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#tw: international travel

yourkeeperoftherunners · 1 year

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Fam

Plot: Your exchange student “brother” from Australia is graduating. Unbeknownst to him, you and your mom have planned to surprise him after his ceremony. It may have been an unexpected meeting, but he considered you family after bonding with you.

Characters: High School Graduate!Felix (SKZ) x Former Exchange Student Host Family!Reader (female), including mentions of other SKZ members.

Rating: PG-13

Notes: Years ago on my birthday, I posted this drabble and it was my first Stray Kids writing ever. While I had a sequel kicking around in my head for some time, I never could get the details together with proper planning and time. My birthday gift to everyone who supported or visited this account.

Many thanks to @xiubaek-13 for answering all of my questions regarding graduation in the Australian high school system!

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“Talking to a secret girlfriend?”

Felix jerked his head up from his phone and looked over his shoulder to see that his sister Olivia trying to read his screen. He shook his head and pointed to the name at the top of the chat. The younger sister peered at the screen and sighed when she saw it was you, AKA the girl who was part of the host family when he went overseas for an exchange program in high school.

“She’s not my secret girlfriend,” Felix said, “She’s kinda like another sister from another country.”

“But you already have two sisters!” Olivia joked, pretending to look hurt. “Does Mum know?”

Before he could respond, the pair were interrupted by their parents, who were calling them to dinner. Olivia headed for the kitchen and Felix quickly shut his phone off and left it on his nightstand.

After he met you when you came home from college one weekend, it had been awkward at first, as you had not been warned about your mom taking in an exchange student while your brother was in Australia. Eventually, both of you found common ground in music and bonded over shared interests during the course of his exchange program. You weren’t always around, due to college, but you had started to stop home to visit your mom and him more often until his last day in your country. Now he was about to graduate from high school and you were finished with college and working a job in a radio station.

“Y/N, thanks for filling in for Jacob,” your manager said as he stopped you in the hallway. “If you’d like, we can slot you in for mixing on some of our newer programs.”

“Thanks,” you responded. “I’m definitely interested. Oh, before I forget, did you see my e-mail about vacation?”

He pulled out his work phone and checked the e-mails for the information. His thumb pressed your e-mail and he nodded as he looked up. “Yeah that’s fine with me. Jacob said he’s starting to feel better and we should have enough people to cover for you. Where you going?”

“Australia,” you shared.

“Funny, I always wanted to go,” your manager mused. “Don’t forget a jacket - it ain’t summer there – they get winter now. Real confusing from what I’ve heard.”

You gave a mock salute and walked to your desk to retrieve your bag. You pulled out your car keys and checked your phone for missed messages.

Mom

Hi honey, are you bringing your shampoo in your checked bag? I couldn’t remember if you said you were or if you were relying on the travel sized bottles. Sent 15:31 PM

Y/N

Hi mom, yes I’m checking my shampoo – we can share so you don’t have to waste room in your suitcase. Also packing the same lotion you use. Sent 19:07 PM

Do you need me to pick anything else up on the way home? Sent 19:07 PM

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“So who’s coming?”

“Mum, Dad, my sisters,” Felix mused as he ticked off the names of people coming to the graduation. “Nana and Granddad said they can’t make it, but that’s okay.”

“I really wish I could make it,” Chan sighed as he moved the phone to his other ear. “I’m really sorry about my schedule – work said I had it off, but then they tell me someone’s got an emergency and I have to cover.”

Felix shook his head and insisted it was fine. “It’s just high school, no big deal.”

“But didn’t you get, like, honors too or something?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Felix replied. “We can hang afterwards.”

“Auntie and Uncle taking you for dinner? Where you guys going?” Chan asked.

“Umm not sure actually,” Felix confessed. “They said it was a surprise, but that I’ll really like it.”

Chan paused and he crinkled his brows after hearing his cousin’s reply. Surprise dinner? To him that was a little odd – come to think of it, he couldn’t recall the last time his aunt and uncle pulled off some kind of surprise before. Not that they were bad at keeping surprises or something, but he didn’t think surprising people or their own kids was their style.

“Did we lose connection?” Felix asked.

Chan quickly apologized and explained he spaced out for a moment. “I’m sure it will be fun, wherever they planned dinner I mean. Hey, I’ll let you go – I need to work on a sample for Binnie. He’s trying to work on something for a deadline and wanted my help.”

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“You have the address right?”

You waved your phone around and with your free hand, you retrieved a physical print-out of the directions from your bag. “I know how you are about using my phone and the possibility of a bad signal or something, so I killed a tree and brought the directions on a printout.”

Mom relaxed when she heard your response and followed you to the rental car area to pick up the car. “It’s a shame we can’t attend the actual ceremony, but rules are rules. I heard that extended family were limited as well!”

“Think about it Mom,” you said as you searched for the shuttle to the rental car office. “If every student invited their whole extended family, they would run out of viewing room for the event. It’s not like back home where they sometimes rent a bigger venue to do the ceremony.” You found the stop for the rental car shuttle and waited near the attendant’s post for the next one to arrive.

Mom put her bag down next to yours and she checked her watch for the time. “We should have enough time to stop at the hotel, freshen up, and then get to dinner. Oh that reminds me, I need to text your father and brother about where to find the meals I left them.”

“Maybe tell them to open a window in case they burn the food,” you joked.

“Your brother did try to improve his cooking,” your mom reminded you. “His exchange mother told me she had him in the kitchen every night for dinner.”

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“I gotta admit, that was kinda boring,” Han confessed once the ceremony ended. He loosened his tie and looked over at Felix who was trying to find his family. “Doing anything afterwards?”

“Dinner,” Felix replied. “You?”

“Probably gonna eat at home and work on some tracks I’ve had in my drafts,” Han confessed. “Dad’s working late and Mom didn’t want to go out without him, so I said we can skip the fancy dinner.” He watched as Felix looked around for his family and nudged him. “You know they’re not here, right? I’m talking about your exchange student family, not your real one.”

“I didn’t think they could make it,” Felix confessed. “Y/N’s got a job and her mom’s got the brother back. Y/N’s dad travels a lot for work too, so yeah. I really didn’t see him all the time when I stayed with them.”

“Ah but I’m sure they’re happy for you,” Han added. “Hey, take pics of your food – I wanna live vicariously through you while I eat cold pizza at home.”

“Why not order fresh?”

“Don’t wanna toss the leftovers – it’s Domino’s!” Han protested.

Felix rolled his eyes and bid his friend goodbye as he pushed his way through the sea of students trying to find their parents and family. He spotted Olivia and made a beeline for the seating area where they were.

“Dad’s getting the car so we can just go to the restaurant,” Olivia explained. “Don’t ask me for spoilers – I don’t know and Rachel doesn’t either. We’re all in the dark about where we’re going for dinner.”

“Wonder what the big secret is with this place,” Felix murmured.

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“Felix was that Han next to you at the ceremony?”

“Um yeah Mum, he’s not doing anything tonight,” Felix explained. “Said his parents weren’t able to make plans, but he’s okay with it I guess.”

“Aww I wish we had known – he could have joined us,” Mrs. Lee sighed.

“I’m not sure they would have accommodated the last minute change to the reservation though,” Mr. Lee reminded his wife. “Hey, I’ll let you out here and I’ll go park. It should be under my name.”

Felix followed his sisters out of the car and Mrs. Lee headed to the entrance to check in. He held the door open for his sisters and a couple leaving the restaurant, then entered the restaurant. The place didn’t look familiar and the name didn’t ring a bell. He tried to recall if any of his friends talked about any hot restaurants they wanted to try some day, but gave up when none came to mind.

“Yes we can seat you now and when your husband gets here, we can direct him to your table,” the host explained. He picked up some menus and and asked the family to follow him. “Some of your party already checked in.”

What?

Felix frowned when he heard that comment and he hurried to follow the host. That couldn’t be right. His grandparents, aunts, and uncles couldn’t come today and even Cousin Chan wasn’t available. (Unless the latter lied and brought their mutual friend Changbin as a surprise.)

The host rounded the corner and stepped to the side while using his free arm to gesture to the table in front of him. Felix stopped short once he rounded the corner and he blinked when he saw who was sitting at the reserved table.

Your mom stood up from her seat and smiled warmly at Felix, before greeting Mrs. Lee and thanking her for the invitation. You pushed yourself out of your chair and started to make your way around the table, but were crushed by Felix running to give you a big hug.

“I thought you were working,” Felix half-whispered.

“Got time off and Mom had some travel points to use,” you explained. “Your mom invited us but wanted to make it a big surprise.”

Olivia nudged Rachel and shook her head. “Told you he replaced us.”

“What?!” Felix sputtered. “I did not!”

“I’m just his host family pen pal I guess,” you responded with a shrug. “Believe me, he talked a lot about both of you and how much he missed you. Wish I could have said the same for my brother, but yeah.”

Your mom threw you a cross look and you sighed as you mumbled that your brother was okay. “I’ll pretend I care about the little gremlin,” you sighed. You looked over at Felix’s sisters and added that they were lucky to have him as a brother.

The pair exchanged a look and Rachel pretended to look thoughtful. “Well come to mention it, we were thinking of trading him in–”

“Hey!” Felix protested.

“We’re only kidding Lix,” Olivia reassured him. “Come on, let’s order – I’m hungry.”

Felix took a seat next to you and cupped his hand under his chin. “So what’s new since I left?”

#Stray Kids Felix #SKZ Felix #Lee Felix #SKZ AU #yourkeeperoftherunners original #tw: exchange student #tw: international travel #number 3202

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destielmemenews · 7 months

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"The infection is most common in parts of Africa, Brazil and the eastern Mediterranean region, like Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, according to the World Health Organization. "

"All leishmaniasis infections are caused by Leishmania parasites but can have varying clinical presentations. The most common form – called cutaneous leishmaniasis – can cause ulcers and permanent scars. Some more severe variations of the disease can be fatal, according to the CDC."

source

#destiel meme #destiel meme news #united states #us news #news #not breaking news BUT something to be aware of #flesh eating parasite #texas #southern united states #tw parasite #it's only been seen in the us in cases of international travel #so it's kind of a big deal for it to just be here now #leishmaniasis #leishmania parasite

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hylianengineer · 5 months

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I've just escaped my own personal hell: trying to order food online with my parents, their hangry anxiety, my own hangry urge to scream at everything, buggy restaurant websites, and a language barrier.

It is a miracle I have not yelled at anyone. I am now hiding in my room eating chips while waiting for Real Food to get here and also trying to calm down from... that. And borderline sensory overload. Ugh.

#hylian rambles #hylian travels #food tw #i am discovering a weird ability to stay outwardly calm while surrounded by angry people. feels awful though.#I'm not sure if my overly calm tone belies my internal urge to scream or not but at least I'm not actually snapping at people like my dad #he's been doing it most of the trip on and off but today was worse #my family is remarkably functional compared to some people's but we have our issues and this is one of them #i spent most of our time in the uk snapping back but I'm getting better at dealing with it i think

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bylerisc4non · 2 years

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HOLY SHIT I GOT IT!! (Mike's self-acceptance journey)

Okay, so we all know that Mike needs serious help and therapy and to learn to respect and care about himself, right? Well, remember Lexi's play in Euphoria? Remember what it did for Rue? Yes. I'm proposing that they just put on a play for Mike about his life and he'll see everything, his internalized homophobia, his projection, s3 and how he was an asshole, between s3 and s4 and how he was so depressed without Will, and that's how he'll decide to change, accept, & love himself. And he'll breakdown and sob a lot and maybe scream and cry about the painting. He will leave that play a changed man and immediately go find Will to tell him he's in love with him. BOOM. Byler endgame happens.

No but in all seriousness, something like that probably needs to happen in order for him to finally come to terms with himself and his love for Will. He needs to see Will's perspective, which will probably come out in a painting fight or something. But he also needs to step back and look at himself and see that he's fucked up but he's amazing wonderful extraordinary and Will loves him for it. And he'll learn to love himself. He'll have a lot of apologies to do, like to El, but in the end he'll forgive himself and she will too.

sorry-- overwhelming brain explosion. More to this theory is that the "play" is actually just a time warp kind of situation where he sees his younger self and has to confront the fact that he's always mistreated and disliked himself, even that little boy. All of his trauma from losing Will and losing himself too (in s3 and while denying his feelings) will hit him. The hurt he felt from being lied to by Will hits him, but also hits ten times worse with the knowledge that he made Will lie to him, he was the one who made Will think he didn't need him or want the painting to come from him. Everything will explode in his face; his self-hatred, his denial, his IH, his ED, his suicide ideation. Everything is coming to light this season. Mike's journey with his mental health through the seasons is going to slowly get wrapped up, providing closure and hope for him.

Mike needs to step back and see himself the way Will sees him, as the heart. He's already begun to see this in the van scene. They will continue this journey of self-reflection in s5. He will step back and see himself, really see himself this time. Perhaps this doesn't mean he will necessarily get Vecna'd but we probably shouldn't totally eliminate that possibility. After all, with the mirror imagery and everything, it could potentially happen. And just the fact that this whole post is about the fact that Mike needs to step back and see himself, like in a mirror (*cough cough* Vecna holds up mirrors to people). And it will be hard to have that mirror held up to him, but he's slowly coming to terms with it. Eddie was a great influence and help with that. He was unapologetically himself and Mike saw that and started being himself too. Of course, there were still moments when he'd hide again, like in Lenora, but for the most part Mike really started chipping away at that mask and coming out of his shell in s4.

Why else would he be dressing more freely and doing his hair different and all that? He's starting to accept himself and he just needs to continue and wrap up that journey in s5. He'll accept himself as queer, which is the root to a lot of his other mental health problems. Therefore, when he's able to finally stand back and see himself as he really is and learn to love himself the way Will loves him, he'll be able to address those other problems. His mental health will only improve from there. However, the addressing of those issues may be messy. I have no doubt that it may end in Mike's "death." He won't actually die (hopefully) but it will be a visual representation of how everything caught up to him, of how his lack of care for himself (but also his loyalty) ended up being the death of him because he would do anything for his friends and has little self regard. He'll die sacrificing himself for those he loves.

BUT THEN he comes back to life somehow because why tf wouldn't he? And gay love saves the day as always. Mike learns to love and accept himself, byler endgame happens, and they all live happily ever after THE END.

But anyway.

In summary, Mike must see a clear vision of the person he's been through the seasons to address his trauma, IH, and mental health issues. He needs to see how he's hurt those around him, but that he's also been hurt. He needs to feel compassion for himself and learn of his importance. In other words, he needs to see himself through Will's eyes. Will sees the true him at his full potential: loyal, a leader, compassionate, kind, funny, smart. He's really, genuinely, the heart. He's started to see that in the van, however, with the realization that Will lied about El commissioning the painting, he may start to doubt himself all over again. (One step forward, three steps back.) So, the confrontation of the painting must lead to Mike seeing himself through a separate lens. He must see himself through Will's eyes and see that it wasn't El's truth but Will's truth. He'll breakdown and this realization will lead to the acceptance of not only his love for Will but of himself as a whole and that hurt in him will slowly begin to heal.

#byler #mike wheeler #mike's mental health #tw suicide #st5 theories #mike's journey with self acceptance through the show is an important plot point that i feel many overlook #but overall he needs to step back and see himself from a different perspective #in season 5 mike will finish up that journey #he will finally view himself as he really is: the heart #i know many dont like the idea of time travel and stuff #but i feel like mike seeing his past self and his hurt and pain throughout his life is a must (this could of course come through flashbacks #he needs to step back and see himself through a different lens #only then will he truly accept himself and be able to challenge the things like homophobia and his own mental health #mike's self acceptance journey #mike getting vecna’d #he needs a mirror held up to him to see himself #idk maybe this is obvious im just rambling #stranger things analysis #internalized homophobia

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windfighter · 1 year

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Cold Italian Winter

Prompt: Scars

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Takuya was already awake and gone from the bed when Kouji opened his eyes. He groaned. The bed was cold and everything hurt. From the leg he no longer had to every single scar across his body. He had really thought the Italian winter would save him from it but apparently not. He slowly sat up. Every muscle in his body protested. He reached for his leg, but let his arm fall down. His thigh already hurt too much to put that extra bit of weight on it. The metal in it felt absolutely freezing and he rubbed a hand across his thigh. Takuya peeked inside, had probably heard him moving about, and smiled at him.

”Morning, princess!”

Kouji grumbled. He pulled a hand across his face, rubbed his hands together and massaged his wrists. How was it possible for one body to be this painful?

”Morning”, he answered.

Takuya tilted his head and took a step into the bedroom. Kouji cracked his back with another groan.

”You okay?” Takuya asked.

”Eargh”, Kouji answered. ”...could you get my crutches?”

”I’ve told you we should just have them by the bed.”

He sat down next to Kouji. Kouji rolled his shoulders. The right one cracked and he winced.

”...you sure you don’t want the wheelchair?”

Kouji hesitated. He leaned against Takuya, who wrapped an arm around him.

”I feel so…” Kouji tried to find the words to explain it. ”...disabled with it?”

It didn’t quite convey how the wheelchair made him feel like he was back there, in the hospital, struggling with the pain left behind after the snake-bite. When he had just lost his leg and couldn’t do anything on his own. When even breathing had been a struggle. Takuya put a finger against the screw sticking out of Kouji’s leg for the prosthesis.

”You kind of are”, he said with a laugh.

Kouji’s stomach hurt. The memories were too pressing and he wasn’t quite in shape to push them away. He buried his face into Takuya’s shoulder. Takuya hugged him and kissed the top of his head.

”Yeah, I know, it sucks to be depending on people like that. I don’t mind giving you a hand.”

Kouji stretched his leg and leaned heavier against Takuya. Takuya rubbed Kouji’s back and waited for Kouji to make a decision. Kouji let out a sigh. He would much prefer the crutches but he wasn’t sure his body agreed with him.

”Wheelchair”, he settled on.

Takuya nodded. Kouji pulled away, leaned forwards and buried his face in his hands. His wrists ached from the movement. Maybe Kouichi had a point, maybe Kouji needed to stop trying to be as independant as he always had, ease up on the travels, give his body time to rest. He was a leg short, had gotten shot at, had bombs explode way too close for comfort. Gotten bitten by animals, some of them venomous. Been way too close to death a few too many times.

He was only 43. But what else could he do? All he knew was how to take photographs and how to tell if an animal was upset at you. There wasn’t really any other kind of life he wanted to live. Takuya knew that. Kouichi probably also did at some level.

Takuya stood up and Kouji’s body protested the shifting of the mattress. He could feel tears prickling behind his eyelids and took a shaky breath. Takuya squeezed his shoulder before leaving the room.

He returned a few minutes later with the wheelchair. Kouji didn’t use it often, prefered to just brave the pain, and had asked Takuya to get rid of it several times. Takuya never did. He parked it by the bed, but stopped Kouji when he tried to move over to it. Kouji glared.

”I know. I’ll let you in a second. Just… what do you want to do today?”

Kouji considered. They were supposed to meet up with Junpei, he wanted to show them the opera and the new restaurant Izumi had opened. They had talked about maybe going to the movies after that. Kouji hadn’t been to the cinema for years and had been looking forward to it. It wouldn’t be impossible, but…

Takuya grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt for Kouji and Kouji pulled the pyjamas off, changed into the other clothes. He pulled his hands into the sleeves and stared at the floor. Takuya moved the wheelchair closer.

”I’ll call Junpei and cancel”, Takuya said. ”We can watch a movie on the couch instead. Should I ask Kouichi to come over?”

Kouji moved over to the chair, carefully changed his position just to test exactly how badly his body was doing. His arms protested. Crutches would have been impossible. He stuck his tongue out in frustration.

”We could get you an electric one”, Takuya said when he saw it.

Kouji shook his head. Takuya had already taken that option up with a doctor on Kouji’s behalf and even the doctor had said that was unnecessary. That Kouji was a healthy young man that could walk and handle everything and thought even the regular wheelchair was excessive. He winced as pain shot through his missing leg again. They should probably talk to another doctor, but Kouji just didn’t want to deal with it. He sighed.

”Movie on the couch sounds good”, he said. His voice was tense from the pain. ”No need to call Kouichi, I’m fine with just you.”

”Yeah, he’ll probably just get worried.”

Takuya grabbed his phone and called Junpei’s number. Kouji wheeled himself into the livingroom with Takuya following behind.

”Kouji’s not gonna be able to make it today”, Takuya said into the phone.

Kouji wanted to protest, but it was nice to hear Takuya use his name instead of calling him princess. Not that he minded, but it wouldn’t have been as much of a joke now that he was feeling like crap. Takuya offered him a hand as he moved over to the couch and he accepted the help.

”Yeah, I know”, Takuya continued in the phone. ”We might be able to do dinner tomorrow? At Izumi’s restaurant?”

Kouji leaned back in the couch and took a shaky breath. Takuya ruffled his hair.

”What do you want for breakfast? I could make pancakes?”

”Something with a bit more protein, thanks”, Kouji answered. ”Can you get me a hot water-bottle as well?”

”It’s that bad?” Takuya asked.

Kouji nodded and closed his eyes. Takuya ended the call with Junpei.

”I could get you the electric blanket as well”, he suggested.

”I’m not cold”, Kouji noted and glanced at Takuya.

”I know”, Takuya said and put a hand on Kouji’s shoulder, ”but you’re all stiff. Thought it could help.”

Kouji shook his head. Overly helpful Takuya was definitely overly helpful.

”Leg’s worst”, Kouji said. ”I really just want that dealt with.”

”Okay then”, Takuya leaned down and kissed Kouji’s forehead. ”Hot water-bottle and painkiller coming up. Plus some rice and scrambled eggs.”

Takuya disappeared and Kouji laid down on the couch. He closed his eyes, listened to the silence of the house. The kitchen was too far away from the living room for him to hear Takuya working in it. Kouji’s back twinged and he sighed. It was as if he was 80 already. Something warm was placed on his thigh and he opened his eyes again.

”Working on the rice”, Takuya said and held a glass and a package of painkillers towards Kouji. ”Figured this was more important.”

”Short-term yeah”, Kouji said and grabbed the package. ”Can we watch something with David Attenborough?”

”Anything you need”, Takuya said with an exaggerated bow.

Kouji rolled his eyes and took one of the painkillers, before accepting the glass. He put it on the couch when he was done drinking and Takuya moved it to the table before handing him the remote and a phone.

”You find the show, I’ll get us breakfast and snacks.”

”Yeah, thanks.”

Takuya left again. Kouji started the television, found The Life of Birds ad started it. The warmth of the water bottle chased away some of the pain and he could feel his tense muscles relaxing ever so slightly. Today was a bad day and he hated it. It meant the rest of the week would also be filled with pain. He sighed. He had returned to Italy instead of going to Norway because he thought the warmer weather would help.

Kouji looked at the ceiling. He had a trip to Antarctica coming up in spring and he wasn’t sure how he’d handle that. He’d solve it later, no use worrying. The people he were travelling with knew him and would help him if he needed it.

Takuya returned with food and a big bowl of popcorn. Kouji sat up, winced at it pulled at his aching muscles and ligaments. Takuya sat down, pulled him closer and pulled a blanket over him.

”I know you’re not cold, but you’ve said yourself that heat helps”, Takuya said before Kouji could protest. ”Eat your breakfast.”

Kouji relaxed against Takuya, ate the rice and listen to David Attenborough talk about birds. The day was less than ideal, everything still hurt, but… At least Takuya was there to help him feel better.

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monstersflashlight · 1 month

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Grabbing him by the horns

Minotaur x fat fem!reader || Face sitting || Tw: internalized fatphobia

“Sit.” He instructed, his big head hanging out the edge of the bed, his horns almost hitting the ground. He looked so good naked and sprawled on your bed, his dick so big, already leaking as he looked at you.

It took you forever to be comfortable being naked around him, your rolls and fat being a big source of awkwardness for you. He insisted you were perfect, he made you feel like you were. He kissed your big tummy, he loved to mark your thighs with love-bites… He loved worshiping you like a goddess. And you believed him, you felt like a goddess around him.

But some topics were difficult to deal with. You still insisted on being always under him, and don’t get it wrong, you loooooooved being under him, his weight almost too much as he pounded you in every position possible. But you weren’t so sure about being on top, much else sitting on his face. He loved your pussy, he could spend hours and hours making out with it as you moaned, groaned and screamed his name for everyone to hear…

“No. I’ll crush you.” You argued. Your anxiety was getting worse as he talked. You wanted to be intimate, everything was going great until he mentioned he wanted you to sit on his face.

“You will not. Are you questioning my strength?” He looked offended. Ouch.

“No. Nothing like that, I’m just too heavy.” You insisted, trying to cover yourself as you talked, feeling naked in a non sexy way.

He let out a slow breath, looking at you with the softest eyes. “Little mate, if you keep saying you are too heavy I’ll spank your ass until you can’t walk so I have to carry you everywhere.” The image of you ass up, face down as he spanked you sparked a new wave of desire inside of you. But you couldn’t do it. What if you hurt him?

“I-” You tried to argue again but he wouldn’t let you.

“Sit.” He repeated, his words final.

The fear of breaking hurting him still very present inside of you. But you approached him, slowly. As soon as you were at arms reach, he was pulling you to him, forcing your legs open and turning you around so you could look at the mirror across the room. You hovered over his face, trying not to sit directly on him. He grunted, sending vibrations through your thighs, making your knees go weak. But you held your ass above his face, trying to erase some of the weight.

“You are gonna suffocate.” You warned him, anxiety filling you once again.

“Then I’ll die happy.” He said, his lips millimeters away from your pussy. And then he grabbed your hips, no preamble, no finesse. He grabbed your hips and pushed you down until your full weight was on top of his face. Your pussy over his open mouth, your clit rubbing against his nose.

Then there were no more words, no more reassurances, he drove right in. The first contact between his lips and your pussy made you quiver, and that was just the start. Before you could think about what he was doing, he was making out with your pussy, eating you out like you were the last meal on earth and he was a starving man. Or minotaur in this case.

Your hands traveled to his horns without you realizing it, grabbing onto them for dear life as his hands moved your hips as he pleased. You were on top, but he was the one guiding every one of your movements, making sure you couldn’t get away, making sure your thighs pressed the sides of his head and your pussy made contact with every part of his mouth.

He kept eating you out like he wasn’t in a hurry, like he was just enjoying the feel of you on top of him. But you? You felt desperate, your orgasm just out of reach, just a bit more and you’d get there. But he was playing with you, he was toying with your pussy like it was the best hobby he had. So you took control, the desperation inside of you so big and so fierce you couldn’t let him control the movements anymore. Your hands on is horns helped you guide him towards that little bundle of nerves. He laughed against your flesh and complied, sucking on your clit as you trashed over him. Your pussy making obscene noises as you coated his face on your fluids. Your orgasm hit you like a tide wave, making you scream his name as he kept going. And going. And going.

“Stop. Too much.” You begged, your pussy oversensitive.

He gave you one last long lick as he lifted you off his face, pulling you over him like his own personal blanket. His dick pushing against your lower tummy as you rested your head against his chest, breathing hard.

“We are doing that again as soon as you recover.” He sentenced, no place for arguments.

“Okay…” You whispered, too spent to fight him anymore.

#minotaur husband #monster #monster x human #minotaur #monster boyfriend #monster fucker #teratophillia #monster x reader #monster imagine #minotaur x reader #minotaur x human

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yandere-daydreams · 11 months

Text

Title: Distorted.

Pairing: Yandere!Dottore x Reader (Genshin).

A Grab Bag Commission For A Very Lovely Anonymous Commissioner.

Summary: With the help of the Akasha system, Dottore strives to keep you happy and docile and, most importantly, unaware by his side.

Word Count: 1.0k.

TW: Unhealthy Relationships, Unreality, Slight Gore/Blood, Unbalanced Power Dynamics, and Obsessive Behavior.

“Do you think Ajax is free?”

Dottore hummed thoughtfully, pressing his scalpel downward and severing a measured length of small intestine from the greater mass. With time to spare and the patient he was extracting his materials from long-dead, he took a minute aside to note the patches of scar tissue lining their internal tissue on a blood-spotted journal, to test for unusual viscosity or durability that’d have to be accounted for in his research. It was a minor study, something that would’ve been handed off to a younger branch of himself not yet ready to play a hand in more dire schemes, but due to the intervention of a certain archon, he was forced to carry out more of his own grunt work than he had in decades. Not that he minded getting his hands dirty, of course.

Especially when the same archon’s nation had given him such a lovely lab assistant to keep him company while he worked.

“Planning to replace me, little mouse?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten. It’s your own dinner party, for the Tsaritsa’s sake.” He heard you sigh in mock exasperation, then again – your frustration more genuine. You were sitting at his desk, working away at whatever little task you’d assigned yourself, the ring of blue light encircling your head pulsing brightly. It was his own handiwork – a version of the Akasha system he’d been able to maintain even after returning to Snezhnaya. He had no idea where you thought you were, what you thought he was doing, what you saw through those clouded eyes, but he knew you couldn’t be here, in his dark, cluttered lab - couldn’t see your beloved husband, the man who you’d crossed half of Teyvat to stay with, elbow-deep in a vat of disembodied organs and viscera. That was what interested him most about your experiment, really. It was one thing to wonder how you’d react if you ever found out the man you loved had such grisly pastimes. It was another, to watch what lengths your mind would go to just to substitute your reality with a more palatable fantasy. When it suited him, he could play a more involved hand in your fabrication, make himself into a hero or a villain or something else altogether, but most days, he was content to let you create your own daydreams. You were the most obedient when you could make him into exactly what you needed, that day.

“To celebrate your return to Snezhnaya,” You went on, as he piled the segmented pieces of a malformed liver onto his scale. “Pierro says that you haven’t been holding up your social obligations. I know it’s not customary, but I thought it’d be nice to invite another Harbinger – so you don’t have to suffer a room full of noblemen and merchants alone.”

So you were aware of his status as a Harbinger, today. More often than not, you treated him like a neighborhood doctor, or a traveling scholar as far from home as you’d found yourself. Sometimes, he was a low-ranking diplomat, or a medic you could welcome home from the battlefield, but you rarely acknowledged him as something so dangerous, something so far above yourself. It must’ve been the occasion. It would’ve been hard to deny who he was when you were sending out the invitations to a Harbinger’s event.

On that note, he abandoned his work, positioning himself on the opposing side of your desk. He was already smiling – it was difficult not to, when you were in his position – but his grin broadened further as he looked over your half-finished guest list, your attempts at calligraphy scribbled across what little scrap paper you could find. “I believe Tartaglia was sent back to his post in Liyue last week.”

You pursed your lips. “Pantalone comes with good company.”

“And he charges market-price for every precious second of his time. You wouldn’t want to bleed me dry, now, would you?” You tilted your head to the side, pretending to consider it, and he let out a breathy laugh, rounding the table and settling behind you, his hands coming to rest on your shoulders. “There must be an alternative.”

“Well,” You tilted your head back, your smile now matching his own. “It has been a while since I’ve heard Columbina sing–”

“Anyone but Columbina.”

“I write Pantalone a letter tonight, then.” You allowed yourself a moment to bask in your own self-satisfaction, leaning back in your seat and allowing your gaze to drift – first to your lap, then to your shoulders, where the blood and viscera coating your hands was beginning to soak into the fine ivory silk of your sleeves. There was a flash of repulsion, a sound not unlike a half-choked scream, and then you were shoving him away, your expression only growing more pained when he refused to move. He felt something tighten in his chest – not quite fear, but pure, zealous excitement. Had you, somehow, managed to break yourself out of your trance? Was there a flaw in the Akasha system he hadn’t accounted for? How much would you force yourself to forget, overwrite, warp and distort into something loving in the coming hours if you saw him for what he was, now?

“Zandik.” The sound of his name on your lips was to die for. He leaned down, pressing nipping at the corner of your jaw, and you groaned, brushing him away. “I’ve told you not to touch me while you’re painting. Look at me – it’s going to take ages to get this out of my clothes.”

Oh. Painting. How adorably quaint.

How adorably wrong.

With a sigh, he leaned down, pressing a fleeting kiss into the corner of your neck. You crossed your arms, sulking, but allowed him to. It wasn’t as if you’d be able to refuse. “Forgive me, darling.”

He straightened his back, watching red seep into white and begin to stain.

“I’m sure you’ll forget all about this in no time at all.”

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere imagines #yandere oneshot #yandere genshin imagines #yandere genshin impact #yandere genshin #genshin imagines #genshin impact #genshin x reader #dottore x reader #yandere dottore #yanderecore #yancore

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biggestsimp12 · 1 year

Text

Who fell in love first?

Its literally 4 in the morning and i got no sleep and brain goes brrr for these so >¬° (probably will post way later lmao)

___________________________

Fluff

The reader hasn't a specified gender

Tw: none. Just lots of fluff

With following characters: Wanderer, Xiao, Cyno, Kazuha , Zhongli, Kaeya, Itto, Childe, Albedo.

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Xiao

You fell first he fell harder

Got trapped in his mysterious eyes when accidentally spotting him at Wangshu Inn. From that day you visited almost daily in hope to meet him once more. When you succeeded to do so, you couldn't leave his mind. You got such a pretty smile, gorgeous eyes and a heart-stopping laugh. He thought you had put a spell on him lmao

He started avoiding you as he tried to figure out this new "thing" you've done to him.

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Zhongli

He fell first you fell harder

Got to know each other after paying for his tea. His stories were so interesting you couldn't help but want to hear more. His nice and gentle aura made your heart flutter. Sadly you got to go as your boss scolded you for being late for work.

---------------------------------

Childe

You fell first he fell harder

Oh, how easily this man got obsessed with you...

How you always greeted him like an old friend despite knowing his status in the fatui.

You better know what you got yourself into since you're not escaping.

----------------------------------

Kaeya

He fell first you fell harder.

Must i even explain? We all know his charms and flirtatious nature could get everyone all over him. Yet he's got his eye on you while you having not even a clue of the situation. How cute.

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Albedo

You fell first he fell harder

You were always very opened minded to his experiments that he couldn't help but start developing a crush on you.

Sucrose had to explain him once more what he was feeling. Very calm about it actually. Didn't try a thing from what Sucrose told him, not wanting to rush you.

Sweetie pie

------------------------

Kazuha

You fell first he fell harder

This boy is a sweetheart omfg

Enjoyed traveling with him and vice versa.

Who would've thought the wind could bring him such a nice person. (>^<)

He sings for you when you guys are on a trip. Lots of stories. Collecting things on the trip and to see your happy face makes his heart skip a beat.

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Itto

You fell first he fell harder

This big guy is gonna leech to you like crazy.

Gonna tell all the new thing he and his squad does.

He won a beetle fight? Your the first to hear.

Somebody tried to throw beans at him? Whining straight to you.

You better stand him cause you're not going to leave any soon.

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Cyno

You fell first he fell harder

His voice softens when he's talking to you. Since he sees you as a friend, he likes telling you all the rendom jokes he has in mind. Laugh at one of them and he's high over heels for you.

Talks to Tighnari about you.

"Have you seen how gorgeous Y/N is? I must be a snowflake since i fallen for them."

(Tighnari internal sighs lmao)

----------------------------------

Wanderer

You fell first he fell harder

The lots and lots of patience you need to have if you like this man. His attitude sky rockets if he likes you. Honestly he's in denial when it comes to human feelings.

Just give him time and patience. He has trust issues and he's scared you are going to leave him. Just give him time and his ice hard walls will melt from around his heart.

----------------------------------

The end

Have a nice day/night

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sunrise-imagines · 8 months

Note

Can we pretty please get something for taking care of fw Finn after the scarab fight?

I almost made myself cry with this one, hit me right in the feels. Hope you enjoy!

TW: Angst, mentions of violence, mentions of blood, eventual fluff, hurt/comfort

Farmworld Finn x Reader The Aftermath Of The Scarab Fight

•Now I know we’re all worried about him considering Scarab legit stabbed him in the head, but considering that we saw no visible blood, my opinion is that his hat protected him from taking as much damage as he could have.

•Keeping that in mind, he still probably has some internal bleeding and a concussion from being slammed into the ground.

•After Finn found out that Jay and the others had gone to the crater, you were instructed to stay with the rest of the kids and barricade yourselves inside the house.

•You rounded up all of them and waited for his return, but after a while of no one coming back, you sensed that something was wrong and told Bonnie to watch her younger siblings while you went to the crater to check.

•By the time you arrived there, Scarab had already found them, and you were forced to watch horrified as his sharp limbs dug into your lover’s head, gasping as he was slammed into the ground and lay not moving.

• Scarab then lunged towards the group of travelers, and with a flash of colorful light, they were all gone.

• You almost tripped over your feet as you slid down the side of the crater, running over to Finn and kneeling down to check his pulse. You take his wrist in your hands, praying to whatever gods were out there that he was still alive.

• You let out a sigh of relief as you feel a shallow but strong pulse through his skin.

• With the Destiny gang having run away, the ones left were Jay and Little Destiny, the former of which ran up next to you, eyes wide with fear and worry.

• “Is…is dad…?” He stutters, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. You reassure him that he’s still alive, but he’s going to need help.

• The three of you work to carry Finn back to the house, where Bonnie and the others wait with bated breath.

•When they all see Finn unconscious in your arms, they break out in a chorus of tears and frantic questions, and you tell Jay to keep his siblings downstairs while you take him up to the bedroom.

• You and Little Destiny drag him up the stairs, and she helps you lay him down on the bed.

• You thank her for her help, and she scoffs, “I-I’m just repaying him for saving me, it’s not like it’s a big deal…”

•You smile at her, putting a hand on her shoulder and telling her to go back downstairs and check on everyone, to which she sheepishly nods and leaves.

• You take off Finn’s hat to asses the damage, revealing his shock of white hair, the only physical semblance left over from his days as The Snowman.

•To your surprise you don’t see any blood on the side that was stabbed, and you figure that his hat must have taken the brunt of the impact for him. There is, however, a large patch of purple bruising on the side of his head, along with some small nicks and cuts from where the rock dug into his skin.

• You do your best to carefully clean each wound, applying antiseptic and bandaging the right side of his head.

• For the next three days you sit by his bedside, making sure to feed him and replace any bandages that had gotten dirty. You sent a letter to Doctor Princess (her farmworld self) explaining what had happened, and she replied that she would be coming as soon as possible, but the trip would take a few days. Occasionally the kids would come in and tell him about their day, or just lay with him for a while.

• Jay and Little Destiny, who had started living with you all since her father pretty much disowned her, were big helps with helping take care of the other kids. You were especially proud of Jay, knowing how hard he was working to stay strong for his little siblings despite being scared himself.

• Then suddenly, as you were preparing to change the bandages on his head, you heard a soft groan coming from behind you.

• You whipped around at the noise to discover that Finn had finally opened his eyes, and was currently trying weakly to sit up.

• You rushed over and threw your arms around, saying how much you love him and how glad you are that he’s awake over and over. He’s still a bit dazed, but he’s lucid enough to hug you back.

• Suddenly the events of that night come rushing back, and he pulls away from you, eyes wide as he frantically asks where Jay and the kids are.

• You reassure him that everyone’s fine, and no one was hurt. He sighs in relief, letting himself relax before wincing at the throbbing pain in his head.

• You gently coax him to lay back down, telling him that he still needs to rest and that the doctor will be coming soon to check on him. He admits that, before he blacked out, he was sure he was going to die, wondering to himself how he was still alive after such a savage attack.

• Leaning down and kissing him softly, you say that the how or why doesn’t matter, all that matters is he’s alive and he’s going to be okay. He smiles up at you, the biggest you’ve seen in months, and tells you that he’s glad that he has someone like you to look after him.

• You chuckle and agree, before leaving him to tell the kids the good news. He silently watches you go, thinking about just how lucky he is to have found someone as kind as you to love him.

#farmworld finn x reader #farmworld finn #adventure time x reader #adventure time imagines #adventure time #finn mertens x reader #finn the human x reader #fionna and cake x reader #adventure time fanfic #fionna and cake fanfic #fionna and cake imagine #angst #hurt/comfort #sfw

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malarign · 11 months

Text

can i kiss you?

contains: bf!Sunghoon x gn!reader | genre: fluff | tw! kissing | wc: 0,3k

request: Sunghoon + 35 gentle stroking of cheeks while kissing

you’ll find this event here!

You laughed at Sunghoon’s corny but cute jokes as he walked you home after yet another date. Seeing him in your college’s hallways you always wondered what kind of person he is, crushing on him from afar. That’s why you were pretty shocked when he confessed he would like to know you better and asked you out. It resulted in you spending more and more time with each other, not only during your lectures but also on the creative dates he came up with. Time spent with him went by to your dismay really quickly. Topics never ended and the more you talked the more you wanted to know about him and his interests.

“Thank you for today, as always it was amazing to spend time with you,” he said, shyness in his voice long gone.

“Same here, can’t wait for another time,” you confessed.

He opened his arms inviting you for a hug. You gladly wrapped your arms around him in an embrace that finally didn’t feel awkward, but comfortable. It also lasted a lot longer than previously. His palms rubbed your back as you played with his hair. He pulled away from you, still holding you close to him, his gaze noticeably averting from your eyes and lips. You smiled as he asked quietly: “Can I kiss you?” Nodding you felt how blood’s rushing to your cheeks but soon realized his were just as pink as yours.

He leaned in slowly, lips only barely brushing against each other at first, only to finally connect in such an awaited kiss. His hand traveled to your cheek to stroke it gently, sending butterflies to your stomach, while his other stayed on your waist. Your lips moved in unison, making you want more of them but at the back of your head, you knew you needed to go back home to avoid the consequences of being late. Slowing down you connected your foreheads while still hugging each other.

“I need to go,” you whispered regretfully.

“Don’t worry, tomorrow is also a day,” he said lightening up the mood, earning a sweet smile from you.

“Let me know when you arrive home,” you said finally parting from him, already missing his warmth.

“I will.” He waited for you to go inside just like always, internally screaming in joy.

thank you for reading! back to the masterlist

permanent taglist: (open) @nicholasluvbot, @en-chantedtomeetyou, @skzenhalove, @nfrgirl, @kpoprhia, @redm4ri

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magics-neptunes-things · 5 months

Text

The One Who Get Away

Hi guys!

This one come just from my imagination, I can't stop listening this cover of Katy Perry's song so... Here it is! Hope you'll like it :)

I put the version of the song I'm talking about under this text, please listen to it while listening :)

TW : Break up, angst, pressure.

Summary : Your a singer travelling the world with your group but the distance is too hard for you and your (ex) girlfriend. Will you find a way to make her stay?

PART 2 IS HERE

youtube

______________________________________________________________

"I just can't do that anymore"

Ona's voice, coming from your phone make your heart go heavier. You know how she feels about you always being away from your shared penthouse at Barcelona. Well actually you are away from Spain, and today even from Europe.

It’s been three years since your record company managed to place a Spanish band in the international market. Yours. So, now that it’s launched and that it’s been months that you are at the top of the charts, no one hesitates to make you travel to all the countries of the world, without stopping.

It’s been three years since you and your band arrived here by chance, when one of your single ended up on a summer hit. Since then, it has never stopped. In three years you have released two albums and you have made three world tours. You’re exhausted, physically and emotionally. But you made the mistake of not reading carefully the clauses of your contract, too happy to be able to live your dream.

Well, the dream slowly turned into a nightmare. Away from Ona for months now, you were supposed to return to Barcelona in two days to finally have a few weeks of rest. Except that your agent found it more interesting to impose televisions and various promotions in Japan, preventing you from returning from England where you currently are to Ona.

Yet, it was what you expected the most since the day you left her at the airport.

"I’m sorry" you whisper, feeling your throat squeeze. "I can always…"

"No, Y/N. I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t. There are no more ways out"

"What do you mean?"

You know what she means and you’ve been terrified of hearing that sentence for weeks. You’ve known Ona since you were a teenager, one night when you felt lonely and couldn’t sleep, you came across her blog. You don’t know what prompted you to write a comment to which she replied and you started chatting like that. Realizing that you were both from Barcelona, you met and the rest is history.

"I think we need to break up"

"No! Ona please we can work through this. Please. I need you, I can't lose you."

"It's better this way. I'm so sorry"

You don’t think you heard Ona’s voice shake in this way before and you are convinced that she is crying, too.

"Onita please… don’t do this"

"I’m sorry. I have no choice"

"Why? Did you… Did you met someone else?"

Ona has a sad laugh and you can perfectly picture her shaking her head sadly.

"Of course not. It has nothing to do with that. But it’s getting worse every time. It’s been going on for three years."

"It’s not my fault" you whisper softly.

"I know"

A new silence sets in and you hope that your girlfriend is thinking and changing her mind. You know you wouldn’t stand a breakup with her. Ona has been your lighthouse in the dark forever. She’s the most important person in your life.

"I have to go, the team is waiting for me. I think it’s better if we don’t write or call each other for a while."

"Ona wait…"

"No, Y/N. It’s over"

"I love you"

Ona doesn’t answer you, but the breath you hear on the phone confirms that she’s crying. She hangs up after a few seconds and you remain motionless for long minutes, stunned. You are dress for your next performance, your presence on stage being required in about twenty minutes. Fortunately your mascara is waterproof and it’s not necessary to redo it when your friend and guitarist enters the room.

"Y/N?"

"Ona just broke up with me" you say, looking at him through the mirror.

And with that, the sobs that were until now stuck in your throat suddenly come out. In a few seconds you find yourself transformed into a crying mess, hugged by Juan. He’s your best friend, even if your fans imagine you together. The record company has forbidden you to reveal your homosexuality and has fun supporting the rumors of romance between you two, claiming that it helps the group’s popularity.

"I’m so tired. I just want to go home" you manage to say in between sobs.

Said house being mostly Ona. Making a grimace, Juan caresses your hair. You are not the only one to be exhausted by the frantic pace imposed by your record company. Juan, your drummer Marco and your bass player Ricardo are just as exhausted as you.

"I know" is all he can tell you before someone of the staff come looking for you.

Your manager looks at you coldly seeing the state in which you are and hands you a tissue for you to arrange the draws. He doesn’t ask you what’s going on. He doesn’t care. You just know that if you don’t perform properly, you’re going to get yelled at.

******

"Are you sure you want to watch this? We can switch channels if you want" Cata kindly assures while looking carefully at Ona.

The brunette shakes her head negatively, stuck against Alexia who passed a protective arm around her. Ona was unable to hide your breakup from her teammates, she’s just as devastated as you are. They had planned an evening to watch the charity concert that you and your group are attending, installed in Lucy’s apartment.

After exchanging a look between them, they finally decided to leave the same channel, the artists walking one after the other. Since this is a charity concert, you had the opportunity to cover a song by one of the featured artists. Your group choose a song by Katy Perry, "The One who get away", a slower version than the original. If you had known, you would have made another choice.

After avoiding a nervous breakdown, you go sit on the stool in the middle of the stage. Juan at your side, you wait for his guitar to be tuned.

"She doesn’t look like she’s ok" Aitana begins, before being immediately shuts up when she meets Mapi’s murderous gaze.

Feeling Ona tense against her, Alexia gently tightens her against her as Ingrid starts to stroke her hair. At the same time, the song starts and you wonder how you are going to finish it. Your hands are shaking, your throat is clenched and you have trouble looking up at the crowd in front of you.

From the end of the first chorus, you have tears in your eyes and at the end of the second you feel a tear roll on your cheek. Despite Juan’s whispers of encouragement, you’re unable to hold her any longer. When the song finally comes to an end, you have the impression that every person who has looked at you has been able to read into you and realize how destroyed you are. And you hate it.

After greeting the audience with the three boys, you let yourself be taken backstage by Ricardo. Juan tries not to make too friendly gestures towards you in public, knowing how much it hurts you and Ona to see everyone jump on these kinds of moments to support their theory.

********

The ride back to your hotel room was awful. All along the way in the van, your manager yelled at you so much that for the first time the boys rebelled against him. It surprised you but also made you very feel loved and cared. They’re the reason you haven’t dumped everything yet, you don’t have the courage to betray them by leaving. If you had been alone, it would have been different. But they are your childhood friends, more like brothers.

You haven’t looked at your phone once since you got back to your room an hour ago when someone knocked on your door. You know Ona won’t contact you. You have no interest in looking at it. You don’t answer when you hear a knock a second time, then a third time. And you don’t move either when the door of your room opens anyway a few minutes later. Juan went to ask for a copy of your magnetic card at reception, not hearing you open.

"We need to talk Y/N."

"Don’t want to" is the only sentence you manage to get out of your mouth.

Rolled up in a ball under your sheets, your cushion tight between your arms and your head resting on the plush lion that Ona offered you years ago, you only want to stay here until the end of time.

"We talked, with the guys," said Juan, regardless of what you just said. "We think you have to go."

You need a few seconds to realize what he just said.

"What?"

"I booked you a plane to Barcelona. You have six hours to pack and go to the airport. Marco takes charge of the manager and Ricardo makes sure the way is clear, but you’ll have to go out from this shit. You and Ona are more important than all this bullshit. Go take your girl back."

********

It is 7am when you land in Barcelona and 8am when you arrive on the doormat of your shared penthouse. You don’t have the key, usually Ona picks you up at the airport and opens you. You didn’t think about it until now. You’re too afraid to lose them somewhere in a hotel room on the other side of the world. But despite your doorbells, no one comes to open.

So you resolve to sit on your doormat and wait for Ona’s return. Your phone is out of battery, preventing you from contacting someone close to your girlfriend. You don’t know where she is and it awakens your fear that she actually found someone else. If that’s what pushed her to break up with you, it will be even harder to fix things.

Exhausted, you let yourself go against the door frame, your feet leaning on the other side. New tears roll over your cheeks and you are so tired that you start to doze.

"Y/N?"

Ona’s incredulous voice wakes you with a start and you bang your head against the handle of the front door while getting up. Your face fell when you realize that Ona is accompanied by a pretty brunette, who looks at you with curiosity. Is she the one she left you for? Why is she here? It lasts a few seconds, until Alexia comes out of the elevator too. Mechanically massaging the part of the skull you just banged, you continue to observe the unknown.

"What are you doing here?"

Ona's question makes you shift your attention to her and you cannot say why, but you cannot gather your ideas. Yet her tone is neither harsh nor accusing, quite the contrary.

"I…"

Reacting first, Alexia slips between Ona and you by seizing the keys Ona was holding and opens the door, making enter everyone. Seeing you struggling to get your suitcases, Ona bends down mechanically to help you get everything in.

"You never met my girlfriend, I think?" Alexia looks at you, maybe realizing what’s happening in your head. "This is Olga. Olga, this is Y/N."

You simply acquiesce but Olga hug you with a smile and you hug her back akwardly, the relief making you feel like you're hovering a thousand meters from the ground. Ona hasn’t met someone else. Just like she said.

"I think we’re going to leave you. Are you going to be okay?"

The look that Ona and Alexia exchange lasts a few seconds, before the captain decides that she can actually leave you both. She hugs you too before delicately closing the door behind Olga and her.

"You look exausted. Maybe you should go take a nice hot shower?"

You carry your eyes with heavy eyelids over Ona, shaking your head negatively. You honestly don’t know how long you will endure this sleepless journey, but you also don't know how long you will be able to stay with Ona. She can leave at any time.

"Come sit down, at least"

You feel a heat wave invading your body at the exact spot where Ona puts her hand on your arm to train you in the living room. You let yourself go on the couch, Ona settling next to you.

"You didn’t answer me. What are you doing here?"

"I left" you just whisper. "The boys helped me get out of the hotel and to the airport. Juan booked me a plane and I called my manager to tell him that I was leaving once on the plane. I was too afraid that he would hold me back"

"Wait, when you say you left…"

"I… quit? Broke the contract, call it what you want"

Ona looks at you with disbelief. She never gave you an ultimatum about your career, because she knew you had no choice.

"I should have done this before. But I couldn’t betray the boys" you whisper without being able to look at her.

A new silence settles and you end up lifting your eyes on Ona. She was looking at you attentively and you plunge your gaze into hers for a few seconds.

"I came to ask you for a second chance. I know things have been super complicated between us, especially these past few weeks. But I can’t live without you, Ona. I’ll do anything. I swear."

Ona’s face softens. Your eyes close when you feel her hand on your cheek, your whole body in search of any source of comfort from her. She stroke your cheek with her thumps, making you shivers.

"Do you know why I never asked you to choose between music and me?"

Without opening your eyes, you shake your head negatively. Ona’s voice is soft and helps you to calm down a little.

"Because I know how much you like it"

"I love you more"

You open your eyes even though your whole body is asking you not to. You’re exhausted and wondering what you might look like. Ona certainly saw you in a better light. She continues to look at you elsewhere, a few seconds of silence settling between you.

"I love you too" she ended up whispering. "But we’ll finish this conversation later, I think you need to sleep before you lose consciousness."

Without really giving you a choice, she gets up from the couch and makes you follow her, gently grabbing your hand. You let yourself be guided to your room, in which she helps you put on pajamas before letting you go to cool off in your bathroom. You don’t leave her figure with your eyes, even through the mirror while washing your teeth, fearing that she will disappear. But no, she waits patiently for you, sitting at the feet of your bed.

"Will you be there when I wake up?" you ask in a hesitant tone, finding the inimitable comfort of your bed.

Ona nods and even smiles as you slip under the sheets. Installed on your side, you can’t bring yourself to leave her eyes. That she still agrees to stay by your side despite everything makes you as happy as it terrifies you. She broke up with you less than 24 hours ago and didn’t really confirm to you that something was still possible between you. She said she loves you, but is that enough?

"I can hear you thinking from here"

With an arched eyebrow, Ona observes you with a semblance of severity.

"I’m just scared" you mumble without taking your eyes off her.

"Of what?"

"Losing you forever. You’re the most important thing in my life, I shouldn’t have waited until I lost you to fix things. You deserve the best, of course, but give me time to show you that I can offer it to you."

Softly biting her lip, Ona advances into the bed until she finds herself sitting on her knees, at the height of your chest.

"I’m not going anywhere Bebita"

"Does that mean you believe enough in us to give us another chance?"

As before, Ona’s face softens and is soon dress with one of her most beautiful smiles. You wrote in one of your song that only one of her smiles makes you feel better and that’s still the case today.

"I thought it was clear. Of course I want to give us a second chance."

You’re so relieved you might cry. In truth, real tears cost on your cheeks and you realize that when Ona leans over your cheeks to kiss them.

"Don’t cry. Rest. I’ll be there when you wake up later, and every other day."

As if to support her words, Ona slips with you under the cover and sticks you against her, in her arms. It doesn’t take long for you to fall into a deep sleep, lulled by her caresses on your back, the softness of her hair that sometimes tickles your cheek and the smell of her perfume and shower gel.

*********

When you wake up, hours later, you need some time to understand where you are. Only after that you realize that Ona isn’t here and you panic.

You stand from your bed so quickly that you fell, making a terrible noise. While you stand up, you here footsteps coming to you and you raise your head just in time to see Ona enter your bedroom.

"What happened?" she asks you, taking your hand in hers.

"You weren’t here, I thought you left" you mumble while looking at your feet.

But Ona make you look at her, tilting your face with her index.

"I’m here. I’m not going an where, I promised"

You nod, taking your phone on the floor. You have hundred missed call, messages and notifications everywhere.

"I made pasta, are you hungry?"

In reality you are not at all, but Ona took the time to prepare you to eat and you don’t want to disappoint her at all. Or give her the impression that she wasted her time. So you nod again before following her to the kitchen. You sit where she asks you to, wincing when you see the different messages from your manager. He’s really not happy. In truth, he is even completely furious. "Is everything all right?" asked Ona as she sat down in front of you, serving you a plate that would be enough to feed your entire neighborhood. "I’m in trouble" you sigh softly as you let yourself go against the backrest of your chair. "They will surely seek to press charges or make me pay" It will not be easy. Your gaze is lost on the bay window of your living room, giving a breathtaking view of the Mediterranean Sea. It’s partly thanks to this incredible view that you decided to choose this apartment. But you are quickly pulled out of your thoughts by the hand of Ona which lands on yours. "It doesn’t matter mi Corazon. Remember? We don’t care about others... "As long as it's You and Me" you answer with a slight smile. That was your credo when you were both teenagers. And when you grew up it stayed, even if lately the geographical distance took precedence over the rest. Now that you have her in front of you, you wonder how you managed to stay so long away from her. "We’ll find you the best lawyer and I’ll be there every second you need me." "Thank you" you answer simply, throat knotted with emotions Ona smiles tenderly and you feel your heart soaring like a butterfly. You find it hard to believe the reality in which you find yourself. Last night, Ona told you she wanted to break up with you and less than twenty-four hours later, you find yourself in front of her, in your apartment, apparently free of any contract.

"Can I kiss you?" you mumble shyly.

"Since when do you have to ask?" Ona laughs.

You shrug and smile too, inviting her to come to sit on your lap. Ona did and you pass your hand around her smaller frame.

Ona gently puts her hand in your hair, making you shiver.

"What do you want to do now?" Ona ask gently.

"Come see you play at the stadium, eat tortilla de patatas, go to the beach… Catch up on my sleep, if possible with the most beautiful woman in the world next to me."

"Did you already call her?" jokes the Spanish.

You roll your eyes before giving her a little kick on the thigh.

"As if you didn’t know it was you" you snorts before gently kissing her cheek.

"You missed."

Ona’s amused smile makes you smile back and you put your lips on hers this time. It’s a sensation you haven’t felt in far too long. Ona all against you, her skin against yours, her inimitable perfume. She is everything that count for you, well beyond your music group, your success and that we forgive you but obviously well above your fans.

"I’m so in love with you" Ona whispers against your lips.

"Certainly not as much as I am" you answer with a smile.

As you predicted, the record company, your producer and even your manager will launch legal proceedings against you. But thanks to Alexia’s lawyer, you managed to get away with it without much damage. Honestly, you didn’t care about losing money, all you wanted was to be able to get your freedom back.

Like you, the boys came back to Barcelona after the group disbanded. They formed another one for a while, with another singer, but they finally turned the page, claiming it’s not the same without you. None of the three resent you and you still see them regularly.

A few months after you left the band, you came out on social media. Without giving all the details either, you and Ona have not made an official announcement for your couple. You attend almost all of Ona’s matches, sometimes making the trip abroad with her and the team. You post what you want to post on social networks, photos of your holidays, your moments spent with your friends or with Ona, obviously.

It’s fun to see people wondering about your relationship, but you appreciate that they do it with someone you really are. Which you’re extremely in love with and extremely proud of. Wag’s life suits you perfectly, especially when the woman you follow is as perfect as Ona.

#woso x reader #woso imagine #ona batlle #ona batlle x reader #ona batlle imagine

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pianocat939 · 1 month

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Yandere bees

No context, just- yandere bees

NAHHH I WAS WAITING FOR THIS.

I did some research and turns out prehistoric bees aren't gigantic, but we'll go with cat-sized bubblebees.

Tw: some religious themes at the end, MC basically gets captured, involuntarily role

Alright so let's say MC is a scientist. This is obviously not current time because MC manages to use time travel to retrieve an ancient bee species for research.

With their team members, they receive a female and a male to observe (taking an entire hive would be too dangerous). Unlike modern-day bees, they don't have stingers but have been shown to use their retractable claws as their defence instead.

While the other team members do more biological research on their internal workings, MC is the one to observe behaviour. The two bees are very young, just barely reached adult age. MC feeds them, coddles them if they get too cold, and tries to measure their intelligence through certain exercises.

Well over time, the bees start to show some behaviour change. They aren't necessarily hostile to the other team members, but anyone could easily tell they like MC more. They make little buzzes and chirps to get MC's attention, lifting their front arms to show they want to be coddled.

Sometimes they try to get out of their habitat to follow MC home.

After about a year with the bees, the whole team goes to take them home. But then the machine malfunctions, and takes the team in a different era compared to MC and the bees.

So MC is stuck to take the bees home alone before returning to the lab. They get close enough to the hive that they can spot it from a distance before trying to get them to fly.

So the bees do. They go back into their hive but immediately start telling their family and friends how this strange creature took care of them and fed them while they were separated. Practically preaching to everybody how wonderful you are.

Just as MC is about to enter the time machine, it gets busted up by a swarm of bees, whilst the original 2 they had captured climb onto them, trying to find a warm spot.

MC is horrified, as they can't go back home. They are taken to the hive and forced to become some revered person of the bees.

(You can take this in whatever you want, I just implied this as platonic since I couldn't really figure out how romancing a bee would go...Which is odd for me considering I can make anything romantic yan)

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere imagines #yandere thoughts #yandere bees #bees x reader #shitpost #I think #blurbs

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oliversrarebooks · 3 months

Text

The Rare Bookseller Part 41: Alexander's Mark

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June 1905

TW: mind control, body control, captivity, abuse, burns, mouth whump, aftermath of forced self-harm

The beach. He was imagining a beach.

A place filled with warmth and sunshine, sunshine that would protect him from vampires. A place of freedom, where the waves would crash against his knees and the salt air would blow through his hair. A place where the auction house and its monstrous inhabitants were a nightmare fit for a cheap horror novel.

Maybe if he managed to pass out, he'd wake up on the sand, the searing pain gone, his body returned to him.

Fitz's mind forced itself back into reality as his new master led him into a different room. He couldn't remember walking -- he couldn't remember anything after the hazy, muddled visions of a seal burning into his chest. The pain was causing his vision to blur and his mind to haze over, but he recognized Mr. Alexander and Miss Lily as they walked into the room. Miss Lily had her head buried in Mr. Alexander's shoulder, but both stood up and at attention when his master entered.

Miss Lily. Her punishment.

Her dress was somewhat askew, her hair falling out of place, and she'd obviously been crying, but there was otherwise no sign of the horrific thing her sire had ordered her to do. But he knew from her expression as she'd left the room that she'd actually done it. There was no question.

"Alexander. Lily."

"Sire," said Mr. Alexander, bowing. Miss Lily said nothing, bowing and holding her mouth firmly shut.

"My knife, if you please, Lily."

Miss Lily stepped forward and gave the Maestro back the silver knife, clean as it was when he handed it to her. He took her by the chin and opened her jaw. Fitz found that he was mercifully able to shut his eyes to avoid looking.

"Satisfactory," said his master, and Fitz would have shuddered at this if he was actually able to do so. He couldn't believe that Miss Lily could be so calm after cutting her own tongue out. It was impossible.

Yet he could feel the enforced stoic expression on his own face, even as internally he was writhing in pain. Was it any different?"

"Sire," said Mr. Alexander, his deep voice surprisingly shaky, "what have you done to -- to your thrall?"

"I have marked him as my own. Surely you remember."

Mr. Alexander's face showed that he did indeed remember.

"The thrall you so desired, child," said his master. "He is mine, now. My performer, my plaything, a vessel for my will."

Fitz could hardly tell through through his stupor, but Lord Alexander seemed sad, meeting Fitz's gaze with a silent apology, one tinged with longing.

Or maybe it was another dream like the beach, a lie his mind was telling in a desperate attempt at escape. The lie that any of these vampires would care. Not when they had this much power, not when they had no reason to treat him as anything more than a possession.

"I see that, Sire." Mr. Alexander's eyes traveled to the burn on Fitz's flesh.

"Your fondness for this untamed, insolent human is far too obvious. It's unbecoming for a vampire of your stature," said his master. "I have tolerated this folly for far too long. It's long past time it was burned out of you."

"Sire..."

"So I bring you a gift and a punishment in one. I will give this thrall to you, to do with as you see fit."

Fitz's chest tightened. Although he could hardly trust Lord Alexander, he'd much rather be with the vampire who joked amiably with him over the one who burned and slapped him, who effortlessly controlled his body's every move.

Mr. Alexander had nothing but suspicion and fear on his face. "As I see fit, Sire?"

"Yes. I will give you this thrall for a year. At the end of the year, I will evaluate his training. If the training is satisfactory, you may keep the thrall for good. If it is not... then I truly will have no choice but to take it upon myself to punish you both." His master laid one ice-cold hand upon Fitz's head. "But if you do not actually desire him, I'll take him and train him myself."

A trap. An obvious trap. Whatever Mr. Alexander had planned for Fitz, it was clearly never going to be up to this cruel vampire's impossible standards. Mr. Alexander's eyes showed that he knew very well what a raw deal this was.

Never-ending torture for Fitz now... or torture and punishment for them both in a year. Fitz knew which option he would take, given the choice. A lot could happen in one year, and every fiber of his being was screaming for him to get away from his new owner, even if it meant running into the arms of a different monster. But it was a terrible deal for Mr. Alexander. It wasn't possible that he wanted Fitz enough to risk it.

The pain of his burn intensified, causing his breathing to quicken and his vision to dim and fuzz. He struggled against the tunnel vision, trying not to pass out, even as his body stayed rigidly upright with his head bowed.

He was never getting out. He would be trapped in this unbearable hell, not even able to protest, forever, and --

Mr. Alexander's eyes were burning into Fitz, even as he bowed. "Thank you, Sire. I accept your most gracious gift and your most fitting punishment."

Fitz felt himself tremble under the stiff pose he was being held in. The determination in Mr. Alexander's eyes was giving him hope, hope he didn't want to entertain lest it be pulled away from him. After all, if Mr. Alexander wanted to avoid eventual torture, wouldn't he have to be as cruel as his sire?

"Very well, child. You know the consequences of disappointing me," his owner said. "Now you shall mark the thrall directly underneath my mark, as proof of this contract."

Every muscle in Fitz's body tensed painfully as his owner handed over the small metal seal to Mr. Alexander, everything within him screaming for him to run, inwardly thrashing against the power keeping him still, to no avail. Rational thought flew from his mind, and all he knew was that he was going to be burned again. A few tears managed to leak from his eyes as his knees touched the carpet once more, his perfect posture giving no indication of the dizzy disorientation consuming him.

Mr. Alexander was heating the seal in a candle. Mr. Alexander was going to press it against his flesh. Mr. Alexander was --

-- singing.

The song penetrated through his terror, wrapping itself around his mind, and the pain and distress began to lessen. With no choice but to listen, no ability to resist, he felt as though he were floating up and away from his body, observing the scene as if it were happening on a stage. The pain on his chest and his cheek was washed in a soothing coolness, reducing it to a faraway ache.

Calm. Safe. No more pain. No more fear.

He was being placed under a spell again, he realized that, but a spell of bliss and comfort. Mr. Alexander was warming the seal in a candle as he sang. Fitz's mind warred within itself, one portion dreading the pain even as the other wanted to drown in the song and forget it all.

Mr. Alexander approached, lifting his chin and tilting Fitz's head into his gaze, the song shifting to something richer and deeper.

You are desired. You are wanted.

He felt it in his bones, the fleeting, breathtaking feeling of recognition and validation. The high he was always chasing, offered to him in its purest form.

In a instant, Fitz fell completely under the spell, without any more fight.

"You're going to feel a small sting, Fitz, and then there will be no more pain," said Mr. Alexander, holding the metal seal and pulling down the neck of Fitz's dress. "You're doing so well."

You are precious. You belong to me.

He was utterly focused on Mr. Alexander's eyes and his heavenly voice. Nothing else mattered. He didn't even really feel the seal as it pressed into him this time, just below the first burn, too lost in euphoria to care.

"You eased his pain, Alexander," said the Maestro, disapproval dripping from his musical voice.

"There was no need for him to suffer, Sire," said Mr. Alexander with a note of dangerous defiance.

"Suffering is the only teacher we listen to. That is what you do not yet understand. In moments of desperation, when every gentle lesson has fled from our minds, the only teachings left are those ingrained upon us by the deepest suffering." He walked behind Mr. Alexander, stroking his cheek. "This is why you have not learned. Your suffering has not yet been great enough. It is most fortunate that I am a patient vampire. I can see your perfection underneath your shortcomings and unfortunate desires."

He slithered around to where Fitz was still kneeling, petting his hair, and Fitz would have shuddered if he weren't still so entranced. "You and Fitzwilliam are very much alike. I can sense that your fates are bound together, like entwined trees or twin stars. You two will be my magnum opus, my masterpiece."

"...Yes, Sire."

"I'll take my leave now. I must return to my manor before the sun rises, and my coachman waits. Good night, Alexander."

"Good night, Sire."

And the mysterious vampire left the room in a flurry of chill air, and Fitz felt himself collapse to the floor as his limbs were suddenly freed. His head was still cloudy from Mr. Alexander's song, but...

He could move. Everything hurt and he was so exhausted but he could move. A part of him felt like he should try and flee the monsters that harmed him, but he was still dazed, too woozy to stand. He could imagine the ridiculousness of trying to escape from a mansion full of vampires while crawling across the carpet in a confused fog.

Besides, he belonged to Mr. Alexander now.

Fitz heard a choked, shuddering sob and realized that it was coming from him. It was followed by a mangled cry, high pitched -- not him. A glance around his shoulder showed that Miss Lily had collapsed to the floor, blood running from her mouth, curled up in agony.

"Fitz. Fitz, I'm here. Are you all right?"

His focus flew back to Mr. Alexander like a moth to the light. "No, sir, obviously not, sir," he said with a pained laugh.

"I know, I know, an unnecessary question to ask. It's over now. You won't be hurt any more, I promise. Just relax." Mr. Alexander began humming a low tune, and Fitz surrendered to it even as the back of his mind howled in alarm at having his autonomy stolen again. He was too tired, too defeated, and he allowed his breathing and thoughts to slow.

"Good, that's good," said Mr. Alexander. "You're safe for now. I'm going to help you, but I need to check on Lily first, okay?"

Fitz nodded weakly.

"Lil, can you stand?" said Mr. Alexander's voice from somewhere behind him. "You have a room here, right? Is Nellie here with you? If you can walk, I can get us all to your room. Nellie and I will attend to you there. Good, that's it. You can cling to me all you need. There you go. I'll get Fitz."

Fitz felt himself being picked up and carried. He was looking up at Alexander's face, clearly upset but still laced with determination. "I've got you, Fitz," he said. "You're going to be all right."

He began to hum again, a soft and enchanting tune. Fitz wasn't sure what this new spell was doing until he felt his eyelids become suddenly so heavy. A lullaby, a sleeping spell. No, no, he didn't want this -- but a part of him did, a part of him wanted to fly far away from here in his sleep, to have a respite from pain and terror. His half-hearted protest was drowned in a yawn as drowsiness settled over him like a blanket, all of his thoughts bending to the deep, irresistible urge to go to sleep.

Fitz couldn't help but shut his drowsy, heavy eyes, just for a moment.

Just...

Prev > Masterlist > Next

Next week, wrapping up Fitz's nightmare. In the meantime, there will be an interlude of Fitz in happier times, from the point of view of his thrall, Roger. Thanks as always for reading and reblogging!

@d-cs @latenightcupsofcoffee @thecyrulik @dismemberment-on-a-tuesday-night @wanderinggoblin @whumpyourdamnpears @only-shadows-dwell-where-we-are @pressedpenn @pigeonwhumps @amusedmuralist @xx-adam-xx @ivycloak @irregular-book @whumpsoda @mj-or-say10 @pokemaniacgemini @sowhumpshaped @whumpsday @morning-star-whump @shinyotachi @silly-scroimblo-skrunkl @steh-lar-uh-nuhs @pirefyrelight @theauthorintraining @whump-me-all-night-long @anonfromcanada @typewrittenfangs @tessellated-sunl1ght @cleverinsidejoke @abirbable @ichorousambrosia @a-formless-entity @gobbo-king @writinggremlin @the-agency-archives @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @enigmawriteswhump @foresttheblep @bottlecapreader @whump-on-a-string @whumpinthepot @cinnamoncandycanes @avvail-whumps @tauntedoctopuses @secret-vampkissers-soiree

#whump #whump writing #vampires #vampire whump #mind control #vampire whumper #branding #rare bookseller #fitz #maestro #alexander #lily

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see-arcane · 1 month

Text

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.

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.

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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