The Lies We Tell

Stitches (Part One)

(Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Medic "Fix" Reader)

Part Three of Snowblind

Rating: Mature Wordcount: 6.1k Tags: Slow Burn, Heavy Angst, Trauma, Found Family, Taskforce 141, Team Dynamics, Major Character Injury, Whump, Hurt/Comfort, Unreliable Narrator, Self Esteem Issues, Referenced Familial abuse, Hospitalization, Self Sabotage Warnings: Explicit Injury mention, Forced sedation A/N: The needed, heavy, heavy chapter for Fix. Please head the warnings and read carefully, and practice self care if you need to

The first time you need heli-evac, it's in Venezuela.

Tracking down a cartel supplier to AQ forces, Laswell tells you. International arms dealers. The mission is off the books, quiet. Clean house, harvest intel. Price and Gaz could have cleared it easily, but for some reason Laswell mandated the full task force. Something about the intel not adding up, too many loose ends. You know better than to question her, all of you do.

Unfortunately for you, Laswell's prophecy comes true.

You see the rug on the floor shift a moment too late. The trapdoor flies open out of the corner of your eyes as you spin, and there's yelling in Spanish just a split second before the bullet rips through your side. You fall backwards just in time to avoid the next hail of fire, and the motion throws off the aim of the attack long enough for you to squeeze off a round, the cartel member's figure jerking grotesquely as your aim rings true.

There's voices then, as your head falls back against the floor, cursing blindly at the pain. You'd been shot before, but this, the bullet inside you feeling for all the world like it was trying to twist inside you further, deeper, makes your voice crack hard and dry in your throat. There's iron in your lungs, breathed in with every staggered inhale, lancets of agony etched across your torso and spine. Something inside you feels wet and warm and abstractly wrong.

You press a hand to the center of the pain, and when it comes away red there's a cognizant dissonance to it, a small 'oh' that manages to filter through your thoughts as the stain blossoms scarlet against your side. It's the sight that manages to make the world begin to spin, hazy and unfocused even as there's shouts and it's Gaz's face that flickers into view, trembling like the hazy after effect of a poorly animated CGI movie.

He's talking, but with the blood rushing in your ears you barely hear him, blinking and trying to clear the strange filter that obscures the pure look of fear in his eyes.

"Stay with me, Fix. Gonna get you out of here."

You nod, and it's all you can really manage, heart pounding relentlessly, pain bubbling up your throat in a choked, pleading cry that has Gaz's face grow ashen with concern.

It's Price, then, who shoves the sergeant aside, and even in your dissociative, blank-minded state you see the tremble of his hands as he fumbles for the med pack strapped to your kit.

Oh. You think a bit groggily, blinking as you remember. I'm the medic.

That's probably bad.

There's no time to process it further, because suddenly Price is pressing down on your side and you yell, try and flail away from the pain. Gaz has to hold you down, face pinching with something that tears further at you, an emotion that feels far too concerned for what you're feeling. There's a distant part of your mind that runs through the possibilities, of the bullet lodged up against your diaphragm, through your spleen, or possibly even your lungs. You can breathe, you can kick your legs, but the dizzying rate of the spinning world around you does not bode well for your near and distant future.

"...x...h-ey...Fix! Keep your eyes on me, mate."

You try to, from behind the veil of tears that clouds your vision as the hurt coats the underside of your tongue in an open, confused whimper. Price is yelling something you can't quite make out, and there's a tone to his voice you've never heard before. It cracks and makes you blink, forces you to try and raise your head at him, only to have Kyle's gentle, gloved hand resting you back down against the floorboards.

When you try to breathe you choke, feeling your chest compress down painfully. The air in your lungs stales, and with a wheeze you grasp blindly at Kyle, feeling panic race potent and toxic through your veins. You catch his eyes then, and the worry there has now transformed into something all consuming. Terror.

He snaps at Price, and though you can't hear the words you hear the tremble in his voice, and you realize at that moment just how terrible things must be, because suddenly Price is cutting the straps of your tac vest and shoving it rudely aside, ripping your jacket and shirt and placing an ear to your chest.

He pales.

It's that bad. Something in your thoughts whispers, and then, in a sudden, macabre burst of clarity. Try to say goodbye.

When you fumble for Price, however, he only snaps at you, tells you to stay still and stay awake. You try, you do, but the world is too bright, oversaturated, spinning like the lights of the county fair rides you saw once as a child from the window of a car. Fluorescent, vibrant, dizzying and enchanting. Glittering in the distance from beneath the grey haze of incoming mid-season thunderstorms. Now it's tinted with a putrid, vile taste of metal and bile and a sudden wave of nausea washes over you, as the skies grow green in your memory. You close your eyes against it, trying to find ground on which to retreat where there is none. Price says something about a helicopter, and whether it's moments or minutes later you feel the dull whump whump whump in the distance, beating the air around you slower than your stuttering heart rate.

Who's arms hoist you up, you aren't sure, but you can smell the scent of them. Charcoal. Gun oil. Sweat. Musk. It's familiar somehow, but it isn't until you see your blood seeping red over white skeletal gloves that you understand.

It's the last thing you see before the world goes dark.

---

You wake about eighteen hours later, and the first word out of your mouth startles Soap so much beside you he barks a laugh.

"Your mother teach you to curse like that?" He asks, but mercifully dims the overhead light when you whine at him. You ignore the fact that your mother would turn you over to your father if you ever spoke like that, deciding that such a tiny detail isn't really worth the time it would take to convey it to the Scot.

When you turn to him, Soap's brow is furrowed in a way you don't recognize. He sits in a chair at your bedside, hands clasped, shoulders hunched forwards, leg bouncing and fidgety. Wound too tight. Anxious. His blue grey eyes are drawn with concern, brow furrowed. He doesn't look at you.

"Scared us stiff, hen." He murmurs low, enough that you have to strain to hear it. "Nearly kicked the bucket- Christ on a cross, Fix. There was so much blood."

You don't reply. There's not much to say, really. You messed up, forgot to check a corner like a goddamn rookie, nearly bled out a result but you're here. Alive, mostly whole...minus the hole.

You tell him as much, but when Soap laughs it's a little mirthless, his head shaking as if he's deciding between disbelief or a reprimand.

It isn't long before Price appears, leaning on the door with a weary smile that betrays his concern. You wonder if he's slept recently, or if he's subsisting only on cigars and a gluttonous dose of black coffee. Cognac, if he found it.

The captain gives you the rundown of your injury. Gunshot to the left side of your ribs, nothing short of a bloody miracle it missed your major arteries. However, it managed to puncture your lung, collapsing it and forcing you to briefly asphyxiate on the helicopter. You were unconscious by the time you were handed off to the med-evac crew, flagging by the time you got to the hospital. Had there been a chopper unavailable, and had it not been for Gaz's quick attention to your labored breathing, it very well could have been your death would have been in a sticky, spider infested cartel hideout, far, far away from home.

That fact makes you feel your heart drop down to your stomach, and Soap sends the captain a look. Yet Price's eyes remain locked on you, arms crossed, head slightly bowed, gauging your reaction. He's waiting for you to say you want out, for you to quit, to go home.

Home, wherever that may be, to the waspish gaze of your father and the sad, docile eyes of your mother. To linen sheets and pristine, white French doors, a garden where you aren't allowed to dig your hands into the soil.

You refuse. You don't speak to Price, returning his gaze with your own. Silent, unwavering, a bough not bending to the howling gale of your thoughts.

He nods to himself, then nods to the nurse hovering by the door, and promptly vanishes.

Gaz comes to visit you, and in the days that pass between him and Soap you are hardly ever lonely. They brings cards, games, sneak you snacks past the nurses. Slowly, their laughter and banter eases the unspokenness between you, the 'What if?' that hangs as a constant reminder in the shape of your bandages. Yet you see it in their eyes, the way they glance at you when wince after laughing too hard, when your eyes grow distant in the silence.

Price floats by, brings with him a thermos of hot tea. It's unlike him, and when you question him on it he merely shrugs, tells you to drink up. Yorkshire gold, you recognize. The same kind you mother liked, with her British sensibilities.

You try to ignore the bitter ache of disappointment that settles inside you when Ghost doesn't visit, acrid like over-steeped tea.

It's on Price's third visit that he tells you you're cleared to head back to base with them. After that, however, you have a mandatory six week leave to fully recover.

It sinks your stomach.

Six weeks. Six weeks they'll be deployed without you, six weeks you'll be trapped at base, not knowing the details of their missions, not knowing if it's at that very moment that they need you. All because you got caught off-guard, because you didn't check your corners and nearly bled out in from of your team.

You swallow hard at the news, but know any protest on your part is futile. Price's orders, as per the doctor's, are absolute.

The next day, you find yourself being assisted down to the tarmac, Soap present at your side and offering little jabs that mask his worry. Price deposits your pack beside his, between the three others. You blink then, see in one of them the thermos he brought you, and wonder why it isn't stored with his own things.

Ghost watches you from where he sits, locks eyes with you when you glance from the thermos to his silent, piercing stare.

Ah.

Yorkshire Gold.

You settle in one of the seats, wave off Gaz's fussing as he checks with your pain. You'd been dosed shortly before the flight, and by the time the plane is in the air you find yourself drifting off to sleep, slouching uncomfortably as drowsiness takes you.

Strangely, when you wake shortly before your landing about eight hours later, it's not your seat you find yourself in. Instead, you lay on the floor of the cargo hold, head braced by a folded jacket. You can smell the scent on it. Charcoal. Musk. Gun oil. You have just enough time to turn and bury your face into it before Soap is shaking you awake and helping you back to your seat.

No sooner have you landed are you rushed off to medical once more, checking your stitches, rebandaging the gash in your side. The doctor frowns when he examines you, pushing his glasses up his nose and commenting within ear range of your captain to not undertake any strenuous activity, that you may require eight weeks instead of the six you've been issued with.

Eight weeks. Fifty six days. Two months without your team.

Stuck alone on base, in the dim light of your room, praying that somehow they return whole, unharmed.

Price must sense your thoughts, for he lays a heavy hand on your shoulder, offers you a conciliatory smile that you feel only deepen the wound in your chest.

"It seems like a long time." He tells you genuinely, voice dipping low, rusty with cigar smoke. "It'll be over before you know it."

You don't have time to reply, because to your horror there's another soldier at the door, saluting before conveying that the captain is needed in the briefing office. When you trail behind Price, he only turns, settles both his hands on your shoulders and gruffly tells you to rest.

When you watch his back vanish down the corridor, you try not to hear the sound of creaking bones and rifle bullets, of cataclysmic destruction that leaves behind only the aching void of loneliness in its wake.

You don't even have time to say goodbye.

You watch from the windows of the barracks as the plane lifts off to an unknown destination, vanishes behind the veil of clouds, and then there's just you.

Alone. Again.

Alone with your thoughts, with the embrace of rumination that feels like the whisper of the witching hours, desolate, dark, restless. You feel it wrap around you even in sunlight, and the ghost of solicitude loops her lithe arms around your neck like a lost lover, kisses the inside of your thoughts with the taste of temptation.

They aren't coming back. They don't need you. They've seen how weak you are now, they'll never return.

"They'll be back." You whisper aloud to yourself in response, placing a trembling hand against the glass pane. "They haven't given up on me yet."

---

You wander the base aimlessly for the next few days, haunting the mess hall and rec room, trying to find yourself in the silhouettes of others. Your small collection of paperback novels is polished off quickly, tiny notes scribbled  in the margins of 'Dante's Inferno' and 'Wuthering Heights'. Eventually they stack in a tiny tower at your bedside, spines creased gently and pages dog-eared.

You heal slowly. Far too slowly. The pain has become mostly manageable, but there are nights when you rise in your sleep with a wheeze, pace the dark confines of your room trying to escape the shadows there. It doesn't help that your dreams are plagued by them, your comrades, bloodied and broken, reaching out for hands that aren't there. Hands you cannot reach.

One night you wake in a cold sweat, gasping for air, the visage of a cracked, bone white skull mask haunting your innermost thoughts. The eyes blank, cold. Dead.

Laswell tells you little about the mission. You get bits and pieces, but every time you push all you receive on the other line is a disparaging sigh and "Fix, you need to rest. I'll keep you updated if anything goes wrong."

You hate it. You don't want to know when things go wrong. You want to be there when they do, to prove yourself to them, in hopes that maybe they'll keep you just a little longer.

Soon. You remind yourself by day five of the team's absence, constantly pacing the corridors, trying to find instances of them in your loneliness. Soon they'll be back. Soon they'll need me again. Soon, I'll know I can stay.

You wake on day six before dawn, gasping awake as you fall in your dream, endlessly into the chasm of failure, where the crippled bodies of your teammates reach out for you with emaciated, broken limbs.

The training grounds are still dark by the time you get to them. You run them, blasting music, circling the perimeter over and over again like you're trying to stay to the edge of a dark, endless whirlpool. Running so as to avoid the chasing, predatory self-doubt that nips at your heels with feral eyes and jagged teeth.

The sun rises, and soon it begins to bake the back of your neck, your shoulders. Eventually you stop, and the inertia of your motion threatens to drag you off your feet. Your chest aches, but you welcome the pain. It's a distraction, a reminder. An anchor against the fraught silence that plagues you more than any wound.

By the time dinner rolls around you're back again, circling the drain until well past sunset, after your playlist has looped for the third time that day. By the end of it you're bent over, breathless, shaking, and yet somehow there's triumph. Yet it tastes hollow, bitter like over-steeped tea, and you push down the part of you that offers a gentle respite, a reminder of self-preservation.

If you run, you can flee, can hide from the perilous self-doubt that threatens to haunt the shadows of your thoughts, spinning cobwebs of dismay that overtake the empty caverns you've long since carved out. Fight or flight fuels every waking moment, a spiral you mimic with your steps across the training field, running a rut in the grass so deep it resembles the abyss that haunts your dreams. Perilous failure, a chasm where the wind howls in your ears and bites across your skin. You feel like a doe in the twilight glade, heaving heavy breaths as the wolves of your ruminations bark and howl, nip at the hocks of your legs.

The entire time your mind flashes with visions of them. Of Gaz's grin, eyes hidden by his sunglasses that reflect the sibylline brightness of daytime. Of Soap's jovial laughter, the corners of his eyes scrunching and broad chest rising, a sound that feels like trumpets announcing victory. Of Price and the sulfurous mist exhaled like dragon's breath, floating up into the same sky where you silently offer wishes for his approval.

Of Ghost, of the stygian, merciless presence of him that feels less like the visitation of a reaper and more of shadows in which to shelter yourself from the dazzling brightness of all things blinding. You lean into him and wordlessly, he has you, watches you from afar and traces your steps that mimic the history of his, observes you ascend the precarious tower of expectations you've yet to dismantle inside your soul. He extends his arms, prepares to catch you if you fall.

You need them. More than they need you, and it's the realization of that which has you clawing your sheets in your dreams. You need them to keep you, here in the place where you've found a home, dangerous and fraught that it may be. There's nowhere else for you. Not with your parents, not with your former company. You need to not be alone. You need to prove to them you can stay. Even if you can just fool them, be selfish enough to trick them into keeping you, you need them to smile at you long enough for the smoke to clear in your hideous self-deprecation, to drink in the oxygen of them like it's your last breath.

If you can heal faster, can show them how resilient you are, then everything will be fine, everything will be-

Red. On your fingers.

Wet, warm, crimson as you delicately prop under your shirt, hissing at the feeling of something torn and damp against your skin. It shines rusty under the scant light of the dark training grounds, coats the pads of your fingers like scarlet ink with which to smear a forbidden oath.

You stare down at it mutely, realizing with a strange sort of distance that it's yours. Gingerly, your hand snakes under your shirt, reveals a torn gash in your side. When you press down your knees nearly buckle at the sudden wash of pain, dark and viscous and choking you. Your voice chokes in your throat and you hate the sound of it, hearing the useless whimper of agony that chases up your windpipe. How you didn't notice the tear before is beyond you, something about imbibing in the hurt, letting the ache fill the crevasses of your heart like liquid metal seeping into a fissure.

Your hand clings to the fence beside you, fingers tangling with the chain link as the distress of your injury washed over you all at once.

Fuck, it hurts.

You've done something, whatever that may be, and now your mistakes seeps over your fingers.

This is bad.

Bad not just for you, but for your recovery. Shit, the looming eight weeks ahead of you seems to stretch into infinity, into an inexhaustible leave where they leave you behind, dismiss you and curse you to roam the earth endlessly, looking for a place in which to rest.

The infirmary.

You have a key, of course, being one of the medics. It's probably empty at this hour save for the sergeant on attendance. You can probably sneak past them, grab enough supplies to see to this yourself without one of the nurses telling on you to Price or Laswell.

You stumble in the direction of the barracks to retrieve your key, shrugging on your jacket to hide the blossoming stain across your side.

You don't hear the plane land.

The barracks are quiet by the time you reach them, most of the officers and squaddies already tucked into their quarters, the commanding officers lounging in the rec room or officer's lounge. It makes your journey easier as you traverse the corridors, trying to avoid any questions lest someone see you even now, realize what a complete and utter wreck you are, dipping falsehoods onto your fingers. Your feet nearly trip over the stairs, hand clutching at the rail ad dragging yourself upwards despite the effort it takes to not think about your leaking wound.

Carnations, scarlet and blotted with vibrance, blossom where stitches meet skin, a grotesque bouquet of regrets with the scent only of iron to color your senses.

When you reach the third floor, and turn the corner, you feel a wave of nausea suddenly wash over you, green and viscous and sour. You have to brace on the wall for a moment, waiting for your stomach to settle before making your way down the hall.

Then you see him.

Tall, imposing, clad in black. He soaks up what little light there is in the dim hallway. The unshed tactical gear makes him look bigger than he is, looming like a phantom outside your door. His scarf trails behind his back, and for a moment it feels almost like the cowl of a specter, his bone white mask a flash of white before it all ends and you're sucked down into an obsidian infinitum.

His hand is raised to knock, hovering over the metal surface. You can smell the grenade smoke wafting off of him from where you stand, acrid, burnt, molten metal like the glint of his stare. You blink as you realize he must have come straight from the plane, not bothering to untack or store his gear before coming to see you.

You startle at the sight of him, and it's in the corner of his stained vision that somehow he sees you, turns with an alert gaze that's soon masked by an expression of disinterest.

"Ghost." You hoarse, and his eyes narrow at your tone, closing the last few steps between you, stopping just short of you. Not touching, not moving, not reaching for you. Contained in his own orbit that you're drawn to anyways, looking up into his eyes, where the ink of his paint has faded from his blonde lashes.

"Fix." He greets, hands loose at his sides, chin tucked to fully regard you. The strap of his helmet creaks as he does, and briefly your eyes dart up to the night-vision goggles still strapped to his head.

"Price sent me to check on you." He offers in the silence that follows, and there's enough clarity within you to note that it somehow feels rehearsed, too practiced.

"Well-" You huff an anxious laugh, try to not let your eyes dart to your door handle, mind running to your desk drawer, where you keep your clinic key stashed. "Consider me checked on."

There's a pause between you, and within it lies the heaviness of the unspoken, the unsaid. All the confessions inside of you threaten to bubble up like the last gap of air before drowning in the deep, dark ocean.

I'm glad you're safe. Where are the others? Are they hurt? Did you need me? Will you forgive me when I wasn't there?

"How's your injury?" He asks suddenly, voice flat, but beneath the feigned disinterest you see his eyes, framed by blonde lashes, dip to your side. Your heartbeat flutters -too loud- as you pray the blood has yet to seep through the fabric of your jacket.

"Fine." You answer, a little too quickly, and that dark gaze sweeps up to your face, pins you to the spot without a single touch. You feel your chest tighten now not with the constricting compression of pain, but with something more phantasmic, a byproduct of his very presence. A prickle of awareness that breathes across your neck every time he ventures close, a reminder of him where he smears his ink stained fingers on the inside of your skull.

Door. Desk. Drawer. Stairs. Five minute walk. Clinic. Back room. Supply closet. Third shelf.

Your mind runs the steps ahead of you, but you can't sidle past, not with Ghost's immense, towering form blocking the width of the hallway. His dark gaze stares down at you, scrutinizing you, and it feels somehow like you're being flayed open by his knife, skin parting from bone as he dares a glance at the hidden, duplicitous interior of you. You try to not meet his eyes, knowing that if you do he'll see it, he'll see all of you, with his gaze that feels like black holes, threatens to tear you asunder with the gravity inside them.

He says something else when your eyes again dart to your door. When you don't immediately, he tilts his head at you, eyes narrowing.

"Fix?"

"Sorry-" You supply immediately, eyes darting back to Ghost. Yet the world around you wavers then, and you frown, blink, trying once more to tether yourself firmly to gravity. Even as you focus, however, the room seems to tilt and sway under you, and you can't help but rock on your feet a little in a subtle but desperate bid to find balance. "W-what did you just say?"

Ghost stills suddenly, and his eyes narrow from behind his mask, form going rigid as he appraises you.

Don't. You think desperately, both to yourself and to him. Don't look.

The wound must be worse than you thought, because the sudden wash of dizziness makes you threaten to sway on your feet, lost in inertia. You can feel the tug of it, your feet carrying you in endless circles as you spiral down a familiar whirlpool, lost in despair.

"...You alright?" Ghost asks tentatively, as if not expecting you to give him a straight answer.

"Solid." You reply almost instantly, and even as you tilt your head up to regard his massive form the shape of him seems to shift before your eyes. Despite being pinned under his stare you try not to sway, not to buckle.

Just breathe. You remind yourself, forcing manual inhales and exhales in an attempt to remain composed. The warm wetness of your wound is already bleeding through your bandages, soaking the gauze packed against your side and dyeing it a rancid scarlet that reeks of failure. You know the longer you stay here, the longer he questions you that you run the risk of being discovered, of your ruse being revealed in horrific, dazzling color.

God, you wonder if he can smell it on you- the bitter, iron taste of blood.

"Don't lie." He states, stepping closer, and when you instinctively take a step back you nearly stumble, one arm dropping to your side in an attempt to find something to balance with. "You don't look fine."

"W-what do you mean?" You try, but your voice wavers when you speak- as unsteady as your form. A sapling in a thunderstorm. Lighting bursts across the darkened skies of your anxiety.

"Fix." Ghost states, and that sends a flash of panic through you, the way his voice evens with seriousness, eyes suddenly steely and trained completely on you. A hunter's scope, and you're caught in the snare.

"Don't." You manage, and take another step back, retreating-

The world shifts under you.

You have just enough time to blink, for your lips to part in an 'oh' of realization before the weakness in your legs finally gives. As they buckle your eyes dart to Ghost's, and you catch a single glimpse of shock that flashes plainly across his gaze before he's moving, reaching for you-

When the world stills again it's to the sensation of an arm under your back, the hand snaking around your side and pressing close to your raw, seeping wound hidden under your gear.

You choke on the pain, the sound a strangled gasp that bubbles up your throat and forces the air from your lungs.

When Ghost moves his hand you feel it, feel the crimson ooze soaking through your shirt and jacket against your side, and painting his glove in dark, glistening wetness.

"FUCKING hell." Ghost snarls when he realizes what it is, his eyes darting down to your side where red colors across the fabric of your white tee.

"G-Ghost-" You manage, even as the world spins around you, an abrupt kaleidoscope of shape and color. It's the white of his mask that grounds you, mirroring his wide, surprised gaze as it turns from his glove to your ashen, stricken expression. "LT, wait-"

"You stupid girl." Ghost snarls, and you flinch.

Before you can stop him, Ghost reaches for his radio, and when he presses down it leaves a bloody stain on the casing.

"Price." He barks, voice grating deep in his chest- the one he uses to issue orders, bring men back into line. "Fix is injured. Tore her stitches."

In a desperate bid you try to reach for him, face alight with pain and shock as you try to stop him, try to grapple the radio away. Yet Ghost merely knocks your hand aside and fixes you with a stare so harsh and cold it freezes you in place.

"How bad?" Price's voice crackles from the other end of the comm, and you swallow, try to answer.

"I-I'm okay." You supply, but Ghost snarls at you.

"She's not okay." He echoes over you. "She's fucking bleeding out."

"I'm...not-"

"Shut up." Ghost bites at you, but there's a waver in his voice you don't recognize as it harshes inside his chest, grinding and impatient and...somehow scared.

You hear Price curse on the other end of the radio.

"Where are you? I'm on my way and sending Gaz to find a medic."

"Southeast hallway. Third floor. Outside her bunk." Ghost replies sharply, and at once he's readjusting you, laying you down on your uninjured side. You curl into yourself, feeling tears threaten as he does so.

It hurts.

The pain itself, but the knowledge that with every stained drop you're exposing yourself, letting him know you failed, that you aren't fit to stand by him, that your injury is-

When Ghost's hand presses down against your wound you yell, the agony of his touch unexpected and horrific as he tries to stem the gush from your side. It blinds you, sends white shooting across your vision in brilliant white specks, blotting out the brightness of the humming fluorescent lights above you both. The aftertaste of it lingers in your mouth, like burnt pennies, thick and vile as it clogs your chest, grips your heart-

"Stay. Still." Ghost tells you on no uncertain terms even as you writhe, tears now spilling from your eyes and tracing down your cheeks in hot, furious trails.

"I'm sorry-" You try, but your voice is cracked, caught in your throat as a sob. "Ghost, I'm sorry-"

"Why did you do this?!" He hisses, as he uses one hand to press against your shoulder and anchor you. "Why didn't you say anything?!"

You swallow, but it does nothing to stop the ache in your throat, the pain that laces up your side and cross your spine, your hips, your heart.

"I-I didn't-" You hiccup, and the world is in chaos now, with your cries and your secrets exposed, with his gaze raking over your trembling, injured form. "Didn't want you to see, Ghost. I'm sorry-"

He stills.

Then, Ghost's eyes take on a light you've never seen before. Frustration, anger, disappointment, these things you've been witness to in your lieutenant. However now the color of Ghost's eyes is dark not with these things, but with fury.

"Have you gone bloody mental?!" He bellows at you, and the world feels like it's trembling with the volume of his voice alone, shaking at the foundations of the earth itself. "Do you have any idea the danger you put yourself in?!"

There's a note of his words that ring true in you, that cleave apart the shell of doubt and allow radiance to seep through. You hide from it, curl further into yourself on the cold linoleum of the hallway, a sob cracking your throat as the weight of the world comes crashing down around you.

They're going to leave you for this. You're going to be alone again, all because your life seems to be a litany of failures, an impossible grave to claw out of as dirt pours in from the top.

You're heaving now, breaths too uneven, too ragged, and when it presses down on your lung the hurt is enough to make you cry out a strangled yell, kick out your feet in an automatic reflex.

Ghost's voice sounds distant now as blood rushes in your ears, your heartbeat wild and banging against the inside of your chest like a frantic, trapped bird. His hands are on you but you hardly feel them as panic engulfs you, and the whirlpool roars as it drags you down, down, down.

"Hey! Calm down, Fix! Fuck, just breathe!"

It hurts. Everything hurts. Your chest, your side, your lungs, the pain feels like it's seeping into your bloodstream, blocking your airways, poison running through your veins.

Another set of hands. Cigar smoke, ash.

"Soldier! Fix! Look at me!"

You can't. You refuse. If you see Price's gaze now in the moment of your ruin the stitches that bind you together will come loose at the seam and you'll unspill, empty cotton falling over their fingers. Fluff where there's supposed to be iron.

"Where the fuck is the medical team?!"

"They're on their way. Keep pressure on the wound."

Hands on your face. Gloves that smell like gun smoke.

"Fix, darling. You're having a panic attack. You need to breathe, you're going to hurt yourself if you don't."

You shake your head, dislodging the captain's touch.

No. You think with a ragged heave of air. Don't look. Don't look don't look please don't look.

The ground trembles as footsteps draw closer, and there's voice you don't recognize, hands pawing at you, light in your eyes-

You flail blindly, confused, scared, and when a heavy pair of hands lands on your shoulders to pin you it only makes your voice choke out with a frantic cry.

"We need to put her under."

No, no, please don't. Not sleep, not the nightmares-

"Do it."

Price. Captain. No, please-

"It's alright, darling. We've got you. You're okay."

Don't-

A jab, a little pinch on the inside of your arm. You try to make a noise, a whimpering sound of protest. There's a sudden flash of clarity before the darkness, and you open your eyes (When did you start crying?) to Price above you, his face pinched, distraught. Ghost is holding down your legs, and as your eyes drift to him he becomes nothing more than a shimmering phantom, blurred dark at the edges, a void in contrast to the too bright world around you.

"Please-" You whisper, the word heavy on your lips, eyes blinking-

Then there's nothing.

Tag List: (Reblog this post to be added to future fics from this series! If you'd like to be removed please DM me!)

@dankest-farrik @zwiiicnziiix @moondirti @sritashimada @ladiilokii @yeyinde @sandinthemachine @verdandis-blog @guyfieriiifierriii @fan-of-encouragement @starlitnotes

Highlife

Price finds you high after a tough mission and makes it his own personal duty to make sure you’re okay

Cw: smut, this ended up being a lot softer than I planned, short mention of blood at the beginning, marijuana and nicotine use

-

The mission had been a shit show, really, it had been. Gaz had gotten shot and you’d had a panic attack the moment you all escaped into the helicopter. It had taken Price’s hands on your shoulders and his piercing eyes glued to yours, demanding you breathe with him to calm down. The image of his blood over your hands was why you’d opened up the box and rolled the blunt. He was fine now, simply patched up and staying in the med bay for the night.

You were a few heavy hits in when the knock at your door sounded. Cursing under your breath and snuffing out the blunt, you coughed harshly as you threw together the box and shoved it under your bed as quietly as you could.

Just as you thought whoever it was decided to leave, another knock came again, harsher this time. You had no choice but to open the door, your brain not fully comprehending the dangers of doing so. Drugs were prohibited on base and in the dorms. It was Gaz who had snuck you this bit late one night.

As you opened the door horror filled your entire body with a creeping anxiety as you came face to face with your captain. His eyes met yours, then went above and past you as he sniffed at the air. Coming back to look at you, he quirked a brow and pushed past you.

“Captain, I can explain-”

“Sergeant.” he cut you off, noticing the hastily pushed over covers to your bed.

Leaning down with a soft grunt that had your addled head keening at the noise, he pulled out the box.

“Captain please-”

“That’s enough now, love.”

It shuts you up for good that time, watching with a solidified dread as he sets the box down on your desk and opens it, snorting as the contents are revealed.

“You know I came to see how you were doing,” he smiles wryly, taking out the grinder and one of the papers, “Didn’t expect you to be one to use drugs to get rid of the day. You’re a little young for that.”

“I’m only a few years younger than you.” you retorted, taking a few steps closer. Bad idea.

Price used your proximity to look you up and down, eyes resting a little too long on your breasts, which were only clothed with a standard black tank top. You had thrown on loose sweats as well that hung a bit at your hips, stolen from Soap a few weeks before.

His hands were deft as they eventually rolled the blunt, his calluses helping him. It was a big one, larger than you’d ever roll for yourself.

“Captain what are you doing?” you finally found the courage to ask, heart stuttering as he dug around in his pants for a light. It forced the outline of his cock to grow more defined, drawing your attention before your right self had the sense to look away.

“Making sure you’re okay. If this is how you do it then I won’t let my presence stop you.” he said gruffly, the light flickering as he held it up to the unfiltered end and lit it.

Coming closer to you, he softly grabbed your chin between his forefinger and thumb and tilted your head up. Your eyes managed to focus on his, met with the deep blue that spoke volumes of experience and pain. But in that moment they were dark, filled with a focus and purpose you usually only saw out on the field. Now they were trained on you as he brought the blunt up to you lips.

You take it, letting him hold it as you breathe in deep. It burns and soothes at the same time, filling every crevice of your chest as you hold it in your lungs.

“Exhale, love.”

The smoke goes right into his face, which he inhaled deeply before taking a hit of his own. Inching his finger up, he gently rested the pad on your lower lip and tugged. You obliged easy, like butter to a knife, mouth falling open for him to exhale into. The closeness was deafening. Your eyes never left his as you took the smoke in, a hint of his own scent and flavor on it.

“That better?” he asked, finger coming to rest on your tongue and pressing down. You couldn’t even answer his question if you wanted to.

You instead nodded dumbly, tongue wrapping around his finger slightly as you did. He watched carefully, throat bobbing as he swallowed heavily.

“I don’t think you’re better yet, hun. Think you’ve been needing something else for a while now.” he nearly whispered, sinking his finger deeper into your mouth.

It wasn’t a lie. The way his hands gripped yours during training to adjust you always sent fire licking up your spine, the mere sound of your name on his lips sending you into a frenzy… you were nearly crazed for your own captain. You knew it was wrong, knew you shouldn’t. Yet as he looked into your eyes with his finger in your mouth, knuckles pinched by your canines, there was no discerning good ideas from bad one. Not as the marijuana flooded your senses and thoughts, finally slowing them.

“Answer me.” he said softly, forcing your head up more as he took another hit and breathed it into your face.

The sound that left your mouth was nothing short of a whimper, a plea for him to relieve you. It seemed to work; he slowly dragged his thumb from your mouth, licking the pad of it as you fought the urge to reach out.

“I am.”

“You’re what?” he pried, bringing the blunt to your lips and allowing you to take more. He always did that. Let you take as much as you pleased, even if you could tell he craved the power of taking it away.

“Needing.” you answered, practically heaving with the effort it took to keep yourself off of him.

He seemed a little surprised at that, surprised at your acquiescence to what he was asking without asking. Price leaned back, putting the blunt out on your ashtray where the other one from earlier rested.

“I don’t do casual, love.” he admitted, voice strained as he opened up to you. No longer the confident captain you knew, now brutally honest and bare before you. It was so shocking that you found no other response than the truth in return.

“I never said I needed casual.”

His hands and lips were on you in an instant, soft and yet urgent, needy yet managing to stay patient. He was warm against you, lips soft against your own as his hands gripped at your hips like a lifeline.

You moaned into the kiss, hands reaching up to caress his face and tangle in his beard. He groaned softly at the touch, his own hands moving up to your back and stroking soothing lines down your ribs.

He had you breathless in moments, tongue gently sweeping across your lips in a desperate request. You let him in, letting your tongue grace his own as the two of you engaged in a slow dance. He pushed and you pulled, sucking at him as his hips involuntarily bucked in response. It dragged a groan out of you, which only seemed to spur him on.

Hands wrapping around your lower thighs, he quickly pulled you up and against him. You wrapped your legs around his torso, pussy grinding against his abs as your arms found their place at his neck.

Price pushed you both against the door, hand bracing on the wood next to your head as he kissed from your jaw to your neck. He bit at your collarbone, drawing a whine out of you as his cock dragged at your ass from where it was stiff in his pants.

“Please,” you managed to whisper as your fingers tangled in his hair. He licked a long strip up your neck before responding, panting in your ear.

“I got you, love.”

Taking you swiftly from the door to the bed, he set you down with a care you didn’t expect from the gruff man you had grown to rely on and respect so much.

He only released you to pull his standard shirt off, revealing the beauty that was his chest. Thickly muscled with a small yet healthy layer of fat that accumulated a bit at his belly and absolutely covered in dark curls. His shoulders were broad yet tapered down to a lean waist where a particularly thick matting of hair trailed from his belly button down into his pants.

You were immediately stripping, tank top abandoned as he unzipped and pulled down his pants. He was stark and massive against his boxers, more thick than he was long.

Just as you reached for your own sweats his hands reached for your wrists, stopping you with a gentle strength.

“Let me.” he breathed, climbing onto the bed with you.

Price truly was a massive man, just as impressive and intimidating nearly naked as he was clothed. And yet he was careful as he slipped your sweats down your hips, revealing your lack of underwear and aching core. Finally pulling them all the way off, he laid a kiss to your upper ankle before setting your legs down on either side of you.

He was on you again instantly, body caging you in as your tongues and teeth clashed with a desperation that spoke volumes of the years that you both had worked together. Years you had been untouched by another because you couldn’t bring yourself to crave the feel of any other but him.

You moaned once again into him as his cock dragged against your clit, hands coming up to fist at his chest. Your hips moved up in response to the stimulation as you grinded up against him. That got a sharp gasp out of Price, startling him enough that he buried his face in your neck once more and drove his cock against you.

“Price please.” you begged once again as you dug your fingers into his nape, pushing his face down toward your tits.

His mouth found one of your nipples and sucked soft then hard, tongue swirling around it gently as his teeth nipped. You whined in response, arching into his attentions as his hand dragged down the length of your body, fingers dipping down into the sopping wetness of your cunt before coming back up to rub circles into your clit. Your body seemed to shatter and melt at once, every sense of the outside world fading to the feeling of his mouth and hand on you.

Price took a moment to pull back and observe you as he worked your clit, clinging to him so tight you feared your fingers might break his skin.

“You’re beautiful,” he cooed as he pressed down simultaneously, forcing a jagged moan out of you.

“That’s it.”

It was only when the first finger dipped inside you that you really began to lose your mind. The stretch was made comfortable from just how wet you were, which Price quickly noticed and decided was enough to push two more in.

The air punched out of you in an instant, a cry escaping your throat as your hips braced against his hand. It only made it worse. His palm against your clit, he rubbed you softly as his fingers began to curl. He chose that time to suck at your other tit, breath hot against your sticky skin.

It was too much too fast.

You came right then and there as he bit particularly roughly at your nipple, cunt squeezing the life out of his fingers as he focused on your clit with the heel of his palm. Panting and whining with each breath, you were already exhausted from what he has dragged from your body.

In the aftermath of your orgasm he looked in your eyes once again, a savage hunger there that would have scared you if you didn’t know better. His lips claimed your own as his fingers pulled gently from your cunt, aware that the sudden loss of fullness would have shocked you.

“You’re fuckin’ perfect.” he moaned against your lips, cock dragging against your already overstimulated cunt. His boxers must have been soaked at that point, ruined with the amount of slick that had pooled from you when you came.

“I need you,” you gasped, dragging him by his hair to pull back and look at you, “Need you inside me. Fuck me, John.”

His eyes went nearly black.

Shimmying out of his boxers, the pure girth of him had your mouth dry and open in shock. Neatly kept dark curls surrounded it, heavily balls hanging low. His tip was huge as well, the entirety of him causing it to droop slightly as he repositioned himself above you.

Noticing your slight anxiety at his size, he leaned down to kiss you once more, soft like the first time. It was passionate, his hand finding your cheek and cupping your face in his palm like it was all he needed. Like you were all he needed. It soothed you, body relaxing as he slowly dragged his cock through your slick. When he found your clit with it you whined, loud and impatient at him. He chuckled softly at that, eyes never leaving yours as he lined up with your cunt and pushed.

All you could do was gasp and moan as his tip sunk into you, stretching you so wide your vision blacked.

“Hey.”

His hand found your jaw, turning your head back to him from where it had been buried in the pillow.

“Breathe, love. Breathe.”

You followed him on instinct, big breaths filling your lungs as your cunt released him enough for him to keep pushing inside. It was too much and not enough, barely able to think around the way he split you open yet so desperate for his balls to sit against your ass that you forced yourself back onto him.

He groaned at the movement, eyes rolling as his head hung slightly, hips jerking a bit as he sunk in to the base. His hair tickled your clit, causing you to squirm under him.

“Oh God.” he muttered from where his head rested between your breasts, chest heaving as he tested you with a tentative thrust of his hips.

It had you seeing stars and moaning from low in your throat, enough to cause him to move. He was slow, hips rolling into you as he lowered himself onto his forearms, forehead resting against your own. It was so intimate that in that moment you knew he had been serious. This wasn’t casual. He was making love to you, worshipping your body in a way that only a man that was wholeheartedly devoted to you would.

“You feel so good.” you whispered to him as he continued to thrust into you, pulling your legs up over his hips.

“Heaven, love. Fuckin’ heaven between these legs.”

Eyes, blue, stark against the moonlight that managed to sneak through your window. Handsome, strong, loyal.

You ran your hands over every inch of him, feeling his biceps strain as they held him up, back taunt as his hips grinded into you and chased not his pleasure but yours. Each moan he drew from you only made him faster, more devoted to the gradual tightening of your cunt.

He increased in pace, grabbing one of your legs by the meat of your thigh and pushing it up and over his shoulder. The angle had you half screaming as he reached your cervix, his moans of pleasure half drowning out your own.

You were close, building up to your orgasm like a tsunami cresting the horizon. Each thrust drew you up tighter, coaxing your body to work just how he liked and how you craved.

It hit you harder than the first time.

You only had time to wrap your arms around his neck and draw him close as you shattered once again, causing him to go hoarse as he fucked you through the orgasm. Price didn’t stop, didn’t let your pleasure end until every drop had been wrung from your body.

When he came, it was with a cataclysmic groan that resonated over every inch of your body. His hips stuttered a few more times before he drove himself so deep inside of you that breathing felt hard. You locked your legs tight around his hips as he emptied himself inside you, shuttering and gasping into your lips as you soothed him and held him close.

He stayed like that for a while after collapsing his weight partially on you, dick buried to your womb and nose cradled to your ear as you both came down from the dual highs you were experiencing.

After a bit he pulled out, leaving you empty and dripping with cum and slick as he found your bathroom and brought a rag back. He laid kisses to your knees as he cleaned you up, gentle and aware of the fact you were still sensitive to every touch from him.

It was only when he got some water in you that he crawled back into the bed and pull you up onto his chest. He ran his hands through your hair and kissed your brow, the silence enough for the both of you. You were eventually brave enough to speak.

“Not casual, right?” you asked, not prepared for the waver in your voice.

“No love. You’re mine now.”

-

Note: Now edited! Thank you for reading and to those who ignored the typos! Might write a part two if I’m feeling it.



TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROAD | MASTERLIST

PRICE x READER

You have nothing on your person apart from a hastily packed suitcase and the dress you came into town wearing, on the run from trouble back home. Too bad John's missing a bride that matches your description.

Or: the 1800s (mistaken) mail order bride au

[ao3]

tags: Alternate Universe - Western, Non-Consensual Spanking, Mail Order Brides, Past Violence, AFAB reader - Freeform, 1800s Timeline, Marriage of Convenience, Past attempted assault, Dubious Consent, Unnegotiated punishment, Minor Violence, Minor Character Death

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20

Extras

Series moodboard

everytime i hear someone call depression and anxiety ‘destigmatized mental illnesses’ i wonder how they react when they find out someone has spent weeks or months in bed or struggles to shower or eat

The Flute. 1896. Source.

dark matter | ghost x f!reader

INSTALLMENT TWO — TIME ROT COLLECTION

type: one-shot, part of anthology series, can be read standalone (6.5k)

cw: dark!ghost, mature language and content, mature sexual language and content, mw3 spoilers, death, grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms, dubcon, size kink, manhandling, breeding kink, cumplay, unprotected piv (18+)

You don't know how long it's been. Maybe days, or maybe it's been weeks, you aren't sure, but it's hard to move when there is nothing that waits for you.

All that's left is a box that sits on your kitchen table. It has his name scribbled across the top, and when you opened it up, just seeing the photos of him tucked into the sides was enough to nearly make you sick. You haven't opened it again since. You haven't touched it. When you touch the cardboard, it burns, it stings.

You don't know what you're supposed to do when the love of your life doesn't come home. You don't know what you're supposed to do when there's bills on the table, when half of the bed is empty, when everything that was supposed to happen died along with him.

You used to sit on this very couch and talk about everything you would do and everything you wanted. You used to lay there, your head in his lap, looking up into those baby blues and tell him about what a good husband he would make, how it was going to be so hot watching him fixing the leaky sink and hanging up the new shelves you bought, being the house husband he was always meant to be.

Someone that pretty deserved to be at home all day, baking bread and fixing a vintage car.

He promised you so much. He promised you love. He promised you laughter. He promised you a lifetime of something more.

But there never really was anything more. He never married you. He never proposed. He just fucked you full before every deployment, whispering into your hair as you drooled about how, "I'll see ye when I get back, bonnie, 'n I'll tell ye how much I luv ye."

But he didn't come back. So you really aren't sure now how much he loved you.

You stand in front of the bathroom mirror, fluffing a brush over your cheeks. The makeup helps, but you look dead, and your eyes are dull.

You don't want to go to work, but you can't pay your bills, and Johnny wasn't your husband, so the box in your kitchen stands as a loving gesture from his mother, and that is all he left behind. And when you went to the service and asked for something, for anything, they said it was out of their hands.

You are entitled to no compensation—because on paper, you are nothing to anyone, and you belong to no one. And though his mother kissed you shakily, with tears in her eyes, you couldn't bear to ask her for anything, because she hurts, too, and you are nothing to anyone, and you belong to no one.

So you work; you work, and you don't stop, and you sleep only a few hours before you get up and do it all over again, and even after a long day, you count the pennies in your purse, and it isn't enough. You let yourself get comfortable, you allowed yourself to succumb to a man, a man you loved, and what did it get you?

Fuck all. You have fuck all, and you let a man do it to you.

Fate and destiny are a cruel reality. Unforgiving—they don't care about the choices you make because they happen anyways, and it's hard to be angry when this is how it was always going to be. It doesn't make you hate any less, and it doesn't make the dust collecting on the box any less thick.

When you do gain the courage to touch it again, you have a week left to find a new flat. You don't know where you will go, but you're packing, and you rip the top of the box off as harshly as a band-aid. Your eyes focus on the knick-knacks that Johnny must've kept. A few different sized sketchbooks, the nubs of worn and used graphite and charcoal pencils, a crystal and beaded rosary that his mother gifted him when he first enlisted. You pick up the crinkled and well-loved papers that are stacked at the bottom, and your eyes blur with fresh tears at the ripped out sketches that sit in your hands.

It's you, in different angles. Asleep, staring out at something, smiling at him. He captures your face beautifully, and you can see where he's smudged the shading with a thick finger to cast shadows and light over you. He sketches in exquisite detail—he always has, but he has always had a certain style, a certain eye, that made lead look like real life. 

It’s odd to see what you looked like through his eyes. Bright. Lovely. Soft. He draws with a breath of fresh air, and you can see where his finger has rubbed away all the harsh lines. When you see a few places where the graphite on his thumb has stamped his fingerprint onto the paper, you feel your throat close up. You want to feel those fingers on your face. You want him to brush the hair out of your eyes and look down at you. You want to feel that hand tracing your jawline, your nose, the lid of your eye—you want to feel the warmth that he always radiated, and you want to breathe in the scent of him until you forget the smell of anything else.

You pick up a loved and bound book, with thinner pages that you know can't be a sketchbook. You unwind the leather string on the front, flipping it open, and you swallow thickly when you realize what this is.

A journal. You never knew he kept one.

The first few pages are dated from when he first enlisted, a few years before he met you. He writes just as eloquently as he draws, and you settle into the couch behind you as you read about his enthusiasm joining, the purpose he finally has, the weight of the world lifting off of his shoulders as he thinks about all the things he will be able to do as he rises through the ranks. You let your fingers skim over the words, feeling how his pen has pierced the paper, and you try to imagine him—fresh shaven with less muscle, life in his eyes as he thought about serving his country. You smile a little, but it hurts after a few moments.

You flip a little further, your eyes skimming over times he cursed out his commanding officer, punched a private for sneaking into the women's barracks, the love he has for a detonator that began when he soldered his first pins. His personality shines, and it's like you can hear him talking to you all over again, and when he begins to talk about a love he doesn't know how to handle, you smile to yourself, because you think he's talking about you.

But when you look again, the dates are wrong. You hadn't met him yet, not at this point, and your smile fades when you realize he's talking about someone else.

He never says their name. He writes at length about them, someone who has captured his eye, someone he says he can't have. Someone unattainable, unavailable, and then there is his own reservations. You don't realize until his entries from a few months later that he's talking about a man.

never felt this way before. not about anyone. rosary i always look at is fucking mocking me, i think. i can hear mum, somewhere, telling me to find a good catholic bonnie, but this is real. i know it is, but i don't know what to do about it. not like anyone i've ever met. can't explain the bond. but i look at him, and i think he looks at me, and i just know. i know. it can't be just in my head, can it? i'm not mad. i'm not. but what am i supposed to do?

You flip the pages frantically. There's sketches of hands on one page, hands that hold a handgun, that squeeze a trigger. They're tame sketches, but you feel a little sick because you feel like you're looking at a part of his life that you're not supposed to be looking at. The intimacy of these sketches—just hands, and you feel like they should be censored to your eyes.

The sketches and the words, they morph as time goes on. Sketches of closed eyes. Of blonde lashes. A harsh brow, a scar cutting across a thin lip. There is no softness in these sketches. Johnny draws with an abrasive pencil. It cuts the shapes, jagged edges akin to glass.

i can't tell anyone. i want to tell the whole world. won't let me. want to scream it from the fucking roof that i love you, but you're such a stubborn bastard. so fucking stubborn.

The sketches suddenly become warped. Angry, spiked, and you can see the emotion from how hard he presses the pencil into the page. More hands, and you can’t help but notice how he draws them simply functioning. Hand over wrist. Holding a utensil. Picking nails. These hands tell a story, and you can see the bumps and bruises and the wounds that litter the surface of them—these hands are anything but delicate. They have wrought. They have dug until their fingernails bled. They have been stuck through barbwire, maimed to the point of texture and roughness and the blurring of scar tissue.

don't fucking believe you. it isn't just me.

You're blind for a few moments from the intensity of your tears. You wipe them furiously, you need to know more, you need to know. The dates skip, and you pause on the day that you met.

so bonnie. so beautiful.

Softer sketches. The delicate lashes that are your own, the gentle curve of your pouty lips. You recognize yourself, but only barely, because he draws you like you are out of focus. He draws you as if you are too far away, just out of reach.

she's everything i've ever wanted. so why can't i let it go?

Your bottom lip trembles when sketches of a butterfly overlap skulls. The motifs never disappear, not completely, and it's only obvious what his true feelings are when you smooth a finger down the sketch of a butterfly escaping its cocoon that hangs from the mouth of a discarded skull head.

haunt my fucking dreams. go away. go away. go away. the ring is right there, so why can't i give it to her?

You close it abruptly. It falls to the floor, the cover of it thudding as you cover your face with your hands. Was he thinking of someone else all this time? Every morning, every kiss, every time he looked into your eyes and told you that he loved you—was all of this meant for someone else? Someone he wanted but couldn't have? Someone that just didn't love him back?

You scream. You toss the coffee table. You shatter the flowers that have died, you pick up the box of his things, and you throw it. You watch the papers fly, the books fall, you hear the rattle of his dead memories meet the floor of the home he left behind, and you scream at all of it just to stop, please, stop, stop, stop—

You're not even sure if it's really Johnny you're angry at. Maybe yourself, because you've never really been good enough to be loved by anyone. No one has ever loved you and you only—you've only ever been additional, on the condition of loving another, never enough to be the one and only, and maybe that's your real problem. Maybe the real problem is that you want to die because you always give everything you have, and no one has ever wanted it enough to give you the same.

Maybe you just want too much. Maybe your dreams are too big, maybe it's just that no one wants what you are handing over. Packaged pretty, all shiny and new, but if no one wants it, you shelve that kind of love, and that's where it rots.

Maybe this kind of love died with Johnny. Not the beginning of something, but the reality of it, and now all you can do is accept the things you cannot change and tame the heart inside of you that isn't good enough to be for anyone else.

When you pick up his things off the floor the next morning, you find a scribbled address on the back of a torn sketch. So, you do the kind thing, and you gather his things back into the box, close the lid on what never really was, and you carry it with you out the door.

The door is unmarked. The paint on it is peeling, but you know this must be the place because there's a pair of dark boots caked with mud sitting out by the bottom step. You raise your hand to knock, and you tap it with your knuckles timidly, adjusting your hold on the box in your arms.

A few minutes pass by, but no one answers. You knock again, louder and firmer this time, and it finally swings open. From the dark flat emerges a large man, sticking his head out from behind the chain latched and glaring down at you. You think he's about to close it on you, but then his eyes flicker down, and you know he must read the name scribbled in big letters on the box that you hold.

It’s enough to make him pause. It’s enough to make him stay, rooted to that spot, even if you can tell all he wants to do is sink back into whatever void he came out of.

"Hi," you whisper, and you have no control over how broken the word comes out. "I...I just thought you should have this."

Because he never really loved me. Not really. Not the way he loved you.

The door shuts, and you hear the chain unlatch, and then he opens it wider. He emerges in the doorway, taking up the entirety of the width of it, and he snarls down at you from behind the mask he wears.

He opens his mouth to spit something at you, but then you hold it out to him with shaky hands, and he can see the tears that are coming down your face. You can't control them, he can tell that much, and he reaches out to take the box from you. You look at his hands, and you recognize them immediately. Uncanny, the resemblance, and you recognize the scar that cuts across the knuckles on his left hand. You know if you push his mask down, you could trace with closed eyes the scar he must wear that starts at his nose and ends at his chin.

He doesn’t know it, but you know what he looks like. You know what he is. If he took off that mask, you would see a face you know, even if Johnny never drew the entirety of it at once. Always bits and pieces of him, but you’d know them if you saw them put altogether. You have the puzzle pieces of him in the back of your mind, and you know you could put them back together if you really tried.

He would not be able to do the same for you. The pieces of you are scattered, and you know they are lost, and that there is no getting them back. Johnny took them to grave; you would never ask for them back, anyways.

You don't ask who he is. He doesn't ask you who you are; but when your eyes meet, there is some kind of understanding. Some kind of knowing. You almost don't want to leave—you know he mustn't be kind, not from what you’ve read of him and the way he looks, but Johnny loved him, and you want to cling onto anything that still breathes that might connect you to him. You hate him, but you love him, and Johnny loved this thing, so maybe...maybe—

The door slams shut in your face, and you catch yourself with the step railing as you crumple to sit there, on his dirty step, crying into your hands. You don't know how long you sit there, but it is dark when you drag yourself home.

It is much too dark outside for you to see the shadow that you pick up along the way—and you’re too in your head to realize it never leaves.

When you come home from work, your knees are weak when you see the letter that’s taped to the front of your door.

EVICTION NOTICE.

They give you until the weekend, a courtesy they tell you they don’t normally give to anyone. You aren’t allowed to stay, even if you come up with the money, and you’re in tears as you pack up your flat. The last place you shared with Johnny, and it’ll be gone soon. You don’t know what you’ll do with your things. You don’t know where you will go.

Johnny never married you. You don’t have any family. You’ll have to stuff your car full of as much as it can hold, and you’ll need to toss the rest. You’ll have to—

The knock at your door startles you. You get up off the floor, where you were trying to stuff all your dishes into a small bag. You pull the curtain back on the window beside the door, and your eyes widen when you see a giant man standing at your door. He feels your eyes on him, and he turns his head towards the window, tilting his head to the side menacingly when he looks at you.

You wipe your face, trying to dry the tears on your cheeks. You open the door shakily, poking your head out.

“Hi,” you say. You wish your voice was steady, but it cracks. “Can…C-Can I help you?”

The mask he’s wearing today is different. There’s a skull mouth painted on it, and his hood is flipped up over his head. He seems taller with his boots on, and he takes up nearly the entire width of your doorway. He’s got so much bulk on him—if you reached across and touched him, you know your hand would hit nothing but a solid wall. No give, just pure muscle and fat. His eyes are still dark, and he still looks like the most unapproachable man in the entire world. He clicks his tongue under the mask, and you swallow when he snarls a bit.

He fishes something out of his jacket. You recognize it—Johnny’s journal. He holds it out to you, expectant, and you open the door wider to take it from him. You feel tears come all over again at the sight of it, and you hold the leather to your chest, hugging it. Johnny never married you, but he would’ve taken care of you right now. If he would’ve known you were here, about to live in your car, he would not have hesitated moving you in with him. Getting you into his bed. Shielding you from the world that was much too scary, much too unforgiving. Johnny would know what to do.

Johnny’s dead.

Just as you are about to close the door, a thick boot stops it. You flinch a bit, looking up, and then a big hand presses against your door and pushes it open until it hits the wall. The man cranes his neck to look around you, and he narrows his eyes at the heap of your belongings huddled in the living room of your flat.

You sniffle, shaking your head.

“I’m just…moving.”

You step aside when he moves. He ducks his head just slightly to get through, and you watch as he walks around, taking stock of what’s in front of him. He seems to find what he’s looking for when he sees the notice on your kitchen counter. He snatches it up and and turns it around to face you, and you just stand there, frozen.

“I told you. Moving.”

His house is soulless. White walls. Beige carpet. Grey tiles. There’s one couch, one coffee table, and one TV mounted to the wall. There’s only dishes in the kitchen enough for one person, and he only has one bedroom. It’s the same lifeless place in there, too. His mattress is on the floor, but he has the decency to put a mattress cover and sheet over it. There’s one nightstand, with just a few cables where he must charge his phone, and one lamp. There are no decorations. There is no other furniture. His house is functional, not valuable.

He puts your bag in the bedroom. That settles that.

You cry that first night. You sleep early, curling up under his one measly sheet, and you cry. You cry because you’re sad. You cry because you’re lonely. You cry because you feel like you owe this man now, this stranger who hasn’t told you his name, and you have no idea how you will pay him back. You cry because you miss Johnny, and he never even loved you.

You jump when the bedroom door opens. He walks in, kicking the door shut, and you watch as he strips himself of his jeans and hoodie, tossing them onto the floor. You sit up on your elbows, meeting his eyes, but he doesn’t take off his mask. Instead, he comes towards the bed, plopping down on the mattress next to you, and you pull the sheet up to your chin. You hadn’t anticipated sharing a bed with him, but you’re also too afraid to complain.

“I can sleep…on the floor if—”

A big hand covers your mouth. You’re silenced, startled that he would touch you this way, and you start to cry again when he presses until you are laying on your back again, moving his hand back until it rests behind his head.

“Please—” You hiccup. “Please don’t hurt me.”

He hums at that. Satisfied. Pleased at your reaction. He could pluck your strings right now, and you’d play music. He falls asleep with that thought.

You try to give him money. He never takes it. You try to buy groceries. You find the notes you spent stuffed back into your wallet later. You try to pick up a broom to clean up, and he locks the supply closet after that. The only way you find out his name is when you find his dog tags in the bathroom drawer, because he still hasn’t spoken a single word to you.

Simon “Ghost” Riley. That’s who Johnny really loved.

You don’t know why the sex started—you don’t know why you let him in, not exactly. Simon had been gone, one of his usual spurts of absence that he occasionally had, but he came home earlier than you expected. Simon likes to shower as soon as he comes home, but you are already in there, under the hot water, leaning against the tile as you empty your head of any thoughts. Simon doesn’t knock, and he pulls back the shower curtain even though he sees your silhouette. There are no words exchanged as he comes in, getting under the hot water, and there are no words exchanged when he takes off his mask for the very first time, and he hoists you up against the wall and fucks you into it.

You know this, too. Your hands trace his back, and you can feel every scar you know will be there, and you can taste the same things Johnny said you would taste when you lick over his jaw. Tobacco. Citrus. Animal.

It almost feels like cheating, but you’re too empty inside to be sad about it. It really feels like lying, even though Johnny’s too gone to hear your excuses. At the same time, it feels like getting something back. Not in its entirety, but something close, something that doesn’t feel the same, but feels so good anyways.

You cry again when you realize you like it better. You cry more when you realize that you’re starting to lose your dreams of Johnny in favor of Simon. You see in the dark instead of in blue. At first, you used to mumble Johnny’s name into the pillow. You used to bury your face into it, muffle the sounds as Simon fucked you from behind, two big hands pushing your ass apart as he pulled you back over and over onto his cock. Now your head is turned to the side, and you’re crying Simon’s name, and he’s fucking you harder, getting down onto his elbows, pressing you into the mattress and using your throat as leverage so he can arch your back and get your ass shaking with how firm he pushes his hips against you.

You’re so delicate, but he can’t be nice. He can’t be gentle. He needs to see teeth marks on your thighs and on your back. He needs to taste your blood and your cum and your spit. At first, he thinks he was doing it because he was lonely, too, but now he just wants to eat and eat and eat.

Eat Johnny’s pretty girl. Fuck Johnny’s pretty girl. Keep Johnny’s pretty girl, because how dare he keep this one a secret, and how dare he try and hide her from him? Johnny wrote a lot of things in that journal, but he didn’t talk about Simon’s insatiable appetite, and he didn’t talk about Simon’s rules. He blamed the entire world for his seemingly unrequited love, but the reality was that Johnny was selfish.

Johnny didn’t want to share. He wanted it all for himself, so it’s no wonder he died for it. When your world isn’t in balance, it compensates. Johnny ended up on the wrong side of the scale.

That’s the fucking truth.

Simon’s got you on your knees again. He likes you this way, ass up, face down, on display. On your back, he stacks enough under your back that you’re nearly upside down, pussy in his mouth as he bends you in half and eats it like that. Now, he’s squeezing your hips, pressing down between your shoulder blades, thick tongue inside of you as he teases your ass with his thumb. Johnny used to love that, but you’re such a jumpy girl.

He’s going to fix that.

Johnny is so predictable. Letting you run around, spoiled, never telling you the way it should be. Johnny made you think you were a pretty princess. He probably intertwined your fingers and fucked you in missionary like a good Catholic boy, but soft, delicate things like you don’t need to be reminded of what they are. They need to be so cockdrunk and dizzy that they don’t know anything else but this place right here, in his bed. Simon knows that’s what you really need—to not know the world outside of this bedroom.

Love is useless. Love can be lost. Love comes and goes, it’s subject to change. Time bends it, rusts it like iron, and Simon doesn’t need something else that will slip through his fingers, no. He needs something that is latched onto him forever. He needs to take one of your ribs and absorb it. He needs to taste you on his tongue and between his teeth always. He needs your blood to be his blood, and he needs your eyes to be his eyes.

Marriage is not finality. Love is not permanent. No—it isn’t enough. He couldn’t keep Johnny, and maybe he can’t keep you, but there is something he can give you that will keep you with him. Even if you left, you would stay somehow, some part of you, and he can see it in some distant place.

Once Simon sees something, it’s as good as true. It might as well be real. Simon is something himself of a manifestation, and he realizes now that maybe he never really saw Johnny because it was you hiding in what he couldn’t see.

Everything is in focus now. He knows what he has to do. Johnny was too stupid to see it—to preoccupied with how beautiful you are between the legs, too mindless when he was cock-deep inside of you to understand what he had in his hands. They don’t make things like you. One of a kind. Once in a lifetime. Something that will never be again if you let go, if you look away.

Simon knows all too much about what it means to leave a scar. He understands permanence. It’s why he’s still alive. It’s why he’s got you here, right here, underneath him, wet-faced and sobbing and clenching so tight around him. Your nails are fixtures in his back, holding him here, and he knows that you understand, too. If he asked you, you would think about the answer, but your body knows. It knows who Simon is and what he wants. He’s certain it does because even if he wanted to, your cunt has him tight, barely enough give for him to pull out and push right back in. It doesn’t want him to leave, and he’s glad for it.

You cry so sweet. Blubbers and gentle tears. You want this; it’s evident in the way you claw at him and pull him back in every time he pulls out just enough. When you pull just that hard, he drops onto his elbows, caging you in, and you sob into his mouth as he grinds his pelvis into yours. The wet smack of his thighs has stopped, but the pressure against your clit has you whining so nice. Fuck, you are beautiful, and you look so sad. From the first moment you showed up at his door, you were all big eyes and sadness. You drag around an air of heaviness that hasn’t left, and Simon is so sick of it—Johnny wasn’t man enough to eat you whole, won’t you just fucking let it go?

Maybe Simon did love him, too. Maybe he did love him back. No, he must’ve—that feeling in his chest still hasn’t left. Simon made a thousand excuses. A man like him, simply unloveable. A soldier like him, just too busy and too dedicated to have anything for himself outside of duty. A victim, what a rotten word, but that is what he is; no one can want him, not really. He saw it, in the back of his mind, peeling back layers of himself just for someone to make a face. After everything, after breaking his nails crawling out of an early grave, rejection just might be the thing that finally killed him. Not a bullet, but the sheer pain from the cut of giving a nasty piece of himself over and not even getting everything back.

Johnny was careless. Loving two things at once, pulled in opposite directions. Too distracted by what he couldn’t have that he forgot about how good he really had it—what a fucking dog. Greedy. Naïve. Fucking delusional. Johnny gave up this to chase something that could never be real. It was pathetic. It was stupid.

It was mine.

“Look at me.”

You do. Your eyes, hazy and wet, meet his, and your hands are shaking as you cup his face and sob because yes, yes, yes, please—I need it, it hurts s-so good.

It does hurt. It burns. It steals. It takes. It swallows, like a brush fire against dry land, licking and eating and tearing apart whatever it can reach. Your moans enrage it, and your cunt feeds it, whatever the thing is inside of his chest that is begging to come out.

This isn’t love. This isn’t romance. This is necessity—survival. Without him, you will come apart, and without you, Simon will starve. He used to take bites out of Johnny. Just enough to make the screaming inside of him quiet a little, just enough to be distracted; but he hasn’t eaten in months, and whatever you’re made of is too good to let go of.

This time, he’ll make it permanent. He’ll make it forever. Where you end, where he begins, where his hands have sunk into you, where his teeth are stuck; he’s going to fix himself to this place, and then he’s going to make himself forget how to leave.

You’re buzzing. You’re somewhere else. You feel like you’re floating above yourself, but at the same time, you’re right here. Simon’s so big; he told you he would be, but it’s another thing entirely to have this man inside of you and hitting your squishy cervix. He’s nasty about it, too—he likes putting a big hand on your stomach and pressing; he likes to feel himself inside of you and laugh at how you cry, and he likes the sound it makes when you’ve come, and your thighs are wet, and his skin smacks against yours with a toe-curling squelch.

“‘s mine,” he says, and you whine, and you nod. You don’t know if he’s asking you a question, but you figure he isn’t. Simon isn’t the kind to ask. He just takes what he wants. He always has. When you come back from the dead, consequences don’t apply to you any longer. You’ve cheated reality, and now you get to reap your rewards.

“Yeah.”

Yeah. Yes. Of course. Yes. Yes, Simon, whatever you want, Simon, anything for you, Simon, yes, yes, yes, yes—!

It will take time. As Simon puts his thumb to your clit to hear you sing, he thinks about how it won’t take much of it. You’re already so docile. You’re already in his bed, eating his food, crying with his cock inside of you and your thoughts filled with nothing but white noise and his name.

Simon won’t be like the man before him. Johnny drew you as a butterfly—something in need, but something that would eventually fly away. Fuck that. If there is a light in you, Simon will snuff it out. If he has to keep you from discovering your wings, he will just cut them off. If it’s the blood inside of you that keeps you warm, he will let it drain from the wounds left behind by his teeth because I will keep you warm, I will make it better, no one else, just me—

His index and middle finger in your mouth silence you. You choke on whatever you are saying in favor of sucking on his wet fingers, your eyes crossing a little as he bites down on your ear and pants there. It’s rare to hear him; Simon tends to swallow any noises he makes in favor of concentrating on hitting that same spot inside of you, but you can hear him now. It’s low and rumbly, so much so that you can feel his chest vibrating against yours. A groan—fuck, he sounds so good. To know your pussy feels so good, it’s making him falter is enough to have you just at the cusp of something white-hot and blinding.

You come when he comes. Simon’s other hand has an iron-grip on the side of your thigh, hiking it up around his hips as he comes hot and heavy inside of you. You shake underneath him, sucking hard on his fingers as he presses his pelvis to yours. You can feel it dripping between your thighs, and the heat of it makes you come, too, a sob coming out of you as you spit his fingers out in favor of closing your mouth over his.

He tastes like you. You suck on his tongue softly, lapping it up, and he uses his wet hand to hold your jaw at an angle so he can spit into your mouth and kiss you again. You grip his dog tags hard, tugging him back to you when he tries to look down at where he’s inside of you. He suffocates you when he lays over you, but you don’t care. You need him skin-to-skin. You need his mouth on yours, his cock still this deep, sharing breath and spit and heat. If you lose it, you’ll lose something else, something more, and you can’t lose it again.

His weight crushes you, and you don’t register the significance of one of his hands underneath you and between your shoulder blades. He feels for something that you can’t see, and he kisses you again when he’s satisfied with what he finds. The lack of something. The killing of it. The knowing that you’ve gotten what it is you’ve been searching for all this time.

He holds you like that always. He keeps your eyes on his when he comes inside of you—always wants to look at you when that first spurt of cum fills you entirely. He likes the way your lashes flutter when he brands you. He likes the way you lose the ability to speak. He likes the way your entire body goes rigid and pliant all at once, seizing up and then melting underneath him until it takes no effort to turn you over onto your stomach and do it all over again.

He notices the change before you do. The tender breasts, the warmth of your lower belly. You are wet always now, eager to be bent over wherever you are because the ache between your thighs is tenfold now.

You’re smiling. You haven’t smiled in a long while, and you’re smiling, hips hiked up on the couch, your dress crumpled around your middle as his cum drips down the back of your thighs. Simon licks his lips as he sits back on his heels, thumbing over your puckering hole.

You lay underneath him in your cocoon. Death at your doorstep, and you let him right in. You draw it around you tight, tucked into this blanket of security and warmth and factitious love that you think will hold this time. Simon’s hand draws around your throat, but you easily fall into him. When he squeezes, crushing what you’ve built back up, you sigh with relief, letting yourself fall into his chest and stay there.

When you close your eyes, it feels like something familiar. Like a place you’ve been before. When you open them, it’s gone. Simon is there, staring at your curiously. Your shadow that never leaves. The thing that remains. Time passes, but you know this will stay, you know it won’t go away. When he bends you over again, his hand slides low, cupping your belly, and your mouth twitches—the ghost of another smile. You put your hand over his there and press, feeling the scars you know by memory alone.

You will give him new scars; and these ones will be only for you.

Fierce wars and faithful loves

It isn't easy being a woman, especially an omega, in the military. Both your primary and secondary genders marking you as inferior in others' eyes. But not every man, and not every alpha, thinks that way. Captain John Price, an alpha if there ever was one, knows something special when he sees it, and the new omega on base may be just what his pack needs.

poly!141 x fem!reader, omegaverse

1: first sight 2: the offer 3: transfer paper 4: family talk 5: introductions 6: decision time 7: joining the 141 8: making it official 9: meet Ren 10: what glass ceiling? 11: settling in 12: asset retrieval 13: nesting? 14: undercover work 15: preparations 16: small comforts 17: new beginnings 18: homecoming 19: a change in the air 20: wine and dine 21:

main masterlist

peristalsis - v

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to "lovers." shower sex. cunnilingus. smut. manipulative soap. oysters as an aphrodisiac. unstable narrator. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

previous

You watch him over an open book.

It’s an old romance, something from the eighties. Classic bodice ripper, billowing sleeves, tight corsets, mullets and heaving bosoms and all. Naturally, it’s set on a pirate ship, the heroine as the unlucky spoils of a merchant ship raid and the hero a lusty captain able to pierce her virgin’s desire for sexual depravity.

It could only have been more pointed at you if it had been set in the North Atlantic—it isn’t—but you glare at Soap’s back anyway.

He must be able to feel it, because he stands straight at the wheel, shoulders thrown back, occasionally flexing.

The freak.

You’d realized the joke he’d been making, once your heartbeat had slowed. Hiding the pelt somewhere obvious enough for you to see it. You live in the age of the internet—you know what it’s supposed to mean.

And you kind of hate him for it. Now, post-coitus, you can’t shove it away into a box—he is the most attractive man you’ve ever encountered. Rugged and handsome, competent at everything you’ve seen him do, seemingly at home wherever he finds himself. Everything makes him smile. Nothing seems to disconcert him.

And a nice big cock he actually knows how to use. Certainly the best lay you’ve ever had.

What every woman traveling solo, you think, longs to encounter on a solo trip across the world, but will never acknowledge looking for. An answer to an unaddressed desire; proof that satisfaction is out there to find, if it’s searched for.

A lover with no conditions. Someone willing to strip your inhibitions away, knowing your protests are only token.

You had not been searching. You’d given up searching.

And now he mocks you—with every satisfied glance he throws over his shoulder.

“Good book?” he asks, all casual and pleased. “S’ one a’my favorites. Tell me when you get to the naval battle.”

You frown. “You haven’t read this.”

He gives a little huff of amusement. “Read all of ‘em, bonnie.”

No, this is where you draw the line. A good cook, a good fuck, and a romance reader? No. No, you absolutely will not take this.

“Sure you have, Johnny,” you grouse, “you read every single stupid book on that shelf. Sure. Hell, you’ve read books that aren’t on that shelf. You’ve read every new release from the last six months, even. Why not.”

He looks at you again over his shoulder, mouth curled. “Aye. Needed ideas, once a’knew you were comin.’”

He says it matter-of-factly, with only a little bit of pride. As if it was a natural step in the process of getting ready for your arrival—renovate the croft. Stock the fridge and pantry. Plan some island excursions.

Study the erotic mind of the average woman to divine how best to seduce her.

Your frown deepens, and you lift the book higher, making it a barrier between you and him. Loser. Couldn’t he just go to the mainland for a few days if he wanted pussy? Not like it would be hard to find, for him.

You resolve to ignore him for the rest of the trip. A petty endeavor, maybe, but it’s the only one you can make.

But six hours is six hours, and you can’t read the whole time. Periodically you have to get up to stretch your legs, and the windows wrapping around the bridge draw your attention to the sea outside.

Johnny drives the trawler at a remove along the coastline, keeping close enough to the islands for easy viewing. The denizens of the Hebrides are out en masse, enjoying the clear weather, joyfully populating the land- and seascape in the absence of human interlopers.

Porpoises, so much smaller than you might have expected, periodically catch the wake of the boat, swimming alongside, playful and curious. Gulls loop in the air above the dunes, fronds of grass fluttering in the breeze. Gannets, stark white, arrow down into the waves, wings folded back pin-straight as they spear their quarry—silvery fish that boil the surface of the water in their frenzy.

Some removed part of you enjoys their pleasure secondhand. The normally-grey ocean is vibrant in the sunlight, crystalline and sparkling and as blue as Johnny’s eyes.

He seems to be in a good mood, too, although that could just be because you let him fuck you. You feel his eyes on you even as you refuse to look at him, dancing along the curves of your body the same way his fingertips might.

At one point—“Bonnie, I know you’re sulking an’ all, but c’mere.”

He gestures you over to the cockpit, and—embarrassed at being called out—you join him. He brings a hand to the small of your back, stepping behind you and pointing over your shoulder.

A gray wall of passing cliffs, and crags of rock jutting up from the churn at their base. You see ten or twelve grey-and-white seals lounging across every available flat surface, some cuddled in groups of three or four, apparently unbothered by the periodic spray of breaking waves.

“No’ where I’d choose to have a kip, personally,” Johnny says, sounding amused.

You turn your head to look at him, hard. His eyes soften when they meet yours, and he tilts his head to kiss you, undeterred even when you flinch away from it.

His hand tightens across your back, fingers digging in. He sucks your bottom lip between his and caresses it with his tongue, as he edges beneath the hem of your shirt to spread his hand across the warming skin of your back.

“I’m mad for ya,” he murmurs when he pulls away, blush high on his cheeks.

“It’s been two days,” you deadpan.

He presses up behind you, open hand sliding around to press into the low part of your belly, right at the sensitive crest of your mons; you can’t help your gasp when, at the same time, his erection nestles into the cleft of your ass.

“No’ to this,” he purrs in your ear. “Feels like it’s been forever, for this.”

When his fingers start making their way beneath the waistband of your pants, you grab his hand and wrench it away, scoffing.

“You’re just a fucking horndog,” you sneer, betrayed by the heat spilling through your core.

“Aw, you break my heart, bonnie,” Johnny simpers, but there’s a mocking edge to it. As if he knows exactly what you’re hiding.

You step away from him, folding your arms across your chest and staring out at the basking seals instead. Then—

“There’s one in the water,” you say.

A few meters away from the rocks, a round head pokes up from the surface, bobbing with the rise and fall of the waves. Its eyes are slitted closed, nostrils dilating.

“Aw, he’s bottling,” Johnny says affectionately, when he comes over to look. “Look at his wee face.”

You remember suddenly your encounter of the previous day—another lone seal, resting apart from its fellows.

“I saw one on the beach,” you say, “yesterday, after you dropped me off. A big one. You didn’t say they might show up.”

“Male?” he asks, and you nod. “Peripheral male, then. I’m no’ surprised.”

You sigh. “And that is…”

As if magnetized, his hands find you again, this time settling on your waist. It seems that Johnny’s touch is something impossible to escape, in his vicinity. He drags them down over your hips and back up almost idly, as if he’s not even thinking about doing it.

“There’s dominant males, and then there’s the rest of ‘em. Only the dominant ones get to breed at the rookeries, see? And the rest of ‘em have to wait around for the females to leave to have their chance.”

He leans into you from behind, nose in your hair, and you hear him inhale as his hands tighten.

“Once a peripheral male finds a female alone, separated from the colony, ready to go back out to sea—well, that’s his chance to pounce.”

You frown, mostly to yourself. “No matter how the female feels about it.”

“We’ve been over this,” he chides.

He brings his lips to the curve of one ear, then the soft spot behind it. His nose finds the juncture of your neck and shoulder, where the capillaries that he broke with his teeth still throb whenever you press your fingers to them. He inhales again, deeply.

“Why do you do that?” you grouse, unwilling to give him the win.

“Like how you smell,” he says, doing it again.

His tongue caresses the bruise before he closes his mouth over it—but he goes no further than to kiss your neck twice more before returning to the wheel. It leaves you reeling, half-dizzy with arousal, and when you stomp back to your seat with a frustrated growl, he only glances over at you, smirking, and laughs.

He finds a berth in the early evening to park the trawler, and at that point you’re thankful for any kind of solid ground to set your feet on, as well as enough open air to disperse whatever pheromones have saturated the enclosed space of the bridge.

You’ve been half-tempted the whole time to make him drop anchor and drag him belowdeck toward the nearest flat surface big enough for the two of you to share; as it is, you’ve simply stewed in your own juices instead, hot with angry arousal and ignoring the slick pooling in the gusset of your underwear.

Johnny steps out into the cooling air in his usual kilt and sweater, and you once again huddle in his jacket, aromatic with his musk, as he leads you onward. This time, unlike the last excursion, he insists upon holding your hand the whole way, callused fingers worming their way between yours, the captured air hot and humid between your palms.

Callanish turns out to be a henge of standing stones.

Meters-tall megaliths, squarish and narrow like broken teeth, surrounding a burial site and extending in two directions as if lining a road. Inevitably evocative of its cousin Stonehenge, with the notable exception that you are allowed to go up and touch the stones with your bare hands.

“They used ‘em for that TV show,” Johnny informs you as the two of you circuit the main ring. “Well, no’ these, they probably had styrofoam for that, but they got the idea from these.”

You lay your free hand on the nearest stone; it’s cold, and rough to the touch, a day’s worth of sunlight evidently not sufficient to warm it. Tiny spots of moss and lichen cling to the old stone, green and eggshell white.

“Why are we allowed to touch them?” you say. You think of bronze statues, rubbed to a golden gleam by millions of tourist hands.

“That’s Lewisian gneiss, bonnie,” says Johnny, laying his hand, much larger, next to yours. His thumb teases the side of your pinky. “Doubt you could make much of a mark on it. This rock here? Three billion years old.”

You look at him, seeing his profile. The expression on his face is soft—not unlike the way he looked at you earlier, on the way here. He spreads his fingers over the stone, tendons furrowing down the back of his sun-weathered hand.

“No’ just older than us,” he continues. “Older than what we used to be, a’fore we were us. Was there when we first made fire. Was there when we came down th’ trees. Was there all the way back when we left the ocean for the first time—”

He looks at you, then. The setting sun catches in the dips of his irises, setting jewel blue aflame.

“An’ it’ll be there, bonnie, when we go back.”

The wind curls around the stones with the chill of the oncoming night. Even despite the jacket, despite the walk up to the site—you feel it penetrate beneath your skin, deep into your bones.

You choose derision, to reject the shiver.

“And you have this all memorized,” you say.

Johnny doesn’t respond. He continues to stare at you, mouth in a relaxed, but inscrutable line.

You suddenly remember that you do not know this man; though he’s told you enough about himself to fill out his background—you don’t know him. You don’t know how he feels about most things, what’s important to him, why he may find one thing or another meaningful. Not the way you’d have to, in order to understand why the gaze he fixes on you feels so significant.

Whatever you’re supposed to understand in the way he looks at you now, you don’t have the ability to discern. The only thing that occurs to you is that, perhaps, you’ve finally managed to offend him.

It does not satisfy you as much as you might have imagined—

In fact, the thought drops through your belly like a rock.

Again. You did it again.

In the one place you thought you’d never have to face this—you did it again. Here is someone who seems to like even the worst of you, and you somehow found an even uglier side of yourself to show him, a squirming thing that cannot help but sling itself around with no heed for the damage it can cause.

But when you open your mouth to say something reparatory, something that certainly won’t fix what you’ve broken no matter what he might say, his expression softens into something thoughtful.

“Visited when I first came here,” he says. Completely unbothered. “After the discharge an’ all.”

You blink. Sharp heat and the numbness of cold, warring across your face.

“Why?” you ask.

“Dunno.” He shrugs, and lifts his hand from the stone, smiling ruefully. “I was a bastard back then. Didnae wan’ anything’ to do with anyone anymore. Mad at the world, a’was.”

Shucked like an oyster; scaled like a fish. Heat wins out, even in the growing chill. Tender skin scalding itself.

“And what,” you say, reflexively nasty, panic whirring up behind your breastbone, “you thought—you’d get some sort of, magical insight here?”

Johnny laughs. “Naw, a’was just pissing my money away, bonnie. Thought I’d come up here an’ try t’ knock one over.”

Tight chest. Can’t breathe. You step away from him, far away, hide it like you’re looking at another of the standing stones, but a stabbing pain spears upward through your diaphragm.

In—count—hold—out—

“Could you?” you ask, wringing something like a normal tone out of your voice.

“Nope. Paid for it later, though.”

He says it casually. He hasn’t noticed. You reach out to the new stone, drag your fingers overtop of the rough surface, imagine every little bump flipping the friction ridges of each print like pages of a book. Cold—the rock is cold. The wind is cold, and sharp with the smell of rain. The jacket is heavy on your shoulders.

The jacket smells like Johnny.

“I’m sure the park wardens weren’t happy,” you say, feeling your heart slow in your chest.

“No,” he says, and—with the silence of a lightning strike—“I drowned, afterwords, first time I went to sea.”

You look back at him. The wind picks up, ruffling the ends of his mohawk; on the horizon, a rind of darkness splits the clouds from the earth.

“You drowned?” you repeat.

The hem of his kilt flutters and dances. His gaze is intense—the angle of his brow unreadable.

“Aye, bonnie. I did.”

Your ears begin ringing—as you stare at him, you get the sense of dreaming. There’s a distinction to Johnny that contrasts the landscape framing him, a sharpness so focused that everything else lenses around him.

“Why—why are you here?” you find yourself asking, though you’re not entirely sure why. The question leaves you as if surfacing on its own power.

The corners of his mouth quirk—although for once, he doesn’t smirk at you, the way he always does.

“You tell me,” he murmurs.

He holds you in the tilt of his head; in the depths of his eyes, currents pulling you downward. You inhale, and expect, for some reason, water to pour into your lungs.

Then a gust of wind buffets the two of you. Johnny turns, surveying the sky. Breaking the spell, he says, “Come on, let’s get back. I don’ like the look a’that storm.”

Halfway back down the path, the front overtakes you; rain begins sheeting down, ice cold, needle-precise into your hair and down your collar. Johnny grabs your hand again even as you start worrying about slipping, and though the torrent veils the way, the both of you make it back to the trawler in one piece.

Back on the bridge, a red light blinks on the panel by the wheel. While Johnny attends to it, flipping a switch and bringing a microphone on a curly wire to his mouth, you squeeze your hair out over the sink nearby.

“This is Soap on the vessel Sea Ghost,” he says, and waits for a response.

“Soap. Drop anchor somewhere. Looks like a storm’s coming in,” a gruff voice comes in.

“Yeah, Cap, we noticed,” Johnny says with a laugh, turning and smiling at you. “We’re moored, dinna fash.”

“Good. Looks like it’s just for the night. Clear enough in the morning.”

“Barry. You got everything? Shops’ closed tomorrow.”

“Never will understand why. But yes.”

“It’s a holy day, Captain,” Johnny says pleasantly.

Price grumbles something about damn Catholics and their damn rules, which just makes Johnny laugh.

Then, “Gaz is here. Made it in after you left.”

Johnny’s posture shifts. Similar to a dog hearing the turning of a doorknob; amorphous attention coalescing, finding a target to point at. Anticipatory. Tail twitching, winding up to wag.

It’s a new reaction, to you—you’ve never seen it before.

Johnny lifts the transmitter to his mouth. He holds it there for a silent moment, before saying, “And Simon?”

No response from the other end of the line, pulled taut, as if snagged. Then Price responds “Haven’t heard yet.”

Something passes over Johnny’s face. Some flex of the muscle in his jaw. An expression held in check.

That’s—

That’s familiar.

“Alright. Back tomorrow then.”

“See you.”

He replaces the mic on its hook.

Thunder claps somewhere over the distant, open ocean. The trawler creaks and groans as the wind swirls around it. Yellow lamps illuminate the warm, wooden space, but are unable to penetrate the lowering blackness outside.

Tension—you can feel it drawing tight, see his shoulder blades shifting closer together. It aches in the muscles of your own back. He faces away from you, like you’re not there—

He turns to look at you. He’s smiling, but it doesn’t look quite real. As if he’s forcing the expression on his face.

“Poor bonnie,” he croons, looking you up and down. The tenor of his voice is saccharin-sweet and thick. “How’s a hot shower sound to warm up, hmm?”

Your belly pinches. “Sure.”

He leads you down a steep flight of stairs into the stomach of the boat, showing you into a single bedroom. The space is cramped, wedge-shaped—barely enough room for the double bed shoved into the middle of it, sheets and blankets gathered in rumples across the top. The unique musk of its occupant wars with the smell of lacquer; the walls are lined with orangey planks, evoking the sailing ships of old.

Directly to the left of the entrance, an open door leads into a small bathroom, into which Johnny guides you, hands on your hips.

“Go’ plenty a’ drinking water stored upstairs so take all the time you like,” he says. “Here, lemme show you how the taps work.”

You half-expect him, after the instruction, to stand there and watch, waiting until you undress. And he does hesitate for a moment, hovering in the threshold, before giving you a practiced grin, telling you to enjoy yourself, a closing the door behind him.

You stand in the middle of the tiny room for an uncertain heartbeat. Assumptions lurching. Almost—hoping.

His heavy footsteps climb back up the stairs.

So, you peel off your damp clothes and drop them into a pile on the floor, stepping naked into the shower. It’s far less mildewed than you might have worried of a single man living alone. Hot water chases cold out of your hair, streaming with pressure far superior to the cottage’s installment.

You realize your toiletries are still above deck, in your bag, beneath the two paperbacks Johnny packed that you haven’t gotten to just yet. You could step out after him—

You don’t do that anymore. You promised yourself.

The floor sways as the shifting sea rocks the trawler in its berth. You reach for the bar on the wall to steady yourself.

One version of yourself is sometimes able to fool the other. The truth is, you could have told him to stop at any time. Put your foot down, hard. Just because he owns the house you’re staying in doesn’t mean he gets to decide what your entire vacation is going to look like.

You scoff at yourself, without any humor. Vacation. Like you’d ever believed this was anything more than self-imposed exile.

The truth is, water takes the shape of the container it fills.

There’s a chill still present in your hair follicles. Impossible for you to identify until now; live with an ache long enough and it stops registering, until it’s balmed with a moment of relief. This is where the addicts begin; experiencing, for the first time, a complete absence of pain, as if it had never been there in the first place, and, once that pain is restored, the ruthless pursuit of its elimination.

Cold rain outside, warm rain within. You stand in the flow, listless. Steam rapidly clouds the empty spaces around you, gathering in droplets on the wall, drizzling down again.

That’s where the mistake is. Pain is never defeated—only deferred. Its panacea provides only diminishing returns, until it’s useless. Until you might as well be swallowing sugar pills or drinking seawater to assuage your thirst.

But you keep doing it. You remember too well how it felt. You chase it down because now you know how it feels.

At some point you have to understand that it always ends poorly.

The bathroom door opens again, and then the shower door, spilling yellow light into the shadowed recess—

Johnny.

The expression on his face is inscrutable; mysterious, as his gaze moves down your body, following the streaming water. Your arms curl around your chest in a perfunctory attempt to conceal yourself, even despite the futility of the effort.

He’s naked, and half-hard, a refrain on the previous night. One hand holds the travel-size soaps and gels that he must have dug out from your bag. He steps in behind you—enclosing the two of you in together.

“Sorry, bonnie,” he murmurs soothingly in your ear. “Had t’make sure we were tied up for the storm.”

The space is not even suggestive of being big enough for two people. You hear the squeak of the shower wall against his shifting back, hot skin slipping against yours as his hands draw you back against him by the hips.

“Dinnae want you t’slip an’ hit your head,” he murmurs, massaging the fat of your pelvis, as if there’s any reason to make excuses for what he’s doing.

Half-raised hackles petted down too easily. You relax into his touch, even as you disdain it. Your heart tremors in your chest.

“What’s going on tomorrow?” you finally ask. “Who’s Simon?”

Pathetic. A jealous lover, after less than forty-eight hours.

“Old task force,” he answers, kissing the back of your head. “Little reunion, food an’ beer, mostly.”

You half-expect him to go immediately for your breasts, or maybe your pussy. His cock is stiffening against the small of your back. But instead, he opens one of your bottles, squirts some pearly body wash into the palm of his hand. Rubbing a little to lather it, he puts his hands back on your hips, and begins massaging it into your skin.

Inward, up your stomach. Pressing into the soft parts of it, with the water slicking his way. His mouth touches the back of your neck—softly. Tenderly. With all of the languor you rejected the previous night, and not enough space for you to slap it away again.

His lips press inward, looking for the bite he left, which he lays his tongue on as if in contrition, licking it like a dog with a wound. The comfortable warmth of the shower swelters with his added body heat; the steam pulses in time with the heavy beats of your heart.

One hand slides up your body, fording your thoracic arch, the wedge of his hand ascending the length of your breastbone. He cups your jaw, bubbles between his fingers, one of your breasts nestling between his bicep and forearm.

He tilts your head to the side as he cranes his head further into your neck, lipping at the space behind your ear, kissing delicate, sensitive skin, as his other hand drags soap around your ribs, beneath and over both breasts, up into your pits and back down again.

A doll in his hands, bent along the shape of his will. He shifts his hips, frotting his erection against you.

“Johnny,” you breathe. “Johnny, this isn’t anything. This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Aye, bonnie,” he hums. “Whatever you say.”

He licks a hollow in your throat.

His other hand dips lower, sweeping down into the crease of one thigh to round the lower swell of your hip; then back up again, fingers spreading.

The stall compresses your arms close against you; the only space you have available to lay your useless hands is on his arms. The dark hair you find with your fingertips is coarse, wiry, plastered to hot skin with water. The spray seeps between the both of you, streams in the runnels of flesh pressed together.

Between your legs, your clitoris heats, awakening even though untouched. You give a small whine, and Johnny huffs a little chuckle in your ear, suckling your neck as his fingers make the descent back, rinsed in the falling water, teasing your pubic hair before nudging your folds apart.

He finds you slick and aching. He only dips lower briefly to wet his fingers, and then, as he settles a light touch over where you’re most desperate for it, relief razes through your nerves in a sudden wash.

You search for the back of his head, slotting your fingers into the ends of his mohawk at the nape of his neck. He hums against you, hand dropping down from your jaw to cup one breast in his palm, weighing it, thumb flicking around the pert nipple in the same tight circle he draws around your clitoris.

Orgasm, usually so obvious on approach, sneaks up on you, quick and quiet, but when it takes you it floods you, rather than knocking you down. You tremble all over, the follicles on your scalp standing on end, the nerves down your back and sides bending like dune grass to a wind.

Your long, breathy cry reverberates against the shower walls, and you lean heavily back against Johnny’s body, grip tightening where you have your hands on him.

He twitches against your back, but he makes no move to chase his own climax. He only turns you carefully, when you recover, and lays his hot, open mouth on yours, tugging your hips close enough to trap his cock against your belly. This time, the wall is cool at your back, the crown of your head moving against it as Johnny angles himself deeper, sliding his tongue between your lips.

“C’mon,” he says, when he finally pulls away. His pupils are huge, black dilation swallowing the blue. The spray fills the empty spaces between the strands of his mohawk, fluffing the hair a little as it courses down the shaved sides of his scalp. “Need to get my mouth on you again, bonnie.”

This time, when he eats you out, he does it at his leisure. Licking honey off a spoon. So lightly that you whine at him, find the energy to bitch at him to do it like he means it, but tonight he does not indulge you.

No—he mouths at you, eyes closed, curly lashes against his cheek as you lay belly-up on the rumpled sheets of his bed. The heat of his tongue in your cleft is the only source of warmth you have as the rain lashes at the outside of the trawler, but the hot shower still lingers in your skin—

Humid. Sticky. Sweat gathering beneath Johnny’s palms where he holds your thighs to his ears, as if mimicking the way your sex will clutch around him when he enters you. Slick and tight and viscous.

When he crawls up your body—nosing at your belly, your breasts, inhaling as if your musk is something he’s trying to get drunk on—he fucks you slow and deep. You stop being able to tell if it’s the storm rocking the boat, or the weight of his hips rolling against yours, one of his hands on the headboard for leverage and the other on your mons, pressing down with the heel of his hand to feel the head of his cock moving in you.

Tacky skin catching on the grind; heart speeding up as he grins at you from above, thumb tapping your clitoris. Enough to wind you up. You reach for his hips with your clawed hands, digging your nails into the meat of his ass—firm, muscle tensed, twitching every time he bottoms out.

“Johnny,” you finally beg, on the edge of a sob, “please, Johnny, please—”

Breath leaves him like a steam valve turned, pressure carrying an uninhibited moan. He ignores your plea, hips rolling slow, forcing you to feel every inch of him in and out of you, every ridge—every vein pulsing on the surface of his cock.

His eyes are closed still; when the widest part of him catches the rim of you around him again, his mouth drops open, lips pink and bitten.

Lost—he’s lost in pleasure, in the feeling of you around him, pulling him in. You watch his chest as it heaves, the flex of his stomach as it tightens—the twitch in the muscles of his arms as the impact of each thrust ripples up his body.

Look at me, you want to say. Look at me. I’m right here. Look at me.

“Again,” he groans, choked, restrained, hands gripping your hips. “Say it again, bonnie—”

“Please—” you whine, on the edge of a sob, “please, please, please—”

Thumb metronoming at a quick tempo where you need it—you seize, back arching, tightening around him so narrowly you could force him out—

He snarls, sharp and hard, thrusting into the resistance, hands falling to fist in the mattress. Breath coming rough and fast, sweat dripping from his forehead into the cups of your collarbones and down between your breasts. Hard and fast now, pushing in as far as your body will let him, and a final, long moan tears from his parted lips, liquid heat flooding you as Johnny goes rigid with a climax following only moments after your own.

Pelvis flush with your thighs. He doesn’t let a drop escape, pushing against you, lifting your hips from the bed.

“Tha’s right,” he slurs, eyes hazy when they open. “Tha’s right, that’s where it belongs.”

He collapses on top of you, almost crushing you with his weight, as he seeks your mouth out with his. He moves his hips against yours with shallow thrusts, whining in his throat.

“Didn’t you—” you pull your lips away, too hot, too cold, buzzing and exhausted, “didn’t you just finish?”

He tongues at your cheek instead, and then down your neck. “Doesnae matter, is no’ enough. C’mon, bonnie, wrap your legs aroun’ me, please…”

After he is finally spent—long after you’ve had enough energy to do more than lay beneath him and let him use you as he pleases—Johnny diverts briefly to the galley, bringing back with him a plate of oysters and a pry knife. It’s his bed, so you don’t complain about shell fragments, but you resolve to make him change the sheets anyway, shifting uncomfortably to find a spot that isn’t soaked.

“Was on this boat,” Johnny says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation only recently dropped. He picks up one of the oysters and shucks it open. “When I drowned.”

The way he says it, you’d think it was a casual thing, something he barely thought about anymore, but the line of his brow is low and serious.

He hands you one half; you bring the shell to your lips and tip it upward. Brine slides across your tongue, flesh smooth and buttery. Johnny watches you with soft eyes before having his own.

“Price was with me. I told him to fuck off, but he said he wasnae gonna let me take it out alone the first time ever. I was a bastard back then, I told ya. We went out in a storm, like this one, even though any eedjit could take a look outside and know it’d kill him.”

You flick at the edge of the shell with your fingernail, looking down at your hands. “Why’d you do it?”

“Dunno. Had somethin’ to prove, I guess.”

“That you could still do stuff like that?”

He doesn’t respond, so you look back up at him. He angles his gaze toward the mess of your hair—the new hickies he’s left on your neck—the bead of your nipples in the cold. The hard angles of his face soften.

“All my life,” he says, measuredly, “all I wanted to be was a soldier. An’ I couldnae anymore. Even though I was better. Hell, I was better than better. But I couldnae go back. That was it. It all wen’ on withou’ me.”

He breaks open more oysters as he talks, hands steady and deft around shells and knife. When he finishes, he slides the plate into your lap, and reclines to face you on his side, propping his head up with his hand.

“We wen’ out when the waves were as tall as a man, an’ us hangin’ onto the railing for dear fuckin’ life,” he continues. There’s a faraway quality to the tone of his voice. “Only life wasnae so fuckin’ dear, was it? I could’ve held on tighter, I think. I fell off.”

“And Price pulled you out?”

That feeling again, meeting his gaze; caught in the arms of a whirlpool, being dragged down. A vial in a centrifuge, constituent parts separating.

“No,” he says, “he didnae.”

“Then…”

“Eat, bonnie.”

There’s a stillness to him that feels unnatural. Johnny is a man who should be constantly in motion, gesturing with his hands, bouncing on the balls of his feet, tapping any available surface with rolling fingertips. Instead, here in front of you, he’s still as a statue. Chest softly rising and falling, but otherwise completely placid.

He gazes steadily at you, down at the plate, and then back up. You sigh, and pick up another shell.

“I don’t remember exactly what happened. I remember getting pushed down deep, real deep, then getting forced up again, on a current or something. Not far enough to get any air, mind. I thought, I’m gonna die out here, an’ I didnae want to.”

He shifts then, a little forward toward you.

“That seemed important, you know? I didnae want to die. Dinna think the sea would’ve given me up f’ I did. It knows. Sometimes it doesnae care. But I guess that time, it did, ‘cause after I blacked out, next thing I know I’m wakin’ up on the shore.”

Something hard shifts in your belly.

“Cap found me a bit later, bringin’ the boat in. Gave him a real scare. Think it turned some of his hair gray overnight. After that…a’was no’ the same. How could y’be, after that?”

You—you don’t want to know any of this. You don’t care. You didn’t ask. His story drops expectation on your shoulders, heavy, custom-tailored, laden with understanding that sands your abraded nerves.

All of this is too much. The damp sheets beneath you, the food, the sex. The fact that you picked the last place in the world thought you could ever meet anyone, let alone someone who—

“And now you have a seal fetish,” you sneer.

Who understands.

Indulgent. This is indulgent, reckless, idiotic in the extreme.

Soap reaches out, and wraps a large, sun-brown hand around your wrist, the one still holding the oyster. Pulling it towards him, he opens his mouth and then tips the flesh from the shell. He slurps it down, noisily, mimicking the sound of his mouth and tongue on your pussy.

“Something like that,” he says, with a sharp, cocky grin.

He changes the sheets. Dims the lights. Plasters himself around you as the storm blows itself out, arm heavy over your waist, thigh and knee nested inside yours.

He’s warm at your back, musky with the mingling aroma of dried sex and sweat.

Sturdy. More real than anything that’s ever put its hands on you.

Johnny, who the sea loved so much it spat him back out. So treasured by the world that a bullet to the brain couldn’t even take him away from it.

Who, by the sound of it, means so much to the people in his life that they would follow him to the middle of nowhere just to keep an eye on him.

Bile churns in your stomach.

next chapter early access

a/n: two chapters left!

do you think Soap constantly thinks about that one phrase "big boy with the skull face" and nearly ahort circuiting because up until that point, whenever he saw Ghost, his brain almost always went "big boy, big boy, big boy—" and his tail wagging like he's being offered a treat (in the form of eye candy).