Your mouth moves before your brain catches up. “Simon—”

He stops, buried balls deep inside you. His eyes lift to yours from beneath the black smear of his paint. Brown eyes gone flat and dangerous.

“What?”

Your fingers swipe at his throat, and then pull back to show him your now candied fingertips. “You’re bleeding.”

For a second, he just stares at you.

Then his mouth shifts beneath the mask. “S’not mine.”

The room seems to go airless around you. For a moment, your brain does not know what to do with the words.

Not mine.

They land somewhere distant - muffled by euphoria and the heat of him still seated inside you. They should mean something immediately - they should send you upright, sober you, sharpen you. But you’re too gone beneath him, too pliant and overheated and pinned, your thighs trembling around his waist while he stays buried deep enough that every breath you take has to move around him.

So you just stare at him.

At the dark paint around his eyes, at the blood smear, at the shape of his shoulders above you. You stare long enough that the unusual details begin arranging themselves in whatever clear space you’ve got left in your mind.

His gloves, first.

They’re clean. Fresh black tactical gloves, one of them still gripping your hip as he stares down at you in pause. You can’t shake the feeling that they’re different - you know his kit. You know the worn seams, the scuffs, the little frays on the knuckles from use. These aren’t the pair he wore earlier.

Your gaze flicks lower.

His shirt, too.

Not the one from briefing. Not the one with the faded shoulder seam and the dust at the collar. This one is clean, dark, newly pulled on in a hurry. You catch a faint whiff of barracks detergent and bathroom soap with every move he makes.

He cleaned up.

The thought comes through the haze in pieces.

Simon cleaned himself up before he came here but somehow, he missed this. One dark smear beneath his jaw.

You swallow. Your voice comes out thin. “What happened?”

Simon watches your mouth form the words.

Your breathing sounds too loud now, while his somehow stays perfectly even - like he isn’t pressed into you to the hilt - like he isn’t the reason your thighs are shaking around his waist. Like he didn’t come to your room with another persons blood still drying in the place he forgot to wash. He lowers himself closer and the mattress dips beneath the weight of him.

His masked mouth brushes the corner of yours, not quite kissing you but just hovering there - dragging the rough fabric against your skin as he speaks.

“What happened was,” he pauses. “Graves opened his fuckin’ mouth.”

A cold thread winds through the heat in your stomach.

You go still beneath him, even though your cunt is still fluttering helplessly around the thick of him. The name alone does something ugly to the room. Sours the air. Pulls the world back in around the two of you.

“What—” you have to stop to breathe. Your nails dig into his shoulder. “What did he say?”

Simon’s hand slides slowly from your hip.

His palm moves over your waist, up your ribs, dragging goosebumps in its wake. He maps you like he already knows every reaction he is about to get - like he can feel the exact second your pulse jumps. His gloved fingers skim the base of your throat and settle there.

Thumb resting over your pulse. Counting it.

“He said he’d wondered what you sounded like when you begged.”

Your breath locks. You blink at him, stupidly.

For a second, you can’t reconcile the sentence with the room you’re in. With Simon above you. With Graves’s name in Simon’s mouth and blood under Simon’s jaw and your own pulse hammering against his thumb like it wants to betray you.

But Simon says it like he has had the words sitting behind his teeth for hours. Like he has been waiting to put them somewhere. Like he needs you to understand exactly what happened to the man who said them.

“He said,” Simon continues, each word dragged low through his teeth, “that a mouth like yours would be wasted on 141.”

Your nails bite into his shoulder.

“I-I—“ you whimper. “Si—“

His hips move before you can say anything else.

A slow, devastating thrust that punches the air out of you and leaves the rest of his name caught uselessly in your throat. He watches you take it. Watches your face twist. Watches the thought you were trying to form scatter completely.

“That Price needs to put you in your place,” he hisses through his teeth. “That he’d have had you on your knees by now.”

Your stomach twists.

You shake your head, but you don’t even know what you’re denying. Graves. Simon. The heat blooming under your skin. The fact that the words should disgust you cleanly, but Simon’s voice saying them like a death sentence makes something dark and shameful coil inside you.

He pulls out just to thrust in again.

Harder this time - hard enough to break the breath right out of you. Enough to make the headboard creak traitorously behind you. Enough to make your thighs tighten around his waist before you can stop them.

Simon feels it.

“Then he looked at me,” he says, voice dropping into something ruined and vicious, “and asked if I’d taught you to take orders.”

Your heart slams so hard you feel it in your throat, pulsing viscously under his palm. The room narrows to three things - Simon’s eyes, the blood on his neck, and the place where he is still holding you down.

There is blood on him.

Someone else’s blood.

Graves’s blood.

The realization comes slowly at first, then all at once.

You see it too clearly: Simon standing there silent while Graves ran his mouth. Simon listening. The moment the Ghost stops being a man in a room and becomes a consequence. You see the gloves he must have taken off. The blood on the old pair. The careful cleanup after. The way he must have washed his hands, changed, checked himself in the mirror, decided he was clean enough to come to you.

Clean enough. Except for the one place he missed.

Simon watches the realization move across your face.

“Oh God.” You force the words out. “What did you do?”

Your voice is barely a whisper.

His answer is immediate. “I hit him.”

The answer is too simple, too small for the blood under his jaw and the hell in his eyes and that is only because you know Simon.

You know the careful economy of him - the terrifying restraint. The discipline carved into his bones so deep it has become part of his breathing. Simon does not hit men because he is angry. He does not waste movement. He does not lose control unless something in him has already decided the consequence is worth it.

He ends things because he has weighed the cost and found it acceptable.

Your fingers curl tighter in his shirt. “How bad?”

For the first time, something almost like satisfaction passes through his eyes.

His hips roll in one slow, merciless stroke and your back arches before you can stop it. You spread your legs and take him deeper; helplessly, embarrassingly, betraying every sensible thought trying to form in your head.

“How—“ you try to ask again, but the question fractures halfway through another thrust.

Simon lowers his mouth to your ear. “Bad enough Price had to pull me off him.”

Your stomach flips in something stupid. Fear should come first.

It doesn’t.

It should be horror. Concern. Anger. Maybe all three. You should shove at his chest. Demand to know if he’s lost his fucking mind. Tell him he can’t do that, can’t put his hands on Graves over his disgusting mouth and a half-formed threat. Can’t turn command into a blood sport. Can’t risk his place, his rank, Price’s trust, your trust, just because another man said something deserving yet ultimately meaningless.

But what blooms under your ribs is not sensible enough to be outrage - it is hot. It is fucking shameful.

It is dark and possessive and awful in the exact shape of him.

Because he heard another man talk about you. Heard Graves put his hands on you in theory. Heard him degrade you, heard him imagine you on your knees, your mouth, your begging, and decided violence was the only answer he trusted.

Your body betrays you before your pride can stop it - a tight little clench around him.

Simon feels it. Of course he does.

He stills above you, and somehow that is worse than movement. He’s pressed to the hilt again, the pressure of him so intense now it leaves your breath caught uselessly behind your teeth. His eyes narrow in something that sees the betrayal before you can hide it.

Your face burns.

“No,” you whisper, before he even says anything.

His mouth shifts beneath the mask. “Oh.”

The sound is low. Cruel in its understanding.

Your pulse kicks under his thumb. “Simon—”

“There she is.”

Your breath stutters, caught somewhere between a moan and a denial, and you hate that he hears both. Hate that he can read you so easily. Hate that your body has already answered him before your pride can even get its feet under it.

Simon looks down at the place where your legs have tightened, then slowly back up to your face. It’s a deliberate act; he is taking inventory of every betrayal.

“You liked that.” He croons.

You shake your head, but it’s weak. Useless. Barely more than the brush of your hair against the pillow.

“N-no.”

His thumb presses against your throat, not hard, just enough to feel the wild little flutter of your pulse.

“Liar.”

Your mouth opens but nothing comes out. You can’t find a single defence, a single outrage. No clever thing you can throw between you and the truth and it is all because he is still inside you. Still wearing fresh gloves like he thought that would be enough to keep you from knowing. Still carrying that one missed smear of Graves’s blood under his jaw like a secret he failed to bury properly.

And now he has caught you reacting to it.

Caught the hitch in your breath. The clench of your cunt. The heat climbing up your neck. The way your whole body went soft and greedy around him the second you understood what he had done.

Simon’s eyes go darker. Hungry in a way that feels worse than anger.

“You should be pissed at me,” he murmurs.

His hips pull back an inch - just enough to make you feel the loss before he sinks back in, slow and devastating, until your hands shift to grab at his shoulders because there is no dignity left in you. No clean line of thought. No clever answer.

“You should be callin’ me reckless.”

Another thrust. Your eyes squeeze shut.

His hand leaves your throat and for half a second, you think he is letting you breathe. That is until both of his hands find your own wrists and pin them firmly above your head.

Your eyes snap open to meet his, expecting full satisfaction, but what you see is worse.

It’s all of him - the width of his shoulders blotting out the dim light, the black of his mask, the hard set of his jaw beneath it, the blood under his neck, those steady eyes watching you like he has already decided exactly how much of you he is going to take apart before he is finished.

“You should be asking what the fuck I was thinkin’,” he says, and you can almost hear the grin in it.

You swallow. “You can’t—”

He moves again, and the words break apart in your mouth.

Your back arches and your fingers curl helplessly against his grip. Your knees shift higher around his ribs, dragging him closer instead of pushing him away, because apparently your body has no interest in helping you survive this with any pride intact.

Simon’s eyes drop to your mouth, then back up to the glass in yours.

“I can’t what?” He murmurs.

You try.

You really do.

You drag the sentence up through the wreckage of yourself, but he is too deep, too thick, too much. The stretch of him keeps interrupting every thought before it can become language.

“You can’t just—” your breath catches on a thrust. “You can’t hit him because he—”

“Because he talked about fucking you?” Your whole body jolts. His eyes burn into yours. “If that’s what you mean, say it proper. Like you fuckin’ believe it.”

You can’t.

Your mouth parts, but all that comes out is a broken little sound when he grinds deeper, cockhead bullying your walls slow enough to make you feel every inch of him, cruel enough to leave you trembling closer to the edge. Any sensible thought is drowned out by the wave of bliss washing over you.

Simon makes a low sound. A rough breath leaves him.

“Too far gone to scold me now?”

You glare at him, or try to. It doesn’t land.

And it didn’t stand a chance, either. Not like this - not with your lips parted and your eyes glassy and cunt stretched pathetically around him. Not with your wrists trapped above your head and your hips still trying to meet him every time he gives you another devastating inch.

“I’m, mmff—serious,” you whisper.

“So am I.”

“Simon—”

“No.” His voice cuts low through the room. “You don’t get to say my name like that while you’re grippin’ me tighter for it.”

Your breath leaves you in a gasp.

He feels the way you clench again, and you see it hit him. See the slight flare of his nostrils beneath the mask. The way his eyes flutter for just a second. The way something brutal and possessive moves through him before he can smooth it down.

“Mhm. Yeah.” His voice drops into something rougher. “Fuckin’ problem, you are.”

Your face burns hotter.

You want to deny it - you want to shove at his chest and tell him he’s wrong. Tell him it’s just your body. Just the position. Just the fact that he has you pinned and overstimulated and too cockdrunk to think straight.

But it’s useless because Simon would know it’s a lie.

He moves again, slow and deep, and the denial dies somewhere behind your teeth.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “Nothing clever now?”

“Mmff.” Your nails dig into your own palms where he holds your wrists down. “Shut up.”

His eyes flash. “There she is.”

“I mean it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do.”

He gives you another measured thrust, and your voice breaks around a gasp. Simon watches it happen with only the most intent focus.

“Try that again.”

You hate him a little. You want him too much for it to matter.

“You’re—” you inhale sharply when he pulls out almost all the way and then back presses in hard enough to make the mattress shift beneath you. “You’re going to get yourself benched.”

“Probably.”

“Price is going to—”

“Already did.”

You blink up at him, breathless and stupid. “What?”

His thumb drags once along the inside of your wrist.

“Read me the riot act.”

Your nerves jump at that. “And you came here?”

“Yes.”

Something in your chest tightens. “Why?”

Simon looks at you for a long second and the room almost seems to shrink around his silence. Your head swims with all of it; the blood under his jaw, the fresh gloves, the heat of him still locked between your thighs.

When he finally speaks, his voice is quieter. “Because I had to see you.”

God. You think he’s lost his mind.

“Simon—“ your back arches and his mouth falls to your neck. “That’s not—this isn’t—“

He lowers himself closer to you, folding you deeper into the mattress.

“You think I lost it because he insulted you?” You don’t answer. His thumb strokes once over the pulse flying at your wrist. “No, sweet’eart.”

His hips move again, slow enough to be cruel, deep enough to make your eyes flutter.

“I lost it because he thought about touching what’s mine.”

The words hit you low and you make a sound you do not mean to make. Your cunt pulses at the word. Mine. A catastrophic vulnerability to a word you will never ever tire of hearing him say.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “That’s what you like, yeah?”

You squirm under him, helpless. “Simon—”

“He said your name like he had a right to it.” His voice roughens. “Like he’d survive putting his hands on you.” The next thrust punches a feral moan out of you, and the pace turns to something almost vicious. “I had to let him know what mine felt like first.”

You moan, eyes shut. Helpless and needy as a whore.

He pauses again. One hand leaves your wrists and grips your jaw. “Look at me.”

You do.

“Another man touches you like this,” he whispers, a lethal rasp through his teeth, “and I’ll break every finger he owns.”

You shiver. His eyes flick down over your face, your mouth, the wrecked shape of you beneath him.

“And if he talks about you like that again?”

You barely manage the whisper. “What?”

Simon presses his forehead to yours. “I won’t stop at his face.”

For a long second, neither of you moves. Then he rolls his hips, and the whole world narrows back down to him - his body over yours, his hand at your jaw, Graves’s blood drying on his neck, and the awful, devastating tenderness in the way Simon kisses you like he is still trying not to become the worst version of himself.

One of your hands slip out from under his to touch the smear of blood again. Simon catches it and pins it back beside your head.

“Leave it.”

Your breath trembles. “Why?”

His eyes darken. “Because I want you to remember what happens when a man forgets who you belong to.”

And in the back of your mind, you think maybe you should argue. Maybe you should tell him you don’t belong to anyone or that this is crazy or that he’s going to get you both transferred - but then he does what he always does and starts fucking you deep and hard and mean - and your body reacts before your pride can save you.

Simon huffs a quiet, humorless breath. “That’s what I thought.”

Then he kisses you - filthy, possessive, furious, and fucks you like Graves is still in the room and Simon needs the whole world to understand it.

You wanted to get up to finally rinse.

To feel like a person again.

But his calloused hand came down flat on your hip the moment you moved, before your knee had even cleared his leg.

"Where?" is all he managed, voice wrecked and low and gravelly with sleep, the word barely fully formed on his tongue.

"I'm disgusting," you complained, a whisper.

"Mm." His thumb moved across the jut of your hipbone, finding crust of himself there. His eyes hadn't opened yet. The corner of his mouth had, though, dragging up at one side. "Yeah… y'are."

"I'm glad you're happy with yourself," you huffed sleepily.

His hand kept going, palm dragging down over your hip and around the back of your bent thigh, and then up again into the real mess of you, fingers finding where you were still half-open and swollen from last night, slipping through the sticky wet, the pad of his middle finger circling your sensitive entrance. It was too much and not enough at once — the drag of him over flesh that hadn't settled, a wince folding straight into something hotter, your hips pushing into his hand.

He made a sound; pleased, throaty, his brows pulling in for a second.

"Look at that," he murmured against your temple. "Bet you don' even wan' it cleaned up, do you?"

"Shut up," you half-heartedly murmured.

"Mm-mm," he protested.

Then he rolled, the whole heavy heat of him coming over you in one move, knee shoving your thighs apart before you'd even agreed to anything, and the air between your bodies went humid and ripe, his chest sticking to yours, the dense hair on it dragging over your tender nipples. And your body answered him — thighs falling open the rest of the way, some primal part of you glad of his weight, glad to be pinned under it, glad he was solid and here and breathing on you. He braced up on a forearm and looked down at you, cyan eyes cracked open and bloodshot, lashes still gummed together. He looked like hell. But so did you, you were sure, and he was staring down like you were the best thing he'd ever seen.

He spat into his own hand without breaking from your eyes, crude, and reached down between you to slick his cock with it. You spread more open for him, your hands coming up to his back where sweat was gathered at the base of his spine.

He sank all the way in on the first stroke, stretching your sore walls, an obscene wet crackle of air pushing out to make room for him, Your whole body remembered him in one shoved open rush. He dropped his forehead to the side of your neck and let out a long breath through his nose.

"Four months," he rasped, almost to himself, the syllables coming apart as they fell. "Four months this was the only thing in my fuckin' head." Then, against your mouth, the gravel coming back into it, his throbbing cock bumping your cervix, your nails scrabbling over his sweaty skin for purchase: "That's it, dove. You can take it. You can take it, look at you, you've had worse than this off me."

You could hear his grin.

"Since last night?" you managed to get out. "Or— generally?"

A huff against your lips, almost a laugh, his hips not stopping. "Both."

He fucked you like he hadn't slept it off at all, like four months of going without you had only stored it up, his cock dragging thick and deep through the wreckage he'd already made of you. Every push of it pressed the sweat-slick of his furry belly against your clit so you got it both ways at once, inside and out, until your spine wanted to leave your body.

He talked the whole time — clipped, half-swallowed, filth pouring out of him like silver.

"Feel that," he asked. "That's last night still in you, that is. Didn't go anywhere." His teeth caught your jaw, dragged, overgrown beard scratching at your skin. "Gonna add some more to it." A deep grind of his hips that pushed the breath out of you. "Was lying there, every night, in the dark thinking about this. You under me, made a mess of, soaked through and still begging for more. Had to think about something else quick or I'd've embarrassed myself." His mouth is in your ear, hot and foul. "Four months of that. And now here you are. Wetter than the inside of my own head."

"John— you're so—," you couldn't get anything else out before he'd angled up and a moan tore out of you instead.

"Gross? Annoying?" he offered, hips snapping now, the bed knocking the wall, his hand slipping between you and the mattress to cant your cunt to his liking. "Yeah. And yet you're clenched down on me like you've never been happier. Funny, that."

It built faster than it had any right to. You'd stopped being able to do anything but hold on — one hand fisted in the wet sheet, the other clamped to the flexing muscle of his ass, your heels skidding down his back for purchase that wasn't there, every thrust knocking another broken little sound loose from a throat you no longer had any say over. And when you came you spasmed around him with your nails dug into the meat of his shoulders and your mouth open on a noise you'd have been embarrassed by if your brain hadn't been simmered down and reduced to nothing. He cursed and pushed his face into your throat and licked the salt off it, tongue flat against the tendon, groaning into your flesh as you fluttered and squeezed and dragged him over the edge with you.

He spilled deep with a groan you're not sure you've ever heard from him before, and then stayed there. Heavy. Crushing. His heart going hard against your chest, his breath sawing at your collarbone. Neither of you moved — both of you a single disgusting glued-together animal. Roadkill, maybe.

Underneath the slowing wreck of your own pulse, the feeling you'd been fending off since he walked through the front door finally claimed you — he was home. Your throat went tight, and you turned your face into his damp hair so he wouldn't catch the sound that squeezed out of it.

He exhaled a warm gust against your throat, then he dragged his lips to the corner of yours and kissed you — sloppy, tasting of sleep and salt and the both of you mixed past telling each other apart.

cw: mature language and content, suggestive language and content, graphic depictions of violence, smut, unprotected piv, cumplay, oral, simon is not a good or nice person (except to reader), reader also maybe isn't a good person who knows, reader has hair long enough to hold, curvy/plus-sized!reader, size difference, size kink, military inaccuracies, 18+

There is a special place in hell for men like Michael.

You can see her through the window by the door. Her big eyes are looking at where you are, paws against the glass. Her mouth opens, and she scratches at the window, and your bottom lip trembles as you set your hand down where she touches.

You could care less about the things you left inside. Your clothes, your bags, your shoes, even your fucking computer can stay behind, but not her. Your tabby cat is inside, sitting by the window, and Michael changed the fucking locks.

You bang on the door for an hour. You leave, come back, keep banging, but no one ever answers. You've never felt this desperate or uneasy, but every time you come back and see her by the window, you nearly lose all of your composure. It isn't fair. She doesn't belong to him. He can take years from you, take your money, take your sanity, but he won't take her. You'll come back every single day. You'll become a nuisance. You'll never let him relax. Until he gives her back to you, he will never know peace.

A single day passes before you decide it's time to take drastic measures.

The nearest military base is situated a good distance away, but not so far that you won't drive to its neighboring city. There's a small main road with a few local shops, including a few restaurants, a bookstore, a coffee shop, and the crown jewel—a pub.

It's just after supper time when you ring the bell above the door walking inside. On a Friday evening, it's lively, packed close with warmth and tall pints and plastic baskets full of chips and greasy fingerfoods.

There's a lot of military around here. You can tell by their haircuts and the way they chug their glasses; but you aren't looking for baby-faced rookies with too much pent-up aggression. You're looking for the meanest guy in the room, and that means someone with scars and someone who goes cloudy behind the eyes when you ask him how he's gotten back from where he's been.

That man is sitting at the far booth with his back to the wall. A place where he can have an eye on the rest of the room at all times. Big, gloved hand wrapped around a sweating glass, gaze focused on the foam of his beer as he pretends to listen to whatever the red-cheeked man across from him is laughing about.

You ask the bartender what they're drinking and order another round, picking up each glass and making your way towards their table. You'd be nervous if you weren't so determined. You stand awkwardly beside the table before his friend notices you there.

"Tha' fer us, bonnie?"

He juts his chin out at the drinks you're holding, and you set them down with a nervous smile.

"Yeah," you look between them. You fixate on the big guy, who barely squints at you over his drink, and you bite your lip. "I was hoping you had room for one more."

His friend cackles, "aye. Always fer a pretty face."

"Cute," you swallow. "But…I wasn't really talking to you."

The bigger one sits up at that. He leans back in the booth, rolling out his shoulders, and you hop up onto the seat next to him. His friend seems to get the message, picking up his new drink and tipping it towards you before taking a long drink of it and going to find a warm spot at the bar.

"Lookin' for advice or a fuck?"

"Neither," you say softly. "You're big, yeah? Are people…generally afraid of you?"

He laughs, and when he wipes at his masked face, you see a glimpse of a tattoo sleeve that adorns his massive left arm.

"Suppose."

"Great. How much for you to be my bodyguard for a few hours?"

He kisses his teeth under the mask, and then he turns his head to look down at you. His eyes are half-lidded, the skin looking a little greasy under the eye-black smudged there, but he's so calm and collected and amused. You've amused him; you're entertaining him. It's the most interesting thing that's happened to him all week, and you hope you're keeping his attention.

"Wot's tha' include?"

"It's gonna be illegal," you mumble, biting your bottom lip. "Just a little bit."

"Tha's my specialty, love."

"Not murder," you clarify, and he just shrugs. "Just…a little breaking and entering. Maybe some intimidation."

"'s Friday night, swee'eart, at least offer me somethin' fun."

"This isn't funny," you suck in a shaky breath. "It's…" You look down at the sticky pub table, swallowing again. You dig your nails into your own legs to keep your composure. "I need to get something back. Something that belongs to me. So it's not really…it's not really stealing."

A pregnant silence falls between you. You fail to keep the tears at your lash line back, and you quickly use the back of your hand to wipe your face gently. You think about your cat scratching for you on the other side of the window. You think about her sweet face; you think about Michael forgetting to feed her in the mornings as he usually did, and how he never changed the water filter in time even when you asked him to.

"'m Simon."

The low timbered voice breaks you out of your inner spiral. You look up at him again, and when you meet his eyes, you're finally able to let out a breath of relief. You don't know why, but there's something extremely soothing about sitting next to him. About being in his vicinity. He's so large and takes up so much space, but it's warm there, and he's not as mean as his outer layer might suggest. He's calm, and the way he presents himself tells you that it is not by luck that he's still sitting beside you.

You tell him your name, and his gloved hand touches under your chin.

"Olright, love. Lead the way."

Every time you have ever come back to this apartment, you have met the closed door with dread. A little fear. You feel none of that; not with the apparition at your back. You knock on the window beside the door, and like always, she appears. She meows on the other side, her eyes wet as she scratches and sniffs. You look over your shoulder at Simon who tilts his head to the side.

"This wot he stole?"

You look back at her on the other side of the window, shrugging.

"No," you say softly. "But it's all that matters."

The jiggling of metal brings your attention back to him. Simon is at the door, a multi-tool in one hand, and he's focused intently on working the doorknob until you hear the sound of a lock turn and then the door opens. The chain on the door jangles just as Simon opens it slightly, and you watch with rapt attention as he sticks his arm inside for just a few seconds, and then he swings the door open wide.

You push past him, reaching for the cat. She meows loudly, coming right to you, and you coo as you bend and pick her up from the floor. Loud purrs and sweet chirps follow as you hug her to your chest. You pet her little head, turning towards the living room. You used to keep her carrier behind the couch, and you find it as you go searching for it, exactly where you left it. You slip her inside and zip it up.

"What the fuck is this?"

You freeze, standing up straight and turning. You're caught, definitely—you knew he must have been home by the fact that the chain was latched, but you tried the nice way. You weren't going to get your cat back by being patient, not anymore.

"I'm just getting her, I'll…I was just leaving."

"Fuck no, you broke into my flat."

"Our flat," you snap back, putting the straps of the carrier over your shoulder. "And I'm leaving."

Michael looks like he's going to take a step towards you, but then he notices the dark shape in the corner of the room. He frowns a little, squinting.

"Who the bloody hell is that?"

You turn just in time to see Simon take a small step forward. The sudden movement seems to terrify Michael; he scrambles backwards into the kitchen counter, making the plates behind him fall off the counter and shatter onto the ground. He nearly trips over himself trying to get distance, and Simon seems to think it's very funny. He laughs, chest heaving, and he looks down at you as he gets closer.

"Flopping like a fuckin' fish, he is, in'he?"

Michael looks around frantically before he finds a pair of prongs. His hand shakes as he holds the pointy end towards Simon, spitting at him.

"Get the fuck out of my flat! T-The both of you!"

Simon's reaction tells you that maybe he has a few wires crossed in his head. He steps forward instead of away, laughing still, and you watch warily as he tilts his head to the side and nods his head towards Michael.

"Go on, then, mate," Simon taunts. "Try it."

Like a fool, Michael obliges. You flinch when Michael swings, but Simon tilts his body at just the right moment to dodge. He smacks Michael's arm, but he tries again—and like playing footie with a child, the weapon is now in Simon's hand, and then oh—

Michael's screaming as it pierces through his open palm.

He bleeds a lot less than you thought he might. Sadly, also, his blood is as red as yours. You thought he might be a little less pathetic at a moment like this. It is a gift, however, to see him bursting into tears as Simon grips the collar of his shirt and leans over him.

"Lot like you like to take things that aren't yers, tha' right?" Simon spits. "Like to punish and intimidate and fuckin' take, even if ya aren't owed."

"Please—please just get out, take her, fuckin' please!"

"Oi, wot's all this?" Simon snorts. "Now yer pissin' where you stand cause it got too real, eh? Got wot was comin' ta you? Reckon it's not like you thought. Reckon you thought she'd come hat in hand, beggin' for wot she deserves, but you wouldn't know good cunt even if it sat on yer face, yeah?"

"Please…"

"Simon—" You try, but he tsks, shaking his head.

"Nah, love, he's gonna learn," Simon murmurs. "Have you learned?"

"Yes," Michael squeaks, and you're not longer staring at the blood dripping on the hardwood, you're oogling at the giant man standing in what once was your kitchen that's starting to look more delicious by the second.

"Good," Simon breathes. "I know where ya lay yer head, mate. Know where ta come back if things aren't quiet on her end. You'd do well to remember tha'."

He releases Michael with a shove; Michael sinks to the floor, hands trembling, and Simon makes his way towards you to put a hand to your back and turn you around towards the front door.

"Need anythin' else?" Simon asks. You're too speechless to say anything, so all you do is shake your head. You clutch the carrier closer; she meows from inside the bag, and Simon nods his head towards outside so that you start moving. The door shuts behind you both, and then you're being led to his truck, ushered into the passenger seat, precious cargo on your lap as you breathe a huge sigh of relief.

The drive is quiet, but a comfortable quiet. You don't realize until a few streets over that you're smiling; a big, sparkling grin that's taking over your face, and when Simon rolls his truck to a stop at a red light, you lean over the center console and give his masked cheek a big, wet kiss of gratitude.

"Got a death wish or somethin'?" Simon turns to look at you, glaring from under the mask. It's so hard to be scared of him. He just put the fear of God into your terrible ex-boyfriend so you could get your precious cat back; he scared him shitless—literally—and he did it looking this good.

"Is that what a kiss gets me?" You ask. You slide your hand down his bicep, swallowing the drool when you feel just how solid and beefy he is under that hoodie. He fills it out too well. He must be so fucking handsome under that mask; there's no way he wears it for anonymity, he must be so hot, he wears it so he doesn't have to swat away all the boys and girls when they usually buzz around him like moths to light—

Maybe death is really this sweet. This good. Your cat is snoozing, safe and sound, in your bedroom with a full belly. The lights are on low; soft orange glows from well-placed lamps, giving the entire living room a warm feeling. There's a man on your couch with his belt unbuckled, mask halfway up his face as he pants because his cock is in your mouth, and he tastes like sweet, sweet victory.

"Ahh—fuck."

You nuzzle your nose up the length. He's so hard; you don't think a man has ever been this hard for you. He's leaking so pretty, dribbles down the length that you catch with the tip of your tongue, forcing him to hiss and spit and bite his knuckles. He keeps his hips still, but his hand around your hip squeezes the flesh there nice and tight, borderline bruising when you suck his tip a little too softly. You lick a stripe around the head before leaning back up towards him, and his hand around your hip curls against the back of your neck as you share a messy, wet kiss.

You twist your wrist, pumping his cock with a gentle glide of your palm, and he grits his teeth between kisses, touching his forehead to yours.

"Oll tha' for a cat, yeah?"

It is true. You did do it for her. But you did it for you, too.

"Not just the cat," you whisper, smoothing your thumb along the tip. He kisses you again, slower this time, and you groan into his mouth as you squeeze your thighs together. "Look at you…"

"Fuck—" Simon grunts, and his other hand finds the base of his cock, squeezing hard, and you giggle as he scrunches his nose. "Don't say shit like tha'."

You can't with his mouth on your cunt. He's laying flat on his back on the couch, legs too long to fit. Boots against your blanket, you'll whine to him about it later, but now both thighs are on either side of his head, and he's slurping with a hot tongue. You cup both sides of his head, dragging your hips, and while normally you'd think twice about dropping your weight on someone like this, the ease at which he hoisted you up his chest tells you Simon's a big, big boy—and he can handle whatever you give him.

"Gonna let me handle things from now on," Simon murmurs. He kisses the inside of your thigh, and you yelp when he smacks one side of your ass. He's waiting for an answer, and you took too long to give one.

"Y-Yeah," you breathe, leaning your head back. You feel yourself dripping between the legs, flooding his mouth, but he curls his tongue all the same. Uses two thumbs now as he hooks his arms around your thighs to pull the wet, sensitive skin back so he can drink what he's owed. He said he takes payment like this, getting his fill; he says he's never really satisfied until there's cum in his mouth and some in your cunt, and he's not gonna leave your flat before becoming familiar with those two, mutually non-exclusive events.

"Yeah, y'r pretty, olright," Simon laughs, but there's no more humor when he bounces you on his cock. Oh, he hurts a little. He told you he might, but then you're really there, knees on either side of him as you clutch onto the meat of his shoulders and hope to God he doesn't let you go. "Told you tha' you'd feel it, didn't I?"

"Yeah," you whisper, cupping that face of his, half-revealed to you, and you rub your thumbs down his scarred cheeks. Gorgeous, even with eyes that dead inside. "'s big."

"Don't—" He snarls, holding down your hips, shaking his head. "Wot did I say about sayin' shit like tha', eh?"

Life has spoiled you. Life is too good. Life is your pet curled up between your pillows and warm beneath the blankets, and life is fucking the sanity out of big, pudgy military men with blood under their fingernails and their breath stuck in their throat. You've rendered Simon to nothing but grunts and sputters. He's focused on keep the rhythm, arms clasped around your middle as he fucks up into you and pants into your neck. You reach for the back of the couch, digging your nails in, and all you can do is cry and take it as he keeps bringing you back down again and again and again.

The kiss you share is starved. You're so hungry, your hand slipping under the mask to cup the back of his head, and he draws your hips down and holds you there as he licks into your mouth and relishes in the pulsing of your cunt. This is what he fights for, maybe.

Not the glory. Not for the good of others. Not for Price and his self-guided moral compass, not for Laswell and her targets, not for revenge, not for blood, not to save the world. It's so he can come back here onto home soil and fuck a gorgeous girl without ever being interrupted by the sound of anything but her.

Her. You. Whatever she is, what you are, what you will eventually be—it manifests itself in the very room he's in, and he's got it between his teeth, and he won't be letting go for anything.

Nothing at all.

He's smoking a cigarette by the open window as she makes tea. He smiles, just barely, with teeth a little yellow when he sees you burn your hand a little as you pour the water into a misshapen mug.

"Olright?" He asks. The mugs shake a little as you bring them back into the room, precarious as you overfilled the mugs. He takes one from you and takes a long sip, flicking the cigarette out as he watches you get settled. You set your mug down on the coffee table, leaning forward to give him that same sweet, wet kiss on his cheek.

"Never better."

Belly full. Eyes bright. You are nothing like the woman that propositioned him just a few hours ago. A monotone, piss-drink evening, and then a scared, desperate girl asking him if he was willing to do something a little off the books.

Fucking finally. The world was just starting to get a little too dull.

It's the middle of the night when he hears the creak of a door. The sound of a little bell. You're laid out on your side, having just fallen asleep. The movie on the telly still plays, but Simon has turned the volume down. The light flickering from the screen is enough that he sees the cat trot into the room, eyes searching for you and seeing the two of you settled there.

She comes over slowly, sniffing the toes of Simon's boots, and then she closes her eyes as she rubs her face against his leg. Low purring, headbutts, and then she's putting a paw to his boot and looking up at him with the same big, wet eyes her mother has. Simon reaches down, scratching under her chin, and then she's curling up on his lap, little head next to yours as he leans back and takes it in. The sight for sore eyes. The thing that makes his medals and his stripes and all the money in the world look worthless—cheap.

Soap caught him at it in the mess — Simon parked against the far wall with a coffee going cold in his fist, focused on watching you eat. Soap followed the line of his stare, found you at the end of it, and grinned like the cheshire cat. "Oh, her," he said, delighted. "Aye, she's one of the hybrids. Mantis." He said it the way you'd mention someone supported the wrong football team. Then, because Soap cannot leave fuck-all alone, he leaned in and cheerfully added, "You'll want to be careful there, big man. Mantis females, ehh— they eat the fella after. During, sometimes. Bite the head clean off and finish the job. Read it somewhere once." He clapped Simon on the shoulder. "Best of luck."

And then he left. Wandered off to find some grub, whistling.

Simon stood very still against the wall, then. Felt the information go into him like a splinter you can't find to pull.

Bite the head clean off?

He looked back at you across the room — you'd tilted your head to listen to the person beside you, smooth and too far round, big dark eyes catching the strip-lights — and the want did not go anywhere, that was the horror of it, the want stayed exactly where it was and the new knowledge simply moved in alongside it and started rearranging some things.

He wanted you.

And being Simon, he did not do the sensible thing and walk away. He did the research.

The thing about dating Simon, you would learn, is that you have never in your life been so well fed.

You understood it maybe six weeks in, when you opened his fridge expecting the usual bachelor wasteland and found it stocked like he was provisioning for a siege. Yogurt. Three kinds of cheese. A bowl of cut fruit under cling film. A tin labeled ‘FROG LEGS’.

It was risk management dressed up as romance, which in fairness is mostly what romance is… Isn’t it?

He'd taken Soap's splinter and built a guideline out of it. He knows — he has read, in studies he will deny owning — that the trouble starts when you're hungry. Or stressed. Or both, which is the cocktail that turns a nice evening into something a coroner writes up.

He has constructed an entire relationship on the single principle of never ever letting you get to that point.

You'll be reaching for him on the sofa, hand sliding up under his shirt, mouth at the hot pulse in his throat, and he'll go rigid and say, in that flat  rumble of his, "When d’you last eat?"

"Simon," you sigh,

"Tha’ s’not an answer, love."

"I'm not hungry–,"

"I saw you skipped lunch."

He watches a lot. He watches you eat with open, naked satisfaction, the way other men watch football, and the first time you caught him at it you'd put your fork down and said ‘did you want some?’ and he'd said ‘no, you have it,’ and meant it with his whole strange heart.

The man can produce a plate of food out of thin air, and there's no point arguing, because he'll simply outlast you, planted there immovable as a boulder until you've eaten enough that his shoulders come down from around his ears.

He's never once said the word out loud. Cannibalism. He skirts it like a tripwire. Early on you'd tilted your head at him a degree too sharp while he was shaving — honestly just affection — and caught his eye in the mirror, and he'd nicked his own jaw and not flinched at the blood at all, only at you. Razor frozen halfway up his neck. The muscle in his cheek jumped and his pupils shrank to pinpricks and you'd thought: Oh. He's frightened. Big, terrible Ghost, who garrotes men in their sleep, scared witless by the tilt of your head. 

You felt bad for almost a full minute.

You have, in fairness, never confirmed or denied a thing. When he goes still and careful you let him. It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for you, this grim devout terror, and you're not about to spoil it with reassurance.

Soap, for the record, has really no idea what he started. He'll see the two of you in the canteen, Simon angling the better-fed plate toward you and think, good lad, taking my advice.

Simon had you down — the eyes that hold on him no matter where he moves, that dark point in each one that stays, tracking, while the rest of your face goes soft and human; the too-far head-turn; the way your hands fold up against your chest when you go truly still, wrists tucked, prayer-shaped.

He did not account for the wings.

You hadn't told him because you genuinely forget they're there — folded flat along your spine, a faint seam under the skin, a sheen across your shoulder blades he'd assumed was an old scar. You can't really fly. You never thought to mention them. Plus, it seemed like he knew plenty.

But now he's got you under him with your shirt long gone and his mouth working at the junction of your neck and collar, and there's none of the careful bracing tonight — he fed you an hour ago, he made sure, he watched you finish — and now there's just his weight and his hands and the husky sounds he makes against your skin. One big palm splays flat on your stomach and slides lower, fingers finding you already slick, stroking slow over your clit until your hips chase it on their own. "So soft, love," he murmurs, like he's not shaking. He gets two fingers inside you, curls them, and your whole spine bows off the mattress.

That's when they snap open.

In the dark it's monstrous; a sudden unfolding of something unknown and far too wide for the room, fanning from your back in a wash of color he can't quite name in the half-light. A deep iridescent purple shot through with flares of red, eyespots blooming towards the tips. One instant flat girl, the next a thing twice your size.

Simon goes to stone, shuts down, every system offline. This is it, he thinks — this is the bit where she takes the head. His fingers still inside you. He holds his breath, bracing.

You make a small strangled noise and pull them back down.

They fold away almost as fast as they came, gone into brackets around your spine, and you throw an arm over your face and refuse to look at him. Your ears are hot. He can feel it where his jaw rests on your cheek.

"Sorry," you whisper. "That just— happens sometimes. It– it doesn't mean anything bad, I swear… just… you… just feels good, is all.”

The single most dangerous woman he's ever shared a bed with has flashed her startle display because he got two fingers knuckle deep inside of her, and now she's mortified, hiding her face like a kid. Four months of Soap's splinter works its way loose, pushing out of his muscle, and falls out somewhere in the dark, and Simon — who has never in his life felt safe and certainly never expected to find it here, of all the deranged places — starts to come softly apart with relief. He pulls himself back to look at you.

"Le’me see you," he says, and peels your arm off your face, and when you do his eyes are doing something you've never seen on him: wet at the edges, wide open, not afraid of you at all. 

Worse than not afraid. Pleased with himself.

He leans back down and kisses you hard, pushing his fingers deeper and says it against your mouth because he’s got nothing left to lose: "Do it again. Want to watch."

So you do. 

And Simon fucks you slow and then not slow at all, and every time he tips you over they snap wide behind you and fill the room with color, and by the third time he's stopped flinching and started hunting it, smug, learning the exact angle that does it. When he finally comes it's with his forehead pressed to yours and your wings open around the both of you like something out of a church window, and he's saying something into your jaw, rough and ruined, that takes you a second to parse as all mine, there she is, there's my good girl.

Afterward you bite him. Just a little on the shoulder, just to be a menace, licking the taste of iron from your canine. 

He doesn't even twitch. "Knew it," he says into your hair, wrecked and grinning where you can't see. "Tellin’ Soap he was right."

Perhaps it would hurt less to desire if you could fill that hole every once in a while. If you could wet your tongue with the taste of satisfaction, of a want fulfilled, of the opportunity to say to someone, “Oh, look what I got” or “Look at what all my work has amounted to.”

That’s never been the case though, has it? Never been lucky enough for a wish to come true. You work like a dog for the barest scraps of what you know you’re worth (what you know and what every day seems less and less true).

Vacations that you never had enough money to take, jobs that never came to fruition, mistakes that couldn’t be undone, memories that you could never remake, friendships that grew apart or that never materialized altogether. 

It’s not all doom and gloom. You have a good job and a decent network of friends and acquaintances, parties you attend on occasion and warm nights at home curled up in bed. You have a roof over your head. There's more than enough in your life to be grateful for.

But the wanting never goes away. That, you have in spades. That, you have in heaps and bounds. That multiplies itself tenfold. 

And it happens that way with your heart too.

There’s a coffee shop down the street from your office with a decent amount of seating and an app to order your drink ahead of time, and every day at around two, you order your coffee ahead of time and walk over to pick it up, rain or shine. 

It’s always busy to some degree when you walk in, a handful of people waiting by the counter and a short line at the register snaking around the merchandise display. The whirr of the coffee grinder hums in the background, just a touch louder than the music, always filling the café with the rich, pleasing scent of freshly ground coffee.

The same chairs are always filled by the same people. Plenty of them you’ve even grown to recognize over time—students bent over thick textbooks, elderly men creasing newspapers in ink-stained hands, and laptop screens glowing with blank Word documents, scarcely a sentence added in the time it took to order and finish their coffee.

You recognize most of the takeaway regulars as well.

They’re harder to remember at first. Quick to come and quick to go. Hard to commit their faces to memory. But some give you no choice—some boisterously loud or ostentatious in dress, eye-catching enough to hook you like a fish, drag your attention down river with them. 

Then, to him. 

He, like you, comes in every day around two for his afternoon coffee. He, unlike you, comes striding in full-chested, confidence nipping at his heels, no world-weariness weighing him down. 

Hard not to notice him. Of course you notice him. He takes up space like a living sun, all bright smiles and radiant energy, handsome in the way that, when men are, they draw people in like moths. You feel no better than a moth sometimes, particularly in his presence. 

Tea-coloured eyes. What you notice at first is that there’s a beautiful man waiting for his coffee next to you, a tall man with the sculpted physique of an athlete, all long limbs and broad shoulders tapering into a lean frame, and what you notice next are those tea-coloured eyes, honeying under the sun. 

You stare so long that you only realize how dry your eyes have gone when the door swings shut behind him. 

It’s no wonder then, that you latch onto his presence like so, a little flutter in your chest on your way to the coffee shop every time after that first time, hoping that you’ll cross paths again. 

And you do. Cross paths again, that is. Only a few times those first couple of weeks, and then seemingly all the time, the two of you always in at the same time. 

That isn’t unusual. There are plenty of other familiar faces picking up their afternoon coffees at the same time as you, people that you recognize at the mobile ordering station and laptop stickers that you’ve come to memorize, the same people sitting at the same seats. People like routine; you’re no different. Neither is he. 

It comes over you like an ague, a desperate, eager thing, quiet enough at first when you’ve only seen him in bits and pieces, not studied him at length yet, but it—

It grows.

It grows like a vine in your chest, weaving around your heart and squeezing until you can feel it with every beat. 

You don’t entirely blame yourself. How could you? You swear you’ve never seen anyone even half as good-looking as him—broad-shouldered and lean, perfect smile, perfect teeth. Haircut always fresh, his edges neat. He squints with the force of his smile, always effusive with his gratitude and praise, so earnest in his kindness that it makes your teeth ache. 

He’s objectively a handsome man. Perhaps the handsomest man you’ve ever seen. What else could you do but go a bit crazy? 

Want may not be a strong enough word for what you’re experiencing. It’s more of a torsion of the soul. A desperate, yearning ache that both releases and constricts when he walks into the café to order his coffee. 

You don’t know what to do with yourself when he doesn’t show up at the same time as you. Your schedules are so in sync that you’ve grown to expect him, fattened and spoiled by the timeliness of his presence. But he doesn’t owe it to you to show up, and there are days when he doesn’t, held up for some reason, or maybe simply not in the mood for a coffee.

You practically drag your feet on the walk back to the office, a sorry sight. Pathetically despondent. You hardly know what to do with yourself the rest of the afternoon, oscillating between dejection and self-reproach. It’s pathetic that the mere absence of your crush would reduce you to such a state, hardly able to concentrate on your work because the stranger that you’ve become infatuated with wasn’t at the coffee shop where you see him for a total of twenty seconds every other day. 

Forgive yourself though. Nothing you’ve ever wanted has come without pain.

What you don’t expect is for him to finally notice you. 

It happens on a day when you cross paths rather than arriving at the same time, him leaving the coffee shop as you’re about to enter. Your heart skips a beat when you look up and see him staring down at you, both of you taken by surprise when you go to pull the door open and he’s already pushing on the other side. 

“Traffic jam,” he laughs when you both lean left and then right at the same time, trying to let the other go around. “Here, I’ve got you.”

He extends an arm to hold the door wide open and angles his body to let you pass through. You thank him as you pass, your heart pounding against your ribs. His gaze follows you as you step inside, and you nearly jump when his voice calls a farewell after you, leaving through the same door.

You stand near the doorway for far too long, other customers coming in and going around you, cutting you annoyed looks on their way to the cash. Your drink must already be waiting for you on the counter and still you can’t move. It takes someone actually stumbling into you to jolt you back into the present. 

That wasn’t part of the plan. It’s thrilling, initially, a rush so overwhelming, so kaleidoscopic, that you ride it all the way back to the office and all the way home, replaying the memory again and again in your head until even you start to tire of belabouring it. 

And still you roll around in bed that night thinking about it, heart racing even hours after your short little conversation, picturing it over again in your mind—the crinkle of the corners of his eyes, the smile nearly pulling across his face, all white teeth and soft, supple lips. 

The only problem is—

Now he knows who you are.

You don’t expect him to remember you after such a quick encounter. He’s not the one that’s been pining these past few weeks. He’s not the one that’s been beating himself up for crushing on a stranger. 

But he does remember you. And not only does he remember you, but he looks for you the next time he’s in. 

It’s one of those days when you get there first, coffee already ordered and paid for by the time he walks in, in dark trousers and a quarter-zip today, and filling them both out nicely, the sweater clinging to the muscles of his arms. You expect him to head straight for the cash like he normally does, blessedly and lamentably unaware of your presence.

Instead, your breath hitches when his eyes drift across the café and settle on you, a spark of recognition glinting in them.

His gaze immobilizes you, stronger than any paralytic. It’s what holds you in place as he approaches, the distance between you halved in an instant, and then fully collapsed, the gorgeous man in front of you doing what Zeno’s Achilles never could. 

“Hey stranger, no dance today, huh?” he asks, clearly addressing you.  

You don’t know what to say. This is your worst case scenario, your category five emergency. In the weeks you’ve spent crushing on him from afar, you hadn’t considered the possibility of him ever noticing you in return. 

“Sorry?” you croak.

He gestures with his thumb towards the door. “From the other day, remember?”

You don’t know how you’ll make it through this interaction without making a fool of yourself. “Right. Haha. I guess the dance floor’s closed today.”

You could throw up on the spot. Of all the abysmal conversation rejoinders there have ever been in the history of humanity, the one you just offered must rank comfortably near the top.

For whatever reason though, whether divine intervention or something more dastardly, he chuckles, amused. He seems to like talking to you. Seems to like you even. That only becomes clearer when he approaches you the next day, and then the day after that, and then every day when you stop by at two p.m. for your afternoon coffee, your coffees now handed out together by the barista, as if you had ordered them that way. 

The small talk alone almost makes you consider switching to a different coffee shop. It’s too much pressure. You feel sick with anxiety at the thought of him figuring you out. 

And he will figure you out. You haven’t exactly played it subtle. 

Then he gets your number. Somehow. And your name too, pried so easily from you that you don’t even notice, like freeing a pearl from a clam; barely a flick of his wrist and you offer it up without a second thought, embarrassingly malleable. 

You get his too. Kyle Garrick. He spells it for you as he watches you save his number into your phone from over your shoulder, so close to you that your fingers fumble with the keypad, mistyping it almost four times before getting it right.  

Kyle doesn’t seem to care that you can barely seem to string together a sentence in front of him. If anything, it seems to endear him to you.  

His attraction makes itself apparent in tender words and a new penchant for touch, a hand always reaching out for you. 

At first, it’s nothing more than the casual brush of his fingers against yours as he picks up your coffee from the bar and passes it to you, no different than a handshake or a high five. Ostensibly perfunctory. But that too changes over time. A fleeting touch becomes a hand at the small of your back as he guides you to a table for a quick chat before heading back to work, fingers squeezing your shoulder when he laughs at a joke you didn’t realize you made, and quick hugs that grow a little longer each time.

Maybe. Or maybe you’re imagining it. 

“So when are you gonna let me take you out for real?” 

That snaps you out of the daydream, reality crashing down with such force that it leaves your ears ringing. His words leave you dumbfounded, gaping up at him in that stupid way that you can’t seem to suppress. 

“For real?” you repeat.

“On a date,” Kyle clarifies, as if the word alone weren’t enough to wreck you. 

“Oh.” 

You tell him yes because the word no evaporates from your vocabulary. By the time it returns, he’s already gone, disappearing into the world (likely an office building around the corner from yours, but it might as well be Timbuktu). 

This isn’t what was supposed to happen. You were supposed to pine in agony until you died. 

It’s everything you ever wanted, and yet, you couldn’t want it less in the moment, terrified for some reason that you can’t quite articulate. You count down the days with growing apprehension, jitters giving way to a full-body sweat. 

You’ll break it off at a later date. That thought comforts you to a point. At some point, there will be a moment for you to bail entirely. 

The problem is the longer you say nothing, the harder it is to say anything at all. Already guilt stays your tongue when all you want to do is tell him that you can’t do this anymore. You need to leave—go anywhere else, run home and lock the door behind you, never go back to the coffee shop again.

But there’s a text in your phone telling you the time and place, and every time you look at it, it leaves you feeling off-kilter. Sea legs without leaving dry land. 

What is it about you that you feel the need to run as soon as you get too close? What about this isn’t what you want? Do you even know what you want?

Of course you know what you want. You want love and affection. 

But having is not wanting. Wanting is safe. It’s the having that’s dangerous. 

You contemplate cancelling on him about a dozen times until suddenly it’s too late, the man in question standing in the lobby of your building to pick you up. He must know someone in the building because he’s deep in conversation when you spot him, his head turning to meet yours at the same time, as if even in conversation, he wouldn’t allow himself to be distracted enough to miss you. Your heart squeezes when he wraps it up in the same breath, crossing the lobby to meet you. 

Dinner is a restaurant in a different part of town, one you’ve seldom spent time in before, trendy in the way that would unnerve you were it not for the abrupt realization that to everyone else, this is simply a familiar part of town. 

To some, the restaurant must be familiar as well. There might even be regulars. To you however, the small, dimly lit room with the booths on one side and the chairs lining the bar at the other, an eclectic assortment of framed photos and decorative porcelain plates on the wall beside you, is lovely, uncharted territory. 

Over dinner, Kyle peppers you with question after question until your head spins, each answer that leaves your lips betraying some nervous tendency towards clandestinity. You have to keep some things to yourself. You have to keep some things private.

You have to shut your mouth before you—

“A long time,” you reply without thinking, the whole world blowing open when you admit it. You hadn't even consciously registered the question before answering. When was your last date? 

Kyle doesn’t seem phased by it though, warm smile somehow warmer than the blood boiling under your skin. “I must be one lucky man then.”

He sweet talks you into agreeing to a drink after dinner, probably sensing the nervous animal in you, the fear about to take flight. 

You assume he means a drink at a bar until you’re standing in the kitchen of your apartment, Kyle standing behind the island with a bottle of wine in one hand, uncorking it with practiced ease. When it pops out, you flinch. 

What a strange thing, to lose time like that. You lose it again after he pours you both a glass, coming to on the couch with his arm around your shoulders, pinned between him and the side of the couch. 

He turned the television on, you notice distantly, staring at it through your glass, red wine sloshing from side to side. It’s not a program either of you would care to pay much attention to, possibly by design. 

“Do you have, um…any plans tomorrow?” you ask, swallowing when he drags his fingers over the bare skin of your upper arm. 

“Nope,” he answers, playing with the sleeve of your shirt now. 

You can hear it coming from a mile away. He makes it too obvious with his fingers trailing over your skin and the heat of his gaze searing into the side of your face.

The sky outside your window is black, the moon only a sliver of its usual brilliance, but your living room is bright, turning the window into a mirror reflecting the two of you, the picture of a couple in repose. 

You watch his reflection lean over yours in the window, his lips grazing your double’s ears, your breath catching when his touch yours as well. “If I give you an inch, you’re going to run a mile, aren’t you?” he murmurs. 

There’s a lump in your throat when you swallow. “No,” you lie.

He must see right through you though. Must see the creature inside you about to succumb to its instincts. 

He must be good at chess, you think to yourself, staring down at him with a stupid look on your face as he lowers himself to lie flat on the bed between your legs, spreading your thighs wide enough to wedge his shoulders between them. Any game of strategy. 

If you never give your opponent a moment to breathe, they can’t gather themselves enough to retreat. 

That thought crumbles to dust when he makes you watch him lick the first stripe up the seam of your pussy, crudely spreading your lips with his tongue. Nothing more substantial materializes after that. 

He eats pussy like he hasn’t had enough to eat. Lips and tongue and hollowed cheeks when he sucks your clit into his mouth and your back nearly arches right off the bed, twisted into such a complex shape that you almost don’t know how to unravel yourself. Fingers grasping at his head, his ears; rasping over the coils of his hair, fingers committing the texture to memory. 

Your thighs tremble and squeeze, pried open again and again every time you try to shut him out. The muscles in his arms barely even bulge with the effort it takes to keep your thighs spread. 

You are wound up in ways that would be a challenge to anyone, but Kyle doesn’t seem to care. He just holds you down and forces you to come on his tongue, rolling it over your clit until you actually start crying. Big, belting caterwauls. His poor baby, he croons. 

When have you been someone’s ‘poor baby’? Someone’s darling, sweetheart, honey, that’s it, I’ve got you, that felt good, didn’t it? God, you’re so pretty, I can’t believe you let me—

He flicks his tongue over your sensitive clit and you yelp, reaching down to slide your hand between his mouth and your swollen sex only for him to lace your fingers together and pull your hand to the side and lick it again. 

“It’s still sensitive,” you complain, and he lifts a brow, unmoved by your bellyaching. 

“So what, you got twitchy little orgasm legs, that means I’m not allowed to lick your pussy anymore?”

“No,” you hiss, embarrassment warming the blood already pooled under your cheeks. 

Warm hands rest on either side of your face as he eases his cock in for the first time, holding your gaze in place as sinks in to the root. All you can do is squeeze your eyes shut. 

They don’t stay shut for long. He pries them open without words, without touch, every ounce of his ardor poured into you and lifting your own to the surface. 

Sweat drips from his forehead onto yours. The sweat makes his hands slip up and down your face with the force of his thrusts, fingers tugging on your lips and pulling them apart, sliding over your gums and teeth.

“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Kyle pants, sweat dripping off his forehead and onto yours, eyes darker than you’ve ever seen them, glassy and feverish.

“Don’t—don’t say that,” you gasp.

He dips his head down to press his forehead against yours. “You can’t tell me that. You can’t tell me what to do.”

Whatever this is, it’s nothing like anything you’ve experienced before. Proper lovemaking. Real kisses with passion, with fervor, with delight; the messiness contained between you, in the sweat rolling down your back and soaking into the sheets, the saliva dripping from his mouth into yours, the squelch of his shaft splitting you over and over, never giving you a second to catch your breath. 

Coming a second, no, third time is painful, like a thing wrested unwillingly from you, and you fall back on the bed windburned. Kyle follows you down, hips bucking into yours faster and faster, his own end nearly on his heels. 

He comes with a grunt, without warning; a sudden surge of heat and warmth, his fingers biting into your cheeks where he holds your face in his hands, his lip curling up into a snarl that you swear you can almost hear, and—

You expect it to be over after that. For him to roll out of bed and pull on his pants, maybe give you a courtesy kiss for a job well done before leaving you to stew in the mire of another rejection, the small win eclipsed by the enormity of losing him. 

What you don’t expect is for him to lay down beside you and pull you into him. Kyle laughs softly when he notices your stiffness, jostling you slightly in an attempt to coax you into relaxing.

“That’s right, baby,” he chuckles a touch breathlessly, pressing a kiss to the bridge of your nose before relaxing back down. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Coffee the next day is different than usual. Early for one, the sun still a syrupy morning gold, not yet the starchy afternoon white, and in a different location than usual, the coffee machine on your kitchen counter hissing through its second cup of the day. 

Kyle maneuvers around your apartment too naturally, a stark contrast to the way you scurry from the bedroom to the bathroom like a stowaway. He’s entirely at home in your space though, helping himself to coffee and breakfast, only glancing at you for permission, the slightest cock of his head and arch of his brow, and you fold under the pressure instantly. 

When you try to skirt around him, he wraps an arm around your waist and pulls you into his side, the touch of his lips against your chest shocking you still, electrical impulses still skittering under your skin. 

“I can feel your heart racing,” Kyle teases, caramel-smooth voice sending a low vibration through your chest.

And why shouldn’t he? Your heart is racing after all. “I’m nervous.”

“I know you are, baby,” he murmurs. “This is hard for you, isn’t it?”

It is. A few too many years on your own have turned you to stone, the slightest touch almost too much to handle. You’ve long learned to expect anything you touch to shock you. 

“Want me to make this easier on you?” he asks gently. You’re not sure what he means by that, but you have an inkling. 

And wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry? To not have to second guess what you really want or what you should do? 

You nod. 

“Okay, honey. Then you don’t have to do it. No telling me to go away. I’ve got it from here.” 

When Kyle takes your phone from your hand, you don’t stop him, even typing in your password for him when he turns it towards you, watching over his shoulder as he shares your location with his phone. 

You exhale shakily, the tightness in your shoulders easing. There he goes with that oyster shucker again, opening you up. 

So be it. What use is there in protecting something that’s already his? 

—i. 4:16

It doesn't bother him much—soulmates, the string, the loss of his own—since he has you, after all—

(a home made of flesh and blood; a place for him to return to when he's done being the other. the phantom. the Ghost. Ghost, to everyone except Price. less a dog of the military, and more a half-kept secret; a dead-eyed beast reeking of rot. emanating wrongness and ruin from his gnarled, scarred pores. a walking biohazard that comes to rest in soft skin and small bones; little chirps in his ear (where have you been? and i missed you and i wish you could just stay home instead and—with a pout, voice little bruised—why do you keep leaving me?) that he replays on repeat when he's gone, a trilling coo just for him. just for him—

where safety and comfort—or the closest approximation to either that he's ever found outside of the cold composure of a weathered, obedient knife in the thick of his palm, a rifle over his shoulder: safety in brute force, in dependable bones; thickened meat, grizzle; an uncapped muzzle—come naturally. instinctually.

his own cocoon. a place where he rests: a slow metamorphosis from the other to the man. maskless. laid bare. the only thing keeping him from reaching for the cold comfort of a blade is the way your hands wrap around the thick of his wrist when you drag him along, small snips of words diluted in sunlight and warm breath. your world without him being filled in slowly; reshaped under his heel.)

—and that is what he tells you when you ask him about it, about his string. Words soft in the gloam, a mere whisper—much they usually are after he comes back—as if you're speaking to a wild animal and not a man, afraid to scare him off even though you have to know by now that you'll never get rid of him. 

Can't get rid of him. 

“Jus’ need you, birdie.”

but doesn't it bother you? is threaded between the screams of cicadas as the sun dips in the horizon, painting their garden, the one he built for you with his bare hands, in a sea of warm, gauzy ochre. Shadows violet touched. The air humid, skin-warm, and reeking of sun-scorched grass, loam; earthy. Herbaceous. 

It's been unusually warm this summer—almost unbearably so—and the shade of twilight does little to abate the thick humidity that clings to everything like a second skin, making each breath feel wet. As if he was drowning. 

It's uncomfortable. Nothing but hot days and sticky nights. A constant, steady percolation of sweat gluing to every inch of his skin; the air warm enough to make him nauseous. But coming out to the garden every evening when he's home has morphed into a routine. A thing they share that always starts with a look, one full of intent. There's never a question in your gaze, just a quiet, simmering agitation—a restlessness that grows as soon as the shadows darken, and the sun sinks low on the horizon. An itch only he can soothe with nothing but his presence in your garden. 

When it reaches a fever pitch and you can't bear to be stuck inside any longer, your fingers will curl over his skin before tucking into the inside of his forearm, his wrist. You'll tug on him—and sometimes he'll go instantly. Melt the hard, unyielding metal of his body into something pliant. Something malleable enough for you to drag along as you please. Other times, he'll firm his feet. Give you nothing—not even an inch—because it's just what older (decades older) brothers do, isn't it? Taunt their younger sisters with a hint of meanness that edges closely to malice. Anchored in derision, in a sadistic sense of amusement that runs through him like a low grade fever, as you pull on him and pout. Keeps the game going until you end up popping his name out on a whine that makes something inside him shift—something unnamed, unknown: a thing that belongs to the other—and he's forced to relent, to give in, before it shatters.

In the end, though, it's always the same:

Tucked into a hidden corner of the garden, buffeted by the thick scent of green.

(and he pretends that smears of your fingerprints on his bare skin doesn't feel like a brand, a hot iron—)

And now, those same green-tipped fingers tugged and pulled, that plucked tomatoes from the vine for him only hours ago in the dizzying heat of the sun are absently rubbing at your wrist where nothing grows. 

(a blessing; a curse—)

He shrugs, and it's a careless thing despite the weight of his words when they slip out, rustling the leaves of the ficus that reaches towards the heavens between them. “Don't need anyone else.” 

“It's not the same, though, is it?”

He knows what you mean even if you can't seem to bring yourself to utter the words aloud, to sound them out. 

You're not my soulmate; soulmates are lovers, and we can never be that. 

“I ‘ave you,” he says again, and reaches over to snatch a fat, ripe tomato from your basket. Pops it in his maw as you sputter that was for dinner, Simon! “An’ that's all tha’ matters.” 

And it is—

Despite the jokes and jabs when he's the other about the idea of you, this mysterious entity he shapes his other world around (all whispered behind hands and tucked into alcoves because no one has the balls to say anything to his face with his string rotting under his boot the way it is), it's incongruent to reality:

in thoughts of others, you are his woebegotten mistress trying to live up to a corpse; he touches you with fingers stained with adipocere, smearing the untouchable death of another person over your still-living skin.

but reality is apodictic. the bonds they share, the woven walls of affection, are entirely platonic. unblemished, untainted, by the notion of the string.

He isn't your soulmate. You aren't his.

This is incontrovertible, but it doesn't matter. 

Soulmates can be platonic, too.

He's heard the spiels. The lectures. Read the memos and the pamphlets from the group that started petitioning for a restructuring of laws and legislature to legally, and definitively, separate the State from the String; to allow bonds and ties to be inclusive to other forms of affection and love beyond connected strings.

your soulmate doesn't have to be the person at the other end of your string.

Ever since the moment he saw you, he knew you were his.

and you was just a little thing, a baby bird; someone—the only one—he'd easily (and decisively) rent the world in half for. render it all to ash and ruin; sodder a safe haven out of the broken bones and charred skin and flayed limbs he'd litter the ground with if anyone got too close.

a moulded sanctuary. a untouched baptism in the shape of little hands on his scarred cheeks; milk-touched breath ghosting so sweetly over the crooked arch of his nose as you stumbled into him, babbling incomprehensible nothings as his brother cooed and his wife watched, hawklike, as the little thing they promised to care for after the disappearance of their parents, tripped into his arms, smearing messy kisses, spit-slick absolutions, over his jaw and chin. the garble of words retextualizing in growth, becoming the approximation of his name that become clearer each time he came back from his missions until there was a sanctity nestled into each Simon's and welcome home's. when goin' back became goin' 'ome.

it was always only (and ever) a fondness, a love. familial and perfectly untainted. innocent—or the closest he'd get to feeling clean, unpolluted, as he'd ever come. 

Desire never factored into the equation. Want, lust; it was all neatly tucked into the closet of the room in which feelings for you were housed. 

Platonic. A home. That's all you'll ever be to him—

(of course, of course—)

“Oh,” you say, frowning at him from over the table as night devours the sky. Bathed in a soft, warm gold from the fairylights you had him string around the garden when you were eleven, and oh, you say again, quieter this time. Oh—

He feels his age, suddenly, in the ache of his bones. In the distant memory of a child he barely knew, but would devastate the world for all the same, stumbling towards him when he's come home from training, from missions, babbling out some amalgamation of his name that got clearer with each stretch of time between the last visit, and then now—

The pout of a bratty teenager dissolving into the curved lines of an adult's frown as you stare at him from across the wrought iron table. Older. Less delicate. Fragile. The same eyes, the same look, but plucked out of the head of the child he adored and shoved into the body of a woman he doesn't know. 

(College, he remembers that. Remembers Tommy's phone call. The texts. Dunno what m’gonna do, Si, m’not ready to watch her grow up. The fear—what if she doesn't come back? But you did. 

Out-competed in every single bid you placed for a house. Flats suddenly unavailable hours before you were set to sign a lease. Jobs drying up. No one calling you back—

except a little company down the street from your childhood home, and, hell, should jus’ stay ‘ere, he'd said, lounging on the couch during his perennial return home, flipping through a book as he watched you fret over it all, worried, and really? you wouldn't mind if I stayed home until I found something else?  

The no was unequivocal. 

You came home. Tommy was happy. 

And he—

Well. He got into real estate.)

But there's still that child in you, he knows. Your cheek dents when you sink your teeth into the soft, inner tissue—a habit that hasn't changed since you were six—and just like then, he has to fight the urge to pinch your skin because somewhere deep down, he knows if he touched you, it would hurt.

(knows if he started, he'd never stop—)

And then comes the low pitch of your voice as you say: i just want you to be happy, Simon. 

It's such a strange thing to say to a man like him—one who lives half of his life in a mask, making quiet, drawling jabs at everyone around him; a steady, easy distance where he doesn't think about the girl he has waiting for him, the man, late at night when he's the other, half a world away from you, scrubbing the blood from his knife while you sleep. 

Shapes him into a respectable military mutt called to heel when he's not at home, not with you. The Ghost is something of a joke between them—is that really what they call you?—and not a spectre, a wraith, that has killed more people than you've ever met in your entire life—

is actively thinking about it, even now, as you sit, pretty as a sunrise, before him, whispering a prayer only the ficus can hear. i just want you to be happy. 

(happy—

as if doesn't keep all of his happiness—or some approximation of it—sitting there, his own little sun, right across from him.)

“makes you think m’not?”

You're still rubbing your wrist, nails curled down. Scratching at your skin. Irritating flesh. He can't seem to peel his eyes away from it, even when you shrug. When you say, quiet and unsure, I don't know—you just seem different. 

(he knows why. knows he brought too much of the other home tonight. can smell that man—unwashed and rotting—amid the ferns, the lush bath of sweet, earthy green. tangled up in gunshots and hasty burials, the man had no choice but to drag the corpse back with him—)

“What ‘bout you?” He grunts, if only to distract himself. “Anyone I gotta take care’a for you, huh?” Anyone piss you off?

The tension breaks. Your too-adult, too-knowing frown dissolves into ash as you laugh, even though he's only half-joking. And maybe a little less than that—a promise only the ferns can hear. That the oak can remember. 

No is a breathless whisper, one caught on the tail end of a giggle. “I don't want you to have to hurt anyone for me.”

“I will,” he says, and he's not joking. Not anymore. “Anyone messes with you, come tell an’—”

“—and you'll take care of them?”

“‘course.” 

You're trying to be sly when you roll your eyes at his antics, and for a moment, he wonders what you'd say if he ever told you he already has. Already hurt for you. Already killed for you—

(you, seven, eyes filled with tears as you clutched his jacket and him why you don't have a mom, a dad. did you do something bad to make them go away? if he stays, you won't be bad anymore. you won't, so please, please stay;

him, twenty-five, with more blood on his hands than he could ever dream of scrubbing off, had said—)

it doesn't matter. nothing changes. he curls his fingers into a fist, a tight ball. bottles up all the things he wants to say in his palm, holding tight, and instead says:

“What are big brothers for?” 

(brother—

is murmured into the pale spill of moonlight. —brother, and not soulmate.)

It doesn't matter, though—

soulmates, the string, the loss of his own

—because as long as he has you, has this garden, everything else is secondary. Peripheral. 

Or it was:

was a safe, uncontaminated space free of pollution, of madness—

(i missed you, you whisper into the thick swath of violet blanketing around them, and you're somehow softer and prettier when all you have to illuminate you is the gauzy, warm glow of old fairy lights and the pale spill of moonlight across the garden. ethereal, almost. hallucinatory. like he made you up inside his head. a product of madness; a symptom of hypoxia. 

sometimes he wonders if he really did dream you up. if his subconscious—or what was left of it—scraped together all the good lingering inside of him until it was a pile of claylike residuum on the dirty floor that he sculpted into the shape of you. his own Galatea. here to haunt him—

you offer him a smile, soft and sweet. i kept counting down the days until you came home is whispered out like a secret.

and he reaches for you—a bad idea, he knows: his atoms are needy, unstable; they have this awful habit of clinging to things and refusing to let go. fusing to anything misfortune enough to end up in his grasp. 

but he's greedy. 

greedy—

and more than a little selfish. 

but beneath the veneer of hunger, the eagerness to quell his insatiable appetite, is desperation. he's been carrying around a corpse for the better part of a week, and seeing things that aren't real—not anymore. he needs to know—needs to convince himself—that you're real, whole, and not one of the figures cut out from his childhood nightmares and pasted into the corners during daylight. 

touching you is like sliding his fingers across the milky sap of a poisonous plant—a feeling that will linger like an incessant itch beneath his skin hours after you're gone—but he does it anyway. takes in your shape, the softness of your skin. the hard press of bones buried in muscle. you're all soft skin, soft peach fuzz—all flushed with life and warm. warm, and—

wet. 

you wince when his thumb touches a faint, sticky line curling over your wrist. a small scratch, he realises. from earlier, maybe, when you kept itching at your arm, oblivious to the blood beading up, congealing beneath your nails. 

instinct drives him, makes him hum low in his throat when you wince again, and try to pull away. stay still, is a rumble. lemme see. but it's his training that has him checking for other injuries, following the path back to the sticky, warm source. making sure it isn't catastrophic, isn't a bullet to a temple, striking across skin like a meteor—

it's minor. cat-scratches. your skin is fever-warm, the wounds a little swollen. but you're fine. you'll be fine; it's just irritated skin. you must have annoyed the milkweeds again, or touched a plant that wasn't meant to be touched, and he opens his mouth to tell you this, mocking words nestled in the crooked curve of his teeth, but he stops short. thumb pausing, digging into something that isn't supposed to be there—

—and then he feels that faint bump on your wrist. 

It's the emergence of a single thread cracking through skin and bone, a little seedling desperately stretching towards its sun, its other half

Reaching out for someone who isn't him. Who will never, who could never, be him—

You’re a late bloomer, it seems. 

(something Tommy calls you with a soft nudge of his elbow against your arm when he hears about it. needling joke, full of fond, brotherly humour—

and it is just that. 

a joke. 

their green-thumbed little sister—the same one with a garden that never seems to wilt or slumber, always a thick viridian that you can smell before you see, much like you (an earthy, herbaceous scent lingers around you, leaking out like a dense miasma of damp soil and sun-soaked plants)—a late bloomer, of all things.) 

But it isn't unheard of. Or even at all that rare, really. 

For some, the thread is already sticking out when they're born: a little, red thread poking through the skin of their wrist, a match made in the womb, dangling like their severed umbilical cord; and for others, they don't feel that itch, that prickling pain of something outgrowing the scant space where tendon meets bone, being forced to split through skin and tissue, until they're older. 

You are not an exception to any universally established rule, but statistically, if someone hasn't grown a thread by the time they're twenty, it's unlikely to happen at all. 

He thought he was safe when you turned eighteen, turned twenty. Grew comfortable when the years kept passing after that and nothing came of it because no string, no other half—an idea that crushed you, he knows; but it didn't matter because you have him. Tommy. His wife. The ones who raised you from infancy. Platonic bonds blooming, full of life and vibrant, enough to slake the ache of a missing soulmate. Something he thought was enough—

Until he's watching silently as you marvel over it, lost in the burgeoning wonderment of who it could be. What they might look like, when you’ll meet them, and oh, if only it were sooner—

Your string is a pretty, shiny pink in its incipient germination; steadily pulsing with life as it cranes high into the air, seeking the other thread to link itself to. Seeking that burgeoning fantasy that he can see spinning in the back of your head. Forging a life without him because what is platonicity, familial affection, in comparison to that promised wholeness.

It's not as if he hasn't imagined that you would eventually move on. Want things for herself that he couldn't, and wouldn't, be able to give you. Braced for that day when you would come home from high school, from college, from work, from trips with your friends to places he could only follow in secrecy, and declare that you found someone you loved. Would move on from the house tragedy built, one brimming with ghosts, and become an occasional guest to a love, a comfort, that once was.

But that was without the string. 

And now—

Well.

The apex of it all is simple:

He thought he was safe.a folly he recognises in the paradigm that follows in pursuit of that little bump. the fissure growing, rotting, as reality around him is prodded at, and bends. proves to be more malleable, more penetrable, than he thought.

on the pristine walls of his undiluted sanctuary, a crack appears.

“You okay?” Tommy asks through a slow inhale of smoke. 

He can feel the shift of his gaze; feel the burn on the side of his face as Tommy watches him from across the kitchen table. It's the same look as back then, when he stumbled onto the patio in a daze, and found the backyard torn apart. Seven mounds of dirt, all six feet in depth, scattered across the disturbed ground. Bags of soil stacked against the railing. A shovel in his older brother's hand. Dirt, that was a little too red, caked under his nails. 

Inside, his wife shushed their baby sister while she cried. Their mother, their father, nowhere to be found. 

It's something full of caution. Reproach. He wonders if somewhere, maybe deep down in a place he can't even reach, Tommy knows that wherever his brother went that night, something else came home the next morning. 

Something covered in dirt and blood. Manic. Half-crazed. A thing that had an awful habit of making every problem they've ever had disappear. 

When the silence stretches on for too long, he forces himself to shrug. But his shirt, damp from sweat, clings to his slick skin, and makes him acutely aware of how hot he feels. 

Feverish, almost. 

Half-crazed. 

He knows how to act. What to say. Reaches for the pack of cigarettes even if the drag of fabric on his sodden skin rankles down his spine in a way that makes him grind his molars together until he hears the creak of a tooth on the nerve of shattering. Enamel tensing under pressure. 

The cigarette, the nicotine—or maybe just the habit itself—lessens the strain in his jaw, but does little to quell the heat in his guts. The slow, simmering fever of fury running through his veins. 

Everything is hazy. Fever-touched. The sharp end of a manic splinter driving itself deeper into his cranium until everything around him looks slightly smeared. Smudged fingerprints rubbed into the edges of his periphery. 

The heat, the stench—because beneath the stale smell of cigarettes, smoke, and ash, is the rot, and it is almost unbearable. Has him gnashing his teeth in anger. Rattling the bars to a cage he hasn't felt like he's been locked inside since he was seventeen. Whatever is leashed inside of him is snapping its jowls to get free.

His string aches. The seed deep in his tissue burning hot, infectious; each pulse makes pus oozes out from the rotted nub that cracks through his skin. 

It's worse than it's ever been. Instead of just the string itself rotting from inside of him, his flesh around it is waxy and red. Hot. Tight. The skin bracketing the string cracks and bleeds each time he flexes his swollen fist—

Beneath the heavy swath of ink etched into scar tissue and mangled flesh, the veins that run the length of his arm are black. Branching tendrils drift off from the main line, leaving webs of rot pulsing under his skin. 

He knows what he needs to do, what he should have already done, but for a moment, he considers going to rest in the garden instead. Dragging you along behind him before he smears myrrh and milk and honey over their skin—

But he knows that he'd never get that far. And even if he did fall victim to scaphism at his own hands, Price would still find a way to prop his mouldering body up on a stick to wave at their enemies, denying him the rest he doesn't deserve. 

Still. 

He needs to leave, he thinks. Needs to bring the corpse he dragged home with him back to the battleground. Needs to sink his teeth into something, into—

“m’leavin’,” he says, and it's only an ironclad control over himself that keeps the rabid froth from spilling out of his mouth. 

And Tommy—

Tommy doesn't say anything for a long stretch of time. Just stares. Watches him that same expression he started to hone into constant veneer the moment you turned eighteen, frowning at him from above your head with a look Simon can't place (won't place) fixed on his face like some loitering mother hen. 

It drives the distance that cracked open between them even wider than it was before, now a deep, jagged bergschrund neither are willing—or wanting—to cross. 

In another life, the irreparable damage to his relationship with Tommy might have clawed at his chest until it was a gaping wound; but in this lifetime, he knows—without an iota of uncertainty—that he did the right thing. Did what had to be done. 

But each look tinged with suspicion is an arrowhead dipped into poison. A chip at the chasm walls that only widens the maw further. 

And when Tommy glances towards the backdoor, to where you’re clawing at the dirt on your knees to make a home for the blue fox willow and rose of sharon you picked out at the nursery this morning, he feels something hot, sickly, twinge in his guts. 

“Oh, yeah?” Tommy says finally, turning back towards him and ashing his cigarette in the overflowing tray. 

He wonders if Tommy remembers that night in the garden, when he'd come home to a dirty house—dishes lying everywhere, food moulding on the counter; pills scattered across the coffee table, the needle of a syringe dripping onto the floor—and found you screaming in your bassinet while Tommy was passed out on the couch, too high to notice anything around him—

Maybe even Simon grabbing him by his collar and dragging him outside. Pushing a shovel into his hand and telling him if anything ever happened to you, to their sister, while he was gone, Tommy should just start digging his own grave. 

The slur in his voice when he said f–fuck, you know I wouldn't let anythin’ ‘appen to her, Si, you know that—

It hummed under his skin each time he had to go away, ears ringing with the sound of your screams echoing through the empty, dark hallway. Worry a splinter beneath his skin he couldn't pry out (even when he took his knife to his flesh, trying to dig it up)—a feeling that still lingers even as Tommy eventually cleaned up his act, sobered up (in parts, pieces), and raised their sister better than their parents ever could. 

He should be proud—and he thinks he is (or feels some approximation of pride)—but he can't shake the look. The suspicion, dappled in red against the jaundiced smear of sleeplessness and a glassy high, that keeps burning through. 

It's there now, too—clearer this time, brighter without the drugs dulling his senses, but just as potent. As heavy. 

Drenched in askance when he shuffles his feet beneath the table their mother sat at, silent and still as a ghost, as their father dumped a tray full of ash into their food after he found a pack of stolen cigarettes stuffed under their mattress, and made them eat it. 

Simon thumbs the scrapes in the wood where he was forced to bite down on the edge while their father threatened to bash his teeth out for talking back—something he'd only done to distract the man from beating his brother senseless—as Tommy finally meets his gaze, and says:

“Yeah. Might be for the best.”

His nail scrapes down the torn wood, each ridge a perfect impression of all the places his teeth had caught in the wood. He chipped three teeth. Lost two. Tommy cowered in the corner while his mum sat, still as a ghost, at the table drinking her tea. 

Dad laughed. Laughed at the scream he let out. At the tooth that scattered across the wood. Ain't talkin’ back now, are ya?

Laughed—

Until he noticed the blood soaking into the varnish. Bellowed at the mess, at the fuckin’ mess—

He ignores the flicker of discomfort when he scrapes his finger across the torn varnish, unbothered by the sting as little chips, flakes, of wood gather underneath his nailbed. Barely notices it as he holds Tommy's gaze, and curls his hand into a loose fist on the table, knuckles facing downwards. 

“Sure,” he rasps. 

And the crack widens.

(it began with a garden.) 

a garden—

and a choice.)

A choice for which the lines of his conviction never blurred, never smeared. A concise, pristine demarcation emerged from the moment he made a choice that changed the trajectory of his life from tragic to harmonious, giving that little thing germinating inside the womb of his mother a chance—giving you, his safe haven, an opportunity to pullulate within this harsh world built around them.

It's something he's never questioned, despite the wealth of scars and crooked bones and gaping wounds he gained when he uprooted everything around him until all that remained was disturbed soil—enriched with peat moss and calcium; a blood-fed garden freed of all weeds, and slowly leaching from the percolating minerals as his enemies (and the gangrenous limbs of their parents—ones unexpectedly, and suddenly, lost to a quiet disappearance that Tommy stopped asking about when the investigation dwindled and the sparse, threadbare sympathy dried up along with the askance in his gaze whenever it was brought up) slowly decomposed humus and perlite, feeding the tomatoes and blood-red berries they planted together when he was on leave. 

And beneath your soft, unblemished fingertips, the silent graveyard he filled for you turned into a lush basin of growth. Everything rich and heady—

Carnivorous, even though you’ll never know the truth of what he fertilises your garden with. Or where their parents disappeared to when you were just a few weeks old. 

Secrets he'll take to his grave because the blood dripping from his hands, the slow rot of his string, is worth it just to see you bloom—

And to reap the rewards of your garden as you feed him from it each spring:

please eat better, you said—demanded, really—when you were no more than ten, and he dutifully swallowed the cherry tomato you plucked from the shade of its leafy umbrella without a word when you pressed it to his scarred lips, crooked teeth sinking into the tight, smooth skin until it popped in his mouth, leaking juice and pulpy flesh between his teeth, a mimicry of what he'd done to the man with blooded, bare hands who tried to bludgeon you to death in infancy. 

Says nothing about it, about the blood in the vines, in the roots, of your pretty garden that you still fuss over every spring despite the years that passed since your siege of longevity, allowing Tommy the occasional beer, and him his preferred cigarette when you weren't around to see it.

"want me to live longer, eh?" he'd quip instead, licking the stuck skin from between his teeth. breath warm, herbaceous; tomato juice—that was always a little too red—dribbling down his chin. "tryin' to butter me up an' become my favourite sister, are you?"

and your breath would hitch slightly. a shallow catch, made more out of fondness and affection than anything else, that always happened just before you would smile, bright and wide, and volley back:

"i'm your only sister."

and the thing is:

what he felt for you has always been platonic, desireless—

but maybe it wasn't as apodictic as he thought.

and as the fractures split and grow, crumbling the walls of his once unblemished refuge, he's beginning to see how wrong he was. that, at some point, a foreign seed was thrown into the satchel and sowed in with the others. a parasitic, carnivorous spore that grew down instead of up. invasive. pervasive. silently, unknowingly spreading beneath the soil and under the roots of everything else until the infection grew, the rot festered, and he began looking at you with the face of the man but the eyes of the other—

a blameless notion. accidental. happenstance. divined by fate instead of choice.

easy to pick at, to cling to; to wrap the thread of this new truth around his fingers and anchor himself to it as his insides are subsumed by the fecundated spores. unwittingly, and helplessly, consumed by pathogenesis—

an easy out.

but he's been thinking a lot about platonicity lately. dwelling on the shapes his world took when he reduced his overarching sense of greed and possession to an oversimplification, or a symptom, of familial piety.

the raw truth is that he's always had those recesses buried deep in his cranium, waiting to burst. the ooze, that putrid sludge, building up over time as the half of him that died in that shallow grave festers; necrotizing in the back of his head. a bloated corpse of the man he once was: a man who wouldn't feel these twisted, awful things for his own sister—not at all; or at least, not at the expense of Tommy. his own flesh and blood.

a casualty, then—or a cruel twist of fate—that the putrid runoff of the good man's rotting body built up over time, forming a cesspit where ruin thrives. where all the good things inside of him go to rot.

even that hallowed place he made in the softness of your touch. desire, possession: psychosomatic.

reality is a layered plane. multifaceted, multileveled. misshapen and bent. and in the staggered remains of it all is another half-truth:

something shifted inside of him. another crack. another fracture wrought in the gauzy, sweet spill of a girl who has always been his proclaiming your burgeoning love, your desire, for another man, a person you’ve never met before, in front of him; each soft soliloquy, these gentle musings of a life without him in it, unearths the things he buried in the dark: the raw, clawing desperation; the possession he's felt since you wrapped your hand around his finger and wouldn't let go—

his. but not—not really.

familial. a safe, softened affection, a love he knows is there—one that's always been more than enough until now. until he still see that glossy love in your eyes, but is now forced to see it buffered from the inky, wet spread of desire spilling in those unbidden fantasies that spin and spin and spin—

it's irrefutable, he knows. his birdie, his baby, loves him, but it's not enough—

not anymore.

and a man that has only known hunger and desperation is readymade to snap his jaws and bury his teeth into the hand that tries to take his meal away from him.

(a meal that has always been his;

after all, would a truly innocent domicile really need a closet in which to stuff greed, desire, into if the threat of it permeating the air hasn't always been lingering in the shadows, tucked into the putrid recesses of his rotting mind—)

Tucked away in a safehouse he hasn't used in a decade, Simon takes a blade he'd heated over the stove until the metal was red-hot to the blackened skin on his wrist, and cuts out the infectious seed from his body. 

On the table, exuding leachates and putrid, old blood into dust-covered wood, is the rotting string he'd cut out first. 

The tail is shrivelled into a husk of mummified tissue. It's brittle. Pieces flake off when he touches it, crumbling into char, into ash between his fingers. The string itself is more of a muddy brown than a red. His blood, too, leaks slowly from the gouged wound in his skin—a thick, sticky tar-like ooze that's more pus than blood, he thinks. Or a noxious mix of both—sanies; a seropurulent discharge that reeks of infection. Of fetid flesh. 

The seed, too, drips the same fetid liquid as it sits on the flat edge of his knife, and he can't help staring at the slimy, black spore. 

It's so insignificant for what it is, for how much trouble it caused twenty-three years ago; now. 

Everything about it is—

Underwhelming. 

The blood-drenched roots he felt being pulled out from his veins are smaller than he expected them to be. Finger-length. Thin. Just these spindly, desiccated strands that look like they'd uproot with just the slightest tug. Branching secondary roots with torn ends—the part he figures must embed itself in veins. The anchor points that act like an umbilicus, leaching nutrients from his body in an anomalous symbiosis. 

To him, it looks far more parasitic than the benevolent organism they've claimed since humans first encountered whatever theorised spore or prehistoric parasite is believed to have caused the strings, one that dug deep into a neanderthal's tissue and refused to let go. That, he supposes, or divine intervention. An act of God. 

It's immobile, much like the plants in your garden. The little saplings you picked from the nurseries in town. Lifeless, almost, but it's beguiling. 

Even as a dessicated husk of pulp and rotten roots, he can feel the life brimming through the veins. The artificial arteries. There's a heart in the nucleus, even if it's blackened with rot and mold. The apex of his problems sits in the string that emerged eighteen years too early. Reached for someone else—

It's in the lifeless corpse of his supposed fate where he thinks of you. 

Of the string budding in your tissue. It's longer, you'd texted last night—another unanswered message in a sea of many because each time he tried to reply, the words you're mine were the only things his fingers seemed to be willing to type—and weird. 

He knows. 

Has been through it before. Endured the alien sensation of a kernel slowly germinating in your wrist, budding between tendon, ulna, and radius. Burying roots in your median cephalic vein. A new, foreign growing pain that felt like it didn't belong—like glass, a sliver, embedded in skin. An entity. A passenger he was forced to carry as it sliced into muscle and tissue, curled around bone, and broke through skin. A constant ache. A throbbing pain. 

His hand became a petiole, a rib. A stalk. Vibrant, blood-red palmates, curling around his fingers as it sought the other half it was cut from. 

It's been two weeks. The only spark of guilt he's ever felt in his life is nestled within the words wish you told me you were leaving, i didn't even get to say goodbye, the text sent only an hour after he'd left the house, the kitchen; the suspicion in Tommy's eyes, sharply cut with a thread of relief when he'd stood to go. 

That inchoate bud would now be several inches long, the string, the stem, curling around your fingers like a nemertea with branching ganglions. Midribs that slot into place, sessile. Designed to be as unobtrusive as possible as it stretches out from between the brackets of your knuckles, seeking its other half, its other polyp, to join, completing the lifecycle of the parasitic string, or—as romantic manuscripts from the early medieval period like to proselytize—finalising a soulmatic union. 

And, with the subsequent text messages that follow, it's a process that might be completed for you sooner than thought because maybe there was a little more to the suspicion in Tommy's eyes at that table, in the garden, on the porch, than he'd realised. 

Tommy is being really weird lately, you'd texted. he keeps pushing for me to check out that company that finds your soulmate for you—

On the table, laying open beside the bisected string and parts, is a translated copy of that manuscript. It's the last book he'd read about the topic—everything else stacked behind it is thicker, dense with the knowledge and understanding of this (still) mystifying organism that infects humanity; filled with scientific research, anatomical outlines—and arguably the most fantastical of the lot. They believed that it was a divine blessing from God, and most of it is unfounded, uneducated assumptions, but nestled in the slew of religious nonsense is a single line he can't stop reading. A noetic line in Middle English that bought on this self-guided surgery to begin with: 

that in this world nys creature lyvynge. Now be we caytyves, as it is wel seene, thanked be Fortune and hire false wheel, hangynge by a soutil twynes threed. And ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne.

A bagatelle, really. Or the majority of it is. Almost indecipherable even with the translation beneath—that in this world is no living creature; now we are miserable wretches, as it is easily seen, thanks be to Fortune and her false wheel—but the last part stands out. 

hanging by a thin thread of twine; and where I left off, I will again begin—

On the table, the bloodsoaked husk of his string begins to reek of rot, but nestled between tendon and bone, a familiar ache gnaws at him. 

Between the carved pieces of tissue and fat, a new seed emerges. 

He has two fingers buried in the shallow grave of his wrist when a plan starts to take shape.

—ii. 5:1

The oppressive heat soon gives way to a torrent of summer storms. 

Thick, craggy smears of slate and iron clot over the cloudless cerulean skies, hiding the unrelenting sun behind a veil of charcoal. Everything is overtaken by a heavy swath of grey gloom and streaks of lightning. 

The deluge that follows is near biblical—a downpour that lasts three days, drenching the ground so heavily in rainwater that it sits on the grass for hours before it eventually soaks into the earth. Feeding the roots. The voracious maw of your garden and the bodies drowning underneath the soil.

Geosmin and petrichor pepper the air in a dense spool, a thickened web. 

He comes back during a respite in the cloudburst when the draping greys lighten into a muddled blue and the dense stormcloud crack apart, a sliver of the setting sun spills through. He finds you in the kitchen, your back to him, stirring something in a pot. It smells rich. Full of spices and herbs. Aromatic. 

Curry, he thinks. Simmering in a pot on the back burner. Then beneath it—rice, buttery and sweet, browning in a shallow pan with butter and garlic and onions. 

On the counter, a handful of sun-ripened tomatoes, diced into pulpy, oozing chunks of red rest on a cutting board next to a small mound of minced, green herbs. Several spoons sit on a cloth near the sink—each of them covered in sauce. There's a wooden spoon tucked behind your ear. A damp towel thrown over your shoulder. 

Your phone is on the table; something mid-tempo, atmospheric plays from the speakers, and you hum along under your breath—I gotta know tonight, if you're alone tonight—as you stir grains of rice. Soft. Easy. Can't stop this feeling. Can't stop this fire. Swaying slowly to the beat. Head bowing with each shallow nod, and it gives him the perfect view of your nape. Sloping and vulnerable. Fragile—like the arching handle of fine bone china. 

It's—

Sweet. Domestic.

In his chest, something cracks. Fractures. It aches, and it bleeds—

You notice him, then, just as the other man, more of a feral animal now, drags itself to the edge of the precipice, ready to jump—

A flicker. Surprise, he thinks. And then: 

a smile, all wrapped up in the rich, heady scent of spices, and herbs; warm, toasted butter and milky cream. home, and him, and you.

didn't know you were coming back, you say, turning towards him with that same, soft smile. “Dinner is almost done. Hungry?”

Is he hungry? He doesn't think a single day has gone by where he wasn't ravenous. 

Starving comes out as a mangled sound in the back of his throat. Raw. Charred. Forced out between clenched teeth. All ash, cinder. 

The growl he lets out makes that pretty smile falter, just a touch, at the edges. Dimming. Hackles raising. Body tensing in anticipation—even if you're not really sure why. 

It's all—

Primal. 

Muddled. 

You take a cautious step back—unconciously done; atavistic fear driving you away from the bigger, dangerous man looming over you, blocking the only exit; your hindbrain sensing the predator in the bush before your mind catches up to the fact that your body, your instincts, are trying to protect you from your own kin. 

Your own big brother. 

He scrapes his tongue against his teeth. The pangs in his belly are almost impossible to ignore—a gaping, rapacious beast in his guts that can't stop eyeing the way your meat clings to fragile bones. The cushion of fat. Muscle. Plump and full and ready for him to sink his teeth into—

In the pale light, soft lines of ruby gleam:

Curled—protectively—around your wrist is the string. Thin, branching hyphae loop around your fingers. The trailing tail tipped inward, kept tucked against the heat of your inner wrist, resting along your pulse, unmoved. Unmoving—

the string doesn't stir. 

the refusal is clear: 

he is not your soulmate. 

The anger that sparks through the hunger in his guts is a sick thing. Twisted. But he swallows it down, tucks the feeling into the folds of his chest and steps closer, reaching for you with dirty hands—

“c’mon,” he grunts, curling his fingers around your wrist, cupping the string beneath his palm. He feels agitated. Restless. 

“You wanna eat outside?” 

Even sounding—and looking—so perplexed, you still turn away from him, turning the dials on the stove to bring the heat down to a simmer. Letting everything rest, your own meal is kept in stasis, as you rearrange your evening to sate his appetite. 

“Rain let up,” is all he gives in response. Then, when you make to grab another bowl from the cupboard, he adds: 

Done enough, ‘aven’t you? 

He lets go of your wrist, and nudges you towards the door. You don't question him at all. Then again, you rarely ever do. Always so eager to please, to soak up any scrap of attention he has leftover to give;

“Go sit outside. I'll grab the food, an’ make some tea.”

so sweetly obedient for him—even to your own detriment. 

You always smell like the garden. 

Earthy. Damp. A forest floor after a rainfall. Mossy and rich. Slightly mineral, too—wet rocks, stones. Herbaceous—like the thick, full fronds on your boston fern. 

A particular thing: like everything before then, before the heart of your scent bloomed to life, was baking in the heat. Everything is still a little sundrenched, a little burnt, but now bathing in the cool respite of a rainshower. The air tinged, slightly, with that soft, sweet acidic scent that lingers in the air after a summer's storm. Geosmin. Water on wet pavement. A street—full of dirt, grime, oil, and scorching concrete—drenched in the aftermath of a deluge. 

It's a scent he carries with him everywhere he goes, invoking you through the process of dampening his fingers and digging through a small patch of soil until the urge to run home is slaked in the disturbed earth.

(—him: hunched over on his knees, thick forearm braced against the ground, nose pressed into the soil; breathing the heady scent of loam into his lungs, the scent of you—)

The respite from the storms comes at a cost, and the price to pay tonight is a thick, wet humidity that drapes over everything like a heavy blanket. And within the sticky, molasses-like air is the scent of you. Thicker tonight. Maddeningly so. 

He can't escape it. Not when the air itself is perfumed with it, with you, in a dense sillage that drips down the back of his throat with each inhale. 

The world itself moulding around the two of you as the trees around the garden table dip from the weight of the droplets sitting heavy on soaked branches and wind-battered leaves, bending to form a lush parentheses of wet, earthy green. 

it's enough to drive a man mad, he thinks, and know, then, if he stayed, if he hadn't left, he would have broke until the heavy spill of you clinging to his skin, soaking his lungs—

(—his hand knocking into his thigh each time he stroked downwards on his cock; teeth sinking into a groan that threatens to spill out, the shape of it a little too close to your name for him to do anything but ignore it, ignore it and pretend like he isn't burying his face in the damp dirt, tugging on his cock, and thinking of his baby sister—)

He's half-hard. Half-crazed. You're stuck in the fading vestiges of the hidden sun still desperately trying to squeeze through the thick, dark clouds above. Glowing in soft ochre. In the warm gold of the fairylights. You look—

Otherworldly, in this garden. This moment. Ethereal—

And drunk. 

Lids, half-mast, over glossy, red-rimmed eyes. Unfocused. Slumped over the table, the bowl of half-eaten curry and rice perched precariously between the edge and your drooping elbow. All effort focused on keeping you from dropping your head onto the wrought iron. 

The mug of tea sits, empty, in front of you. 

“Tired?” He pries, leaning back against the chair. Legs kicked out. A big, dusty boot sliding between your ankles. 

It's a sick thing when you give a sluggish nod and he coos, a little lower, a little meaner, than usual. Poor baby, slips out into the dripping ficus. You're too out of it to notice the edge in his voice. The hunger. 

It's as if the world around you is stuck in molasses, in tar. Slowed to a drip, an ooze. Everything tangled up in a thick, sticky web. Thoughts catching on the strands like flies, unreachable. Paper-thin. He slips his booted toe up your calf, your leg. Nudging your knees until they split apart over the chair for him. 

The old table and chair set is a deep emerald—patches of it blackened; lost to time, to rust, to rot—and made of curled iron, all of it bent into curving leaves and vines that twist into a pretty rose centre. Open gaps, finger-thick, keep it from being a solid piece; but that wasn't the design for these old, vintage bistro tables. He can see right through to the ground where dappled sunspots scorch the pavement, and—higher up—the split between your knees, the pretty part of your thighs. 

It's too dark out to see much, but the hazy shadow at the apex, hiding the colour of your panties from his view, is enticing enough. More than enough. 

In all the people he fucked, in all poses, the positions, not a single one of them comes close to the sheer eroticism of his little sister struggling to stay awake, but keeping your thighs spread for him to look between. A good fuckin’ girl. 

It's nothing but shadows. A vague hint—the suggestion of it, of your cunt—but it has sweat pooling along his hairline, dribbling down his spine. A fever in his veins at the thought alone. That dark patch is enough to make him sweat. 

Wonders, then, what you'd look like arching into it. Willingly spreading your thighs for him. Desperate for it. Rubbing that pretty cunt on his boot—a little performance, just for him. 

“Look’it you,” he rasps, and with his foot, he pushes your thighs apart wider. Openly staring at that crux. Poor thing. “Should get some sleep, huh?”

You mumble something, the words tangled up in exhaustion. Delirium. Slurred and incomprehensible. 

Adorable. 

“C’mon,” he urges, and pulls his boot away with a huff. “Gotta be a good big brother an’ get you to bed, don't I?”

You say nothing, but he doesn't expect you to. The sleeping pills he crushed up and mixed into your tea are probably stronger than you can handle—

But he pulls back, boot dropping to the ground after tucking the image of you slumped over the table, legs spread; silently letting your older brother push his boot between your thighs just to steal a glimpse of your panties. 

(it's not the first time, though—he has several pairs shoved in his duffle bag, all snatched up from the hamper before he left—

some of them kept, just for him. the rest forced onto whoever he picked up for the night; modelled and posed for him. their faces hidden. 

he's sick in the head, he knows; and more-so now after the cutting, decimating realisation that just that sliver, that peek, of your panties beneath the table turned him on more than the people he'd forced into your used panties—)

“C’mon—”

He stands with a huff. Hard, amused. Starving. Watching with a strange, awful, mix of want and affection as your head drops backwards, and you blink up with him with liquid eyes, lost to the medication. The drugs. Droop-eyed and dazed, but still so fuckin’ trusting. Arms sluggishly lifting up when he steps towards you, thrusting the string—the one that refuses to even twitch for him—into the warm, gold glow from the lights, putting it on display. 

You were so happy about it during dinner. Prattling on about how Tommy was going to register you for a string search, find your soulmate for you as soon as possible. The elation cutting into your gaze as you spoke about it, about finding your mate made his skin crawl. Made him clench down tight until his jaw ached and his head pounded. Biting down on the urge to growl out you're fuckin’ mine—

His sweet baby sister, blooming for someone else. 

The mumble of his name brings him back. Centres him. 

He helps you up as you babble. A syrupy slip of a thing that he tucks under his arm, holding tight. A sloppy smile, all wide and bright, even as it wobbles at the edges, builds when you see him. 

Your nose pressed into his ribs. Missed you, mumbled into the damp fabric of his shirt. Missed you so, so much—

You're so much his baby sister at this moment that it aches. 

But it doesn't make the hunger go away. 

Instead he presses his lips to your temple in a sloppy, smearing kiss, all teeth and sticky skin that makes you giggle, and pulls you up, walking you back into the house, down the hall. To your bedroom. Pushes you towards the bed, echoing the yawning, slurring mumble of goodnight, Simon that follows him down the hall as he pretends to leave. Leaning against the wall as he waits. Listening to the creak of bedsprings in the old, tissue-walled house as you settle into an artificial sleep. 

Then, he prepares. 

It's quick. Just two snips. Four neat stitches. Faster than he expected it to be, and with this newfound wealth of time, he can't ignore the itch in the back of his head—some long, forgotten conscience of the man he used to be (the man he could have been if he never dug that grave)—whispering in the still, quiet dark that he can stop here. That this is more than enough—

But he thinks that man ought to know better.

He's known hunger like no other; knows what an empty stomach does to itself. Knows just how far someone would go to try and sate the ache inside that pit that is never full, never satisfied. Should remember rummaging through bins for scraps. Begging on street corners. Stealing from stores and shops just to bring his wears home and have it taken away. Unable to sleep on an empty stomach. And—

The feeling of self-cannibalisation. The act of the body eating itself to survive.

It's never enough. And in that shallow grave, he told himself he'd never settle again for seconds, never beg for the leftovers on someone else's plate. Barter for scraps.

All or nothing.

And he wants all, wants everything, he can gorge himself on when it comes to you.

A rapacious, selfish beast that eats, and eats—

He's decidedly unbothered by the lack of guilt he feels; the absence of morality in any shred of his being as he picks up the torch and continues. Cauterizes the wound, welds the flesh together.

When he's done, he holds the fresh wound between his fingers, letting the blood settle so it can start to ebb and flow. Watches the blackened, burnt skin slowly begin to peel and flake. Dead tissue fluttering onto the bedsheets the way it should, leaving behind nothing but red flesh, slightly inflamed. A little swollen, but nearly healed. Strings heal quick. Quicker than flesh, than skin. The antibiotics will help, too. Everything coming together in a quiet breath; tucked between the stench of rot and burning flesh until all that remains is soft, sutured tissue and a small pile of ash beside your elbow.

And the rest, he supposes. The severed string in his hand, slowly withering away—the signifier to an immediate death on the opposite end of the rope. Whoever your soulmate was, they're gone now.

That, too, he feels nothing about. No guilt. No anguish. Just a bone-deep sense of satisfaction thrumming through him. Something primal, all animal, that preens in the back of his head as he gathers the string in his palm, the symbolic other half that tried to take you away from him, and without a second thought, he pops it into his mouth and starts to chew—

(Can't leave behind any evidence, after all.)

Gamey, slight tough. Touched with incipient bloom of rot percolating from its dying pores. With a single swallow, it goes down: falling to the yawning chasm of a belly that'll never be full; and with it, so too goes the only thing in the world that has ever stood a chance to take you away from him.

And without much else to do but wait it out, he gathers his things, dusts the dead, burnt skin from the bed, and leaves—as if he was never there to begin with.

In the morning, he yawns awake to the sound of a shrill scream. Then the hammering of feet on old, weathered wood. His brothers voice echoing down the hall, words garbled with sleep and confusion. hey, wait—

but heedless, his door is wrenched open, and you're filling the frame; eyes widening with disbelief. With a touch of disgust and horror that he's sure you'll overcome with time. Looking slightly sick, a little mystified as the once small nub stretches across herringbone until it kisses the mouth of his umbilicus. A connected line that gets smaller as the gap closes.

soulmates found.

(or—

reforged.)

A minute later, and Tommy is there, his eyes just as wide as the gears turn, as the sight before him is laid bare. Unmistakable. A breathless, shaken no, oh fuck, no leaving the slack of his jaw as he watches the scene unfold, as his eyes follow that hideous trail. One that binds his brother and sister together—

It's telling, he thinks, that the first thing Tommy says to him is not what happened, but instead:

“Simon…what the fuck did you do?”

He's comfortable in the chaos that follows.

In the visits to doctors and specialists, and the uncertainty that clots the home like a thick, noxious miasma as everyone around him, around you, try to poke and prod at the cauterised knot that ties you to him eternally.

There's no give. No loopholes. His precision fools everyone because no one has ever tried to do what he's done, and the string is a living, breathing thing that's as easily manipulated—just like an organ transplant, tricking the body into thinking things are as they should be—and it pulses to life as it heals, sharing nutrients and blood between the two of you.

Inserverable, the specialists say.

A bond—even one as rare as this (if not utterly unheard of)—cannot be broken without consequence. While there are rumours and theories about it, nothing has been proven. All that is known is that no one has been able to find the perfect middle of a soulmates fated string, and when cut, the individual whose string is shorter than the other dies. This is ironclad. Laws were formed, strengthened, around this very notion.

The string, however taboo, cannot be cut.

And even if it could, he won't let it.

Because the thing is—the missing part to that half-truth—is that he's been waiting for this day since he was eighteen.

—and ther I lefte, I wol ayeyn bigynne, indeed.

from the moment he showed up to the hospital after getting the call from Tommy, and held you in his arms as you peeled your red, swollen eyes open and looked right at him (him, not Ghost, not the other; not Simon, the man, but him, him, him—), he knew you were his. that first hitch, that little breath. he leaned down and caught it between his teeth—warmed milk, honey-sweet—and swallowed it down. let it moulder in his belly until he could taste you in the back of his throat.

this tiny, insignificant thing—

the schematics never mattered much. he doesn't think there was ever a time when dwelled on blood or familial bonds, or felt sick over the fact that you grew up calling him brother. that his brother is your brother, too. same parents. same blood. it isn't, and wasn't ever, a perversion; he didn't try to reshape the boundaries of your relationship, or push you past what was normal. it was kinship. platonic. familial.

you were, and are, simply his.

he was content with just having you close. your presence a balm to the aggravation within himself. sprouting life within lands he once thought were barren. reshaping the geographical plains of his own existence until it perfectly bracked around each breath you took; a shadow that loomed with every step.

he became this—

this thing. a wild animal, once feral and crazed, domesticating itself just so it could be allowed close enough to smell the sweet, warm milk of your breath; feel it on his scarred cheek when you used the broad stretch of his shoulders to balance on his knees, wobbling like an unstable sun in his lap as you kissed the mess of his chin whispered the words that kept bringing him home, over and over again. dragged him back from beneath the funerary dirt he was buried under. giving him the will to turn a nightmare into a home (into mausoleum that entombed the rotting remains of his father and mother—neither good enough to be near you). a lush garden. a happy, giggling girl in his arms pushing blood-fed tomatoes between his maw. he stretched his legs out as he chewed and knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life just like this: no more, no less.

but then he felt that nub. that little seed beneath your skin that mocked him, told him that, under no uncertainty, you belonged to someone else. and that just wouldn't do.

see, the universe might have gotten it wrong—gave him another soulmate, another person, instead of you—but he's learned a lot from the military, from John Price; knows that the most important thing in the world is correcting mistakes. making things right.

killing his own soulmate (and yours when he cut your string) was just the right thing to do because even then, he knew there couldn't (and wouldn't) be anyone else.

and when you slip into his room, the epitome of a sacrificial lamb marching towards death, he feels the cracked, misshapen pieces of himself begin to shift again—

(a little hitch, a hiccup, as you come to stop in front of him, wide-eyed and nervous. wincing sharply when familiarity bleeds into unease, and you can't stop the routine that shapes you anymore than he can stop the blood in your veins; a little slip shattering the silence: Simon—)

—and then fall into place.

he loops his finger around the joined thread, giving a sharp tug that makes you gasp as you're pulled from within; stumbling forward, and catching yourself on the breadth of his thighs. warm, soft hands sinking into the give of fat before steadying against solid, tensing muscle.

your touch, even featherlight, ignites something inside of him. the animal slinks back, squeezing between the gaps of the man and the other until it's prowling in the forefront, ready to stake it's claim—

(a primal thing that buzzes along his hindbrain, over his skin. little animalcules that bead from his pores, fattened with the logic they syponed until all that remained was raw instinct, an itch reaching a fever pitch.)

"c'mere, baby," he burrs, breath reeking of bone ash and cherry tomatoes. "come closer. ain't gonna bite—"

much, is left unsaid, but you flinch like you hear it all the same. the urge to soothe is there—a reminder that despite the desire, the want, the drive to reach for you, his unstable sun, and protect is keeping pace with the fever burning in his veins.

a dichotomy, of sorts.

and he sees the way you lean into him, too—familiar, heartbreaking; his baby and your grabbing, clinging hands always reaching for him when you wobble—before the new delineation of what you are to him, of what he is to you, slips back in, and you pause, hovering. unsure what's allowed anymore. what isn't.

he wants to say anything. everything. that despite it all, he's still the man you baby-fed cherry tomatoes to; the heavy, herbaceous scent of lush green clinging to the tips of your dirt-crusted fingers. all of it shaded in something endearing, sweet (warm, sticky summer evenings spent on the patio he built, watching as you chased down fireflies and beetles and fussed over the perennials: all of it a thick, percolating drip of nostalgia in the back of his throat, stuffed into his nose like the sweat that gathered on the nape of his neck)—even if the man he is now wants to chase them with his mouth, lick the blood-red juice from between your fingers.

wants to fuck you in that garden where the bodies rot until the cries of your ecstacy wake the dead—

he tries, he does, to let you adjust. grow into acceptance, into love, without brute force or shallow manipulation. knows that you need time, space. need to acclimate to the newly established boundaries of your relationship, and come to terms with this—artificial—reality when the man you've known only as family, as kin, as your brother, is your soulmate.

bound by fate, by this dangling red string that clings to each umbilicus, sharing breath and blood. an unignorable truth that the man who built you a garden, taught you how to tie your shoes, and called you baby and birdie and brat is now calling you mine. is allowed to call you that. expected to, really—

could fuck you in that garden if he wanted to despite everyone knowing you're his baby sister because all it takes is a single string and the noble lie blooms back into consciousness.

the boundaries of your relationship blurred overnight, and he wants to give you time, he does, but the other (and maybe the man, too) hunger. have always hungered. and there was a moment, a slip in time, where he could have lost you—

it's enough to drive a half-mad man insane.

push him to the brink.

and that's where he is. what he is. a man on the brink—

until your hands lift, coming to rest on his shoulders. fingers digging into his collarbones as you wobble over his thighs. onto his lap. milk-sweet breath puffing against his chin, his jaw. that little hitch when his hands come up, grabbing your hips; steady and firm and unrelenting as you squirm into this new skin, this new role.

a messy kiss against his cheek, and barely even that. just a smear of trembling lips over scarred skin. too nervous, too novice (too rattled over the sudden shift of your reality—) to really know what to do: you pepper soft, shaky kisses over his skin and pretend that he can't feel the feverish chills racking through your body. a symptom of the lingering uncertainty as you wrap your head around what the world is telling you to do (and not do), to feel (and not feel), and try to figure out how to claw out of the brackets and be as comfortable in his arms, in his bed, beneath him, the way soulmates are expected to be.

sympathy, though, isn't enough to eclipse greed, and he drags you down firmer into his lap, letting you feel the unmistakable press of his cock seated against your clothed seam. relishing in that hitch, that gasp, as he bends down and takes over. turns innocent, kittish kisses into something that's devouring, an eating: all teeth—soaking your lips in his spit, tasting the inside of your mouth as he gags you on the thick of his tongue. swallowing down your spit, your gasps, these little whines in the back of your throat as he pushes his cock into you and wraps his hands around your neck so you can't pull away and hide. revels in the triumph when those little mewls lose the touch of disgust and your hips shift, searching and seeking. eager for the pressure his thickness brings. a smearing, messy kiss—

"want more, don't you, birdie?" he sinks his teeth into the panic shaping your lips with a groan. a greedy nip. "s'alright," he adds, his hand slipping down, down—

the width of his legs pry your thighs apart, but he gets a sick little thrill watching the way they twitch, desperately trying to close. likes it more, he thinks, when you're like this—unsure, but forcing yourself to like it. to enjoy it.

you have to, after all.

but he can taste it on your tongue. the slow glaze molting over your eyes. you don't want him now—not really. any desire you feel is a placebo caused by the string that tugs and pulls between the two of you, but—

not for long.

"it's alright," he burrs again, petting the inside of your thigh. "you're mine, ain't you?"

there's a pause, but it's briefer than he expected. and then a nod, a little less unsure than he thought it would be. he can't stop the groan that slips out, raw and fractured, as your martyrdom begins to crack with the shift of his hand, leaving behind a slick, sticky leak that he chases with his fingers until he reaches soft lace—

soft, damp lace.

he pushes his knuckle into the spill of it, groaning at the soft, wet heat he feels hidden behind the fabric. pity, force, doesn't soak you like this. doesn't make you fever-hot and sticky. hips rocking slightly, a little hitch. pushing forward, into fingers. his touch. 

him. 

you're his. all his.

"'course you are,” he coos as you ruck against the press of his knuckle, eager and needy and so fuckin’ sweet. that soft, elated look you had for the person who was meant to have his place is angled up, focused on him. it's ego-feeding. has him preening in the aftermath of his hardwon conquest: the spoils his baby sister, his soulmate; doe-eyed and needy. sating the man, but stoking the fire of the other. 

after, he'll drag you out into the garden and fuck you amid the drooping vines of the tomato plants just because he can—because you're his. after all,

“the universe said so, didn't it?"

(you've always wanted a soulmate.