jasminedragoon - ~Jasmine Dragon~
~Jasmine Dragon~

Isabel: 22: she/they FREE PALESTINE, LGBT RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

452 posts

If Any Of Y'all Bitches Touches This Blog I Swear To God I Will Personally Hunt You Down.

If any of y'all bitches touches this blog I swear to god I will personally hunt you down.

If Any Of Y'all Bitches Touches This Blog I Swear To God I Will Personally Hunt You Down.

I would like to make something very very clear, this is NOT an AI friendly blog.

I do not consent to my fics being fed to AI or used to make AI chat bots. Please don’t do it to me or to other fic writers unless you get their very clear consent to do so.

This includes stealing the premise of a fic written by someone else in order to make a chat bot for the character.

And if I’m made aware that any of my writing has been violated and debased in such a way I will be immediately deleting and wiping all of my work from all platforms and deleting this Tumblr.

Please, have some respect and decency for other people’s hard work. Writing is an intimate thing, and this is a gross violation.

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More Posts from Jasminedragoon

1 year ago

I promise I'm normal I know the lore intensely I swear I like this a normal amount

jasminedragoon - ~Jasmine Dragon~
1 year ago

im in financial trouble again boys. really badly this time

gofundme link

pre-tdlr: my mom no longer has a job and wasn't given paid leave. i don't have a way to make money right now, rent is expensive, and we have a lot of kittens to take care of until they can be given away. we need money very very very bad. we are both physically disabled to a degree (severe chronic pain, hers worse than mine). I'm offering art in exchange for donations. okay now here's a detailed rundown

To give a more in depth recounting of the situation for the uninitiated, for the past year and a half, my mother and I have been virtually homeless. We've been temporarily housed by friends and family a few times, but patience with this sort of thing runs thin, so my grandpa (very generously) bought us an RV to stay in. We have a spot to park it, but rent for a PARKING spot for it is 800 a month--And it's over 1k a month in other places. shits fucked

Now, here's the main problem: My mom lost her job. She wasn't fired, but they moved shop, and despite essentially begging for compensation, they have given her nothing. This is with knowledge of our situation, too.

We do qualify for food stamps (thank god) but we desperately need money to help cover rent and cover some other...troubling problems. The RVs tags are expired, and it takes a crapton of money to get them replaced; If we were to move the RV with expired tags, we would get in legal trouble, so I'd really rather not be dealing with that if we get kicked off the property

On top of everything else, we have several kittens and even more cats; The kittens are still weaning on their mother and can't be given away, but we need money to feed them, too. seeing them go hungry would break my already broken heart into a million more broken little pieces

Most of the money would be going toward rent and bills, laundry (we have to go to the laundromat for washing clothes), gas for the car, new tags for the rv, and fees involved with me getting an ID, alongside whatever else comes up, just to help keep us afloat until my mom can land another job.

I will be offering rough-and-dirty commissions in exchange for donations to the gofundme if that gives you any incentive. Please. Please? Pretty please

If you can't donate, that's fine, but please share & reblog! It would mean the world and I'm just. Trying to keep it together while all this is happening. I'm planning on getting an ID as soon as possible, alongside a bank account, but I don't know when that will be. For now, this is my only option. Thank you so much!!!!!!!

gofundme link

3,285/? [goal subject to change- we are unfortunately living off of donations right now]

EXAMPLES OF WHAT ART TO EXPECT UNDER THE CUT! [theyre all commissions ive done since making this post]

Im willing to draw pretty much anything, including mechs, furries and gore. nothing too NSFW preferably, and not anything hateful. will do suggestive stuff. OCs, fanart, so on so forth. If you do want a comm, just screenshot proof that you donated and shoot me a DM and we can talk about it :3

Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
Im In Financial Trouble Again Boys. Really Badly This Time
1 year ago

I'm so devoted and crying. I just- I need a few days to recover

I'm So Devoted And Crying. I Just- I Need A Few Days To Recover
Honey, Stomach, Mine ; 2. More Intelligent Than A Face

Honey, Stomach, Mine ; 2. More Intelligent Than a Face

Series Masterlist ; Part 1.

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics; Dystopian Society; Outbreak not Cordyceps AU; Angst & Yearning™️; Slow Burn; Sexual Inexperience; Cock Riding; Size Difference; Size Kink; Sex Ed for Omega’s 101; Power Dynamics; Creampie; Discussions of Heats and Knots and Slick, Oh My!; Virginity; Emotional Hurt/Comfort; Young and Needy Omega; Possessive Behavior; Age Gap

A/N: FYI I do mention that she has small breasts in this one only because I usually write big boobs and thought it was time for some itty bitty titty committee representation. 

Word Count: 13.9K

Read on AO3

Tip Jar

2. More Intelligent Than a Face

Existence is a strange thing, a needful thing. Something to be sated, filled, satisfied, this ordeal of being a living, breathing person. And to be an unusual sort of person, someone with needs extra to what the regular sort would require, doubly strange. 

You had always thought, in different ways, that the mating program, although a choice thief, a freedom thief, was also benevolent in its control in some ways. After all, it gave those of you who were of the not usual sort, alphas and omegas, that such thing that you needed so badly. 

Each other. 

A bad, terrible, devastating thing that in turn gives you something necessary, life changing, life fulfilling, even, perhaps. 

When your aunt had died and you’d been taken away and then put away and then shut away for what seemed would be forever, it had not, at first, in your child’s mind, seemed so terrible. But with the years, that existence you bore that needed, it began to hurt. It eventually became a very terrible thing that in turn, had taken away your ability to recognize yourself, as well. The reality that you’d been caged because of what you were, perhaps not particularly who, but certainly, what, was, at first, difficult to see. And then, when you did see it, even more difficult to look at. 

A thing caged because of what it is. And again, existence is a strange and needful thing. Caged because of what you exist as; caged because of what you need because of what you are. Caged because they can give you what will sate you. 

You open your eyes slowly, the bright, waning golden light of dusk shooting over the edge of the end of the world; bleeding pinks and violets feeding the fire. And he’s there, in a deeply set arm chair pulled up by the hearth, staring into the flames, and you realize, like you’d never truly considered before, that the cage was in part also his fault. That in ways, you’d been put away also because of what he is. You wonder if this should make you angry, resentful. If it should mean you should not want to be here, langoring so comfortably in his home that he’d brought you to. This man who you do not know, who does not so much even look like he wants to know you. In ways, your caging is his fault. And certainly, concretely, the prolonging of that caging was entirely of his doing. So why is there no resentment?

Once, one of the other omegas had said that they were brainwashing all of you. Preparing you, ripening you for slaughter. He’d come in later than the rest of you, when he was more grown, more mature, when he’d seen more things in his before life. He had lots of opinions, lots of thoughts, said that your before life, those ten years of living with your aunt, of only being a child like all the rest of them and not an omega, did not count. He said you’d been too young to understand all you’d lost. A boy named Leo. He was kind, but he was angry. And his anger frightened you. It was something you did know, in the sense that you could recognize it, for you’d seen anger before, but you could not understand it. For some reason, maybe you were built wrongly, and Leo was right, and you should have been angry like him, but you could never find it within yourself to muster it. Maybe there was nothing wrong about it. Maybe everyone was simply built and made and felt differently and that was fine too. But you knew that he was wrong on some accounts, particularly, that your before life had counted, that your aunt, who you remembered with so much love, had counted. And most of all, what he was most painfully wrong about, was that you did, and deeply, understand all you had lost. 

After all, you could only see the sky for one hour a day, every other day, now, and that one hour made your understanding of everything around you, everything happening to you, keen and painful and humiliating in a very clear way. 

The last rays of the sun wash Joel in vibrant orange reds now. A slash of glowing vermillion across his face, something almost violent about the streak of light, something possessive, and you focus your eyes intently on the sight of his face. This man, this alpha, who for all intents and purposes would or could own you as declared by the government or nature or even Leo and all he’d said would happen once you’d been claimed. 

But there was one last thing he’d been wrong about, that young, angry boy, and what you felt was the greatest chasm between the way the two of you had existed within your new designations, which was that, at one very recent point in Leo’s memory, he had belonged to someone, to somewhere. He’d had a place and a home and a family, and he had belonged, and you had never had that. Your aunt, despite her love for you, had been too old and tired to want you, truly want you. You had never been wanted in any soft, true way by anyone before. And looking at him now, you don’t think Joel could ever be capable of wanting anything in a soft way, but you do think he could want something in a true way, and you’re certain that could be more than enough for you. 

“Why didn’t you come for me?” Your voice, scratchy and small from sleep, floating away from you towards him. He jerks, the twitching returned, head snapping towards you, eyes wide, moving forward in his seat as if he’d spring out of it and towards you without thought. His scent seems to be heightened somehow now. As if your sleep had awakened your senses in new, keener ways. You can feel him tickling the back of your throat, threading his way through your hair, beneath your clothes, between your legs. 

“Are you hungry?” He asks, ignoring your question. “When was the last time you ate? You need to eat.” And again that frown, too many fast words. 

“Why didn't you come for me?” You press. “They told me you didn’t know if you wanted to come, that you wouldn't answer. I want to know why.”

He sighs a heavy, heaving thing, falling back in the chair, and turns back to the fire, and you want to whine and cry until he puts his attention back on you. You feel so… so– you don’t know. Little, unmade, with a need to be big, to grow and grow and grow so that all the things you feel and want might fit inside of you, so that he might fit inside of you. You feel hungry as if your gums ache and sting with a desire you’ve never tasted before. But also, and despite all of these conflicting, churning things, you also feel so inexplicably at ease. He’s just there, and you are just here, and you’ll make him answer, you know you have it in you to make him do the things you want, and you can’t say how, you don’t know how, but you understand that you do. 

There’s power in that – even as you are, all you are not, you can see it – the ability something small possesses to make something big move, do, be. There’s power in that. 

You whine low in your throat, and he turns back to you, something dark and tumultuous in his eyes, brow crooked sternly, but he opens his mouth. “I was going to leave you there,” he says, and you immediately wish he’d shut it. Never mind, you want to tell him, you say all the wrong things.  

“But why? I was waiting for you.” Whine, whine, whine.

“I didn’t want this. I never have.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want me?” You ask again, just to be absolutely certain you’re understanding that you’ve once again found yourself in a place where you are not wanted for, or despite of, the thing that you are. The logistics, the intricacies of it don’t seem to matter as much anymore, after everything, the before life, the not life, all that matters now is the yes or no. 

But he goes silent again, attention back toward the fire, the sun set, no more glowing vermillion slash, very little hope now too. 

He ignores your question again. “Tell me about the place they kept you,” he says instead. 

“There’s nothing to tell.” You want to cry now, for the first time, besides the tears of initial happiness when he’d finally walked into your white box, you want to cry. You dig stubby nails into the round of your knee, hard as you can, trying to make it hurt and distract. “It was very calm and very quiet.”

“Did you have friends?” He won’t turn back to look at you, and it makes you feel very lacking. Very much like the nothing they tried to make you feel you were before. 

“No. They wouldn’t let us.”

“They wouldn’t let you have friends?”

“No. They said it would agitate us – too much socialization. Really, they just didn’t want us realizing, becoming angry and aware”

This makes him turn, makes you feel, within yourself, the anger you’re telling him of, like oh, now, when I’ve been shocking and honest, you look at me – after I waited all that time for you. There is no resentment about the cage, only for the waiting. You should stick your tongue out at him, make him an ugly face, turn over and go back to sleep and ignore him the way he’d ignore you. But no, you think, let him see that you do understand, and you do know some things, that you are angry, and Leo was right.

“What did you do then?” He asks. 

“I read. I learned about myself, about you. About what we are.”

His gaze is so intense now, a ricochet, a scream, something very persistently sad. “And what are we?”

“People just like all the rest of them. But with more necessity.”

“How do you mean?”

You tip your head side to side, bright fire eyed gaze to bright fire eyed gaze. Your cheeks feel molten, sweltering, sweat at your nape, the fire in the hearth so bright, but not as bright as you; your belly glows. This is what you are, this is what you’d been made into. “There is so much necessity in existing, don’t you think?”

He tips his chin, he doesn’t understand. 

“We need so many things. We require so much to be alive, to be what we are, to be satisfied and content.”

“Do we?”

“The things we are, yes. I think so.”

“You don’t seem like you spent years in that place,” he says, voice slow, molasses in the notes. There’s something hypnotized slumbering in him that forces something satisfied to swell within you. Your belly glows. 

“I had a before life. People forget that.”

“I read in your file — you lived with an aunt.”

You wait for the: only for ten years, but the diminishing does not come. “Yes. She was kind, and I remember all of it, even if the rest of the world forgets it happened.”

“Did they ever mistreat you? At the facility–”

“No. Never. There was nothing.” You’re the one to turn away now. The sun has entirely gone away, a single glowing sliver just at the drop off of the end of the world. You stick your hand out straight ahead of you, fingertip following that line of fading light through air and space and sea. 

He watches you unblinkingly, and asks, “What do you mean?” The far off light glows through your skin, through your fingernail; he follows the path of your hand.

You can pretend in your mind that you feel the warmth of it against your fingertip, that it scorches the way it glows, heats the length of your limb, feeds the same glow in your belly, but there’s no more possessive streak of light to wrap around you; now, the heat only lives within you. This is what you are, this is what they said would happen, and now it’s finally happening. You let your arm fall back to your lap, limp, and turn to look at him again. He looks so angry, and you feel so incredibly sad for him. This cold perch, this cage that is not white like your box, but dark and struck right on the edge of peril, this place he chose to exile himself to. They were honest, in the things they'd told you all, the truth of the way alphas exist out in the world. Lonely and ostracized and feared, brainwashed to your reality maybe, sure, the way Leo claimed. But in certain things, they’d been honest, and you’re glad for it, that you have the ability to understand him now from this vantage point. The reality of how he exists, the reason for that look in his eyes, it all makes sense to you. 

“I suppose that can be a kind of bad thing… a mistreatment. Making nothing of us, of our lives, taking the whole world away until someone chooses to come and give it back to us.”

He flinches, the look shutters, clicks and flashes, a camera capturing the truth of what the two of you have already done to each other without even really knowing one another at all. “I’m sorry I waited. I’m sorry I took so long.” The words cost him something the way all truths cost something. “That I wasn’t there for you as soon as I should have been.”

“Why weren’t you?” You ask, although you know. 

“I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m not– I’m not right. I’m not well.” And this costs him more than the rest, you can see. The thump, thump, beat of his heart in his throat. You should tell him to stop, mercy is power, but you think, feel, that this pound of flesh you’re demanding via his truths is what you’re owed for your life and a year of waiting. And anyways, you’ll pay your own pound of flesh in kind eventually, and it’ll cost, even if it’s freely given, it’ll still cost. Everything is equal here, it’s only that it takes a certain kind of eye to realize the truth of that. 

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Everything, what I am, the whole thing of it and this. It’s all wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know.” And he looks suddenly angry, aged, wearing all his years and all his very obvious loneliness, teeth bared but on the verge of falling out.

“No…” you say slowly, thinking, rationalizing, a rolodex of truths in your mind. What you are, what I am, what we all are and all the honesties that compromise us. “I don’t, but I understand anyway. They make you all nothing, as well, don’t they? They take it all away, all nothing until you have one of us. It’s a terrible way to live.” And you don’t ask him, it’s not a question, only a very obvious thing. 

Your words upset him, put him right at the mouth of madness, all those shakes and jitters returned, but you only lay your head back down on the soft pillow he’d tucked beneath you, hands folded undercheek to wait for the explosion that does not come. There’s something in you that wants to see him angry, angry like Leo, like the boy who’d said you didn't have to be what they told you to be, that reminded you that you could choose for yourself. One of the few things you’d agreed on, despite and inspite of the friendship that they would not let you have but that would have blossomed anyways if they’d given you the time. They wanted to make you nothing, but you didn’t want to be nothing. You wanted very much to be alive and to belong. 

You realize, watching Joel muzzle his nature before your very eyes, wondering if the truth of him would have him springing up out of the chair to smother you with his weight and temper you with his knot, subdued with his teeth sunken into the gland at the back of your neck, that you want to see him angry. You realize that you want to see him break, that you want to hear that truth no matter what it costs the either of you. You want to see him honest. 

He struggles, a dog fight right before your eyes, but when he wins, it changes the game, turns the truth chimeral. Makes you see him in a different way, and all at the same time, makes you aware and even more comfortable than you’d already been. You’re safe here. He is safe. Most importantly, you want to be here. 

“Let me show you your room,” he says after a deep breath. 

“My room?” A little seedling of dread and sadness and disappointment. 

He shows you to a bedroom hued in soft blues. The sea when it is gentle, the sky when it’s joyous. Everything comfortable, nothing white, like he’d known already. 

He stands awkwardly at the mouth of the entry, as if scared to step foot into this serene pool of azure and marr it’s peace. You watch him out of the corner of your eye as you move around, no shoes, no socks, slowly running your fingers over all the soft surfaces, sweaty little toes sunken into the deep pile of the rug underfoot. 

“I wanted you to have somewhere to adjust– where you’d have privacy. I’m sure this– that I– that it’s all a shock…” he stutters.

One of his boots inches forward, snaps back, like he wants to follow, like he needs to follow, like nature is right here in the room with the two of you, but he wins that dog fight again, holds back. Frustrating. 

“I’m not shocked. But I– I won’t stay with you?”

“No,” he says with a finality that makes that seedling bloom in full. “I also got you clothes. And– and soft things. I know your sort–”

You give a soft huff of air through your nose, my sort… our sort.

“Like things like that. And I also… I also put some of my own things in the drawers,” he nods towards a dark mahogany dresser shoved up against the wall; shy and boyish and hesitant all wrapped into a package that would seem to be none of those things. “They say that helps.”

“Okay… thank you.” 

“Went into town to get it,” he says of the robin's eggshell blue duvet, a more dove gray blue wash for the silk soft sheets beneath. It’s all beautiful and delicate and lace trimmed and looking at him, huge and rough and something like a lonely mountain, you can’t believe he’d chosen this for you. “Lady at the store said you’d like it when I picked it out.” And that makes satisfaction smother the seedling, yes, he’d chosen it for you. A good sign. 

“You went into town to get me things?”

“I told you I want you to be comfortable while you’re here.” Something about the sentence tickles your mind, but then you’re lowering yourself onto the cloud soft bed, cool silk and cotton beneath your skin, sliding against his clothes, your belly glows bright. You’re full of distractions and truth. “There’re a couple of young women that live down aways.” Young women? You perk up at the thought. Friends? “Ellie and Dina. Two young alphas, and they’re good people. I’ll take you down to meet them soon, when you’re ready.”

“Two alphas?”

“They’re a couple.”

“Like– like in love?”

He hovers at the edge of the rug with that strange look in his eyes again, the one from before – I’m only an omega, you don’t have to be afraid of me – and a palpable desperation to cross the border you don’t think he’s even aware he’s letting you in on, but that you can see nonetheless. Two fingers tucked into the line of his belt, twisted there as if grasping for restraint. 

“Yeah, they’re together.”

“I didn’t know alphas could do that… that they’d let you.”

“Reckon it’s why they came all the way out here, to be honest, for freedom. But ‘course they can – be together, that is. We can do what we please, despite what they’d have us believe.” And Leo’s words ring in your mind again. Perhaps everyone sees the truth of what you are except for you. The seedling grows vines, suffocates. All the hope you’d thought would live here seems to have never even existed at all. You feel, for the first time, heavy with all the things you do not know, all the things you lack, all the inexperience and naivety like ignorance thick and cloying in your blood. “From what I understand, Dina presented late, after they’d already gotten together. And by that time it was a done deal, they were in love, no going back. And anyway, they make it work, make it look easy as nothin’, to be frank.” He runs a big hand over the back of his skull, and the way he lifts his arm has the thick of his bicep bunching, fat ball of muscle just there for your teeth to sink into. You shift restlessly on the bed. 

“Easy as nothin’,” you say slowly, trying to imitate the dip and pitch of his drawl. Your fingertip follows the line of stitching in the duvet, petting at the seams holding it together. “Is that how we’ll be too?” And although you mean the words, intend the question, you’re suddenly awash with shy regret for asking, even though you can’t say exactly why. Probably for the look on his face, which goes immediately dark and serious, and even yet, you persist. “Will it be easy for us too?” And you’re sure your voice must sound like you’re begging. 

“No. It won’t. It won’t be like that between us. You’ll stay here as long as it takes for you to acclimatize to being out of that place,” that place, he says like a curse, and it makes you angry, “To bein’ out in the world, and then we’ll find somewhere for you. Somewhere that’s safe and comfortable where you’ll be able to make your own life.”

“I don’t– I don’t understand,” you tell him, but it’s a lie. You do understand, you see, and very clearly, that all you’d waited for during your life, the before, the not life, the extra year, it had all been in vain, for nothing. It would not be given to you here. 

“What don’t you understand?” And his tone is cruel and spitting, making you flinch. “I’m sending you away soon. This is what I’m saying.”

“But I don’t– No–” You’d waited so long. He’s being so mean, and you tell him so. 

“Yes. You need to be with people your own age. You need to see the world and grow up,” and what a horrible thing to say, you think – to grow up. As if it were not a thing you’d been forced to do already all on your own, without anyone to help you.

“Well then what do you care about what I need? You make no sense!” And you bare your teeth at him. “If you don’t want me–” 

But he cuts you off, broad palm held up in a staying gesture, and it’s so incongruous with all the rest of it, that you want to laugh in his face. “Didn’t say I don’t want’cha.” And that frown again, he makes no sense, the tip of his boot makes landfall in the high piled rug, halfway in, hypnotized and compelled in full. You settle on the bed and feel very calm despite the too fast beat of the thing that moves and lives within you, despite your anger and confusion. 

And through the beat and the heat and the sweat on your neck, despite the shyness you’ve forgotten is shyness right at this moment, but that you’re sure will return later because this is what you are and this is what you were made for: him. You ask, “Then are you going to knot me now?” Because if he’s going to send you away, then surely he’ll give you that before you go, surely he’ll still want that from you. 

He splutters, going all red in the face as if the notion of a young omega asking the experienced alpha she’s been presented with to do that most basic thing his nature demands, is something out of the ordinary. “What? No– no.” But despite his supposed refusal, he takes two steps forward towards you. Venturing further onto the soft piled rug, leaving large crushing footprints in his wake. 

“Later then?” You ask very pragmatically.

“No. Absolutely not. There will be no knotting.”

You shake your head at him, small frown between your brows, but still feeling calm despite the tragedy. Forcing that horrible seedling down into submission, the vines smothering all your hope. “But what do you mean?” And you feel like a child. 

“I’m not going to fuck you. We aren’t doin’ any of that. You’re too– you’re too young, practically a girl.” A child. He has an accent that thickens with agitation, the ends of his words sluicing off between his tongue and teeth and anger while he hurts you.

“You don’t want me,” you say, and it isn’t a question anymore, only an obvious thing.

His eyes go very dark, and you want to turn away, look back at the edge of the world and the bright glow of the sun being swallowed by it. “I don’t want that.” And the way he spits the words hurts, making you a thing impossible to desire.  

“You don’t want me,” again, repeated, so the both of you can bask in the truth of it. 

But it snaps something in the room, or in him, or amidst the honesty being brought out here and now. He takes two ground-eating steps forward to loom over you aggressively, forcing you to fall back on your elbows, looking up at him wide eyed but still inexplicably not afraid, only a greater thing than what can be called merely disappointed. And yet, not disappointed enough to not notice the way one of his knees presses against the inside of one of yours. “I should get to have a fucking choice too, shouldn’t I? Like you, locked away in that horrible place–”

“It wasn’t horrible,” you try and say, but you don’t think he hears.

“The way you had all your choices and freedoms stripped. Shouldn’t I also be allowed to have one single goddamn thing?” Where else would I have gone if not there? “A choice – to say, no, stop, I don’t want this.” He’s so angry, and it is all suddenly so clear, and he finally grabs you, pulling you up by the bend of your elbow, the small joint almost crushed in his massive fist to pull you halfway up off the bed and towards him, getting in your face with all his anger. 

Leo’s voice again, you don’t have to be what they tell you to be, you can choose for yourself. This is what Joel wants too. 

“You can’t end up stuck out here at the end of the world with some washed up old alpha who can’t give you a quarter of what you need and deserve. I won’t let you. I won’t,” he snarls.

But despite your greenness, your naivety or your ignorance or your youth, you think: how dare he? “And what about what I want? What about my choices? Or are you going to be just like all the rest of them? Like the whole world telling me I’m too insignificant and too stupid to decide for myself? Just locked away in another cage–” You spit at him, trying to claw and shove at him, stubby nails digging at the sun pebbled skin of his throat, yanking at his too long hair and patchy beard, inadvertently pulling yourself closer to him. He grunts, struggling to take you in hand, slippery thing you can make yourself into when you really want, and you, trying your mightiest to hurt him any way you can as he’s already decided he’s going to hurt you with his rejection. “Is that what you are? Just like all the rest of them?” You cry amidst your struggle, choked with tears and being too little to be effective but too big for your own skin. 

You shove at his jaw, trying to scratch at his cheek, but he grips you full around either arm, locking you in place and gives you a swift but measured jerk, jostling you into submission, trapping your hands bent as they are up by his neck so that one small palm is sliding to the back of his nape, over the gland behind his ear, at that soft vulnerable hollow, and coming to rest at the one in back, at the base of his neck beneath his collar. Both of you go still as stone, frozen by the truth of what you both are and how inescapable it all is, reality held in the palm of your hand.

Obvious: a designation is not a thing you can ever hide. Alphas and omegas wear it on their bodies like markers. Glands scattered at different places: behind the ears, at the base of the neck, inside the wrists and ankles; vulnerabilities that when acknowledged, bitten, seal a mating bond. Places that if handled properly, turn you into nothing but what you are at your basest nature. And you can’t help yourself – at the feel the spongy patch of skin, slightly raised and slightly rougher than the rest of him, a place that when in rut or in heat, would become, will become, extra sensitive, extra swollen, extra ripe – when you slowly slide your fingers against it, feeling the texture of it, the way it’s even hotter than the already sweltering rest of him. 

He growls low and rumbling in his chest, that sound again, and he’s so angry, it’s painted all over his face in shades of defiance; coming off of him like radiation, angry at you, angry at the truth of what you both are, angry at himself and the world and all of it, but he pulls you closer anyways, tugging your forward by his grip on your arms which is starting to mimic the ache you’re suffering at that place between your legs you long to show him, pulling you in so that the tips of your breasts, covered beneath his thick sweater and the too thin, soft bra they gave all the omegas who needed them, brush against the thick of his chest, pulling a soft breath of a moan from your tongue.

“You’re being so mean to me,” you whisper. “And I don’t deserve it. And I waited so long for you and you never came for me, and now this is how you’re treating me,” you say with a hiccup and a tear, and you feel little and big and that place that calls for him pulses and hurts and leaks. He’s so mean and you’re so sad and you want him and you can’t understand why he’s being this way when you were made for him and he for you, and if nothing else was right in this world, then this was the thing that was supposed to be. 

His eyes shift quickly back and forth between both of yours, that frown, mouth turned down, his mustache that connects to the patchiness of his beard showing how contrary he finds you. You frown back at him, trying to pull away, whining when he tightens, pulls you closer, right up to his face as if he needs to inspect you even more closely. Your toes aren’t touching the rug anymore, scraping against the thick round of his boots, and you won’t have it. You’ll give him a piece of your mind, you’ll show him. “You think that because I’m little and young and easily bruised that I’m not in control.” It’s not a question. If you could grow fangs, you would. If you could rip him to shreds, you would. “That I can’t control you. But I made you come for me, didn’t I?” Now you laugh at him, now you show him. “I knew if I wrote to you, you’d come, and you did. I made you come. I made you.” And saying it feels like victory, so you don’t care that it makes his face crack, you don’t care that he pushes away from you, letting you fall back onto the bed with a limp bounce, storming out of the room, the door slamming shut behind him. You don’t give a thistle for choices. You want to be selfish, you want to be alive, you want to see the sky. You have the sea now, and you want to be this thing you are because this is already you, this is what you were made into, and you have no choice but to bask in it, and you won’t bend to him or give it up for him only because he can’t accept the same of himself, only because he’s still trapped in his own white box. 

-

He knows, as soon as you make whatever stupid decision it is that you’re making, that something’s off. A shift in the air in the house, his heart beating funny, his scent changing because his body knows you’re not in its immediate vicinity anymore, something that tells him off, off, off, be vigilant, she needs you so much, you can’t fail again. He reminds himself of all the decisions he’s already made, of what he knows he wants and does not want, of what he is and what he is not. 

After he’d stormed out of your room – I made you – he’d retreated to hide in his own bedroom, to the other big chair by the fireplace in here, cowering like a dog with its tail tucked between its legs, forcing himself to listen to you cry for hours, the whine and whimper of an omega in need of something he was made to give, and yet will not. As if a little thing like you could make him do anything. Him. He grits his teeth, chews on his own tongue, digs his fingers into the arms of the chair to force himself to remain seated in place, to not return to you, to not give you all the things he knows you need and want to be soothed by. 

He can smell your scent changing already, reacting to him, reducing him to nothing, entirely effective in your conquering. And he’d stupidly thought that perhaps the heat, and the rut that it would yield, would wait, give him a moment of reprieve or compassion before it came for him. A moment to think. He thought he’d have more time, a chance to escape the thing he so desperately wants but cannot and will not let himself have, refuses to give in to. His body stirs and smolders, and like he’d done for eleven years and then one, he ignores it. He ignores the truth of who and what he really is. 

He sits in his chair, head propped up against the back, and listens to your cries and mewls ebb and quiet until finally, he thinks you might have sobbed yourself to sleep. He doesn’t want to hurt you, he doesn’t mean to hurt you. It’s the absolute last thing he could ever, ever want. Everything, not only in his nature, but in his character, in the things that make him up as a man who’d want a woman like you, is clamoring within him to go to you, to give you what you want, to sooth you with his voice and his scent and his cock. To fuck you into your heat until you’re soft and slick and fevered enough to take his knot, to let him breed you, to let him mate you. His cock stirs and thickens beneath the rough confines of his jeans, that thicket of skin at the base where his knot waits in ready for you, simmering with heat and tightness. He digs his knuckles into his temple until it hurts. 

You don’t want me… Of course he fucking wants you. He’d have taken your cunt for himself right there in that white box room, on your rickety little iron cot for all the surrounding omegas and witless betas to hear without giving a single shit what anyone said or thought if he had any sort of right or will or choice. If he had anything more to give you. And then watching you go right to sleep when he’d brought you into his home, the sight of you feeling so immediately safe and content, ready to nest amongst his things and his scent – that feeling of having within himself the things that he needs to be what he is – indescribable. 

Pretty little omega – and truly, you’re so pretty. All he’d never let himself imagine or desire or hope for. He’s too old, past his prime and forgotten by the world, but he’s still a man with a working cock, still an alpha, even if only in the simplest of ways. Of course he wants you. 

He lets himself languish miserably before the fire, eyes going hazy with exhaustion, the comedown of adrenaline, the presence of warm omega all around him, the taste of your pre-heat scent coating his tongue and throat. He pulls his socks off and lets the heat of the fire warm his feet and thinks he should’ve given you his room instead, let you sleep in his bed, near the fireplace, between his sheets and amongst his scent. He can sleep out in the dirt for all he matters as long as you’re comfortable. And the rational part of his brain wants to laugh at the thought, sitting here alone, realizing that despite his battling, his nature will always win out in the end, that all this fight really means shit. His cock gives a faint throb, his deflated knot rhythmically pulsing in time with his heart, ready to swell and claim what everyone including nature, but excluding Joel, has said belongs to him. Of course he wants you. And if he’s honest, or a fucking liar, he can’t really say which, all his truths and deceptions have become so muddled within his own mind, his past and his present and this future he’s never thought he wanted or had a right to, the year of waiting was more a form of self punishment, restraint as proof of fear, than anything to do with you. 

Anger, yes, that everything had been decided for him for so long. That he isn’t even allowed to decide what he is, what he wants. But fear, more than anything, that interminable curse of failure he’s so haunted by and so afraid of. How could nature ever look at him and think him strong enough to take on the role of caretaker, protector, alpha – whatever it is that you need him to be, the whole world in the eye of a young and untried omega – when he can hardly stand the sight of his own face in the mirror? There’s nothing but tragedy setting the stage the two of you stand posed on. 

Finally, your cries fade to soft hiccups, and then a peculiar silence he doesn't trust. He waits, ears peeled, his head turned slightly towards the cracked open door of his bedroom, sensing the shift in scent and after a few beats of too loud silence, a thud and a huff, the music of a little mind thinking too loudly and mischievously for its own good. Even the wind seems to blow differently as if it knows you’re scampering about amidst it now, vulnerable to its lashings, and he’s shooting up out of his chair and charging through the house. By the door, he realizes his boots are gone, stolen from where he’d dropped them discarded after he’d left you in your room to cry your salt tears. He forgoes a coat and his flannel, braving the icy wind in nothing but his white undershirt, stepping silent but no less frantic out onto the deck. The truck is dark and quiet, still in its usual spot, and this quells his fear minutely. It occurs to him that you likely don’t even know how to drive. 

But when he comes around the western facing corner of the house, it’s worse than he could’ve imagined, and the scar slashed across his right temple suddenly zings like copper, burns like fire at the sight of you. You are, for some inexplicable reason, crawling on all fours, towards the edge of the cliffside. And he’s frozen solid for a second, shocked and terrified, and then moving forward like lightning, tripping over his own two feet and breath before he realizes you’re right at the very edge now, and he needs to move very fucking carefully to ensure he doesnt send you spilling in fright over the edge. 

He alters his movements, continues forward slowly, his bare feet over the freezing ground and sharp bric-a-brac of the forest floor, the slabs of stone turning to ice as he nears the edge, and he watches the uncoordinated wallop of your movements, banging your knee with a small yelp, as you crawl like a slow and drunken spider in his too big clothes, dragging his too big boots around your ankles, to the very edge of the cliff side, slowly lowering yourself to plop down with your head and arms hanging over the edge. 

He pauses about ten feet away from you and waits for your next move, but you lie still, quarter part of you draped over the edge of the cliff, and he realizes that you’re watching the water far below crash against the rocks. 

“Sweetheart,” he calls slow and gentle, crouching down low so that his voice travels along the ground where you lay. “Sweetheart, what’re you doin’?” You start, turning back towards him, one palm coming to the edge of the rock to shove yourself up to peer back at him, rock pebble spraying out over the void with your movement, and his heart and stomach lurch to his throat, almost gagging at the terror. Your eyes are hazy and bright, and he recognizes the beginnings of the fever, it’s tendrils wrapping themselves around you, making you a little confused, a lot needy, and he’s so fucking stupid, he should’ve never left you alone. But he hadn’t thought it’d come on this fast, that you’d affect each other so. 

“I wanna go down there,” you call over the small hill of your shoulder, turning back to peer down at the beach. You point down at the shoreline with your other hand, wagging your finger as to emphasize what it is you want.

Jesus fucking Christ, he’s going to have a goddamn heart attack. “Alright, baby. Come back here, I’ll take you down. Let’s go together.” You mumble something, arm flopping out, waving him away. “Please, sweetheart, come back here with me,” he begs, and there must be something in his tone, he’s sure, because you turn full back at that, looking at him suspiciously like you remember his earlier words of rejection and no longer trust him now. 

“I’m glowing, sir. I need to feel the sea and the cold.” Your voice sounds not your own, like it comes surfing off the wind to his ears. 

“Not, sir. Joel. Only Joel, remember?”

You push yourself up, moving to sit back on your knees, but still right at the edge, still too close. Sweat slides slick and frigid down his spine, the complete opposite of what you must be feeling right now. Only Joel. Only Joel, he hears you mutter at the sea. “There isn’t anything only about you. Leave me alone. Go away–”

“Please, baby. Come back here. Let’s go inside, I’ll give you the sea, I promise. Just come over here – with me.” You turn back at that, shifting on your knees to face him. If you lose your balance, stumble, you’ll topple back over the edge. He just needs to be good enough for you to want to come to him, convincing enough. He puts his palm out towards you, all supplication now. “Come here, sweet thing. I’ll show you the sea, I promise I will.” You start your slow spider crawl back towards him and his scar burns, a sharp pain through his brain, piercing behind his eye, heart beat to death between his ribs. As soon as he gets his hands on you, he’s going to fucking throttle you, he promises. But he’s almost got you, and he dares not move, barely even breathes, his hand is shaking so badly it interrupts his view of you on every other painful heartbeat, and he realizes his eyes are blurry with terrified tears, and suddenly, that anger doesn’t matter even half an ounce as much anymore because then you’re here and crawling into his arms, up into his lap so that he’s falling back onto his ass on the cold, hard ground. He pulls you into himself, clumsy little spider legs wrapping around his waist, your arms going around his neck so that you’re clinging to him. 

One of his boots lies lost and discarded back by the edge of the cliff.

“Please, don’t ever fucking do that to me again.”

“I’m glowing,” you sigh into his neck.

“I know you are, baby. It’s okay, we’ll fix it.” He feels you nuzzle at his collarbone, his neck, the gland, already sensitive and swollen behind his ear, already, already, already, God help me, and his heart feels like it’s beating so hard he can feel it move through your chest cavity and reverberate against his hand on your back. Christ, it wasn't supposed to happen this quickly, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to have more time, more choices, more control. The wet of your lips mouthing at his skin, and then the peek of your tongue tasting his gland, and he rumbles deep in his chest, his mind going loose and slacken like an old rubber band, and then snapping back to clarity at your surroundings. Cold wind and now the beginning sprinkling of needle freezing rain, your shivers jittering into his chest.

“We gotta go inside – let’s get up,” he murmurs into your ear, unable to resist nosing at your hair, the small, freezing cold seashell hidden within. 

Wait, wait– and then the scrape of small, blunt edged teeth just there at the vulnerable patch of skin. He swallows a scream, and the caged thing rattles and howls inside his chest, his arms going iron and binding around your back, pressing you to him, chest melded to chest. “Wait, please,” again, and now a tiny kiss. “If you don’t want me,” and he never should’ve even insinuated it, it’s the worst thing he’s ever done in his entire miserable fucking life. “Then will you please–” another soft press of lips to his jaw, the corner of his mouth. His hand slides down your spine, he can’t help himself, presses down on the base of your vertebrae, the heat of your cunt along the pulse of his cock, through cotton and denim and cold, just there, just there, he’s so fucking close. “Will you at least kiss me–” but you’re not waiting for another rejection, you’re just licking clean across the slash of his mouth, taking his bottom lip between both of yours for a shy little suck, unsure and inexperienced with desperation. And then there’s nothing caged about any of it, no more white box, no more perch at the end of the world, he squeezes you to himself so that it hurts, and he kisses you.  

Hand twisted too tightly in your dampening hair, he pulls your head back, and with a rumbling grunt sends you deep and languid into easy submission, the steady deep timber of the sound wringing the desired effect on you. You twitch once, as if he’d tugged on your strings, his pretty puppet, and then go soft and open and easily penetrated, jaw hinging open so that he can lick inside of you, tasting all you have to offer which he refuses to accept he’s actually taking and which you’re all too desperately eager to give. 

He takes it all regardless. 

Slick mouth against slick mouth, out there in the cold rain and wind, rolling around in the dirt, he tastes you the way the two of you were made for. Pulling your hips closer, rolling his up to meet all the heat you have to offer which will only get hotter and hotter the more he continues down this path. You claw at his hair, the gland at your wrist rubbing against the one at his ear, marking him with your scent and pheromones, marking him as yours. And he swears he can almost feel that glow in your belly too, a little wriggling comet in his hands, set to burst. The crescendo of your whining climbs higher, your mouth hungrier, and Joel feels insane for a second, entirely outside of himself, lost to his senses. All he is, is what you need him to be, something hard and strong and solid for you to mold yourself around, and it’s so right it’s wrong. Not what he’d planned, not what he’d decided. 

He rips his mouth away from yours, panting, forgetting his name and his sense and everything else he is besides a hard cock and a now equally smoldering belly. “Wait– wait,” he begs, burning comet, too willful to tame without teeth, surging in his arms. You rub yourself against his face, your hair sluicing through his, your soft tits against his chest, his neck, bumping his chin while you try to climb him perched in his lap like you are. “Wait, please–” he tries to sooth over your huffing whines, and then a sharp stinging little bite to his jaw line. 

No, no. 

“Stop. We have to stop, please. This isn't what’s supposed to happen. This isn’t what I want.” And you hear that. 

The comet burns out, you go still in his arms, and it feels worse than anything. He wishes he could swallow the words back immediately because then you’re pushing back and away from him. Scrambling out of his lap, escaping his arms as fast as you can. 

“You’re horrible! Get away–” He dodges a small, kicking foot – the bootless one.  And you’re stumbling to your feet, tripping over the too big shoe wrapped around your too small foot. He pushes to stand, as well, gripping you about the elbow, avoiding a weakly punching little fist now. This is truly getting too ridiculous. The two of you need to come to terms with each other, meet in the middle, forgo the theatrics you seem all too desperate for. He ducks away from another ineffectual punch, grips you by the scruff of the neck, unruly kitten that you are, and pushing you forward, hooks you under his arm, lifting you clear off the ground and rendering you entirely captured, bent in half, a wilted flower over the strong of his forearm. 

You squawk indignantly, kicking your feet against the back of his leg as he stomps over to his abandoned boot, slowly filling with rain now, fuck this shit, and trudges through the mud back to the house, ice cold droplets dripping off the tip of his nose. The two of you are well on your way to soaked, but he thinks it might not be such a bad thing, considering the ball of heat radiating from your belly, the one in his own mimicking you. It seems to pool in the palm of his hand, where he’s got you hooked and caught over his arm, honey collection of magma.

Let me go! You’re screeching. “Leave me alone! You don’t even care about me and I hate you and I want to see the water!” More kicking and clawing.

When he finally dumps you back onto your rumpled bed, undignified yelps and pathetic little growls, he’s at his wits end. Taking you firmly in hand, heavy hand back at the nape of your neck, thickly calloused palm scraping against the quickly swelling gland there, other pushing at your hip to drape you over the edge of the bed like a rag doll, he folds himself over you, smothering you with his weight and heat, forcing you into calm. You go shocked frozen, wracked with shivers and then finally, blessedly still and quiet. This was all you needed, for Joel to follow his instincts. 

He presses you into the bed with his too heavy weight, thick arms caged around your head, pert little ass tucked up against his pelvis, and he breathes you in, lets you settle. 

“You need to behave,” he rumbles, and all you do is sigh bleary eyed and exhausted by your own willfulness. “You’re not to go outside all alone at night like that again, do you understand me? And you are especially, never, ever, to go that close to the cliff edge again.”

“But the sea–” you whine and shift, rubbing your little cunt against his now fully hard cock, perfect position that he’s got you in, presented to him like this. He presses tighter against you, growling deep in his chest to shut you up. 

“Promise me.” But you whine, shifting, starting to cry a little, too far gone to the start of the fever he’s done nothing to really sate. There’s still time yet, for your full heat, but these beginning symptoms, they need to be soothed just as well, tempered just as diligently as the full blown heat would be. If for nothing else, than for the sake of the omegas' comfort and happiness. He bends his knees, shoving the thick of his erection up against the apex of your thighs, pressing you further up onto the bed and tighter beneath him, and nosing through the mantle of your hair, he finds the gland at the back of your neck beneath the collar of his sweater and bites down gently. Not breaking skin, only giving you teeth to feel, to be soothed by, that blunt clasp that’ll dull your own sharp edges for now. 

He laves his tongue along the scorching patch of skin, the texture different to the rest of you, different, even, to his own glands, like silk, like water, something liquid about the feel of you here beneath his tongue and teeth. You let out a terrible little sound that has the threads of his control snapping, providing cause for concern, and he growls softly, pleased, in response. It’s a sound of submission and acceptance and praise, from the both of you equally, all at the same time. He lets you settle like this, petting at you with his tongue, giving you the scraping edge of his teeth like a threat, every so often. Grinding, because honestly he can’t even fucking help it, against that scorching little cunt he knows would already, even now, be so soft for him. Perhaps, not soft enough yet, not ripe enough yet, to take his knot and everything else he wants to force on it, but soft enough for him to teach you how to take a good fucking. 

A virgin, never even had a heat before, and trapped here between his teeth and beneath his cock. It would all be so easy, it would all feel so right. 

But that is, Joel thinks, just the thing of it. It would feel right – but would it be right? He can’t yet tell. 

You cloud his judgment, seduce his nature into wanting to give you everything and anything you could ever even think to ask for, and he can’t yet tell if it’s just you, that sparkle and that light and that heat like a comet that lives inside of you that he’s coming to suspect is wholly yours, nothing to do with biology or designations or markers that tell of what you should and should not be, that’s got him so desperate to please you. Or if it’s only nature, trying to force him into another choice he’s not made for himself. 

-

You wake slowly, disturbed out of your sleep the way one feels when they’re being spied on by something too large and too scary to look at right in the eye. 

You shift in the blue bed, cool and calm now, all that glowing heat from before that’d forced you out into the cold and the wind, hungry to throw yourself through space and time out into the sea, reckless and free, gone away now. All you feel as your eyes blink open slowly, is a shivery, damp cold rattling down the line of your spine. The room around you is dark, the glow of the slumbering fire out in the living room peeking in through the slightly left ajar door of your bedroom. 

He’d stayed until you’d gone boneless and calm, trapped beneath his weight and between his thick strong arms, letting you suck on the gland inside his wrist as you’d pleased. And when finally, you’d been just on this side of awake, he’d changed your clothes and slid you beneath the soft sheets and weighted duvet, and sat in the cozy sofa chair by the window until you’d been too exhausted by the embers in your tummy and the tight want between your legs to fight sleep any longer. 

The chair sits cold and empty now, and above it, the wide window, the pitch black of the world beyond is bright with unknown terrors, and you huddle into your nest of pillows and blankets, hiding beneath the edge of the duvet. 

You’d never had a window in your bunk, had not experienced the night in years and years, and looking at it now, put on display as it is through the clear pane of glass separating you from all of that unknown, you feel suddenly terrified, nothing but little. It feels as if you were to look away from it, it’d reach through the glass and pluck you out of your bed, whisk you far enough away that he’d never be able to find you, come for you again, and also, like if you don’t stop looking, it’ll eventually begin to look back. You wiggle backwards, bum finding the edge of the bed, and then sliding out, feet first, gaze still peeled on the window and the night, walking backwards out of your room and pulling the door shut on your way. At the very last moment, you peek through the sliver of the door edge and frame, nothing but your nose remaining in the blue room, and you swear the night stares back now. 

You shut the door with a snick, and turn to rush on tipped toes in search of his room. 

He’s sleeping on his back, one thick arm thrown over his head, the other laying across his belly, and you peer over the edge of the bed, hands clasped beneath your chin, watching the up and down of his breathing, the flicker of his eyes beneath his lids. He has long eyelashes and funny whiskers and hair everywhere. Under his arms, and across his chest and his belly, leading down below the sheet covering him, to the thick lump there, that place you don’t know yet, but do understand. He’s hairy, and he’s big, and the aching place you want to show him comes awake in response to all this man you have before you. And although the house is warm, the fires stoked diligently to keep you as toasty as you need, another shiver runs its way down your back. So taking hold of one of his thighs, you hoist yourself up onto his too tall bed, knobby knee stabbing him in the side as you climb on top of him, planting yourself right in the middle of his broad expanse. He gives a rough grunt, shocked awake by the little creature climbing its way all over him, hands shooting out to steady you by the hips as he jerks startled. 

“What in the Sam Hell–” You ignore his spluttering, rubbing your bottom against his stomach, finding a comfortable position to drape yourself over him, wilting like a felled weed snuggled up against his chest, tucked just below his chin, giving an entirely contented sigh when you settle. “What the fuck’re you doin’?” He has such a nasty mouth. Someone should wash it with soap for him. 

He tries to roll over, but you cling, bearing your sharp little teeth to latch at his collarbone, holding tight, refusing to be shoved away again. “M’cold–” you fuss, chewing and slobbering all over him as you pull yourself closer, hitching a knee over his hip, burrowing your foot between the bed and his back. 

“You have t’go back to your bed. You can’t sleep here.”

You whine, chewing harder, and he grumbles, but his hands slide from your hips to your back in a soothing pass and you slick your tongue against the flavors of his skin. He tastes so good, and he smells so good, and in a tiny voice you know will get you what you want, you say, “The window is too big and it’s so dark. I’m scared, alpha.”

He groans, grip going tight and strangling around you, fists bunching in the oversized clothes he’d swaddled you in after he’d dried the rain and outdoor chill off of you before putting you to bed. “Can’t I just stay here? I promise I’ll be good like you told me to,” and you nuzzle against him, making sure to thoroughly cover him in the headiness of your scent. Everything is so warm and right, and he’s so thick and comfortable and strong everywhere, perfect for laying on top of like this. The hair on his chest is prickly, tickling your face where you rub yourself against it, and he rumbles low, a deep sort of purring sound that you feel vibrate in your tummy, big wolfish man that he is, but his grip goes loose and soft after a while, stroking and soothing and petting along your slopes and planes. Convinced. Ha. 

You hold very still, breathe very slow, make sure not to spook the beast while he accepts the fact of you here atop him until he finally says, already sleepy and relaxed again, “Alright… but you’ll behave like I said.” And eventually he rolls the two of you over, little omega barnacle that you’ve turned yourself into, and tucks you into his warm side. 

The third time you wake to him, there’s fire everywhere. And an ache in your womb so sharp it sends shivers through your whole body. You cling and grind and tremble; forget your name, where you are, nothing more than that sticky throb in that place that you want to give to him so, so badly. 

He’s draped atop you, heavy arm caging you in, thick chest covering your back, smothering you between incredible strength and, soft, Joel smelling sheets. You cup the ball of his bicep, it’s big and hard and hot, and drag your palm along the thick slope. He’s so strong, he could crush you, hurt you, make you into anything he wanted, and you want all those things, you think. You want him to do whatever he wants if only he’ll make the ache go away. Fire and glowing bright heat everywhere, most of all your belly, your heart, somewhere so deep inside you’d never known it existed until he’d come and made you aware of it. 

Your fingers slide along his wide forearm, hairy here too, thick wrist, hard, strong bone beneath, and then the soft spot on the inside that belongs to you now. You stick your tongue out, tasting the spongy patch, scraping your teeth along it. If you bite him, you’ll be able to keep him forever, he won’t be able to send you away, but there still remains – even if just for a little bit longer, before the heat you’ve been waiting your whole life and a year for to finally take you – a part of you that’s still rational, head only halfway gone to the clouds. That part which reminds you that more than anything, you want him to choose you. Without the bite as a deal breaker, bond sealer, only because he wants you, only because he likes you. 

But you can taste him, it doesn’t mean you have to bite him, and you the tip of run your tongue along the inside of his wrist, gently suckling at his gland, the flavor of him so much stronger here, as if his essence is more concentrated at this small place. And the ache between your legs, in your tummy, deepens, spreads and blooms and ravages. The inside of you feels sensitive and swollen and big and little all at once, and you shift your bottom, trying to rub yourself back up against him, your sucking mouth pulling sharper, a whine bubbling in your throat because you need something, something more, and you think you know, and you know you understand, but you’re not sure, and if he could just wake up and show you it would all be so much better.

You press back harder, arching so that the aching place feels the heat of him behind you, that hard ridge there that makes your heart pound all through your body. You’d shucked off your leggings and the sweater he’d put you in through the night, too hot and sweaty with the big beast smothering you as he’d been, so now you’re left in nothing but one of his too big t-shirts and the soft, cotton white panties all the omegas always wore. You whine again, gnawing on his wrist for real now, and a big paw of a hand comes up to wrap around your hip, stilling your wriggling. You feel him lean closer, burying his face in the back of your hair, groaning, hot bullish breath fanning across your nape. He rumbles deep and it only makes you feel worse, more desperate, more hungry for that thing you don’t know how to ask for. You want to cry his name, beg him, but your tongue feels fat and swollen inside your mouth, too full of blazing heat to form actual words. He just has to know, he just has to be able to tell. 

“I know,” he mumbles against your nape, nosing around to your ear where he presses his mouth. “I know, it’s alright.” You gurgle again, pulling his wide palm to cover your face completely, nuzzling against his rough palm, muffling your pathetic animal sounds of supplication. It’s okay, it’s okay, you can hear him murmuring and you’re not sure who the words are for, but you feel certain they’re not for you. He’s scared, you know this. Between all the things you’re so uncertain of, this you’re sure of. He’s afraid, and it’s your job to reassure him, to show him how well it will all be once the two of you come together. 

You push your face harder into his palm, and you feel him hook his fingers into the elastic of your panties, tugging the soft fabric wide, tugging them down your legs, and there’s that same need, yes, that comet bright glowing heat, but also, and something you can recognize as more your usual self, a desperate sort of shyness. Something coming unraveled and unspooled for the whole world, him, to see. You can feel the slick uncoveredness at the apex of your thighs, running down your legs, a blossom of heat and vulnerability there at that place, the core of you, and it doesn’t feel shameful, necessarily, but painfully exposed. Your softest place bared for him to see. And yet, alongside that, the knowledge that this soft place is only for him, that you only ever want it to be for him, and so this can, again, be nothing but right. 

“Look at all this slick you’ve made for me, what a sweet girl you are.” There’s such reassurance in the timber of his voice, it makes the heat change, something swirling but steady, constant. You spread your own palm against the back of his hand covering your face, line your fingers along the backs of his, little and big, matched alongside each other, and you press his fingers against your forehead, squishing your nose against his palm, Hiding there in the cup of his hand from the whole world and him, waiting for this truth of yourself to finally be revealed to you. 

His palm strokes along your bare thigh, I know, I know, he keeps saying, and they’d told you all that your alphas would know, that they’d show you, and there’s reassurance in this, that some part of what’s happening is unfolding as they said it would. It makes you feel not so small, not so untried and naive. You try and lay as still as possible, willing the flames into patience, breathing in your own hot breath from the cup of his palm. I know it hurts, we’ll make it better, I promise. He shifts behind you, the rustling of fabric, and then his hand on your bottom again, moving in a slow circular motion, steady and reassuring. He moves to your leg again, lifts it and then something hot and hard and big, coming to rest on your inner thigh, and he lets your leg down, starts the soothing rub of your bottom again. 

“We’re gonna go so slow, alright. Only a little at a time and not the whole thing today. We gotta wait for your heat to settle in all the way, time it all right so that my rut doesn’t start before you’re ready to take me. How does that sound, sweetheart?” But your tongue is still fat, your words still jumbled and missing, and all you really want to ask is if he’s changed his mind now, if he’s finally decided he wants you, and you think you’re crying, sipping salt water from the palm of his hand. “I know I wasn’t how you needed me yesterday, and I’m sorry for that.” He presses his forehead against the back of your shoulder, hand sliding up your hip to your waist, dragging his shirt along as he goes, uncovering you for himself. And you feel so intensely, that you belong to him, and you can’t understand how he could have ever not felt the same way. 

You hitch an agonized little sob, muffled by his hand, and he rolls slightly so you’re half draped atop his chest, his palm rubbing soothing circles low on your belly now. And forcing you out of your hiding place, he pulls your face back to look at him, gripped around your jaw. His face is very serene, and this settles you, makes the words he’s saying clearer, more meaningful. “Can you hear me silly thing, or can all you think about is taking a cock right now?” You scrunch your nose at him, you know that word, it’s his hard thing between your legs. 

“It’s so heavy, alpha,” you sniffle, feeling the weight of it pressing against you there. 

He nods, warm look in his eyes that crease at the edges. “That’s how it’s going to feel inside you, baby.”

“The knot?” A seedling blooms again, this one very different now, full of hope once more. You realize you’ve found your missing words. 

He shakes his head, not yet, and drags his palm up the inside of your thigh, squeezing and kneading as he goes, and you want to complain that he moves so slow, that he needs to do something else, you don’t know what, but something. You want to click your teeth at him, bite him again, anything to make him go. 

And then: “Drippy little girl,” and he’s finally there and a moan that’s almost a scream because he’s cupping a place that is so unbearably sensitive and raw and full of heat and wet like you’d never known was possible. 

Oh, oh, ah, ah, ah. “It’s alright,” he says, rubbing gently back and forth, a slick sound that is loud and embarrassing coming from between your legs. “It’s alright. This’ll help for now. We won’t go inside.” And he grips the heavy thing, his cock, in his own palm that’s all slick from your leaking and presses it against you. He rolls over completely now, shifting higher in the bed so that you’re sitting full on top of him, back to chest, bum to belly, and he spreads your thighs wide with his other hand, pulling your shirt up to bare all your nakedness for him to see. You wonder if he can also see all that burning shyness you’re suddenly so chock full of. 

“Look at these pretty little tits,” he murmurs, cupping one small morsel in his palm, squeezing so that you’re arching against him, mouth agape like a fish, trying to find sounds that seem to have suddenly gone missing once again. “That’s right, I know.” He moves to the other one, squeezes and pinches and shakes it so that it jiggles in the cup of his hand. All the while he strokes his cock between your legs, pulling his hips back every so often so that it slides against you, coating it in all that wet slick you’re spilling for him. 

You look down at the place where it juts out between your thighs, and it’s so big. Dark and angry looking at the end, thick and covered in veins that make it look even angrier and about to burst. You ask him if it hurts him, and he laughs a little and says it isn’t anything you can’t fix which makes you seven different shades of pleased. 

The hand at your breasts moves up to your face again, and he turns your head, searching for your eyes. “We started off badly yesterday, yes? But we’re gonna do better today. I promise.” He slides his hips back again and this time he presses harder against you, his hand flat against the underside of his cock so that the top is slicking all along you. Sensitive little cunt, he says when you tremble and shiver and keen, and that’s when you know that’s what it's called. Your cunt. That place that belongs to him, that you want to give him so badly, that you want him to want so badly but that you barely even know yourself. No more experience than the greedy, frantic digging at the soft, hot flesh beneath your hand in moments when everything had felt too tight and needy to do anything else. 

“Gonna break you in so well, baby. Gonna teach you how to come, how to fuck, how to take a knot.” And now the wide head presses against you, against a place that is so, so incredibly sensitive it almost hurts. You suck in a sharp gasp, trying to jerk away from the hurt, but he holds you in place against him, presses again, yeah, I know, yeah I know, like he’s trying to put it inside you, and yes, you think that’s what it is, that’s what you need, even if it might hurt. “You’re gonna get everything you need jus’ from me,” and his words are slurred and dripping slacken from his tongue. 

He starts to move faster, you think he’s swallowed the same stone of desperation you did, rough grunts and huffing pants, and “So fucking small, it’ll never fit.” Jesus fucking Christ. And on every slick slide forward that wide angry head of it, his cock, bumps the crest of your sex, catches at your hole. You watch it in shock as it presses in just a little, and it hurts and feels like you’re full of bubbles and everything is sticky and your tummy glows with heat. 

“Your little cunt needs this,” he grunts, the head catches, he presses, presses, pulls away, you want to bite and scratch and demand he go all the way, and you’re nothing but a pounding heart and a clenching cunt and you want more, and when he slides again it notches full on at the tiny opening, he pauses, lets it rest there before he presses not even half a centimeter further, only giving you the wide stretch of it, letting your cunt flutter and grip around the very head. 

“Look at that–” And he peers over your shoulder to look at what he’s doing to you. “Look at your tiny cunt stretching for me.”

You cry, trying to pull away, trying to shove yourself deeper, to take the whole of it like the greedy thing you are, but he holds you in place and lets you flutter and flutter and cry until something in your womb pulls tight, and with his fingers swirling at the apex of your sex, the little nub that is so sensitive it pulls a warbled, baying moan from your tongue, an ah, ah, ah, he gives you your first orgasm with him. A desperate thing, too much and not enough, and with his other hand he’s squeezing, shoving his fist along the rest of the length of his cock, pressing it hard where you meet, and then he’s feeding you a blazing heat, filling you with it, stirring your insides to flutter and shiver harder. Forcing you to cry and beg for more, “Please, please, please,” more.

“You’re not ready yet.”

And although you’re not entirely certain for what, you promise, “I am, I am, I can take it.” You know he’s supposed to put it all the way inside, that then, the knot will come. And although you’re unsure what it will specifically be like, what will become of you during or after, you know you’re ready to discover it all. 

“Not yet.” And he’s grunting it through clenched teeth, his hips churning, spitting tip grinding at your hole, something hot and thick sliding wetly all over and between the two of you. “You’ll do as I say. Your little cunt needs this, needs me to be patient with her.”

He lets the slick weight of himself fall away from you, leaving you feeling stretched and bruised and all shivery on the inside, yet still hungry for more. And he pulls his hands along the slopes of you, leaving trails of sticky wet along your skin. The proof of all you are, invisible but tangible, with a taste and a smell and a feel. 

You lay your head back on his shoulder, the heat swirls and simmers for now, and your cunt, your cunt, your cunt, you want to give it to him in full, it throbs and trembles against his slick cock. “I’ve never had a heat before,” you tell him although you know he knows. He probably knows everything there is to know about you, which, admittedly, is not much. 

“That's alright.”

“It will come soon, yes?” You peer over your shoulder to look up at him, and he nods down at you, that warm, eye creased look on his face again. You like the sight of it so much. 

“Will I go away from myself?”

“No,” he says gentle, “I won’t let you. I’ll keep you here with me. You have nothing to be anxious about.”

He rolls the two of you over, keeping you in the comfort of his embrace, and he’s huge and steaming and naked behind you. His hairy chest, his hairy legs all along the smooth and sensitive curves of you. And his thing, it’s still trapped between your thighs, heavy and sticky with your wet, and still kind of hard but not as much as before. You reach between your legs to touch it, and he jerks and hisses but lets you do as you please. Curious fingertips gently along the thick round end of it, down the long length to find two heavy and hot weights hanging lower. 

“Where is the knot?” You ask uncertainly, shy with all the things you don’t know. 

“Here,” and he grabs your hand, moving your fingers to the base of it where there’s an area of skin, of a different sort of texture, rougher, thicker, around the circumference of it. You prod gently at it, not understanding. “See, it’ll swell when it’s inside of you, and then we’ll stay connected for a time, and I’ll fill you, and that’ll help your heat. And after a while it’ll go down, until you need it again. Did they explain to you how it’ll happen?” His cock is thick between your thighs again, beneath your exploring fingers. A little harder and bigger than it was before. His body, something like a wonderful miracle you need to know everything there is to know about it.

“Yes, but not– not all the way, I don’t think. They said you’d show me.” You turn back to look at him, searching for confirmation, reassurance, but instead ask: “Why did you change your mind?” And finally, of his own choosing, he grips you by the throat, and presses a small kiss to your mouth. The greatest victory of the day, and it’s only just begun. 

“It’s exhausting, not letting yourself have what you need.” Need, not want. He shifts over you, coming up on his elbow and rolling you so that you’re on your back and looking up at him. You bring your fingers up to explore along his face: the hooked nose, soft mouth, heart brandished beard. He sighs that bull sigh, and you giggle as it tickles your throat and cheeks. Need, not want. That stings. “Fighting against what you are constantly– and you reminded me that we still have control in what we are. That there’s still choice in this, decidin’ to be what we are without resenting it. And we need each other, after all.” Need, not want. 

“I don’t think you need me.”

“No?”

“No.” The truth that you very much feel like you need him, you keep to yourself. And anyways, he knows. You know he knows. 

“M’thinkin’ I didn’t know I did. Or couldn’t say it out loud.” And he mimics your exploring fingers: thumb against the fan of your lashes, up the slope of your cheekbone, prying your mouth open to catch the edge of your bottom teeth and look inside. There’s a warm look in his eyes, like he’s pleased with you, like you’ve done a good job. “Think I’m realizin’ how wrong I was. How I want this all too.” 

Want, not need. 

He bends his head and kisses your mouth, kisses your breast, shows you how much he wants it.  

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

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1 year ago
I'm So Excited

I'm so excited

jasminedragoon - ~Jasmine Dragon~
1 year ago

FUCK MY HEART KEEPS GETTING FORCEFULLY RIPPED OUT. Dear God I love the comparison between being more animal than girl, I connected with that part so much. Just every part of her struggle and complex feelings of her self image being fragmented based off of what she was taught is written so perfectly that my heart hurts for her and I understand the pain sorta. And the way Din reacts is so perfect because part of her clearly wants to be hurt by him at the same time doesn't and God it's so perfect ❤️❤️❤️

This is the real Christmas gift :)))

The Cassandra Complex : Chapter X : Geryon

The Cassandra Complex : Chapter X : Geryon

Series Masterlist

(Din Djarin x F!Reader)

Content Warnings: Angst; Lemme say it again for those in the back, ANGST; Hurt/Comfort; Din's kinda being an asshole but he's hot and his dick is 10 inches long and he's also sorry; Dark themes from previous chapters continue

A/N: Hello and surprise and I'm sorry. I promise one day *ONE DAY* they will be happy again!!!

Geryon is my favorite figure in Greek mythology :) He is a very special monster to me :)

Rating: Explicit 18+

Word Count: 8.1K

Read on AO3

CHAPTER X : GERYON

Who can a monster blame for being red?

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“We have got to stop meeting like this.”

He’s been pacing back and forth across the hull of the Razor Crest, the metallic jilting song of his heavy gait, the clank, clank, clank, threatening to lull you back into unconsciousness. There should be no comfort to be found in this moment, and yet, just the sound of him is enough for a measure of peace. You can’t believe you’re here right now, lying in your pile of blankets as if no time had passed at all. His anxious pacing had stirred you back into wakefulness, your head all muddied and muffled, your ears seeming to pop into a pressurized silence and then ebb back into clarity. 

You feel, suddenly, that you’re more tired than you’ve ever been in your entire life. A bone deep tiredness after a life that’s been too long and too heavy for someone who is, for all intents and purposes, so young. 

He whips around at the sound of your voice, snapping forward to loom over you, voice deep with the intent to intimidate, maybe even hurt. “How did you know about him?” He demands without preamble, picking up right where the two of you had left off before you’d stupidly fainted from pain and exhaustion. You shiver and shrink back into the blankets, pressing the tips of your fingers against your mouth to stifle the too loud hiccup of your breathing. You’re not going to be afraid of him, he doesn’t deserve that. 

You try to gather yourself, swallowing the bitter nausea that sits heavy on your tongue and push yourself up into a sitting position on shaky, weak arms as he falls with a heavy thud to kneel before you, spits your name, sharp and angry, quickly losing patience. “Who told you about him? What have you heard?” You hold out a warning palm as he leans forward, trying to bully you into compliance with the urgency of his tone. 

“Don’t touch–” you warn, and then all soft, helpless hurt and accusation, “You have a son?” And you wish your voice didn’t sound as it does, like a child begging for the truth to not be what it already is, and you won’t cry, you’ve already promised yourself you wouldn’t, but your mind is so weary, your heart so vacant, it’s hard to remember the things you have and have not promised, the things you should and should not do.

“Who told you? You promised you wouldn’t ever rifle through my head, and I swear to the Maker–”

“I can sense him in you,” you snap. “I haven’t been rifling through anything! You’re so annoying. And get back–” you bare your teeth at him in a tiny snarl, nose scrunched with the exertion it takes to push a weak tendril of the Force against his chest and shove him back just barely. If there were a well within you, measured by the will of your strength and power, the Force, it would be bone barren dry right now. 

He’d gone and had a child, a son, without you. He’d left you, or let you leave him, what did the details matter anymore – and he’d had a child with someone. 

He snatches you up by the elbow, dragging you towards him, weak and shapeless as you are, barely any strength to hold yourself up, much less defend yourself, and his grip is tight enough, punishing enough, that you know it’s meant to cause pain. Harsher than he’d ever handled you before, on the verge of hurting you in a very real way. And after everything that’d been done to you… you’re like a raw, scalded nerve, nowhere left to touch that isn’t covered in hurt. Every inch of your skin screams in pain, and you swallow your moan of agony, trying to suppress your animal sounds. His other hand comes up to grip your jaw, stopping you from twisting away and squeezing the frame of your face so tight in his strong fingers, you feel your bones creak. “Explain. Now.”

“Please, Din,” Please, don’t touch me. “I can– I can sense him– inside you,” you gasp. “He’s strong. He – he has the Force?” You shake your head in his grip, brow folding in on itself, trying to make sense of what it is you’re feeling, the confusing amalgamation of Din and the Force and memories of something, someone young and innocent and pure beyond imagination. Like a well of the Force, of greater depth and strength than you’ve ever encountered before, but viewed, or felt through the veil of his memory, from afar. “You– you still carry him with you.” A child, his child. A little boy, the picture gains clarity in your mind, and then more confusion, as if there were a block in his mind, some protective encasement that keeps the truth of his precious secret safely guarded. 

His hands tighten around the curve of your jaw, jerking your face up to force your eyes to look right at him, and he holds you trapped there for one breathless moment, his gaze like this is worse than any torture you’ve endured thus far, burning but hidden, and then the miniscule shift of the helmet, and you feel the light brush of a single finger against the gem of your earring, and you think: It’s so scary out there. Do you recognize me? We used to know each other. 

“What the fuck happened to you?”

“Look how strong you’ve become,” you say by way of an answer through your smooshed cheeks and clenched teeth Like an insult more than anything else. “Whatever it was that was done to me… something far worse has happened to you. The great Mandalorian, come to save the poor little Sith, huh?”

His fingers dig into the tender skin of your cheeks, your upper throat, harder, hard enough to squeeze a moan out of you before he’s shoving you back with a revolted scoff, pressing up to his feet to pace away from you again. You’d told him once you didn’t like it when he treated you like this, roughly, all that time ago, and he’d always remembered before now, had always measured himself, but it seemed that two years was long enough for him to forget this. 

“You are not a Sith,” he reminds you without turning back, that reminder that he knows what you truly are, perhaps, even better than you yourself know, and you panic for one second that you’ll vomit. But then he gentles: “There’s blood on your earring,” and you sag forward, trying to breathe slowly through your mouth, stretching your eyes as wide open as they’ll go, forcing yourself not to blink so that the tears brimming there won’t fall. I hate you, you mouth the words silently down into the blankets, unsure who it is you’re directing them at. 

“You’re going to tell me where the fuck you’ve been,” he says, turning back to pace towards you, hands on his hips, the snap of his cloak as he whips away again, as if he can only stand to look at you for so long. “And what in the Maker’s wrong with you?” He continues. “Did you get into a fight or something?”

You shake your head slowly down at the weave of the blankets. They’re the same ones from before, he’d kept them, and you are so sad and scared and terrible, and when you lift your head back up to look at him, standing just there looking so defeated and suddenly so singularly powerless… You can’t remember what the point of all this was supposed to have been. 

“I’ve been here,” you say, for the truth is the only thing left to you now.

“On Corellia?”

“Yes.”

“And you… you can sense him on me?” And his voice has gone suddenly soft, suddenly quiet. A father speaking of his child with care, even in the tone used to address him. All the fight’s gone now, and that tiredness sets in deep where the spirit meets the bone. 

You nod, full of so much grief, unbelief that the two of you are here again together, swallowing the gasp that wants to force its way out of you, but you surely can’t help the seeping of it, for there is so much held within your heart when you say up at him with those infernal tears so close to falling: “You had a son with someone?”

He whips back around, pacing finally come to a pause. “With someone? What? N– no. No.” He shakes his head furiously, rushing back towards you, falling back to his knees so that you’re pressing yourself back and away from him. “No, cyar’ika. No. He was a foundling. I– He was a bounty, but along the way he– he became…” He shakes his head again, and you watch the tightening of his fingers around the cap of his knee, the creak of the leather of his gloves as he wrangles his restraint into control, trying not to reach for you. Please, don’t touch. Please, don’t touch. If he takes you in hand, if he puts his hands on you in gentleness or care, you’ll lose. You don’t know how, but you know you’ll be lost. But perhaps the battle is already lost, for when he says, “I would never do that to you. Never with anyone else but you,” it doesn’t matter if he’s touched you or not, the hole in the ground, the two years, the endless, endless darkness and the pleas for something worse, for end or a quiet that doesn’t stop, none of that matters anymore because the battle is lost here and now in this moment. 

Your breath comes in painful, sharp pants. The icy air gusting out of the ship's vents turns your breath to hurt in your lungs. You shake your head at him, trying to swallow the barren dryness in your throat away. “You should have.” And you don’t mean to hurt him worse than you already have when you say it. You don’t mean to hurt either one of you. These are words only of sincerity. “That’s what I left you for, so that you could have that.” But you miss the way they’d pulled your bones from your skin as you say it anyways. A terrible lie wrapped in the hopeful intention of truth. 

“I would never.” You can imagine he’d used this same tone of voice when he’d sworn his Creed as a child. All staunch honor and unwavering conviction. 

You whip your head away at that, unable to bear the sight of him, the sound of him. Even if you want to smell him more than anything. To bury your nose in the crevice between helmet and cowl and inhale deeply right there where the scent of his warmth and sweat and skin is the most concentrated. “Well that’s what I wanted. What couldn’t you understand about me leaving you? You should’ve made your own life. Forgotten me.” Snakelike and spitting and full of venom.

“Is that what you did? Forget? How? Tell me. Tell me so that I might remember for next time.” He stands to pace away again, slow measured steps now. Chewing on a thought, thinking, thinking, and then a death dealing sort of blow when he says, “I could have. I could’ve had all that, you know… There was a woman,” and his voice wavers.

So many terrible things in a terrible, terrible life. You close your eyes to it, accept, even now already, that this is how it should be. You think of your time in your beloved hole, all of your choices that lead you there to such a terrible fate, your time with him, so lovely and so full of light. To have been granted the opportunity to love and be loved, even if you’d never said it, it was the greatest gift the Maker had ever granted you. Such a recompense after everything you’d suffered. The death of your parents, a childhood alone and enslaved and abused, that moment when you’d finally put blade against the only terrible father you’d ever known, the creature who’d put you in chains and ensnared you to this dark fate, master and father and monster all in one, even that had been painful, the taking of your so fiercely desired freedom. And so this now… worse than all the rest, but you’ll accept it too. This is what he deserves. This is why you had let yourself be put away. 

“There was a woman,” he says again, voice unsure, uncomfortable. Almost like he doesn't want to, but feels he must. “A time back– we were on Sorgan, and she wanted me… she wanted me.” And he says your name again, softly this time like an apology. “To be with her, to stay with her and her daughter. She wanted us to be a family and I– I considered it… for a moment. What that would be like, to have someone want me to stay with them. To want to make an end with me.” He shakes his head down at you again, from his great height and you break. Fuck acceptance. A condescending sigh and, “You ruined that for me too. You wouldn’t let me, your memory, you wouldn’t let me be with her.”

“I hate you,” you spit through clenched teeth. You wish you had the strength right now to get up and fight him. 

“That’s fine. That’s your right. It doesn’t change the fact that she wanted me to be with her, and that I thought about it for one brief, delusional moment,” He sounds like he’s laughing through the modulator, “And then just… couldn’t. I couldn’t, cannot even fathom staying for anyone else that isn’t you.” And the laugh fizzles out into a crack. “How does that make you feel? Powerful?... Over me. Does it make you feel like you have power over me? Like you own me? Like I belong to you?” Now tears, perhaps, like he’d cry if you gave him the chance. Like you’ve hurt him enough to drive him to that. The nausea is back. The need for violence is back. The fucking fire in your back and your skin and all over… why, why did you let them do so much to you? You’d been so stupid. It’d all been such a terrible mistake. You should have never let him go. 

“No.” You won’t cry. You won’t cry. “It doesn’t make me feel powerful.”

He suddenly seems to lose all strength. Falling back into a crouch, his knees folding in under him, the clash of the armor against the durasteel floor sharp as a cracking bone. 

“Because you do– own me, that is. You do.” And he says it so simply. Like it’s the basest thing in the galaxy, as simple a thing as the birth of new life, the birth of a star, a black hole sucking an entire planet and all life into nothingness, death. Things that are really not simple or base at all. 

So you shake your head, refute his truth. “I don’t. I don’t want to – I let you go.”

“But you didn’t. Don’t you fucking see that?” And his voice is gentle, but he slams his fist against the steel floor all incongruous rage, and it echoes and rings between the two of you, his violence. “You didn’t let me go, you only took yourself away from me– left me chained.”

“What was she like?” You cut him off, an envious, ravenous thing all tinged the hue of bile – something poisoned, churning within you. “Was she beautiful? Was she kind? Was she good? All the things you could ever want a woman to be? Would she have promised to stay forever?”

“She wasn’t you.” And oh, how you hate him in this moment. You hate him, you hate him, you hate him. This is guilt, this is punishment, this is retribution of the cosmic sort. Something from the Maker sent to remind you that she who sins shall be made to atone. But haven’t I atoned enough? Haven’t I paid my pound of flesh? This man and that soft heart is your punishment for all you’ve done. 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” you tell him because there is nothing else to tell. Because it’s the truth, and you are, you’re so sorry that he couldn’t find someone else, someone better, kinder, more alive. And then, because if a thing’s going to hurt, it should hurt all the way, a glutton for punishment but a coward for consequences you ask: “Did you fuck her?”

“I didn’t kiss her.” Consequences. You bare your teeth at him, an approximation of a hiss and a snarl and a howl of grief so ragged it rips through your throat. Folding in on yourself like a dying star you turn your face away, trying to gather yourself and get away from the sight of him.

“I hate you,” you spit the lie again, again and again as many times as necessary until it becomes truth. “I fucking hate you. You should’ve stayed lost, you should’ve gotten sucked into a blackhole for all I care, you fucking asshole. You stupid metal beast! You should have died out there, left me to rot anything, anything but this,” you heave. 

“I could’ve had a family.” And you want to ask him why he’s doing this to you. To tell him you don’t deserve such cruelty. But you know that isn’t true. 

“Then you should’ve fucking stayed with her.”

“I wish I could have. Instead, I waited for you… I looked for you.”

Blow after blow, and perhaps, you think, this is not cruelty after all, but necessity. There had always been so much left unsaid between the two of you before. Perhaps, it’s finally time only for honesty. “I didn’t ask you to wait for me,” eyes cast down at your hand twisted in the blanket, voice small and pitiful. You have new scars there now, faint and glimmering like cobwebs beneath your skin. They’d wanted to see how much it’d take to leave a mark for good. They’d found their answer. 

“You didn’t–” He scoffs, hands braced against his knees he shoves up again and turns in a directionless circle, all coiled tension and so much rage with nowhere to go but the pitiful sac of girl shaped tragedy littering the floor of his ship. He brings both hands up to clutch the curve of his helmet. “You didn’t ask me to? I didn’t fucking ask for this either.” He turns back to shout at you, a real shout this time. One so full of anger it makes you flinch. “You think this is what I wanted? To wait for someone who abandoned me out of pure selfish fear? No. No, it’s not what I wanted either. But how was I supposed to forget?” He asks. “Hm? Tell me. How was I supposed to let it all go? Tell me how you did it, and I’ll go and do the same since you’ve been so successful. Tell me how you did it and I’ll–”

You surge forward on your palms, teeth bared. “I trapped myself in a hole in the ground until I forgot my own name and still I wasn’t able to forget you.”

“What?”

“Oh?” You coo at him, eyes going all wide, you bat your lashes at him mockingly. Your shoulder suddenly feels like it’s about to pop out of its own socket with the way you’re bracing yourself on your arms. “What? You weren’t expecting that?” You sit back slowly, bones creaking. “To know while you were off fucking someone else, wishing for a family, I was trapped in a grave having my skin pulled from my body over and over and–”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m leaving.” You try and push yourself up, clawing at the walls to pull yourself to rights by your fingernails. “I hate you,” you say again, and again you don’t know which of the two of you it is you’re talking to. 

He sneaks up behind you, taking you in hand by the elbow again, Maker, your shoulder, and whipping you around to face him, clutching your other bicep to pull you up onto your tip toes and to his level. “What are you talking about?”

You let your weight go heavy and sagging in his grip, head falling back on your neck to look up at him, and he plants his feet firmly apart, locking his arms so that he’s bearing your weight entirely. He gives you a tiny jostle. “You’re exactly as I am, you know? We’ve always been the same. A creature in a mask.”

He’s quiet for a second, confused. His chin tipping to one side and then the other. You know he’s reading you for what you’re worth in this moment, which you must admit is very little. “Is that what this was all about? The whole time? My face?” Your heart goes colder than ice, and you’re glad he’s bearing your weight for you. You think, suddenly, that you’d not have been able to remain upright on your own. 

“N– no. No. I don’t care about that. I let it go years ago.”

“Let it go?”

“No. I mean–” Stupid. “Nothing.” Tongue muddled, caught. Terrible. 

“But it was something? Then? Answer me.” He jerks you again, harder this time so that your teeth click together. 

You shake your head no, but say, “Would you have been okay with it? If it had been you, the one kept in the dark.” Always the dark, again and again. “Would you have been okay never really knowing who I was?”

“You know me, cyar’ika.”

“Don't call me that.”

“You’re the only person in the entire galaxy who ever has.” And his touch is gentle and cradling now, supportive in a different way. 

“Would you have been okay with it?” You ask again stubbornly. 

“Do you think–”

“You say I’m the one that can’t ever give a straight answer, but you’re just as bad!”

“Do you think,” he repeats more forcefully, talking over you, “That your very first night on the Crest, when I gave you my name, when you told me you could see inside my mind, that I would have stayed had I not understood the reality of what it was we were getting into? What I was getting into? That there was that possibility. You told me, don’t you remember? That you could’ve looked any time. You’ve always had me in the palm of your hand, and I’ve always wanted to be just there.” His thumb starts to move gently up and down the inner slope of your bicep, it’s the first soft touch you’ve felt in two years. 

And it was something you’d always known. Of course. The most obvious thing between the two of you, besides the love. You bring your hand up slowly, pinching the lip of the helmet between your thumb and forefinger, tremulous and terrified, you pull him down slowly so that the hard curve meets your forehead in a soft press. The two of you are so still for a moment, shivering, but still. Soaking up the proximity of something so necessary for survival after going so long without. “I should have never left, but a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts. And I am more sorry than you will ever be able to know. For all of it.”

“Tell me what happened,” he whispers, voice smooth and deep, fathomless through the modulator. You close your eyes and think of the warm cave, the pool of water, the feel of this man that you love moving inside of you, using his body to translate all he’d felt for you with his touch. You think of the amazing ability people have to hurt those they love in ways no one else possesses. It is a cruel realization the business of loving someone brings about, the reality that to truly hurt someone, you must truly know them, and that to know is to love. 

“I was taken. Put in a very dark place. Hurt. They tried to make me forget, and I could not help but remember. It was all such a terrible mistake, Din. I made a terrible mistake.”

“Taken? Taken where? By who?” Voice full of panic and urgency. Everything you never wanted him to know. He brings one hand to his mouth, pulling the glove away by the edge of his teeth, and you follow it with your eyes as he lets it fall away, slowly, the dull thud of leather hitting steel, and then his skin, his skin on your face.  He cups your cheek in the palm of his hand, and it’s two years of heartache and a terrible noise coming from either one of you, an animal dying or coming to life, something painful and raw. He holds you so gently, and you let so many terrible things happen and now what will the two of you do? How will he ever look at you after he knows everything you’ve done? 

Everything you’ve ever done. Your eyes shift upwards again, the black transparisteel T-visor. That last, eternal barrier. That haunting flash of beskar in your mind, buried deep, come to the surface.

“A grave. Zealots. Servants of the Dark side.” You bring your hand up, run a slow, gentle finger along the edge of dark protecting his eyes from you. 

“Tell me,” he says gently.

But you shake your head, mouth pursed. Not that. Something else though… “I never looked, you know?” 

He knows you mean his face. “Why not?”

“It wasn’t mine to take. Not mine to have. It wasn’t the right time.”

“If there was ever going to be anyone, it would’ve been you.”

“There is one more thing.” Your voice sounds very far away. One of those terrible moments when your life suddenly branches out before you again, and you always know how a thing will end and there was never any other recourse but for the two of you to end up exactly here in this moment from the very first time. 

“I killed a Mandalorian once,” you finally, finally tell him. “Many, but there was one worse than all the rest.” 

I’ve never met a Mandalorian before, a lie and a truth. You’d never met one you hadn’t killed in the end. 

He goes shocked into stiffness, hands rigoring into cold shackles around your arms. They drop from where he grips you. He steps back, and in a way, it is such a relief. The truth you’ve held on the tip of your tongue, the thorn beneath your nail bed for so long, finally come into the light. 

“What?”

“Have you– have you ever done something so– so terrible that you regretted instantly? Something you felt in the moment you had no other choice but, and then– and then suddenly clarity sets in, and you realize you could have done everything else but what you’d just done? Wished you could turn back time in that very instant, and go back and change everything?” You press forward to clutch at his cloak, fingers twisting in the coarse fabric to force him to stay with you, but he pulls you away with fingers wrapped around your wrists, steps back again and again. 

“I’ve done terrible things–” you whisper, your eyes so wide, terrified of the thing you’re about to confess, of yourself, always, more than anything. “Things that you’d hate me for, if you knew the truth of them. To myself, to others.” You bring your hands up to your throat, wrapping your fingers around yourself there, feeling the patter of your thundering pulse against your palm. 

“Tell me,” he says again, and this is the last moment, the last stretch. The end is so near. You will look for relief in this feeling of horror, you decide. Like all other times when you’d been so entrenched in the pain of it all, in fear or loneliness or violence, you’ll look for the relief this confession will grant. Perhaps, absolution will finally be possible by way of confession. Exile, too, surely, afterwards, for you know there’s no way he’ll ever stay with you, look at you, after you tell him of your killing of his people. And you think again, that you have always been a monster, red, but if you’d been given a chance, a choice, then perhaps, you could have served as mantle and protector for a family that had never been afforded to you. You know that he could have been that, that you’ve lost the chance now for good. 

“After the fall of the Empire, the Dark and Vader, my master was weak, his acolytes dispersed and felled, their power waning. And for the first time in my life, I saw hope.” Your voice fluttering up with an airy note of that childlike wonder you’d felt in that moment of realization, when you’d recognized what it was you could become in that moment of freedom. “I took it, seized it. I killed him.” You walk backwards, blindly, needing the support of the wall to tell of this. “You know, my first memory is of my master. I can’t even remember my parents anymore. And he was never kind, surely. Never gentle, and caring only in a way that served him. But I belonged to him as any tool, weapon, belongs to a man, and there was something about that, that was meaningful. A child, alone, belonging to someone who would keep them no matter what. Sometimes, I try and remind myself of this, when I think too much on the things he had me do, the things I did for him, sometimes even gladly… I remind myself of this as a way of consolation. What else did I know? What other choice did I have? Death? Perhaps… But strangely, before… or,” You shake your head, your eyes falling closed as you search for the words or answers within yourself, “Strangely, I– I can’t remember when that changed, but it did because I didn’t always want to die. I– I wanted to live, even if it was for him. To please him or serve him or be useful in any way. They hoped to fill me with fear. But fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. And hate… leads to power. I was only ever the thing he wanted me to be in the moment I was powerful enough to defeat him. And you can’t know what that means, to live such a fruitless existence, to have no purpose… it’s terrible. But he finally gave me that in the most terrible and glorious of ways.” You open your eyes again to take him in, Din with the heart of a sun. 

“I don’t mean it as an excuse, but– but I think it’s important to remember. That he was ever the only one… it feels that, before I met you, he was the only other person I ever really knew. Only ever him, but then I met you, and then I knew you. And can a girl ever be more animal than girl? I don’t know… but surely if it was possible, then that’s what I was. So when I escaped, when I killed the only father I’d ever known, who was also a monster, yes, but also all I’d ever known, I was more animal than girl in that moment. You understand, Din?” You ask, but he gives no hint that he does, more droid than man now, and so you continue on anyways. “I killed the remainder of his following. I was stronger than them, stronger than him sometimes, and I know he feared that. I escaped to Corellia. The chaos of the planet was easy to hide within, but you must remember, again, I was more animal than anything else at that moment.” You give a short laugh, “I don’t know why all of my tragedy always seems to start and end on that planet. Perhaps, it’s why I keep going back there. And he–” You want to turn away, but force yourself to remain facing him. “He ended up joining me in that tragedy. He tried to help me, the Mandalorian, found me broken and discarded, waiting to die in the gutter like a street rat, entirely unaware of what it was to survive without the guiding hand of someone else.” You’d been so terrified, delirious and confused and reborn again – like an infant, come straight from a hostile and poisoned womb, newly birthed unto the galaxy and left to fend for yourself. Mind and body, savaged, yes, but with a soul that sang and howled with victorious growing pains at your newfound freedom. It had been so long, trapped, so long you’d forgotten the sound of your mother’s voice, the feel of your father’s strong hand on your child softened cheek, but you’d been free then, and you’d thought that even if you were to die like that, in the slums of Corellia, on the street like a pauper, at least you’d die clutching freedom in your hand. And then he’d found you. 

“But I had never known help, Din. Never. I couldn’t recognize such a thing. He led me to safety within the city, saw me for what I was, a broken, haggardly thing, perhaps, and he helped me. And once he was done showing me his kindness, I killed him. For no other reason except mistrust and habit. I– I didn’t know there was another recourse, that that wasn't what I had to do. I didn’t know I had other choices besides violence. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I killed him, Din. I’m sorry I never told you. I’m sorry I am the thing they made me. I’ve tried to be better, I’ve failed bitterly, and I’m sorry.”

You hope he understands that you hadn’t thought before you’d acted, more animal than girl, you’d performed on base instinct. And worse than anything else, he’d had a son, that Mandalorian, like Din does now, and you can still bring forth the memory of the child’s face in your mind even after all this time. You’d seen him as you’d ripped through his father’s mind, pilfered and savaged his memories and left him for dead in a filth strewn, back alleyway. An entire life torn apart in a single moment, and in the very millisecond before his soul had left him, the last thought you’d laid eyes on within his mind had been the image of his own face reflected back at him as he’d seen it earlier that day just before he’d hidden behind the protective helm of his Creed. You’d stolen his future, stolen a child’s father, and desecrated a life’s worth of dedication all in one single foul, unthinking instant. You’d not even given him the dignity of dying with his Creed intact. 

After all this time, you still felt that was what made the sin all the worse. That unintentional theft, to openly spit in the face of his benevolence and generosity, an unforgivable thing. 

And it would be easy to say that you hadn’t recognized that which he’d been offering – the sight of a merciful and helping hand extended to you without malintent or pretense. That you hadn’t recognized it, and perhaps, it was the truth, but you were sure it didn’t really matter at the end of it.  A thing worse than all the death and destruction and pain you’d dolled out in the name of the dark side, that one act was singular in its unencumbered horror for you’d not had the farce of your master's orders to hide behind, the helm of the dark whispering in your ear, stealing you of your choice. This had been wholly your own action, entirely your doing. 

The first thing that had ever belonged only to you in your entire life. And strange because during your time as a Sith, you’d undoubtedly killed any number of the beskar covered warriors, but this last one, it had been a kill without thought, without necessity, without influence. Only as yourself. Perhaps it had set the stage for all the rest. Perhaps it had set the stage for your own fall. 

You aren’t aware you’re crying until you feel his mouth on your face, his throat vibrating with low growls as he licks at your tears, the hollow thud of the helmet hitting the floor finally registering in your ears. Stop, it’s okay. Please, don’t cry, little one. You squeeze your eyes shut tight as you can, trying to pull away, escape him again, but he pulls you close. The long, uncompromising line of him pressing all the way along your softness, inciting the chill of death inside of you back to life. 

“Do you really think,” he starts low, the sound of his unmodulated voice for the first time in so long, “that there’s anything you could ever do, that I’ve not forgiven you for already a thousand times over?”

You begin to thrash in his grip, feral and wild and not wanting to be tamed this time, but he does not let you run, not again. His arms like bands of iron around your waist, stitching you to the cold steel of his chest and crushing your protests from your lungs. The two of you fold slowly to the ground. Huddling you between his crouched thighs, you try and push back, but he cages you between his knees and arms, and you turn your face away from him, trying to escape his wet mouth, the damp of his lips catching against your tear soaked lashes. “I never wanted to be this– this thing,” you gasp by way of another apology. “I never wanted to live like this – strange and violent and obscured in the shadow of something I was too young to ever understand until it was too late. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I lied or deceived you or made you feel something for someone that never really existed. Most of all, I’m sorry that it could not be true,” you gasp. “I’m sorry that I could not be true. That I couldn’t be something else.”

“You have nothing to apologize to me for. You think…” he says very slowly. Measured. “You think that I haven't done terrible things, as well? That I haven’t killed when I, perhaps, could have been merciful? That I’ve never been afraid or lost or weak? That I’ve never let violence overtake me? Worst of all, that sometimes I even liked it. We’ve all done things to be ashamed of. We will all, at one point, do things to be ashamed of. That is what it is to be human.” Human. You don’t know if you’ve ever truly been that. “What means more to me is honor and loyalty and character – these are things you’ve shown me.”

“I haven’t,” you cry.

“You have,” he growls, and he takes you between his hands violently so that you’re crying out in pain from your wounds or shock or fear of what he’ll do to you now. Crushing you to him so fiercely you feel as though he’s trying to squeeze your very heart from your chest so that he might look upon it with his own two eyes. “You exist. You exist, and you are here and you are mine. You were never given a choice. You were a child, stolen and abused and turned into something you were never supposed to be. The Force within you is a gift, and they tried to corrupt it into something it should have never been, but they did not succeed.” You try and shake your head at him, push him away, scream and cry and tell him that he’s wrong, that you are bad and poisoned and that even he, the great warrior, cannot save you. But he grips your jaw in his long fingers, grinding your bones between his strength, and halts your disagreement. He snarls at you, so furious at what had been done to you. You realize, suddenly, that he is vibrating with barely restrained rage. For you. Not at you. 

“They did not succeed. Your presence here, your regret, your wish for more, for better, your very escape, proves to me that they did not. You were too strong, too good.” I am not, you moan, starting to thrash and claw in his arms again. You don’t know, you’re wrong. “I know your true heart, I see you. As much as you hate it, as much as you wish it were otherwise, I know the true desires of your mind. As much as it pains you to be seen, to be known, I do. I always have, from that very first moment in the darkness, I saw you.” And his voice holds so much conviction, so much surety, you’re left with no other choice but to believe him, for Din is good and honest and true, and if he says it’s so, then it must be so. 

You go loose and weak suddenly, eyes pressed together tightly, squeezing tears out through crinkled lashes. Din is good and honest and true, and if he says it’s so, then it must be so. Your entire body is trembling, fraught with nerves and a surging of truth inside of you so overwhelming your heart beats in your ears, behind the fragile membrane of your eyelids. 

They’d done such terrible things to you, over and over again, and you were nothing but a single blip in the galaxy of stars, a singular pinpoint of terrible pain. That’s what they’d turned you into, but here, in his arms, you’re beginning to realize they’d failed at their goal.

He pulls your face into the space between his jaw and shoulder then, so tenderly, and you finally open your eyes to take in the skin of his throat, the growing stubble there. “Come here, sweetheart. It’s okay. We’re together now.”

“I’m not sweet, don’t call me that.” But there is no conviction behind your words, and you clutch at him more tightly. Your fingers twisting into the folds of his cape, clawing at the skin of his cheeks. 

“You are for me,” he says. And it’s true. There’d always been something about him that’d made you fragile in the face of his strength, in a way you’d needed, in a way you’d never had before.

“No. No.” You try and push and pull at him weakly, fruitlessly. “I’m leaving soon. I just need to catch my breath, and then I’m going.”

And he clutches you tighter at that, fingers twisting through your hair to jerk your head back painfully. You snap your eyes shut, mouth falling open on a gasp. “You’re not going fucking anywhere, do you hear me?” 

He’s being so careless with his face, dangling it before your closed-eyed face. “I won’t open my eyes. I don’t care what you do.”

He gives a rough sound of frustration, pressing his panting mouth to your cheek, growling against your skin, “Try to leave me again and see what fucking happens,” and there’s no doubt or wavering in his voice, only a great sort of conviction laced in terrible fury. “Go anywhere in the galaxy and see how long it takes me to find you again.”

“Please, Din– it hurts.” You can’t help it, he’s being too rough for the state you’re in now, barely holding yourself together at the seams. His hands leave you immediately, pulling back so that you’re sagging between his crouched thighs. You listen to the sound of him picking up the helmet, the hydraulics engaging once again as he fits it over his face. 

The two of you are quiet for a moment, catching your breaths. Your lungs feel set to burst, your vision jumping from bright light to murky dark and your stomach twists a sharp, brutal pain. Everything hurts everywhere. 

“How long?” And you know he’s asking about your time captured. 

“I don’t know,” you say, bracing your hand against the hard strength of his thigh, barely able to keep yourself upright. “I lost track of time, but it was winter when they took me away.”

“It’s winter again now.”

“Yes.” And the truth sits like a heavy smog between the two of you, a very long time. “I don’t want you to forgive me,” you say then. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Which is why you won’t look at my face.” He pets your head so gently, and you lay your cheek against the beskar over his thigh, letting the coolness of the metal settle the flames running beneath your skin, and think it is terrible, sometimes, to be understood so deeply. Tears drip over the bridge of your nose and lose themselves in the weave of his pants. 

He shifts, settling on a folded foot beneath himself, bringing you in closer to his chest, careful, careful, as if you’d been made of nothing but breakable hurt. Silence swells, fraught and unbearable, between the two of you, and your heart beats in rebounding thumps. You feel you know what he’s going to say before he even says it. “I told you that there’s nothing you could ever do I’d not forgive you for. I think… I think that love allows for forgiveness.”

You choke on your breath. “Don’t say it. Please, don’t say it,” you beg. He continues to pet your hair slowly. 

“I love you. And you’re going to listen to me say it. If I have to live with it, then so do you.”

“This doesn’t feel like love, this feels like punishment,” you whisper, tears falling faster, soaking the duraweave beneath. 

“How would you know? You’ve not had it before.”

Your eyes snap up to the face of his helmet, and you try and jerk away, but he holds you in place with a hand fisted in your hair. His voice is still gentle, not meant to hurt. “Fuck you,” you spit, hurt anyways.

“But neither have I, and yet, I know that’s what this is.” You shake your head in his grip, so full of confusion, listening to the wheezing whittling of your breaths pass in and out of you. You can’t understand. You don’t. Or you don’t want to. 

There is something humiliating about the easiness of his forgiveness. He forgives you now, and so what was all that for? Where does the point of all your suffering go now that he’s so swiftly given you that which you’d craved for so long? 

“I don’t give a damn what you’ve done. I’d let you stab a knife through my heart if it pleased you and die still loving you.” He cups the side of your tear soaked face, drags the warm, dry pads of his thumb gently beneath one swollen, aching eye. The callus of his trigger finger catches on the paper fragile skin, and there is a writhing, howling pain working inside of you, inside your heart. 

I love you too, you mouth up at him, words made only of air, but no less true. “But I can’t look yet,” you tell him, “I’m not ready yet.” Not strong enough to grant myself that. 

“I know.” And you’re grateful. Grateful for this, for his understanding, even if it is terrible. Grateful he’d not kissed you yet; you’re not ready for that yet either. 

“How can you not be angry with me? How can you not hate me?”

“The only thing I’ve ever been angry at you about, is that you forced me to betray you.”

“I didn’t–”

“I should have never let you go.”

“I didn’t want you to,” your voice breaks. “I wanted you to fight.”

“I know, cyar’ika. I should have seen that.”

There is, with startling clarity, the realization that there was no point at all. That there is never any point, justification to suffering. It just is, and then it is not. 

“Why did I do all of it?” You plead, cry.

“Why did you do all of it?” He asks you instead, for at the end, you’re the only one who can say. 

And there is no justification, and no point, and it all just is. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

“You did what you had to. Or what you thought was right. I know. I see who you really are. I understand.” And absolution is a very specific sort of thing, and it lives here between the two of you. It always had

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