily and a worse for wear Monchhichi with its face rubbed off laid out on your pillow. He wondered if you would be embarrassed. No doubt, you wouldn‘t want Patrick of all people to see you little childhood stuffed animal. But you probably didn‘t want Patrick breaking into your house either - shouldn‘t have provoked him in the first place.

Patrick heard floorboards creaking and groaning under soft footfalls and his heart pounded into his throat. He adjusted himself in his pants, anticipation skyrocketing. It was now that he reminded himself that he didn‘t make any solid plans other than finally getting you, getting under your skin in one way or the other. He stayed silent, eyes fixed on your bedroom door when the handle jiggled and opened a crack before creaking. You cursed softly before easing the door open all the way and walking inside barefoot. In the dark, Patrick heard your breath hitching before you froze, hand squeezing the doorknob and the other hovering near the light switch. He saw it in the twitch of you shoulders, the slow shuffle of your feet - you were about to run or scream and he just couldn‘t have that. He was fast from the adrenaline already pushing through him in waves. It took three long strides to clamp his cold, clammy hand over your mouth while the other pulled you further into the room so his boot could guide the door shut. The weight of his knife in his jacket pocket was the only thing keeping him grounded right now and holy shit he hasn‘t been this aroused in ages. He shushed your muffled yelling like he was holding a child throwing a toddler tantrum but he couldn‘t keep the grin out of his face when your eyes almost rolled out your skull with how wide open they were. “C‘mon, let‘s not wake mommy and daddy up, hm? We don‘t want you to end like your cat.“ Patrick‘s eyes darted to your harshly rising and falling chest, the shadows of your necklace heaving with your breaths.

You bit into his palm, hard. Patrick grunted through gritted teeth and his grip on your face doubled to throw you onto your bed, the springs protested loudly. “You stupid cunt.“ His voice was level because if your parents came in now it would ruin everything. Your soft breaths were still fast and loud in his ears. “I came here to make you suck my dick. Mark you up a little.“ His fingers slowly laced themselves into your hair, the fresh bite oozed blood and the contact made his palm sting. Your hands scrambled mindlessly to grab onto his wrist when he took hold of a fistful of lose strands in an iron grip. The pain in his hand helped him hold onto what little self control he still had around you. “But you‘ve really done it now, princess.“ He angled your head back until you met his eyes. He could make out the barest features in the dark with the moon illuminating you from behind but he didn‘t doubt for a second that you couldn‘t see the glinting hunger in his eyes with the soft light hitting his face.

His free hand yanked your sweater up to your chin and you gasped out his name. The little sounds you made went right to his half chub as he unclasped the front of your bra. You really made it easy for him now. His imagination had nothing on the real thing, the warmth, when his thumb traced the goose bumps forming on your breasts from the cold air in your room - the way you cried out when he seized the meat of your breast hard enough to bruise, his rings digging cruel marks into your skin. “Patrick—“, his eyes darted up from your tits, “you can‘t-“

“But I can. Don‘t act all shy, girlie. Y‘riled me up for weeks now.“ Your hands tightened around his hand that still held your hair too tight to be comfortable. “It hurts.“ His grip faltered for a split second at the come-hither tone while you looked at him with those wide eyes. His jaw flexed and he harshly tugged his hair back because what if this was another mind fuck and you weren’t inviting him into your panties and how dare you fuck with him still.

“It hurts, yeah?“ His other hand left your chest, trailed lower and leaving even more goose bumps underneath the ghost of his fingertips. He roughly yanked the button of your jeans open, not even bothering with the zipper. Your hands shot out, letting go of the one in your hands to push at his chest and arm as he inched his fingers into your panties. It was uncomfortable with the stiff fabric of your pants in the way but he made it work for himself as he brushed over your public mound and further down down down— until he tuned out your pathetic shoves and stupid whining and ran a finger through your folds. “This makes you wet, hm? Fuck, just knew you‘d be a little whore.“ He sounded breathless in his own ears or maybe it was all the blood leaving his brain to collect in the hardest erection he ever sported because while he saw your annoying little mouth move, your voice was just noise to him now as he worked your pants down your thighs.

You kicked at him, movements slowed and restricted by your jeans around your knees and he caught your ankle in a mean hold that had you suck in a breath. Before you could catch yourself, your head hit the mattress as the brutal grip on your hair disappeared. Patrick sunk onto his knees, your thighs automatically tried to close once he was eyelevel with your pussy only to press against his head and for him to pry them back open by pinching the skin on the inside of your thigh. He propped your legs on his shoulders, one hand staying high up on your thigh. “Be good. Because if you‘re not, well—“ He didn‘t finish the threat, his mind spinning with ways to go from making this mildly uncomfortable for you to mutilating and ruining you for any man after him - and if he wasn‘t rock hard before, now he was. He heard you breathing harder and when he ran his middle finger through your folds again, he searched your eyes. Your whole body was pulled taut as a bowstring but you were staring down at him, face screwing up as he prodded at the entrance. He wasn‘t sure if he wanted it to be out of anticipation or fear for what he was going to do to you.

Patrick pushed his middle finger in and he loved the drawn out gasp that left you, the way you clenched around him once he was knuckle deep. His eyes flickered to where you swallowed his finger up, to your face, and back down again. Your head fell back into the soft mattress beneath you once he pulled out halfway, almost gentle enough to make you think this wasn‘t Patrick Hockstetter finger-deep inside your pussy, before he thrust his finger back in at an angle that made your hips buck up the mattress. He repeated it once, twice - each time pulling out slower, further to thrust back in when your feet kicked against his back.

He pulled out and for a second, Patrick saw his butterfly knife held tightly in his hand. He didn‘t remember taking it out of his jacket and it felt weightless no matter how hard he squeezed it. His breaths became labored and the air was too thin and he didn‘t bother to search for your eyes again, gaze trained on the very tip of the knife that caught the moonlight on the polished blade. He didn‘t hesitate as he eased the knife into your clenching pussy, blood flowing like a river and his head was filled with screaming and his vision was obscured by the amount of blood gushing out of you, soaking through your blanket and mattress, dripping from the blade once he drew it out again. He looked up again, watching your chest rising and falling, and you picked up your head to look at him with parted lips and heavy eyelids. Patrick blinked in rapid succession, looked back to his empty hand. The only fluid clinging to his finger was your slick - the same slick that made your naked flesh glisten and he licked it off his hand before he gathered more by roughly dragging the pads of his fingers across your pussy.

He got off his knees, fixing your thighs around his waist, and his dry hand smacked against your cheek to get your attention. “You‘re so fucking wet. Open up. Taste yourself, baby.“ His thumb pressed against your lower lip, smearing your lipgloss. He didn‘t wait for you to comply - prying your jaw open and sliding his wet fingers in when he was met with little resistance. Your complains were muffled buy the three-finger intrusion and Patrick only had so much patience left. He pushed deeper, passing your tongue and stroking the edge of your throat until it naturally confused and you gagged. “I said. Lick. It. Off.“ He pressed his fingers into your throat with each menacing word, until he was sure you would throw up if he made you take more but soon enough he felt your tongue lapping at him and he eased up on your throat - going for his belt with his other instead. The metal clink made you pause and you tried to lift your head off the bed which proofed to be difficult with a set of fingers in your mouth that practically deepthroated you if you moved. He would shove your head back down anyway.

Patrick shoved his pants down just enough to pull his cock out, a soft groan creeping out his chest in relief and shock of being exposed to the chilly air of your room, the open window blowing the nights cold breath inside. Finally - mercifully - Patrick pulled his fingers from your spit slicked lips to seize your hips on both hands and you could pick up your head, eyes glazed over with something Patrick couldn‘t read and it pissed him off. “Ngh- Patrick, wait—“ He didn‘t. Nothing you said would make him wait anyway so he cut you off by gripping his cock with his wet hand and grinding the leaking head against your clit. The breath you were pushing out turned into an airy moan and your nails clawed at the blanket your own slick was currently ruining underneath you. He gave an experimental prod - your eyes screwed up tight - and then a grind that caught on the edge of your hole, just shy of sliding in but only dragging against your folds again - your mouth fell slack as your body was wound up like a Jolly Chimp at the suggestion of his dick actually sliding home.

“Yeah, you‘re just begging for it - fucking drooling on my dick.“

“‘M not.“ The protest was weak once your hips chased after him until his hand planted itself on your belly to keep you down.

“Well, you‘re gonna take it like a good slut- Fuck, I‘ve waited so fucking long.“ His fingers tightly held onto the base of his length to actually line his swollen head up. He liked to deny himself release until his balls ached and his dick was red and angry but he would be lying if he said he could resist feeling you the way he tried to make his hand feel for weeks now. Maybe Huggins wasn‘t wrong for once in his life - Patrick was pussy-whipped and he liked getting what he wanted. And when Patrick wanted, Patrick took. His hips pressed forward until he met resistance and your legs jerked to close them only to be blocked by his body, so he pressed harder. A wordless whine heightened into a keen of his name when his head breached you and he groaned low in his throat, one-inch-deep and sinking deeper and deeper deeper deeper in your chest, blood spraying onto his chest when he yanked the knife from between your ribs and out of your beating heart. He slid two fingers into the wound, feeling your everything draining out around his digits and how would it feel to put his cock inside—

“Fu-uck—“ Patrick wasn’t sure if the pleasure sparking in his brain came from the snug feeling around his cock or the vivid images of you becoming his best kill yet. His hips were flush against yours and the stretch from a single finger to the biggest erection he ever had over a girl, had to feel like he wanted to split you in two and maybe he did want that. He wondered if it hurt you. He wished it did. Your babbling might be in prostest or encouragement, to him it was all the same anyway. You were clenching around him like a vice but your body was more honest, drooling more lubrication until his cock was glistening when he pulled out a few inches. “You‘re so tight,“ - he collected your wrists into one hand, pinning them to your chest once your manicured nails came dangerously close to scratching his face - “Don’t do that. You‘re such a good hole for me - fuck - don‘t stop now.“ Patrick set a fast pace once he made himself comfortably familiar with the ridges and pulses inside you, fucking into you with purpose now.

Your mouth dropped open with a strangled moan, the way he snapped his hips into yours knocking the air out of you but you still drew in enough air to mewl “Patrick“‘s and whine “ah, please-“ while twisting in his one handed grip around your wrists. The thought of letting you scratch him bloody never seemed better once your unfocused eyes twitched between his face and your ceiling, your hips meeting his punishing thrusts. So he let go, watching the circulation flushing your hands again, watching the beginning of a bruise blooming your wrists. He only slowed down to fumble for his lighter but you didn‘t seem to mind - taking whatever he gave you like you were made for it, like you were his for the taking, like you were real. He wanted to snuff every ghost of a thought like this. He came here to proof that you weren‘t real but the moment he felt your muscles convulsing around him - the moment he was sheathed inside you - he never felt more alive and he hated you for it. He wanted to ruin you.

“I wish you would—“ Patrick cut himself off with a grunt as he hit the right spot inside you and your nails dug through the fabric covering his shoulders. He didn‘t care to explore the rest of his thought process, opting for drinking in the dull pain your nails left in his shoulders.

The metallic clang of flicking open his lighter seemed to snap you out of your mindless orgasmic chase, picking up your head until the thumb on his other hand drew tight circles against your clit. “Gonna- ‘M gonna—“ A mean grin stretched across his face at the little twitches your hips gave. He spun the flint wheel until a flame ignited. “Yeah?“ His thumb eased it‘s pressure to make you last. The hand with his lighter twirled in lazy circles, allowing the metal case of his zippo lighter to heat up while trying not to scorch himself with his rapid pace.

“You wanna cum?“ You only managed a high whine of “yes yes yes“ as you dangled dangerously close off the edge, your legs wrapping around Patrick‘s back. “Cum for me, you whore. C‘mon, cum on my cock.“ His voice was tight with holding in his own release as he felt your walls spasm like you wanted to pinch his dick off. He grabbed your shaking thigh and pressed the hot metal lighter into your soft skin, hearing the sizzle your sweat soaked skin made as he burned his mark into you was enough to make his balls pull tight painfully hard. The searing pain ripped right through the waves of your orgasm, waves of pleasure ebbing away to make way for the ugly throbbing in your thigh but you <i>moaned</i> like Patrick just made you ride higher than ever before and it made Patrick grind into your overstimulated pussy to reach his own peak.

Patrick dropped the lighter on your bed, cooled off enough to not burn anymore, and slowly pulled out of you. You only had half the mind to feel his cum leaking from your abused hole but he had his fun watching your clench around nothing as you recovered from the aftershock of what was sex with Patrick Hockstetter of all people. He didn‘t usually get a thrill out of possibly knocking a girl up but it wasn‘t like it really mattered now.

Patrick reached into his jacket pocket to pull his knife before you would even notice and finish the job. It was empty and he caught the grin on your face before the metallic shine in your hand.

He wondered how far ahead of him you were all this time.

#tw gore #tw gross #tw death #tw slurs #tw violence #tw dubcon #it #it 2017 #it imagine #patrick hockstetter #patrick hockstetter imagine #patrick hockstetter x reader #the bowers gang #smut #patrick hockstetter smut

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oonajaeadira · 3 years

Text

If You Will Let My Heaven Touch Your Stars (Ezra x f!reader)

Rating: Mature.

Pairing: Ezra (Prospect film) x f!reader

Warnings: FLUFFY SMUT. INSPIRED BY THIS. Non-explicit oral (m and f receiving). Formatting may be strange in certain Tumblr themes due to paragraph spacing with the poetry.

A/N: Okay, y’all. I was looking for another reason to write some Ezra. I got inspired by this naughty confessional post and felt the need to rise to the challenge, but make it a bit soft. You know I’m allergic to writing physical doings without some emotional yearnings. So it has come to this. And I’m not sorry.

Summary: Ezra runs his mouth over some poetry. You run your mouth over some Ezra.

TAGLIST: you can always request to be on the taglist for this or any of my work. If you’d like to be on taglists for upcoming fic, please sign up here –> TAGLIST

MASTERLIST

_______________________________

You know that sigh. It will be shortly followed by a gravelly, dissatisfied “hm.”

“Hm.”

Next will come the impatient flipping of pages as Ezra learns that the book he’s chosen from the stack he got in trade on the Pug is…”less than literary and more than malignant.”

“What’cha reading, Ez.” The main node on the electropulse generator blew during the last harvest and you’ve been doing your best to repair it for the better part of the scaling period. Better to keep eyes on the electrics than let them wander over to his bedroll where he’s stripped to his skivvies, propped up against a crate, reading.

The rotation of Ranakh-4 is almost sixty hours, and in the north hemisphere there’s always light. Should be perfect for prospectors to take shifts and get things done, but instead, it creates a scaling period--a good fifteen-hour window of intense heat and sunlight that’s too dangerous to be exposed to for long, causing lots of nasty side effects. Including skin scaling. Hence the name. So during that period you and Ezra hide in the cooled tent, sleeping, polishing gems, maintaining equipment, wasting time, and generally trying not to annoy each other too much.

That’s a joke between you. In the years you’ve known him, Ez has yet to get under your skin. Ezra’s usually up for a game of dice or five-stand during scaling period, and if you’ve got gear to clean or inventory to count, he’s good for a story. Or ten.

But after the third rotation he stopped playing games of chance with you and his stories got gradually less... crusty. He still had a lot to say, but he stuck mostly to mining anecdotes, weaving around salacious details and editing himself in the moment.

And you’re pretty sure you know why.

This isn’t the first posting you’ve had with Ezra.

There was the assignment on Phintreas. The job on TG-19. The second assignment on Phintreas--that one it was just the two of you. Just like this one.

There was a moment near the end of that run when you took a break from digging to stretch, arching your back in the dappled sunlight and pulling your arms up and back toward the thick foliage tops. There were singing insectoid creatures on Phintreas and you’d dropped your wrists to your head to listen to their song a little, closing your eyes and hearing in their hum the chords of a song you used to love.

It was just a few seconds, the warm air on your bare shoulders, the long thin trees--actually large grass--rising and swaying above. A pleasant stretch in your lower back. But there was something off. Your ears were full of insect song but there was something missing.

The sound of Ezra’s digging had stopped.

You turned to find him taking a break, leaning on his shovel, jumpsuit open and pulled down to a knot at his waist like yours. Dirt-streaked arms and undershirt, looking at you, staring with sad eyes, the long slopes of his mustache running into his patchy beard making him look like he was pouting more than he was. Probably. Totally lost in thought, his eyes slid down your torso. When he woke to the fact that you caught him using you as a backdrop for reverie, he didn’t even have the balls to be embarrassed. Just realigned his focus on his shovel and went back to digging, the veins straining out on his big hands.

“You okay, Ez?”

“As well as one can be, sweetheart. I feel we’re close. It is a fine day full of wonderments.”

You’d thought about that look in the days afterward. Didn’t really know what it meant for you. Until the final sleep cycle on that grass planet, the wind traveling through the fields making the grasses sing hollow and low in the night.

“What’cha reading, Ez?” You’d come to learn that it was a magic question, one that not only got you an explanation, but perhaps a chapter or two in his baritone twang.

And that night, as you packed your final bag, he swung the spine around to read out, “Papas Cordel, Love Verses.”

He didn’t ask you if you wanted to hear any. He just started to read.

Softly. Slowly. The words were innocuous on their own but their combination was sinful, his voice melting at the back of your brain, lifting the fine hairs of your neck, slithering down your spine before making an orbit to press upon your core and vibrate there.

He never said goodnight. Just read you a few poems full of worship and yearning in that sonorous voice of his, then rolled over and went to sleep. It left you in a panic, trying to control your breathing, in full understanding of what that look from a few days ago had really meant.

And for the duration of your next couple of jobs you spent some time in regret, wishing you’d decoded your feelings sooner or that he’d made his own clearer. You’d vowed that if you ever had the chance to go back and live that night again you wouldn’t hesitate to….what? To do what? You never got that far. Didn’t matter. Time doesn’t go backwards. After a while, it was easy enough to convince yourself that you’d just read too much into it, that you didn’t really feel anything and neither did Ez. He had just been tired and staring into space that day. And he’d just been aesthetically moved by the song of the grasses in the night wind. It was a trick of the light, and the more you rationalized it, the further the memory slipped into the realm of silly fantasy.

So when this assignment came, you’d had time enough to leave the fantasy behind and met Ezra as you always had--as a friend and a damn talented prospector you were happy to dig with. The man always got his haul and getting paired with him always meant profit.

It only took one scaling period to make you realize you were lying to yourself.

Scaling period means getting somewhere shaded and cooled and making yourself as comfortable as possible. Which means stripping down to essentials. All those dice games trying not to look at Ezra’s broad, bared chest, looking up from a hand of cards to find his eyes quickly darting away from you…. By the third rotation you’d noticed that neither of you could make eye contact with the other anymore and after that, Ezra generally spent his downtime during scaling periods laying on his bedroll in his skivvs, reading one of the dozen books he’d scavenged back on the station.

You weren’t sure if you were flattered or embarrassed or even injured that he wouldn’t move on whatever he was tense about. But, ultimately, this arrangement was easier.

Or so you lied to yourself.

A “what’cha reading, Ez” got you a few chapters of an old time-travel adventure or a philosophical treatise on the life of some forgotten pioneer while you mended a garment or recounted the supply of viable drill bits or tried to fix the damn faulty electropulse generator for the millionth time. Something rollicking and full of resonance to keep your ears busy and your mind distracted while you focused your eyes on anything but Ezra’s bronze skin and sable eyes and full lips and big hands and thick thighs and--

This time he clicks his tongue and runs a hand through his hair, humming a high note in a kind of frustrated laugh. “I won’t devastate your ears on this one, sweetheart. Not much of interest here but some poor soul ruttin’ and scraping for talent that eludes them. How this found its way into a thing to be bought and sold I will never understand.”

And yet, he keeps reading. Silently.

After a few minutes and another wire successfully cleaned and reconnected, you repeat yourself, taunting him.

“What’cha reading, Ez.”

“Mm.” He just flips through a few more pages, refusing to answer.

“Hey.” You chuckle into your work. “What’cha reading.”

You hear a huge intake of breath before a hold and a forced release.

“Wow,” you laugh. “Fine. Don’t waste breath on it. Just tell me which one it is so I can avoid it later.”

“Love and other Stars by Aeon Aido Raja.”

“I see. What’s it about?”

“Sadly, it is about a poet who cannot seem to make the match between words and sentiment; a volume of supposed amorous verse.”

“Amorous verse,” your hands stop working on their own. “Love...poetry?” There’s a sudden flashback to the sound of hollow reeds and soothing verses in the night. The words are a program in your brain, overwriting your inhibition and professionalism, pushing you to a deeply-coded goal to calm the flutter in your chest.

“So it claims. Although I fear it lacks full understanding of both--” His voice cuts out as he realizes you’ve stood and you’re moving toward him and his wide eyes lock to yours as you sit beside him on the bedroll. “Now what has gotten into you, sweetheart?”

You know exactly what’s gotten into you. The triggered wish of returning to that night, the built-up tension of dancing around each other in your underwear, trying to deny what’s going on, watching him purposefully respect you when you know he feels something, when he knows you do too--

What was it you were going to do if you had a chance to go back to that last night on the grass planet? Time to find out.

“Read to me.”

Ezra hesitates, unsure. “This?”

“Read it.”

His eyes flick down to follow the quick fold of your lips as you wet them with your tongue, unconsciously mimicking you, before fumbling his gaze back to the book and, with a regretful sigh, begins.

“I have never told you When your lips found my own I have never told you My dearest--

“Walking through the light of a moon in decline-- Can you blame me if I steal your kiss? If I call you to my side before it collides with the ground?”

When he looks for your reaction, you’re not sure if he’s pleading with you for permission to stop or continue.

Shit. He’s right. It isn’t great. But you’re here now, you’re going to make the most of it.

“That’s not...so bad.” And then you find out what you would have done that night--or at least how you’d start--by showing him your raised palm, lowering it slowly toward him. “Tell me if you want me to stop.” Your hand travels down through the air, just to the inch above his skivvs, waiting a moment in the aura of radiated heat there, before settling lightly over him. He never says no, never takes his eyes from yours, the only reaction coming from a small lift in his chest, the corner of his mouth curling just a fraction, and the fabric beneath your hand quickly becoming the only thing there to qualify as soft.

“Sweetheart, what you’re beginning here--”

“The only words I want from you are that poem. I want to hear you read. You stop, I stop.”

The heat hangs heavy between you, burns beneath your hand. And with a huffed exhale, Ezra starts again.

“I have never told you When your lips found my own I have never told you My dearest--

“Walking through the light of a moon in decline-- Can you blame me if I steal your kiss? If I call you to my side before it collides with the ground?”

Supporting him from underneath, you’ve begun running your thumb up and down him, and his breath hitches, bringing him to a stop. So you stop.

“You stop, I stop, Ez.”

“Believe me, gentle one, I do not wish the impediment of your affections--”

“Then don’t stop.”

In a beautiful panic, Ezra looks back to the poem. “You sure you want this one?”

You nod. “I don’t care how good it is. That’s the poem I want. Keep going. I've always liked your voice. I know you can make it pretty.”

He stares at the page a moment, and you push him--literally--gasping into a start.

“If ever I could tell you When my heaven touched your stars If ever I could tell you Beloved--”

You stop palming him when he stops to breathe, and it’s only when you trace his waistband with your fingertips that he swallows and continues, willing you to keep going--

“Waking in the night to the aching void of your embrace-- Can you forgive me if I plead your name? If I summon you to my body from wherever you are?”

Whether it’s the want in his voice or just getting further into the words, the poem is already getting better. His eyebrows begin to push together and arch, as you stretch the top of his underwear down, wrapping your hand around him. His words start riding the occasional groan which just resonate with you more and you rock yourself against the bedroll in time with your gentle, yearning pulls--

“You hold me adroitly With accurate proximity To keep your breath and my breath Two founts and one pool. To swim a in star-reflective stream of our holy recreation--”

He’s doing so well, the words wandering out deep and breathy, so beautifully controlled...until you lower your mouth to him.

Then there’s a strangled staccato grunt as he adjusts, takes a couple of quick breaths and continues--

“But your body is a.....wildfire Your lips a destruction And I give my everything over to your….cleansing devastation.”

Oh, his struggle is glorious. You can feel him trying not to buck, needing to blow out a breath between pursed lips here and there to concentrate on the print. He reads with intent, leaning into context and feeling, making a gift to you of every word.

“I have yearned for you to find me worthy of a spark An ignition... The rebirth of your combustible attentions.”

He pauses again to breathe, and while you allow him a small reprieve, he’s stopped a little too long and you abruptly halt. When you pull back to look up in reprimand, he gives you a soft smile through his panting, shaking his head in wonder. You know he’ll have plenty of praises when this is over, but he doesn’t seem to want to break the spell to say them now. When you return his little smile, he looks back to the page and continues, prompting you to return to your own administrations.

“How you draw from me each sweet effusion-- Every secret vein untapped-- Now yours in expert execution, Now open to your burning maw.”

He pushes through the poetry rather than into you, allowing you to hear him and match him. Your body begins to counter-react as you feel him brimming, turning on more need in you than you’ve felt in a while, and you show him just how well he’s doing by doing well by him.

There’s a shift in his voice as more breath enters in and nonverbal noises begin to punctuate the words; a shift in his body as his fingers tangle in your hair and grip tightly, suggesting a final rhythm--

“But within the fire An aperture of...divine precipitation Where those of us who live untouched Can go to drown To die To howl…..! To see the blessed face of eternity Or the….busting open….of a thousand….wretched….stars-- You-call-me-to-sinful-prayer You-invoke-my-abject-soul I find myself in debt…!...and thrall…!... to your superior…!...divinity--”

When he stops reading this round, you show mercy as he pounds his fist into the bedroll and makes his own additions to the poem, exclamations made up of your name and curses and calls to higher powers. You can only expect a man to expel from himself wondrously one method at a time, and Ezra’s earned his reward so beautifully.

Damn his opinion. The poem was perfect. You chose correctly. Either that, or Ez’s tongue really can spin any old refuse into gold.

But the book is still held high, and as you lift from him and guide him through his aftershocks with your hand, he breathes heavy though the final verse--

“This is how I love you from afar With agony and forlorn words While you hover forever in my purview A shaft of dazzling incandescence Shining down from your sun/star Through the glass of my desire Starts and restarts an everlasting blaze”

Then, setting the book reverently on the bedroll, he takes your face in his hands, dragging his thumbs across your lips, no longer needing the page for the last lines.

“If ever I could tell you And if you will let my heaven touch your stars If ever I could tell you Beloved--”

Ezra’s kiss is achingly grateful. He tries to put into one kiss the loving equivalent of everything you’ve just done for him.

When he pulls back, he gives you the tiniest rough shake, a punctuation of his playful consternation. “Mmm,” he grunts. “While I am glad to know you find my recitals pleasing, you’re about to find out that my talent for oral ministrations do not stop at mere recitation.” With a miner’s strong arms he flips you over him onto the bedroll, making short work of your underwear and pinning your legs around his shoulders in a matter of seconds. “Now, I will not be so cruel as to make you put words to my reciprocation, unless you’d like to fill the silence to direct me to your will. Or say what you please. I will not be able to add to the conversation as I will be otherwise occupied.”

You don’t know if it’s years of running his mouth or wagging his tongue or yapping his jaw, but he’s well practiced in using allllll the muscles therein to help finish what poetry couldn’t quite accomplish.

At one point you think of surprising him and trying your own hand at reading while being entertained. But when you fumble for the book, it opens to the same poem.

But not the same poem.

The opening lines are there: “I have never told you When your lips found my own I have never told you My dearest--Walking through the light of a moon in decline--Can you blame me if I steal your kiss? If I call you to my side before it collides with the ground?”

And that’s it.

That’s where it ends. The whole published poem--a mere seven lines.

Oh, Kevva. That’s...that means….

Damn, Ezra. The mouth on you.

The book drops to the bedroll.

And you break into pieces as his heaven masterfully consumes your stars.

________________

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Taglist: @melobee @extraterrestrialdork @14mcmd1122 @grogusmum @cannedsoupsucks

#soft ezra #soft!ezra #ezra prospect #ezra prospect x reader #ezra prospect x you #fluffy smut #pedro pascal #ezra prospect smut

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