#this is so sad these bois need more friends
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⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ SPEED DRIVE!
ferrari driver!percy jackson x fem!reader
masterlist | rules
warnings one swear word!
on the radio . . . speed drive (charlie xcx)
percy knew it was a bad idea leaving his house without at least a pair of sunglasses to conceal his identity. he was craving cookie dough ice cream, the grocery store wasn’t too far away and it was the middle of the night - who would possibly recognise him at a time like this?
the answer is many people. while percy did love his loyal fans, both tifosi and others, even he had to admit they were a little crazy. all it took was for one to snap a photo and post it on twitter and the rest seemed to immediately spawn all around him
“percy, is it true that luke might lose his seat next year?” he heard one voice say as he attempted to weave through the thick crowd of people. why couldn’t he have one second of peace? unfortunately, percy had made another awful decision that night - walking to the grocery store
this left ferrari’s golden boy with two options: either tough out the wall home with fans and paparazzi alike swarming him, or find someone who was willing to drive him home. with cars on the street in front of him were stationery thanks to the red light, percy made his decision
he bolted for the first one that caught his eye, a car that was small, (ironically) bright red and most importantly had an open roof. percy also had to admit the driver was kind of pretty, at least from what he could see from that far away
the light turned yellow and you prepared yourself to continue driving. you’d only recently gotten your drivers license and this was your first time driving without someone more experienced with you in the car, so you were just praying to end up at your apartment in one piece
just as the light became green and you began to drive, some random guy jumped into the passenger seat of your car, causing your heart rate to increase dramatically and your foot to immediately press on the brakes - out of shock or fear (or both), you weren’t sure
“drive!” he nearly yelled at you. you just stared at him, your mouth agape. it was way too late at night for this. at your state, percy huffed and leaned over to the wheel, beginning to steer for you
this snapped you out of the daze you were in and you slapped his hands away, your brows furrowing in anger as you drove, “who the fuck are you and what do you think you’re doing in my car? i’m pulling over right now, you need to get out.”
“no, please, i promise i didn’t mean any harm! can you just drop me off at my house?” he asked. you didn’t need to look at him to know he was incredibly desperate. who was this guy? as you recalled his face from when he first got into your car, you realised he did look a little familiar, but you still couldn’t figure out his identity
at your silence, percy continued, “i’ll do anything, do you like car racing? i can get you tickets for that!”
okay, so he was rich rich. you didn’t know the first thing about racing, but one of your friends was obsessed with formula one. specifically, a driver called peter jameson (or something along those lines). still, you rolled your eyes at his offer, disliking the way he attempted to bribe you
“no, it’s fine, you don’t have to do anything. where do you live?”
after percy told you his address, the car ride was silent. neither of you knew what to say to the other. you were still shaken by his sudden appearance, and percy was trying to conceal the blush that coated his cheeks. he was right, you were beautiful. the moon made your skin glow and your eyes brighter. from the death grip you had on the wheel, percy could tell you were new at driving. cute
“thanks a lot, you have absolutely no idea how much you helped me tonight,” percy said as he got out of your car. part of you was a little sad to see him go. sure, he freaked you out, but something about him was magnetic - maybe it was those sea green eyes that put all of poseidon’s oceans to shame, or the light dusting of freckles you hadn’t noticed until now
giving him a small smile, you said, “you’re welcome. have a good night.” you stayed for a little and watched as he entered his home, a bittersweet feeling tugging at your heart
once you’d gotten home, you noticed he’d left something on the passenger seat. a strip of paper with a line of messily scrawled numbers lay on the leather
call me. (917) 173-1839 — PJ
#percy jackson x reader#percy jackson x you#percy jackson x y/n#percy jackson#percy jackson x fem reader#pjo#pjo x reader#percy jackson fanfic#percy jackson blurb#f1 driver pjo#f1 driver percy jackson#f1 driver percy jackson x reader#cynwrites
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MR. FUNNY GUY — l.heeseung
PAIRING: heeseung x fem!reader GENRES: fluff, humor WC: 3.8k+
WARNINGS: a few swear words, mentions of alcohol. yeji, sunghoon's sister, is portrayed in this fic as being of age, because there is a part that insinuates that she has been drinking.
NOTES: this came to me as a totally random thought and made me want to write it, without pretension. yes, konon is written as jake's girlfriend just because i wanted something totally different, and i've never seen anyone put her as the girlfriend of any of the boys. idk, nothing special, hehehe. i hope you like it!
masterlist
Every group of friends consists of having outstanding personalities or a representative for each thing among them. Heeseung could be the personification of the funny kid.
He had always been in charge of making the best jokes and making everyone laugh ever since he met his friends at the end of high school and the beginning of university. With Heeseung around, it was as if there was no sadness at all.
Even his attitude was that of a big, awkward, funny guy, which gave him even more credit for his antics.
Heeseung was responsible for making Jake stop crying when he got his first low grade in calculus at university. Not even his girlfriend was able to cheer him up, but Heeseung trying to prepare a smoothie and forgot to close the lid of the blender, causing all the fruit and mixtures to fly around the kitchen... Oh, that got a good laugh out of Jake. And a few curses from Jay, for sure.
Heeseung was also responsible for making Sunghoon and Yeji cry with laughter a week after their puppy went missing. She was crying and he said he would help his friends find her, even if their hopes were slim. Heeseung did find her, but that didn't stop him from coming back all wet and with mud all over his shorts because the dog had wandered into a garden and he ran with his life to rescue her. Telling that story out loud made it all worthwhile in the end.
What Heeseung never managed was to get many smiles out of you, Yeji's best friend. It wasn't as if you and she joined Sunghoon's group of friends very often, but when you did, you were the only one who stayed quietly in the corner of the room and didn't crack a smile when he made a joke.
At first, it didn't make much difference to him, not least because you only appeared occasionally and Heeseung only found out about you sometime later. Because you really were so quiet that you seemed almost invisible. But as time went by and Yeji attended more and more of the boys' meetings – even more so after she and you made friends with Jake's girlfriend – Heeseung didn't want to admit it, but he started to feel a bit insulted.
Why weren't you laughing at his jokes? Why didn't you crack a single smile at his antics in front of his friends? You were supposed to hate him, in Heeseung's mind. That was the only explanation for why he never saw a single curved movement of your lips.
"Relax, man" Sunghoon said one night when the two of them were in the kitchen preparing the popcorn for the movie. "Yeji said that Y/n is like that, very closed," he took a larger bowl to pour the contents into, placing it next to another in case he needed a spare. "She took a while to open up to the girls, so maybe it's nothing personal."
So it would seem. Heeseung thought, rolling his eyes as he tried to forget about it and focus on the movie night they all had together.
A whole month passed and he tried not to focus on the thought that you didn't like him, because if that were the case, Heeseung would have gotten there first. He knew everyone there before you did, so if you didn't like him, you might as well not hang out with them anymore and just be friends with Yeji and Jake's girlfriend.
But no, that night what he wanted to happen happened. And without expecting much, without creating any expectations that you would smile at him.
"What are you three doing?" Sunghoon approached and ruffled Yeji's hair, hearing his little sister grumble and curse him for it.
"Trying to make sushi at home" she huffed "But Konon's the only one who can, and she gives the hardest tasks to me and Y/n to do."
"Come on, I think we're doing fine," you said, avoiding looking at Konon because you knew she was laughing at the two of you.
You held up a hot roll you had just rolled, hoping it wouldn't fall out of your hand and spill all the rice. Your eyes met Sunghoon's and then looked at Heeseung, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.
"You're doing a great job," Sunghoon complimented.
"Yeah, long and crooked... Looks like Sunghoon" Heeseung pointed to the hotroll in his hand, and he almost shouted when he heard the sound of your laughter.
It wasn't possible what Heeseung's eyes were seeing at that moment. You. Laughing and then smiling at him... Did that really happen?
Sunghoon abruptly turned to Heeseung as if he was thinking the same thing. Of course, he and the boys were the only ones to hear Heeseung's lament that you never smiled at anything he did. But now it had just happened.
And he wasn't sure if he wanted to see it again, because strangely Heeseung's heart was pumping in a way that he wasn't happy about. Not to mention the fact that, apart from thinking about your smile and the sound of your laugh for weeks, the boy wasn't proud to say that he had dreamt about it.
Was it stupid to say that he had actually dreamed of your smile? Shit, that couldn't be possible.
"Heeseung!" Jake shouted to get his friend's attention, snapping his fingers in front of his face.
"Fuck, what a fright" Heeseung wriggled in his chair "What's wrong?"
"I've been calling you for about five minutes, what world were you in?"
"In the world where Y/n keeps smiling at him" Sunghoon hummed.
Fucking bastard... How did Sunghoon have to be so direct like that? All right, his friends knew and couldn't stand to hear Heeseung fantasize about it for weeks, but hearing it out loud from someone else made him feel like a bit of an idiot.
"In my defense, I'm still in shock about this" he tried to say, hearing Jay's laughter from across the room.
"Still? How long has it been... like, three weeks? A month?" he asked, already knowing the answer. If Heeseung were to count, it had been a month and a few days, because every month the girls tried to make a different food. And he distinctly remembers his skills – not unlike Konon's – in rolling the seaweed into sushi.
"Do you like her?" Jake sprawled further back on the sofa, almost throwing his legs over Heeseung's lap. Sunghoon was sitting on the floor staring at the TV while the movie was still playing.
"What? No" he said too quickly, regretting it the moment all the boys' eyes landed on him.
"Dude, you literally went to great lengths just to make her laugh for you" Jay got up from his chair to walk over to Sunghoon and sit down next to him on the floor.
"And when that happened, you didn't stop talking about it the whole time," Jake added.
"I said you could all make me stop talking—"
"We don't want to, it's cute" Sunghoon smiled "Besides I think it happened a few more times after sushi night."
"What?" it was Heeseung's turn to shout, startling Jake who was cursing at him quietly as he curled up on the sofa.
At that moment Heeseung was standing in the living room, pacing back and forth near the TV and watching his friends with mixed feelings. Jake was still recovering from his shock, Sunghoon was pressing his lips together, feeling guilty for saying it just then. While Jay held in his laughter and closed his eyes to wait for the conversation to unfold.
"You're just telling me about this now? Fuck Sunghoon, what do you mean?"
"Dude, I'm sorry" he said, "It's just that you got so excited about it that if I told you she smiled a few more times, you might explode."
"I'm exploding right now" from the coloring of his face, it could be possible.
What do you mean you smiled at Heeseung or something related to him and Sunghoon didn't say anything at all? Now he wanted to know, what was the occasion? Had he done something funny, said something at the wrong time, or made a joke? Or did you genuinely smile just because he was around? What had been the circumstance in which you smiled at him?
"All your gears are turning at the moment and I think it's my fault" Sunghoon got up from the floor, straightening his pants and then sighing, "But she smiled at times when you weren't looking."
"Why?"
"Look, I know your mind because I've lived with you for years, but I have no idea what she was thinking about it" Sunghoon's words had a unique effect on Heeseung. He was even more pensive.
"Yeah, he's right," Jake said.
"You too..." Heeseung then turned to Jay.
"Dude, we talked about this for hours and worked it out together," he defended himself, cringing when the other threatened to approach.
"Hey, calm down!" Sunghoon held him by the shoulders even though he knew his friend would do absolutely nothing to any of the three "Now that you know, you can do something about it."
"Yes, kill the three of you."
"Or talk to her and ask why" Jake shrugged and stood up, giving his best smile in response "Now how about we order something to eat? I'm starving."
"No, no more drinks for you today, young lady" Sunghoon snatched the glass from Yeji's hand, listening to his sister's protests even though she was already a little upset.
"But hey, we're celebrating" she tried to catch it, but to no avail, her older brother was taller and would surely use that to his advantage.
"Celebrating what? The loss of your liver?" Heeseung looked around at the number of glasses on the kitchen counter.
He sighed as he imagined that the owner of that house would have an extremely difficult time cleaning up, but his thoughts were soon cut loose by the sound of laughter that flooded the room. His body went still and his eyes widened at the sight of your standing in front of the kitchen door.
"Hey, Heeseung, you look like you've seen a haunting" you waved at him, smiling briefly and then turning your eyes back to the Park siblings.
"He just heard something" Sunghoon added.
Not knowing what it was, you didn't bother asking him and just walked into the kitchen where the three of them were still standing.
"What's going on?" you asked.
"Yeji's already drunk, so let's go home."
"But she's celebrating," you pouted "It's not every day you get an A in Professor Choi's class."
"The worst professor at that university" Yeji picked up a glass to raise and pretend to toast, then put it back on the counter.
"But you've had enough, so I think you'd better go home" he looked at his sister and then at you "Has Jake taken Konon yet?"
"They just got home, Jay told me as soon as I came into the kitchen" you looked around for something to drink "And you two, what are you doing here?"
Sunghoon had gone after Yeji before he left and Heeseung had been in charge of looking for you, so the two of them could take you home safe and sound. But he didn't want to say that out loud.
"We came after you two," Sunghoon replied.
"Okay, let's go" Yeji whined "I won't be able to finish my drink anyway."
"Not even if we just have one more beer? It'll be quick and—"
"Nope" Heeseung stood in front of you when you threatened to approach the fridge. Looking up thanks to his height, this was the closest he had come to you since you two met.
It might have been the effect of the drink or the moment itself, but he looked glistening and that had – strangely – made your heart flutter.
Blame the drink, blame the drink, please.
"Come on Y/n, these two dullards don't know what fun is" Yeji pushed past Heeseung, ignoring his protests as she grabbed you by the arm and pulled you out of the kitchen.
"That's it man, a few more moves and you two would be kissing in this kitchen" Sunghoon held Heeseung by the shoulders without missing an opportunity to tease him.
He acted on instinct to stand in front of you so that you wouldn't advance into the kitchen, right? He also ignored the distance between the two of you because he miscalculated his steps and Sunghoon was right to say how close you and Heeseung were. But those thoughts had to be pushed aside as quickly as possible.
And that happened when Jay's voice echoed in Heeseung's ears, standing next to his friend's car.
"Can you take Y/n home?" he asked. Heeseung didn't want to show his shock, but the orbs almost popping out in the expression that caught him off guard made Jay laugh right away "I've had a few drinks and I certainly won't be able to drive."
"But—"
"Take her and come back for me" Jay handed Heeseung the keys to his car.
"Why don't you just go along? I can drop you home later."
"Because I'm not finished here yet" Jay's lips protruded forward in a pout, he took a few steps away from Heeseung, nodding and smiling at his friend "And I don't want to witness anything pornographic in my car. Unless I'm the one doing it," he shouted the last part and Heeseung turned sharply in the direction you were with the Park siblings.
He would have given anything at that moment for you to be so drunk that you hadn't heard any of the shit Jay had said so far.
"Where's Jongseong going?" Yeji asked when he saw the boy disappearing among some people in the garden of the house.
"He said he didn't finish whatever it is in there" Heeseung sighed "Come on Y/n, I'll take you home."
None of you missed the mischievous giggle that escaped from Yeji, soon to be joined by Sunghoon. Heeseung knew very well about his friend, but why did his little sister even seem to be complicit?
"Do you know where I live?" you asked so naturally that Heeseung had forgotten how serious you were whenever you were around him.
"No, but you can tell me while we go in Jay's car," he said, and you just agreed and let him guide you to the vehicle. Neither of you cared what the Park siblings said as you and Heeseung walked to Jay's car. He showed himself to be a tremendous gentleman by opening the door for you and checking that everything was okay until you buckled your seatbelt so he could close the door and turn the car around.
"Can we go?" he asked and you nodded, giving Heeseung the coordinates so he could get to your house.
For Heeseung, the silence was necessary while he reorganized his thoughts because, for the first time, he was in a place alone with you. That had never happened since the two of you met.
Now for you, the silence was agonizing because it made you think and observe. To think about how hard you'd tried to get away from that man next to you and to observe how well he drove. His hands firmly gripping the leather of the steering wheel, his long fingers drumming now and then when they stopped at a traffic light or how agile his hand was at holding the gearshift. You also found yourself swallowing when his hand accidentally hit your leg when changing gears. He wasn't doing it on purpose, you knew that, but it was inevitable not to smile quickly.
"We're here" he was the first to break the silence, indicating that he had followed your coordinates very well, and now the two of you were parked inside Jay's car and in front of your apartment complex.
You looked out of the window, a sigh escaping your lips as you looked back at the boy in the car sitting next to you.
"Thanks, Heeseung" you said sincerely, opening a smile when his eyes met yours. Heeseung smiled too, but he didn't look so happy about it. He seemed... Annoyed?
"Can I ask you something, Y/n?" he said just like that, not even bothering to respond to your thanks. But you didn't mind either, after all, your sobriety was starting to kick in, but even so, your alcohol-addled body made you more curious than usual.
"Anything," you said.
It took him a while to formulate that question, pondering whether he should really ask it or just let it go and get on with his life as if it didn't affect him. But it certainly did. Heeseung knew why he had dreamt it, he had to ask.
"Why haven't you ever smiled at me?" might seem like a silly question from the outside, or even sad if the person was as sentimental as Heeseung.
At first, your eyebrows drew together in surprise. But then everything relaxed and you unbuckled your belt to turn around and face the boy.
"What do you mean?"
Heeseung repeated your gesture a few seconds later, unbuckling his belt and turning to face you too.
"I mean, ever since we met you've never smiled at anything I've done," he shrugged, trying to sound firm in his words, not wanting to waver or show how ridiculous it might seem "Surely Yeji has already let it slip that I'm the clown of the group and, I don't know, you're the only person who's never given me a single smile."
"Does that bother you?"
No. He should answer, to appear tougher.
"Yes, a little" Heeseung didn't want to follow his thoughts, he wanted to act on the emotion of the moment "I thought you didn't like me or, at worst, thought I was so dull that you begged the girls to get away every time we met in a group."
He was being so honest with you, opening up so genuinely that you felt a little bad. Maybe your way of acting on everything you'd heard hadn't been nice, you might have been a bit extreme with it.
"I'm sorry" was all you managed to say, without knowing exactly why you were apologizing. Whether it was for your reaction or for never getting to Heeseung and wanting to get to know him.
"Why?" he asked.
You didn't want him to ask, so you wouldn't have to explain yourself, you'd get out of the car and drive away. But Heeseung's sparkling eyes seemed to call out to you every second, guiding you to him as if you belonged there, staring at him as the words came freely out of his mouth.
"We have a group of friends at college and certainly Yeji's brother and his friends are sometimes a topic," your gaze quickly shifted to the window behind Heeseung. Anything being more interesting than his eyes paying attention to you right now "I once commented that... Well..."
"Say, it's okay," he tried to encourage you and you looked back at him, could blame it on the drink if something got out of hand, and would say the next day that you didn't remember anything you were saying. Even though by then your sobriety had reached more than half of your body.
"I told I thought you were very handsome" you nibbled your lower lip and continued, not even giving Heeseung time to process the information "A friend of ours said that you were not only handsome but funny, but that was a danger."
"What? Why?" he tried to shake off the tingling feeling in his chest and his cheeks heating up at the confession. So you thought he was handsome from the start.
"Have you ever heard of the theory of the funny boy being a danger?" you crossed your arms and snorted when Heeseung denied it with a nod "He'll make you laugh so much, you'll laugh. Laugh and laugh until you're naked in his bed."
It was his turn to laugh, hiding his face with his hands and messing up his hair.
"Shut up, don't laugh," you groaned in frustration, uncrossing your arms and trying to push his hand away from your face. The contact was electrifying, even if it only lasted a few seconds. Heeseung uncovered his face and looked at you.
"So Yeji's friend said that about me, and you believed it?" Heeseung wanted to sound confident as he raised an eyebrow, even though, if he had to get out of that car, his legs would be as soft as jelly.
"Well..." a few seconds passed and you sighed, "I avoided contact so I wouldn't have to believe it. I don't know, preserve myself as much as possible since you seem to be well known at the university."
"So you didn't want to smile at me because you thought you'd end up in my bed?" Heeseung leaned forward a little, looking a little defiant. You leaned forward too, your hands resting on your lap.
"You make all the girls smile, what difference would it make if I smiled at you?"
Don't be so honest, Heeseung thought to himself, but it was already done when he launched into it.
"Maybe because your smile is beautiful and when that happened on sushi night, I ended up dreaming for a long time."
"What? Did you dream about my smile?" you almost shouted in the car.
"Too many questions for one night, don't you think?" Heeseung pretended to shake himself, looking for the car keys that he hadn't even taken out of the ignition. Turning on the air conditioning might be a good idea since neither of you made any mention of leaving.
"Too many confessions for one night" you leaned back in your seat.
"I think we're going to need a few more nights for you to tell me more" he also leaned back in his seat, but his head remained turned in your direction.
"Are you asking me out on a date?"
"Would you?" he asked back, a stupid – but extremely beautiful – smile adorning his lips as he said again, "I want to prove that friend of yours completely wrong."
"I'd love that, then" to his surprise, asking you out had been completely light-hearted. He didn't feel like throwing up or running away, or even saying something silly, stuttering... Nothing. Heeseung was just himself as he watched you bend down to him and brush your lips against the corner of his.
From the way Heeseung's head was tilted, giving indications that he wasn't going to move, you purposely kissed him on the corner of the lips, pulling away before he made any risky moves.
"I'm waiting for a message from you so we can make an appointment, mr. funny man."
You winked at him, watching as the tip of Heeseung's tongue traced the exact spot where your lips touched the corner of his. The smile never left him as he watched you open the door, wave, and close it to leave.
A smile had never left Lee Heeseung like that.
© ikeuverse, 2024. do not copy, translate or steal my stories.
#enhypen fluff#heeseung fluff#enhypen#enhypen heeseung#heeseung#lee heeseung#enhypen au#heeseung x reader#enhypen x reader#enhypen masterlist#lee heeseung fluff#heeseung fanfics#lee heeseung x reader#heeseung imagines
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Protecting her
Life with Pablo Gavi, the boy everyone adores, and I hate with all my passion not for any particular reason. I actually tried making peace with him the moment I stepped foot into his house at the beginning of my exchange program.
I tried to be nice, to even become his friend but he would always push me away and find some reason to fight me. Even Aurora and his parents tried to make us like each other but it didn't work so I just deiced to stay out his way..somehow that didn't stop him to sabotage me every step of the way all the freaking time!
leo: look at what your brother did to me! boy is a delinquent! I can't do this anymore Y/n..I'm sorry.
There was a picture attached of my soon to become boyfriend with bruised eye and busted lip. Did Pablo really did this just so Leo dumps me knowing it would spite me!?
I heard stumbling and rushed towards the front door to comfort Pablo about this. I was done staying on the sidelines and letting him do whatever he pleased just because I am guest at this house..this is MY life he was messing with for his own amusement!
"Why did you do it!? Tell me he said something to provoke you? Tell me you weren't just trying to spite me by doing this Pablo.." I said but he completely ignored me, like I was invisible, unimportant and that drove me mad.
"No! You're going to start listening to me! WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO LEO!!??" I said pushing him against the wall with all my strenght which was not possible unless he let me do it.
"Hm..or what if I don't listen chiqui? What will you do to me precious..huh??" he pushed back and I needed up glued on the wall in the matter of seconds. I gulped..he was so close..and I was no longer angry at him..I was tired of this whole "hate" thing.
"I'm tired of this Pablo..just leave me alone!" I said trying to push him but he wouldn't budge looking down at my face like he was lost in thought. I would give up everything ot know what he was thinking right now.
"P..please.." I was close to tears yet again being dumped not to mention that all my "friends" here only hang out with me thinking they will get to meet my new "brother"..I just wanted to be left alone by everyone especially Pablo Gavi who made this whole trip horrible!
"Fine.." he moved and i walked away not knowing that something in him broke seeing me so sad in front of him knowing he was the reason for it.
I was crying rather loudly knowing his parents and Aurora are not here and Pablo probably didn't even care about it. I was very wrong since he was glued to my door listening to each sound until finally opening the door and walking closer to the bed.
"Stop crying.." he said and I realized that he was indeed there watching me, probably in amusement.
"Leave me alone asshole!" I yelled feeling the bed move as he laid behind me making my whole body contract especially when his strong arms wrapped around my body..what was this nervousness and why did it feel so good to be held by him!?
"Please stop crying...if you like Leo that much I'll stay away.." he said while his hands were tracing invisible shapes on my bare skin making shivers moving down my spine and make me breathless. I truly didn't care that deeply for Leo..I almost cared more how it was angering Pablo..how I finally gotten some type of reaction out of him. I slowly moved turning around in his embrace to face him.
"It's not about Leo..it's about you..why can't you just stop hating me!?" I spoke my hand moving to his face caressing it gently and he let me do it for a few moments closing his eyes looking like he was enjoying it..maybe Pablo felt something for me..maybe I did for him too..maybe that's this tension between us..maybe it's love?
"Because you're annoying!" he pulled away and that gentle caring Pablo vanished in a matter of a second and he was back to being hateful asshole..he only wanted to feel in control and I gave him the chance..like an idiot..thinking he was genuine.
Quickly, he was out of my room returning to his crying himself to sleep..he was a coward to speak about his emotions..because I am not permanent..I will leave him soon and he couldn't afford to get attached.
Weeks went by and I couldn't sleep without imaging those strong arms wrapped around me. Leo asked me to try again but I rejected him..I couldn't stop thinking about my "gentle" Pablo wondering if that was his true nature..I wanted to get to him again..to feel that way again..to understand him.
"Are you ready hermanita?" Aurora said and I met her outside as she was my ride to the stadium for El Classico. I rarely went to his games thinking he would hate me there, but today I wore his jersey and went with the rest of his friends with pride. I wanted him to look me in the ye and tell me hates me if he does so much!
y.n.bebe
Rora and me at #ElClassico ❤️❤️
comentarios:
gvirafans: with Gavi jersey👀
aurorapaezg: hermanitaa💗
belengavira: pretty girls ❤️❤️
pablogavi: ❤️
I saw his comment..he probably did it because people would talk if he didn't..but a heart..it felt special..and made me even more determined to get close to him again.
During the game, Gavi was comeptlely focused as always wanting to win against the biggest enemy. Barca was better but it was frustrating that no ball would finally enter the goal..and time was running out till end of first half.
"I saw that new hermanita of yours..hmm..the things I'd do to her body" Vini provoked and Gavi lost it kicking the ball into the audience and walking towards him while everyone pushed him backwards and referee showed him a red card.
"Say that again hijo de puta!? Let me hear you say it again!" Pablo was not stopping until Xavi himself pulled him away from the pitch giving him a whole lecture about being more mature player.
"It was a good game hermano" Aurora said when we met with Pablo since Barça still ended up winning. Pablo was still heated and seeing me there wasn't helping.
"It's all her fault!" he said pointing at me in front of everyone and I looked away sadly..he was trying to hate me so I give up but I'm not giving up that easily because i know what I felt that night is real!
"Leave her alone! She did nothing wrong!" Aurora tried defending me but I was done being silent walking towards him bravely.
"Let's leave them alone.." Pablo's guy friends said and everyone left as the two of us stood there across from each other not saying a single word. Two can play this stupid game Gavi!
"What did I do to you huh!? Why don't you admit that you don't actually hate me Pablo?? I know you don't.." I said touching his sweaty jersey but he pulled away quickly like he was scared..
"Don't touch me!" he yelled expecting me to turn away and run but I moved closer again.
"Why? What are you sacred of when I touch you huh?"I said once again touching his chest and this time he didn't move staring at my lips longingly.
"Chiqui don't.." he whispered when I moved closer feeling my cheeks blush at the new nickname he chose..the feeling was back and I didn't want to lose it.
"Why?" I asked touching his face and again he closed his eyes as his hands wrapped around my waist pulling me even closer as our chests touched.
"B..because I won't be able to hold myself back" he whispered as we both opened around eyes looking into each other.
"P..Pablo.." I said breathlessly moving even closer but then Leo's familiar voice interrupted our little moment and Pablo pulled away angrily.
"Please let's talk Y/n..about us" Leo said and I internally cursed seeing Pablo's disappointed look as he just walked away without a word..freaking great!
"Is she coming?" Aurora asked
"She has another ride" Pablo said annoyingly reminding himself why he put up a wall..last thing he needed is to get hurt by a girl right now.
"No! I don't!" I said rushing after them after telling Leo I was done with him and sitting in the backseat next to Pablo whose jaw was clenching and he was clearly angry.
"He understood that it's over.." I whispered to Pablo but he was unfazed..once again like he didn't care. Here we go again!
"I don't care!" he whispered back before going on his phone as I sighed loudly besides him.
That night I couldn't sleep..I couldn't have him mad at me anymore..I did maybe the stupidest thing in the world walking to his room in the middle of the night. Luckily he was awake..
"P..Pablo.." I said and he turned around sitting in his bed with a surprised look on his face.
"Go away!" he said but I moved closer standing in front of him.
"I'm not going anywhere..I know why you hit Leo, he told me what he said to his friend and that you heard him" I said and Pablo looked up with raised eyebrows.
"He said you're alone and he can get with you in a week..and I showed him you're NOT alone" Pablo said and I smiled nodding my head and touching his hair as he looked up at me.
"And Vini?" I asked moving my hand down to his face while he looked at me finally putting down his guard and being vulnerable once again.
"Don't talk to me about that disgusting hijo de puta!" he said angrily and I knew he must have said something about me on the pitch..something that didn't sit right with Pablo and he needed to protect me..something you don't do for a person you "hate".
"Don't get angry.." I said and he nodded feeling more sad than angry while his hands snaked around my waist and he pulled me in kissing my stomach over my dress and I breathed heavily.
"I can't stop hating you chiqui.."he spoke into my stomach and I sighed raising his chin up and moving to sit on his lap.
"Why Pablo?" he said moving his hair back and he leaned into my touch as his face went into my neck and he started kissing my skin passionately.
"Because you're leaving me so soon..and I don't want to lose someone I love so much.."he finally said what's been on his mind for awhile and I felt my heart banging against my chest.
"So you decided to hate me? Why didn't you just ask me to stay with you??" I said with a smile and he was surprised to hear me say those words looking up into my eyes hopefully.
"And would you stay for me chiqui?" he said while I held his face and his hands tightly held onto my waist.
"Hmm it depends.." I said smirking moving in and he gulped once again looking at my lips longingly and I smiled.
"On what chiqui??"he smirked and I blushed to scared to tell him what I wanted right now..I just wanted him to finally kiss me.
"Hm..let me guess then" he held my face pulling me in and kissing my lips hungrily making me breathless but never happier. Then he pulled away..and I wanted to cry..I was so tired of these games and I just wanted to be with him!
"Please don't push me away again..please" i latched onto his shoulder and he smiled kissing the top of my forehead before pulling me in bed with him letting me lay my head on his strong chest.
"I'm never letting you go again precious.." he said as I looked up kissing him again as we continued to make out pulling onto each others clothes int he heat of the moment...
#gavigif#gavi#fc barça#fc barca#fc barcelona#pablo gavi x you#pablo gavi x y/n#pablo gavi x reader#pablo gavi icons#pablo gavi#gavira#gavi x reader#gavi x you#gavi x yn
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. ✉️ ་ ˖ ʿ ִֶָon melancholy hill. 花朵
想象 life as cupid couldn’t be more underwhelming and boring, because, even if you are a matchmaker, (or THE matchmaker) you can’t bring anyone to love you. but then jake is ready to love you for eternity.. 想象 reader thinks she’s a tad bit ugly. however, jake changes that. ( jake is obsessed with reader lolz! )
You were always the odd one out.
You never went out, you never hung out with your friends, you never goofed around at night. you never had time for anything!
People thought you just hated socializing, or maybe you didn’t like other people in general, they assumed you just liked being alone…
or you were just some loner who couldn’t gain a single friend so she copes by not hanging out with anyone.
And that was way off. In fact, you loved living. But were you someone who had time to live? No. You weren’t.
Because you were the one and only Roman God of love, lonely hearts expert, Cherub, you were CUPID. you put people together and made them fall in love, you were the reason people believe and didn’t believe in love.
maybe their relationship didn’t work out, but maybe it did. but your being on earth was why people could be with someone else, love someone destined to them.
But that’s what made you feel pathetic, you put two people together for them to have a soulmate for life, but whose arms could you creep into so you can cry and weep in their warm embrace? no one. because it was apart of the contract,
‘No use of corruption over your love bow. If you break this rule, you are erased from the face of EARTH, or, someone else can take the blame and receive the punishment instead.’ Fuck. It’s that serious? that was your exact thought, you have to live a life without a someone? a partner?
School was worse. Boys didn’t like you, girls thought you were a loser. Life when you didn’t have that love bow was a different type of sadness.
So you found yourself in the janitors room. Curled into a ball with your knees to your face, a flood of tears when down on her cheeks like there was no tomorrow. She felt so alone, so helpless. Hiccups and sniffles filled the room; she didn’t give a single care in the world if she was late.
She thought to herself, she was just ugly. It wasn’t because of the contract, instead, it was because no one was actually attracted to her. It made her violently sob like a baby, she just wanted someone’s arm around her soul, someone who can hold her until she felt safe.
“Hello? Excuse me pretty miss.. are you okay?”
You opened your salty eyes and met eyes with a guy whose australian accent was so strong and raspy, almost as attractive as how the guy was already. However, you realized, pretty miss?
“oh I’m fine.. I’m sorry, I’m gonna be late to class.” she tried getting up from her position, but it seemed like the guy didn’t want her to go. “it’s dismissal, you don’t need to hide your beautiful face,”
“You know me but, it’s Jake. Sim Jaehyun. I noticed you were crying, I wanted to see if you were okay. Are you okay? If no one asked you yet.” She felt embarrassed, “Thank you, Jake. But I need to go, I’m sorry, please don’t waste your time on me—”
“I didn’t want to tell you but, I’m not wasting time on you. It feels like I’m wasting time if I’m just gonna stand there so oblivious, I’m sorry. but you’re gorgeous, I love the way you look..
…I was your classmate since grade 6 but you just never noticed me because whenever I talked to you, you thought I was a mere joke.”
“I’m not gorgeous, Jake, and I always avoided you because I thought it was always the popular girls playing tricks on me.”
“God! You take my breath away! If you’re not gorgeous, Hell; you’re perfect!” Jake cried out, trying to bring her to realization. “You’re so sweet and kind, I don’t know why no one wants to approach you! That’s why I fell inlove with you!”
Jake, held her face so gently and she felt his warm hands on her own bones. “I might not be cupid, but I think someone as pretty as you.. would be a perfect match with someone who adores you so much. And that’s me.”
“but Jake. I’m cupid. And if I date you, I’ll be gone forever. Unless; you will be gone forever.”
“So what? If I feel your arms around me once I would be alright with not existing anymore, I just want to be yours.”
Yeah, jake wasn’t cupid. But she was, and when jake knew what were the consequences, he was seriously ready to take the blame. He would be ready to be erased off the face of earth if that meant he could be interlinked with her.
@ jwnstars !! cupid is here :^
OK. I hope that touched you guys like it did to me, this was so sentimental and precious to me. (Sorry. I just love this) the last part was my fav part writing because OMLLL ??? Jake would literally give up his life for his gf / s/o so that they could live theirs, so fricking cute !!! :’)))
He would give up his everything to be with them forever. Fuck. I might cry. ( @all4aoki witnessed me making this :3 )
#enhypen#enhypen fluff#enhypen imagine#enhypen scenarios#enhypen x reader#enhypen fan fiction#enhypen jake#enhypen jake x reader#enhypen jake x y/n#enhypen jake x you#enhypen jake soft hours#jake enhypen x you#jake enhypen x y/n#jake enhypen drabbles#jake enhypen x reader#jake enhypen fluff#jake enhypen#jake sim#sim jaeyun#sim jake#sim jaeyoon
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Alrighty! @number-one-shadisper-shipper and I binged the Knuckles series today, so time for thoughts! SPOILER ALERT.
I'll admit the show wasn't perfect. I've seen the negative reviews, and I kinda get where they come from. BUT! I did enjoy this show greatly! And I'm not here to complain. Time for some happy thoughts, y'all! 💙🤩
I think you need to have a love, not just tolerance, for the SCU in order to properly enjoy this show. I do have such, so I had a lot of fun with it.
There were definitely scenes from every episode that had me either squealing, laughing, crying, or flipping out. But my favorite was likely the first episode, because come on, we saw the Wachowski family! Most of them, anyway! While I missed Tom's presence, I was grateful for that comment from Maddie about him being "out of town," so he wasn't just gone for no reason.
The SECOND it showed our three space babies hanging out together in their room?! I SCREAMED. THE BOYS!!!!
Tails sitting on his bed tinkering with one of his gizmos, Sonic rocking out to music with an air guitar, and Knuckles exercising from one of the ceiling planks. IT'S THEM!!! They're just hanging out, doing their thing, looking oh so much like brothers. And Sonic's narration at the beginning was GOLD. 🤣💙
Even though we didn't get enough of Maddie being a parent, we definitely got a nice chunk for it only lasting part of an episode. Maddie called Knuckles "one of our kids" (that had me SCREECHING). The angry mama vibes were GOLDEN. 🤣 The way she made breakfast for them, the "Boys, breakfast is ready!" I love the normalcy of it! Can't wait to see more in the future! (Her calling to them with "boys" is somehow just the sweetest thing and I'm melting.)
The poor mailman being like "I just wanna go home, man" 🤣
We were right, fellas, Knuckles had no idea what being grounded meant. 🤣 Although the way Sonic piped up with "Oh, I definitely know what it means," has me suspecting that Sonic himself has gotten grounded a decent amount before. 😂
Knuckles trying to talk back, and Maddie going, "ExCUSE ME?!" then just making those tiny, terrifying noises and Sonic being like "Bro don't mess with Mom when she's mad" (okay, he didn't say "mom" and that made me sad, but the mom vibes were 110% there so I'm here for it). 😂 And since Knuckles snuck out and later Wade said, several times, "Aren't you grounded?" seems to confirm that this entire show is basically what Knuckles does when he's grounded. 🤣 Although ... his comment about not being able to be grounded because he had no home made me very sad. 😭
I did not have an issue with so much Wade screentime! Sure, he isn't my favorite SCU character, but I love what this show did with him! I'd already seen his moments in the movies (like nearly shooting Robotnik in the face with an actual handgun). I like how they gave him actual family issues; a dad who abandoned him and his family, a realistic sister, a mom. Bad family memories. Awkward reunions. They could've made it a joke, but they didn't, and I greatly appreciate that. Especially since I've witnessed firsthand how painful family separations can be. 😔
All the emotional talks Wade and Knuckles had caught me off guard in the best way! The way they talked about their different family issues, the way they talked of betrayal from friends, and being left alone, hit way harder than I was prepared for. Especially that talk they had at the burger place in the middle of the night? Oof. Good talk right there.
Also, even though they took a "show don't tell" take with it, I loved how Knuckles relaxed more and more throughout the show. In the beginning, he couldn't rest, he couldn't sit back and have a genuine good time. But the more he hung out with Wade and his family, the more he learned. He learned about music and found "his jam" (that was literally amazing btw). He watched movies with Mrs. Whipple and ate snacks in the hotel room in Reno and watched more movies. He had his teenager moments of rolling his eyes and rebelling, but he was so well portrayed here, I loved it. I felt for him.
Despite the bizarre nature of the episode "Flames of Disaster," (we were cracking up so hard) I'm trying to glean bits of the truth of Knuckles's story from the crazy musical play that Pachacamac put on in Wade's dream. I mean, "Longclaw" and her tribe were there, and ... what the heck was that giant demon thing?! Iblis?! Does our Knuckles Wachowski have an actual history with freaking Iblis?!?! 😱🔥
I was deeply intrigued by the two main antagonists, especially at the implication that G.U.N. did seem to exist before the events of the first movie?! Did it exist, get disbanded after the Maria incident, then get reformed?! My brain is exploding. 🤯 I was even more shocked that they apparently died? I guess I shouldn't be surprised, the Wachowski kids don't seem to have much qualms about getting rid of the baddies for good as the game versions do. That was a terrifying phenomenon, what happened with the two rings. 🫣
And then the Buyer getting crushed by the giant glass ball 👀
Although in those last two episodes, I admit I was freaking out and legitimately near tears at Wade's seemingly having to "betray" Knuckles. Before the reveal that all was in good communication, all I could think was how relaxed Knuckles finally seemed, chilling in the hotel room, being excited about whatever Wade wanted to "show" him, questioning whether it was a song, him declaring that he was going to bring his favorite hat, 🥹 all I could think was of their previous discussions about betrayal from friends and family, and when Knuckles called Wade "my friend" right before the elevator doors closed, I just about sobbed. I was like "please, don't let him be betrayed, don't let him have come all this way and relaxed so much only to get 'betrayed' once again by someone he's come to consider a friend." 😭 We heaved a HUGE sigh of relief when it revealed he was aware of the trap the whole time. 😪
Maternal instincts went nuts when he got so badly hurt in that final battle 😭 I literally reached for the screen several times and was right back to almost weeping 🥲 And someone tell me I wasn't the only one noticing the parallel in that scene with Wade standing in front of his unconscious body the way Tom did with Sonic in the first movie. That, PLUS Knuckles's epic comeback, and his retrieval of his own power?!?! EPIC!!!!
The ending was abrupt, sure, but the pure joy on Knuckles's face after everything as he jumped up to high five Wade was just too sweet. 🥹
So yes, even though I would have loved just a little more, a return to Green Hills, a reunion with Maddie, Sonic, and Tails, I adored this show. It was a wild ride, full of laughs, tears, excited screeching, etc. 💙💛❤️ I don't care what anyone says, nothing will make me hate it.
#sonic the hedgehog#sonic#knuckles series#knuckles series spoilers#spoilers#knuckles#knuckles show#knuckles wachowski#sonic wachowski#tails wachowski#maddie wachowski#the buyer#review#positivity#positive review#IT WAS SO MUCH FREAKING FUN#sonic cinematic universe#scu#wade whipple#no hate to wade you hear me#none#any hate replies or anything will be deleted#this is a positivity zone#i am here to have fun not complain#i will have all the fun and no one can stop me#sth
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I AM SO DUMB AND SILLY- HOLD ON-
SHE WANTS ME TO BE LOVED BY THE HAPPY FITS IS DEATHDUO/PISSA CODED. HELLO??? Maybe someone already mentioned this song- I don't know, I didn't see anyone mention it— BUT IT FITS?? IT FITS THEM BOTH
I know you know, I'm not too discreet
Walking around, heart on my sleeve
So, you say you love me, but not the way I need
Things are so close to what I want to be
I've known you so long, and maybe too well
All of the boys, you kiss and tell
Though I'll never be them, see I'm just a good friend
Though it's not quite bliss, I don't want this to end
Missa, it's so Missa coded with these words. He's more emotional, he's more open with his feelings and he's always nervous and embarrassed. He is vocal and is more connected with his feelings. It was so obvious that Philza even knows, he knows what Missa said when he tried to speak quickly in Spanish. Missa isn't exactly good at hiding it, but he sure knows not to press further in Philza's boundaries!!
Missa wants more, but he knows Philza isn't comfortable. So he's content with their arrangements, even if he wants more! He still wants to be Philza's friend, someone Philza can turn to even when he wasn't around as much for the kids!!
(also the whole "all of the boys, you kiss and tell" is a silly hint how Philza is super comfortable with Fit and others. You know what I mean-)
Let's take a walk down by the beach
It's warm on the sand, we'll save space for Jesus
I'll pick you flowers while you count the hours
'Til you can go home and watch drama TV
I'll say it now, there's no turnin' back
Time after time, my odds are stacked
So, I'll say no kiddin' while you wish I didn't
Maybe this time will be different for me
Philza, ohh, this old crow father is so repressed with his feelings. We have to rely on his actions, and sometimes actions speak a lot (not for Missa. PLZ- we need to gently hit him with a hammer to get him to understand).
But we can see how Philza keeps things that remind him of Missa. He kept the armor stand for so long, holding hope that Missa will eventually return. He tells Tallulah about Missa, and Chayanne keeps the skull that Missa gave him.
We can see the gradual shift as time flows, and seeing how the other Islanders start to get into more relationships. Philza is slowly starting to yearn and do things, or well say, he'd never would say about someone else (other than his wife). And by God's, the new crumbs we got just confirms this because of how much he changed from "platonic government assigned husband" to "MY Missa"
Also the way Philza gets so sad and upset when he mentions how Missa thinks Philza doesn't want him-
One day you'll love me before we grow old
All of your wishes to have and to hold
I'll do your dishes and ask for no kisses
So, I'll tell you what I want if
You tell me what you want is
Quit movin'
Quit dancin'
Why can't you love me here tonight?
The yearning from Philza, who desperately wants his platonic spouse back. He'd do anything for him, get him anything if he can just come back hommeeee and Missa is willing to do anything whatever Philza says he needs him to do. He won't press further, until Philza says something-
lord help me-
Deathduo/pissa crumbs save me...
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Blood of My Blood: Never Loved
One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.
Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.
Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.
He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.
The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.
Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.
Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.
Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.
Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?
“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”
He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.
Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.
“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”
And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…
But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.
But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.
That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?
He did not know.
Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.
Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.
“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”
He had paused to puff and shrug.
“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”
It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.
Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.
Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.
Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.
You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?
What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago.
The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.
He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.
“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”
“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.
“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”
“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.
“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.
The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.
The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.
Once while alive. The other…
“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”
He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.
“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”
“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.
“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”
Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.
“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.
The wretched woman had fine aim.
And that’s not all she has, is it?
“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”
“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”
“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”
“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”
“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.
“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”
“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”
“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”
So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—
He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.
The cold lump shifted in its pocket.
He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.
A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.
Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.
Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.
“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”
And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.
He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.
Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?
A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.
And he had ordered it.
In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.
So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.
Instead, a magic trick.
Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—
But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.
“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”
He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…
Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?
Fine.
Talk of those in love.
Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.
Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.
And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.
Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.
The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.
A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…
“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.
Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.
All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.
“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.
“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”
“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”
Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.
The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?
“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.
“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.
“What is it? Has something happen—,”
His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.
Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.
His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.
“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”
“To—to wear it in town—,”
“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”
“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”
“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”
“Sir—,”
“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”
“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”
“What? What did you think? Do tell.”
“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.
What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.
There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.
But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.
Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.
Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.
Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.
It had.
Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.
“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.
The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.
“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”
Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:
“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.
Good.
Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.
Amusing fireworks had ensued.
They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.
A fine excuse the latter had made.
He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…
A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.
Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.
Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.
How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.
And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.
Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.
“Was there something you needed, Sir?” Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.
“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.
“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”
“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”
“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”
“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”
“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”
“You have until you finish the cigar.”
“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”
“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his…dismissal.”
“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”
“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”
“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”
“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”
“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”
Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—
But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.
All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.
“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”
“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”
Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.
“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.
“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”
The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—
And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.
He had.
He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught. “Was there something else?”
“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”
“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”
“Everything I want is above the neck.”
“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”
“Surprise me.”
“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”
He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—
You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.
He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.
“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”
“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”
“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”
“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”
And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.
Off he had gone. Dense and careless.
Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.
The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?
The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.
“Father? Are you alright?”
The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.
“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”
“You look different.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”
“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”
“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”
“Good-day, diavol.”
And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.
And then.
And then.
Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.
So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.
Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.
But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.
His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.
If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.
What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.
He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.
He had known his son was missing.
He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.
He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.
He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.
Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.
She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.
It had been him.
How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.
What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.
You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.
Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.
He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.
But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.
Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:
Have you truly grown so slow, Count?
Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.
Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.
I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?
His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—
Mine!
It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.
Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—
Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…
You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.
But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.
Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.
A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.
They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.
“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”
“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”
Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.
Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.
The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.
“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”
Then, fired into his head:
This is the last time you will touch me.
And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.
There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?
He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—
Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—
—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.
He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.
Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.
Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.
And his focus was in splinters now.
You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?
“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”
If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.
He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.
I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.
He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.
Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.
His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—
How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?
In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—
This is enough for me.
In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—
Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.
In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—
You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.
In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—
But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—
In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—
and sheltering—
In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—
and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.
Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.
The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.
Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—
There.
The window in the library.
Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.
He staggered.
Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.
I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.
Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…
Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.
This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.
The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—
A toy? This alone?
Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.
This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?
Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.
I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.
The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.
All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.
You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.
Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.
This was not that.
This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.
Your heart? YOUR HEART?
A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.
Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?
Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—
Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.
That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.
The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.
The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.
The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.
Jonathan Harker.
Jonathan Harker.
Jonathan Harker.
The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?
He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.
It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.
Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?
Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…
The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.
The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.
Count. I did not know.
The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—
I’m sorry.
The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:
I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.
The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.
Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.
Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.
I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.
Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.
No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—
The void was gone.
They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.
‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’
And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:
‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’
‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’
And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.
This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.
For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.
Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?
Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.
I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.
Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.
Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.
There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:
I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.
There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.
I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.
There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.
I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.
The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—
Let me go, Count.
No.
Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—
Before it’s too late.
No!
Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.
MINE.
And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.
In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.
Jonathan?
“I’m fine. …How long was that?”
Less than two minutes.
“It felt longer.”
It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.
“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”
Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.
Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.
And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.
“Do you need..?”
No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish.
Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.
Are you certain you’re alright?
“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”
It showed you, didn’t it?
“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”
That. Was this what hurt you in there?
“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”
Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?
“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”
A slaying made into euthanasia?
“…That is certainly a word for it.”
There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.
His hand seized around hers.
“Why?”
She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.
You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.
They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.
“Mina. Did you know?”
The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.
It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.
“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”
Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,
“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”
When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.
The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.
“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”
“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”
“Mm.”
“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”
“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”
Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.
Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.
Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.
In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.
But wept just the same.
#this AU has wrung four novellas out of me#I pray this is the last or my hands will be reduced to nubs#anyway#for maximum ambience imagine Dracula rocking back and forth in his dirt box listening to Annie Lennox's “Love Song for a Vampire”#but this time with the (grudgingly) appropriate Harker swapped in#he's about there#blood of my blood#dracula#dracula bad ending au#jonathan harker#mina harker#quincey harker#my writing
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okay so. sam with a praise kink & a humilliation kink.
Imagine Dean breaking into Sam's dorm once, one week after he left for college, cause he's drunk and sad and hurt and he misses Sammy. It scares Sam shitless and he almost punches him but Dean manages to hold him down, "easy tiger", and then they're wrestling, more trying to touch every piece of the other's skin than actually trying to hurt each other, and it takes 0 time for Sam to get painfully hard in his pajama pants and of fucking course Dean notices.
"Still the same horny mess, huh, Sammy?"
And Sam just lets out the most pathetic whine as Dean reaches for his cock, hand moving up and down lightly and slowly and Sam missed this so much he could cry.
Dean has him begging for it in no time "use your words, babyboy" and Sam's brain can barely come up with anything but please please please.
Dean turns him over and climbs on top of him, taking both their clothes off as fast as he can and Sam just waits.
Dean starts to finger him right there on the floor and Sam can't wait, he needs Dean inside, his whole body feels hot and he's tingling and the friction of the carpet against his cock is just so good, so right, so he begs again please please please and Dean tells him to shut up, shoving his cock inside Sam hard and all at once and it punches the air off Sam's lungs.
"Quiet Sammy," Dean leans in to whisper to him, "You don't want your college friends to know you're a slut."
And oh my god Dean is fucking him so slow and so hard, Sam can't take it, he starts to fuck himself on Dean's cock in a pathetic rhytm that is not nearly enough.
Dean even stops for a moment, lets him do all the work, and then he grabs both Sam's arms and starts to fuck him properly, using Sam like he's a fleshlight, and oh god the memory of Dean fucking that flashlight in the bathroom when he thought Sam was asleep, Sam moans loudly, his cock leaking on the carpet.
"You should see you right now. College boy turns out to be nothing but a pathetic slut. What's the use of studying so hard if you're just gonna be fucked dumb by your brother's cock, huh?"
Sam is so close, his entire body shakes, and Dean is still holding his arms and he can't touch himself and it's all too much and he starts crying, moaning Dean's name and hoping he'll get the message.
And oh, he does, he pulls Sam in until his back is flushed against his chest and starts fucking him slowly, kissing his neck, and Sam needs more, he starts moving, and fuck, Dean's hand finds his cock.
"So good, Sammy" Dean groans and Sam can tell he's close, too, "Perfect for me, doing so good."
And Sam only nods, fucking back on Dean's cock and thrusting on Dean's hand, and he needs it so bad-
"Go ahead, Sammy, let go for me. Let me see how perfect you look when you cum on my cock." Dean speeds up his hand and Sam cums with a loud cry, body falling forward, but Dean catches him and turns him on his back, gritted teeth as he throws Sam's legs over his shoulders and enters him again, fucking Sam even harder, groaning "fuck fuck fuck" and spilling inside him.
Sam almost wants to beg for him to stay like that, inside him, not moving until the sun comes up, until Sam can feel him getting hard again, until he can fuck Sam and spill inside him again and again until he feels full.
But Dean just gets up, gets dressed and leaves.
Sam doesn't get up from the floor and it doesn't take long until he's hard again so he starts jerking off, high on the feeling of his brother's cum leaking from his hole.
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So I was thinking about a post I saw a while ago and it made me realize that I believe it didn´t really occur to Anakin that Padme was too young as a 14 year old Queen because he was a 9 year old slave and already making adult decisions, like:
Sure, I will risk my life to give you the ship parts you need new friends.
I will sacrifice the pod I built with many sacrifices that I wanted to use to escape with my Mom once I got her and my slave chip out of her body with my self made slave chip detector.
I know exactly how to cheat on my owner, I have know him all my life actually and he loves gambling.
Sebulba, leave Jar Jar alone, you could kill me instead but then you would have to pay for me so go away.
I built a droid to help Mom around the house and I am also looking after grandma Jira here, fixing her things so the heat doesn´t get too much for her.
Do you need the droid army that is invading Naboo stopped? No problem, I will just destroy their main star chip and I didn´t even get out of place as Master Qui-Gon Sir asked me to.
Then Anakin became a padawan and was send to missions in which he had to use his lightsaber to get out of "negotiations"
So of course he defended Padme being a Queen at 14, to him her words about being happy for being relieved of so much responsibility sounded as if she thought she was doing a bad job with her planet, that´s why he told her he heard people were so pleased with her they wanted to keep her more time as their Queen. He thought she was selling herself short.
I believe the whole, "too young to be doing this" only beat Anakin in the face when he was send Ahsoka in the middle of a war zone.
I mean, he called her a "youngling" not even a padawan, he most definitely didn´t want to be training a 14 year old youngling in the middle of a war zone and he only accepted because he saw how sad Ahsoka looked when she thought he didn´t want her.
Ahsoka just had to invoke a little bit of tears and she already had him grapped around her little finger.
Anakin: Sure I am supposed to be your Jedi master and you should call me master but we are in the middle of a war zone, we both could die tomorrow, your situation sucks Snips and you are too young yet to notice it so of course you may call me skyguy to your heart content.
He is actually worse with Luke, honestly, it didn´t matter to him his little boy already destroyed the death star in ANH and his Master was calling for his head because he could become a Jedi and try to kill both of them, to Vader he was just "a boy"
In ESB Vader was at the parenting stage of thinking about Luke like, that´s my baby, nobody can touch him or his friends until I say so ok?
So he can recognize when someone was too young to be send to war, slavery or fight his Sith Master and he was right most of the time, except when it´s about himself and his perfect Queen Padme, they were veteran kids just doing their jobs.
Love him honestly :D
#anakin skywalker#padme amidala#ahsoka tano#luke skywalker#anakin has oppinions about ages#anakin“protective brother/father” skywalker#tpm#sw aotc#empire strikes back#star wars#anakin: childhood trauma what childhood trauma?
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umm so i wrote a little fic/blurb idk i don't think it's good but it's something that's been stuck in my head for a while with my own little oc named grace but her name is only mentioned a few times so it could totally be ignored and seen as reader.
anyway this is my first ever fic so please be kind to me and if you have suggestions or other fic ideas i'd love to hear them.
not proof read and lowercase intended.
and if you think it's awful please lie to me i'm fragile 😔
deny
you are a lover girl. a hopeless romantic, someone who dreams of finding "the one" and living happily ever after. kie often says you tend to fall in love a little with everyone you meet. you can't help it though, you have so much love in you, it feels like you'll burst at the seams if you don't share it with others.
you think you're in love with your best friend jj maybank. no one understands you the way the wild blond haired boy does. no one can communicate with you with just a single look the way jj does. no one makes your heart beat out of your chest and your tummy flutter the way his dimpled smile does, eyes crinkling at the corners, a slight sunburn on his nose because lord know that boy doesn't use the sunscreen you bought him.
so yeah you're in love with jj maybank but then yesterday a different boy kissed you. pope heyward, your other best friend, genius extraordinaire whom you thought was maybe in love with kie but no- he kissed you and you felt a tingle in your ever beating heart. heat filled your cheeks and your ears became fuzzy. that was a new feeling when it came to pope. it made you excited to explore because as much as you love jj, you don't think the boy would ever return your undying affection because your friendship meant too much.
----
you stood in the threshold of popes bedroom, gasp stuck in your throat, eyes wide and mouth open at the sight before you. you’re not sure how to process what you’re seeing.
before you on the bed that pope kissed you on not even 24 hours ago, is jj maybank, your closest friend, kissing the heyward boy.
so many emotions flow through you at the sight before you.
shock because not once has jj; or pope for that matter mentioned or even hinted that they liked men- or each other. then again, jj has always liked beautiful people and pope is certainly that.
sadness because you and pope had literally just kissed. maybe you were naive to think a simple kiss meant something more to the boy, but it was pope, you don't think there's a mean bone in his body. then again you’ve always been too much of a romantic, too blinded to really see what’s in front of you. blinded by your want and need to be loved that perhaps you create situations in your mind that you interpret as reality? maybe you need to contact your therapist again. you're sounding even more delusional than before.
lastly, you feel jealousy. the angry green monster rumbling around in your tummy, making its way up your throat. you’re not sure what exactly is making you jealous because the image of the two boys kissing is surely confusing. are you jealous because pope is kissing another person who isn’t you? a part of you is jealous because he’s kissing jj. or maybe it’s that jj is kissing pope or that maybe they’re kissing eachother and they're not kissing you? you're not sure at this point. dear diary jealousy is a disease babes, and you are infected.
you must have made a noise because next thing you know, the two boys are pulling apart, a string of spit still connecting them and for a second your love rattled brain is jealous of it. the spit that is, because deep down you’ve always known that you wanted them both… to be the one to connect them. you feel slightly crazy being jealous of spit.
jjs face goes beat red and then flushes pale, like a ghost. he looks terrified and like he might vomit all over the floor in a second.
“grace!” popes panicked voice reaches your ears but they’re still kind of ringing from the shock of seeing your supposedly straight best friends kiss.
in your heartbroken haze you wonder if you're being a bad ally right now. you love the gays you swear! you just never pictured pope and jj as being a part of the gays ™.
you clear your throat, “jb and kie are waiting for us downstairs. we were going out on the boat today, remember?”
you try and say that as gently as possible because jj still looks like he’s going to pass out and pope isn’t much better.
popes hands are shaking as he reaches for you and a part of you wants to pull away but you’re not mean. you’ve never been mean so even if your feelings are hurt you’ll always put your best friends feelings above your own. and it looks like pope needs to touch you. maybe to hold your hand and reassure him you’re really standing there, witnessing something that you probably shouldn’t have.
so many emotions flicker through popes eyes. you can’t really see his blush but you’re sure if you touch his face it would be hotter than the sun.
pope grabs your hands in his shaking ones. you can feel how clammy they are and you hazard a look back to jj who has yet to even move. you’re a little concerned he’s gone into shock.
you let out a soft sigh and smile at the boys, a smile that is mostly genuine.
you squeeze popes hand and make eye contact with the panicked blonde boy on the bed.
“it’s ok jj. i won’t say anything if you don’t want me to.” you speak kindly, as if you’re talking to a scared feral cat.
you only see jj swallow hard. “for what it’s worth, i understand the appeal... wanting to kiss pope and all.” you tease hoping to cut the obvious tension in the room. you feel like you're the one choking now.
jj and pope both let out huffs like they’re afraid to laugh but also relieved you’re not upset.
“you’re not mad?” jj croaks like he still has a frog lodged in his throat. he looks at you with soft wonder, like you’re the best thing in his life. his stare makes your tummy flutter.
“of course not. you guys are my best friends. i only ever want you to be happy!” you reply honestly. jj deserves happiness after the shit life he’s been dealt. he deserves good things and if you have to set aside your feelings in order for him to have good things then by golly you’ll do that.
“grace, about yesterday-“ pope starts off,
“don’t worry buddy, already forgotten.” you cut him off. hopefully saving him the strife of having to apologize to you about the kiss and saving you the embarrassment of him telling you he regrets your kiss. you don't think you could survive hearing that out loud.
you march over to jj still holding popes hand, effectively dragging the boy with you. you throw your arms tightly around jjs neck and after a heartbeat, jj returns your hug. you move your head to look at pope and nod at him, encouraging him to join the hug.
“now c’mon. you know how pissy jb gets when he’s made to wait” you giggle.
you lead the boys out of popes room and home and into the twinkie without giving them an option of saying no.
“finally! i thought y’all died or something. what took so long” john b huffs in exasperation.
“my fault jb!” you quickly chirp so the boys don’t have to panic and think of a lie “pope showed me the new book he got and it’s my favourite and i starting gushing and you know me i can’t shut up and… well i forgot why i went up to get them in the first place” you giggle with a sheepish smile.
“you’re so lucky you’re cute, grace” kie laughs teasingly.
you see pope and jj making eye contact. you have a feeling you might need to play therapist for them soon. pope doesn’t know how to talk about his feelings without beating around the bush and well, jjs favourite thing to do is deny deny deny.
actually, that’s exactly what you’re gonna do too! deny you have feelings for pope. deny you have feelings for jj. deny you ever saw them kiss and deny that them kissing only upset you because you weren’t a part of it. deny that a part of you enjoyed it. deny that your feelings matter in this situation and deny that if given the chance, you’d love to be in between a beautiful jj maybank and pope heyward sandwich.
yep, deny deny deny. this is gonna be a long freaking summer.
#jj maybank#kiara carrera#obx#outer banks#pope heyward#jj maybank x reader#pope x reader x jj#jj maybank x oc#pope heyward x reader#pope heyward x oc#john b routledge#my fic#obx fanfiction#obx fic
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30
LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
thank you so much, I shall answer these prompts NEOW
21: Fics you wish you could find more of?
Oooohhh more fics involving Gwen, that's for sure. When she's written right she's one of the strongest, most relatable characters imo, 'cause all she wants is for the world to be right and just and kind and everything wants to prove her wrong, but she won't back down from her views. I would also adore more Elyan, just in general. And complete rewrites of the show 'cause the one I'm reading right now is so good I might do one as well. Also modern au's where they're all like secret badass spies or smth, 'cause those are so fucking cool (i am accepting fic recs for ALL of this, please feed me y'all)
24: Everyone knows that fandom doesn’t like uther but what are your feelings about gaius?
I think 1) we need more concrete info about how he was when he was younger, but 2) i think he is severely complicated and wanted what was best of merlin and morgana, but failed the two while also giving them a ton of love. With morgana, he just didnt want her to pursue her power lest she become uther's next victim, cuz gaius cares for the pendragon siblings like his own. With merlin, he was just trying his best with his overpowered nephew, who alos has a destiny regarding his people's genocide's son, and he just doesn't know what to do half the time, kinda like merlin. I didnt like how he lied to merlin n morgana, how he gaslit her and how he made merlin hide and become so anxious abt his magic (and we see what that looks like season 5), but i get it. I really get it. I dont know what i wouldve done if one wrong move could mean the death of two kids he considers his own. I bet he was scared all the time and hated himself for it.
27: Modern Merlin headcanons, if any?
OH BOY. OHHHH BOY. So many. It really depends on what au i have for modern merlin, but I'll give you a few generals:
he's a teacher of sorts; i like the idea that he's kinda collecting magical anomalies and teaching them how to understand their powers and being, since he knows what its like to be afraid of urself, so he's a personal magic teacher. I also rly like my magic elementary school au, since its merlin teaching magic to a bunch of kids, which is adorable
he has officially one cat, a black one called Midnight, that accidentally became immortal along the way and now hes severally attached. I say officially since hes also friends with any other animal that he might come across and they recognise him if he passes them again. disney princess fr
he's figured out his gender and he can turn into a woman if he wants; she looks exactly like merlin, same height, same weight n muscles, the hair is longer cuz merlin likes it that way and her voice is deep and gorgeous
his favourite weapon is a staff or any long distance fighting weapon of the sort; also he looks cool as fuck fighting with it, but thats just a bonus
I'll stop here but i have SO MANY MORE
30: Side character death that makes you the maddest?
Elyan. There was, quite literally, no need for it. I was gonna say Lancelot, since we did not get enough of him, but his death made sense for his character. Elyan? What the fuck was that? It was just for pain and nothing else. What did it add to the story if not just a sad funeral scene and thats it? It just felt like they wanted him gone n found a way, and that pisses me off. I feel like him saving gwen and living would've given such a complex situation when she turns evil, 'cause what if she "confides" more n more in her brother, creating a rift between arthur n elyan, which then creates a rift between arthur n the knights, which would just isolate him further n make him suffer, which is what morgana wanted!! we couldve had protective brother elyan! I think i just wanted more knights in general.
Thank you so much for this ask, I yapped a fuck ton but it was funn
#merlin#bbc merlin#come get yall headcanons#hey look i posted a thing#merlin prompts#this was so fun
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just some thoughts from sherlock and co. Mailbag episode
honestly I did this to myself and at 3am no less.
In an mailbag episode on the sherlock and co. patreon, answering a question on their favorite musicals, John answered Les Misèrables. And being the romantic we know our loveable doctor to be, I was perusing the songs from the 2013 movie album and came across On My Own.
Sung by Èpoine about her unrequited love for Marius. And that is sad in its own regard, there's a reason it's one of the musicals most popular songs and Samantha Barks does a great job of that crushing emotional weight of being so wrapped in someone, so ultimately dazzled by them and wanting to be near them. But knowing they will not look at you the same, will not place the same value on the time and proximity you share. And that is not their fault and it is hard to love someone and desire to be close and yet have them be the source of your greatest pain and rejection, even though they may wish you no harm.
It's been hinted at and out right stated (by Sherlock) that John wants to be liked. And given what we've heard about John's last relationship (the one whereby he gained ownership of Archie after the split) and perhaps some insecurities there, insecurities in his own capabilities, comparing himself to others, its understandable to read John as something of an insecure man. Not in a toxic manner but John definitely has a lot of self doubts about himself and his place in the world and what he can offer to others. Despite him so naturally being able to attune to people and their needs and being quite bloody smart and intuitive. All round just a decent person.
And John, as much as anyone, marvels at Sherlock Holmes. This almost mythical figure. John admires Sherlock and maybe envies him on some level. I think not in Sherlock's deduction skills or specific knowledge skillsets but maybe in Sherlock's apparent surety in himself and where he is in life and what he wants from it. Sherlock is plainly himself, even if it means not "fitting in " John often tries to mould himself to what others might like, and hey, as a people pleaser, oh boy do I understand that. Almost becomes like muscle memory.
Sherlock in turn, I think admires John's social prowess. His ability to express the complexity of emotions. Just because someone doesn't emote the typical way doesn't mean they don't feel the emotions. And that can be incredibly frustrating when you want to communicate with others. Sherlock cares about people. He's interested in people. And he can't always express or connect with them in the way he wants. Like a language barrier he mentioned in another mailbag episode. That is why Sherlock and John work. They draw out in each other and supplement for the qualities they lack or yearn to have more of. They're a balancing act. A good one. And I'm not the first to point that out.
All this to say, imagine when that act is separated. The Fall. Grown so comfortable to have the other's support, always by each others side and then, suddenly the other person isn't there. And you have to remember how you functioned without them before. But you can't go back. You're not the same person you were. But if they aren't there to remind you, to encourage you, it's easy to fall back into old habits.
And so the song. On My Own. From John's perspective, watching the man the myth the dazzling legend that is Sherlock Holmes, getting swept up in the adventures, feeling totally out of place but thrilled be along for the ride, participating, maybe growing in confidence all because of coincidental flat share with possibly the most brilliant and bizzare man he's ever met. The world is changing for John Watson. And Sherlock is seemingly at the center of it all. He's found purpose. Friends. A home. Maybe more. But John is as fallible in his assumptions as any of us are. And Sherlock appears to have no interest in such relationships and John, not confident enough to make the first move. So he can daydream. Of what it would be like to be with Sherlock. And what it would be like be without Sherlock.
And then the Fall. And he truly is without Sherlock and his world has dulled and greyed and blurred. The city has lost its glimmer. The flat is quiet. The words are meaningless. And John sits with his what ifs.
Don't think of John hearing this song. Of the heartbreak of knowing that you can ever be with the one you love. And knowing that taste of what brilliant technicolours the world is when you were with them, full of stimulating twinkling lights. And thinking it could never be that way again. Don't imagine John, sat in the flat, in the achingly quiet flat, as a woman sings for her never was love, head in his hands, Archie resting his head on John's knee. Don't think of John cursing himself for not being sure enough to tell Sherlock how he felt, for not being good enough again to save his friend. Don't think of John Watson, once again, on his own.
#sherlock and co#sherlock and co.#sherlock & co#sherlock homes#john watson#I just have a lot of feelings about these two okay?#I dunno if I expressed myself well but here we are#jonklock
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Saw that Daniel Radcliffe post and got inspired to make something dumb
#dead#danganronpa#makoto neagi#naegi makoto#monomi#meme#shitpost#danganronpa trigger happy havoc#komaegi#lowkey#lol#a e i o queue#no i will never be over the fact that corpse Makoto is technically canon#actually thinking about it--this would also work for Rantaro and Kokichi#i mean that effigy was kind of like a ''dead'' Rantaro yeah#'cept Kokichi actually got to keep it lol#a Kokichi and Nagito sleep over with their treasured life sized Rantaro and Makoto dolls#they paint their dolls nails and talk sh-t about everyone else#take turns being each other's officiate to their ''pretend'' weddings to their dolls#this is so sad these bois need more friends#straight up losers bruh ;-;
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Hot take. Spencer is misunderstood and is a complex character who isnt all that bad, you guys are just mean.
#thats my boy youre ragging on.#evil spencer is an interesting take on the character. he is an asshole. maybe deserves one smack to the face#but i keep seeing genuine vitriolic hatred for him and seeing him portrayed as an irredeemable monster and that makes me sad inside#i need to write up a post on spencer and why i think he acts the way he does#“he tried to kill Hiro” so many other engines tried to kill other engines. Diesel was boasting about how everyone would get killed and then-#-subsequently replaced by him. im not excusing his actions. but i think theres a reason behind it#and if Hiro can learn to be friends with Spencer i think you should at least look at him with a bit more kindness#Hiro my sweet grandpa how do you have so much love in your heart. you forgive a clearly misguided and insecure engine who was surrounded by-#-horrible influences (engines on the mainland)#forgive my boy spencer hes an asshole but he gets better#ttte
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feeling super Chill and Normal about them
#critical role#the legend of vox machina#tlovm#tlovm s2#tlovm spoilers#there's something here about vax needing his sister more than he thought she ever needed him#and scanlan needing his friends more than he thought they ever needed him#and both of them at a turning point in their stories as the narrative is permanently changed#i am going to be emotionally destroyed if they get enough seasons to complete the vecna arc#just saving the wish so that the party could stay together#yeah liam o'brien is going to kill you with his sad bois#but sam riegel is going to trick you into thinking his funny characters are as deep as a soap dish#and you will regret ever believing him#scanlan shorthalt#vax'ildan#my screenshots
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speaking of people's wrong opinions on art i love haikyuu's art development and its current style idc what ppl say about it
#not every mangaka needs to draw their characters like models sometimes they need to look a bit silly and match the overall tone#idk its sad that so many fans ignore how good furudate's shape language is like his stylization rlly pushed those formssssss ugh#also the faces got more variation it is so easy to tell hq characters apart even though hq rarely uses screen tones like its just bw#i also love how furudate draws old people he is so good at captivating the charm fo all ages ranges its sooooooo#i remember a few years ago i saw ppl complain about kuroo oikawa etc not being Pretty BOys anymore like i guess ut also it makes sm sense t#me#HQ is from HINATAS pov and i think characters like oikawa and kuroo looking goofier and less handsome/intimidating only highlights that the#become hinatas friends like theyre not these imposing seniors anymore those are his friends#i also like that they look and act their age i love that everone is pulling weird faces all the time#hq's visual comedy is just good in general esp with hinata and kageyama oughhhhh#haikyuu! art is great i think it plays such a big role in why its so beloved#even if not everyone likes it
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