Updated as of 7.17.25 - Will be revamped soon I swear :’) 

♥ = NSFW; please check tags and warnings before reading!

I recommend reading on Ao3 where possible—I’ve made small updates & improvements to those fics over time. My account is currently unlocked so that unregistered users can read.

Viktor →

Baby, You’re the Cure ♥ || Ao3 Link Status: Discontinued Anon requested: I would love to see Viktor as an apothecary and he makes a bunch of medicines and tinctures and reader comes in for something and they get flirty it can be sfw or nsfw. I made it: Super horny, featuring accidental aphrodisiac use. 

Good Intent ♥ || Ao3 Link After a particularly shit day of losing your job and ugly crying about it, Viktor cares only to help you feel better. Your idea of a distraction from your problems is unconventional and quite unexpected, but, well, he’s happy to oblige. 

Horny for Revenge ♥ Status: Discontinued You’re fucking Heimerdinger’s assistant. He can’t resist fucking with you sometimes, when you’re least expecting it. But for once, he picked the wrong morning to underestimate you. ↳ Part 1 ♥ ↳ Part 2 ♥

Imagine Being Loved by Me ♥ || Ao3 Link An Academy party seems the setting for your long standing flirtation to finally come to fruition, but it doesn’t go as anticipated when Viktor disappears and turns back up where you least expect. Good thing your office is quite private. 

I’ve Been Saving All My Summers for You || Ao3 Link Status: Discontinued Scion of your noble household, the time has come to ensnare a husband. Your eye is trained on Prince Jayce Talis, for you were raised with the ambition of making such a fortuitous match. You will spend the season attending his lavish parties, hoping to entice him with your wit and charm. Which is difficult, when you are most certainly in love with his advisor instead. ↳ Prologue ↳ Part 1 ↳ Part 2

Let’s Get Physical || (Ao3 link) (Asks tag) Status: Hiatus A beefy gal looking for a better place to workout, your friend Jayce invites you over to his home gym. He offers you everything you could ever want: great equipment, great company and a really cute roommate who might just hate you. ↳ Part 1 ↳ Part 2 ↳ Part 3 ↳ Part 4 ↳ Part 5  ↳ Part 5.2 ♥ ↳ Part 6 ↳ Part 7

+ Side Story: We Have Chemistry (Together)

Send Nudes ♥ || Ao3 Link As the titles says. You slip Viktor your nudes and let the chaos unfold. 

Temperance ♥ || Ao3 Link When Viktor is alone in the lab, you kindly pack up your Academy office and spend the day in his company, working alongside him. He’s a busy man and your timing isn’t great, but you can’t help the way you want him. And you get the feeling that maybe he wants you too. Could all this be solved by passing him a note that says “hey wanna fuck circle yes or no?” Sure, but you’re not that smart.

Wreathe Me in Darkness, My Earthly Flesh and Blood || (Ao3 Link) (Asks Tag) Status: Discontinued “On an evening just after the autumn equinox, a fire lit to warm and brighten the study, you shake his cold, bony hand and make the acquaintance of Viktor.” Alternatively: In the early years of your long, long life, you unwittingly fall for a vampire. ↳ Part 1 ♥

Drabbles: Perv!Viktor does crimes of the panty stealing variety ♥ Birthday Celebration Smut Prompts (2022) ♥ Birthday Celebration Smut Prompts (2024; incomplete) ♥

Jayce →

Drabbles: Boobie touching w/ a side of surprise™ ♥

Karlach →

Ais doesn’t sleep over. It’s a preference that should be a rule. He knows where that leads with the wrong sort of person who is terribly, unattainably right. 

Except that sometimes he fucks Vere so stupid that it bleeds back into him and suddenly the morning light washes pale over his naked skin like the bathwater they end up sharing. It spills from the edge of the metal tub, overfull, and the alcove beneath the little half-moon window blooms with the scent of wet slate and spiced oil. It echoes with corks thumbed from prismatic vials and Vere’s fussy sighs. 

It’s possibly the worst thing about him. Another sound reason to bail after he curls away in a fucked-out clump like smouldering embers and the view is entirely his spine, a knobbled chain, shifting with the tectonics of his breath. Vere is—of all the vile, irredeemable things that otherwise get Ais utterly bricked—a morning person.

His legs bracket Vere beneath the bubble limned surface, but not in the way he wishes. Vere does not want to sit between them and let Ais wash his back (“Not interested in a degloving, thanks.”) or his hair (“Oh, wait, you’re serious? Pass.”). The only weight on his chest is the messy knot within his ribs that writhes to look at Vere adjacent, luxuriating like this domesticity is normal, like he is not a small god with wild whims, volatile and angry. He is not free. They are not free. This is not free. 

Ais tries to relax. Leans back and lets the rag draped across his forehead, dripping into his hairline, cool pleasantly. Can’t sink his eyes shut, though. The margin between relaxed and asleep is razor thin and just as dangerous. There’s no peace in water, to be near it doesn’t soothe him right. Not even here. When the rich, frilly bubbles part the surface, he keeps expecting to see fathomless red churning beneath. Expects to hear whispers in every splash of water from Vere’s cupped hands, every resonant drip if he listens too long or too close, like the Seaspring is calling out to him. Like it misses him in its own awful, wanting way. 

He watches Vere instead: how he combs his vicious fingers through his hair, slick with oil, so saturated with the warmth of patchouli that Ais may as well have his nose crushed against Vere’s scalp; how he picks his nails and lathers his dewy bronze skin. The marks left on that canvas, jaw to shoulders, frame the collar so nicely. He’s black and blue and scabbed all over from the only way Ais’ mouth knows how to say unfortunately, I love you. He’s partial to the mark, a full moon of teeth, on the jut of Vere’s collarbone where he bit hard and long and bloody as if to needle what goes unspoken into Vere’s skin like ink. 

With a wet rag, Vere blots it gingerly. His ears flinch backward so scarcely that Ais nearly misses it. It’s exactly the kind of perverse joy he finds in watching Vere—picking out those little reactions and digging his scabbed, silvery fingers into the meat of them. 

Smug, like everything about his bearing—the way his head lolls and his arms drape the edge, the way he leers half-lidded—Ais asks, “Sore?”

“Deliciously,” Vere hums in perfect stride, bloody little crusts flaking away. He doesn’t look up from that task. “Lucia—” the cleric, his handler “—is going to vomit when she sees this. I doubt she’ll even want to be seen with me.” His lashes flutter. “Do you think she’ll send me home on bad behavior?”

Ais shrugs. “It’s always bad.”

“Oh, untrue,” tuts Vere, his slender leg breaching the water. A fine, arched foot lands wetly on Ais’ chest, just below the damp leather cords wound tightest around his neck. Vere’s eyes crinkle at their upturned edges. It starts to slip down. “Occasionally, I notch it up to worse.”

Ais snorts and makes to swat him away before the claws crowning each toe catch his longest pendant. But at the very last second, he snatches hold of Vere’s achilles heel and yanks.

Hard.

Vere slides bodily with a pinched-off shriek—undignified, unlike him, and very satisfying—suddenly submerged to the chin. He catches the rim, gripping it by the stiletto points of his nails to keep from going completely under. All for the slow, simple press of Ais’ lips to his inner ankle, a kiss to cap that sphere of bone; a show of force that says let me be soft with you, an irreverence in his wine-dark stare that says give me control.

And Vere’s face warms to sunset tones, even as disgust curves his mouth and his body draws taut.

Ais feels it coming, then, and chooses to let it play out. Lets Vere’s leg coil in his palm and snap forward to kick him sneeringly across the cheek, because this is how it goes. The damp white rag, barely clinging to Ais’ forehead as it was, drags through a fine line on his cheekbone beading with blood. It slips off with a wet slap.

Of course it has to be a struggle. And Ais understands. Always does. But it’s usually more fun when he’s not so goddamn tired, worse than usual. 

The water sloshes as Vere drags himself upright, “You perverse little brute of a hellspawn—” and more and more of his beloved bubbles are lost to the turbulence, “You wretched fucking cephalopod—” agonizing at the climax, “My hair—!” Vere clutches it, speared up at his nape in a shiny, ruby-red knot that he releases, tightens and jams the carved wooden stick back through.

Something twines through his thoughts, caressing the wet folds of his brain like it means to push them apart to make space. And Ais is suddenly forced to acknowledge the part of himself that is, indeed, a wretched fucking cephalopod. The kind that would break Vere on the rocks to see him wrecked and gasping. The kind that drowns and devours and sucks the sick marrow from bones so that the consciousness of all things becomes their strength to draw on, their knowledge to misuse. The kind that speaks in his own inner voice sometimes. Until it doesn’t.  

But then there is Vere’s voice like a hot scythe, cauterizing, if only for a while, the sick, salty, Ocudeus flavored leak. “—and that was not ten minutes,” he seethes, but the shadows don’t. Not even a twitch. “I mean you? Able to appreciate the kind of effort that goes into good hygiene? It’s clearly too much to expect.” 

Ais lets his legs knock into Vere’s and his mouth slopes lazily. “Mm. ‘Cause I’m filthy?”

“Disgusting.” Vere’s sable-soft ears tick forward, ramrod straight. His eyes seem to churn, but they don’t flatten to that one dimensional shade of fuck-off carenelian. They don’t look away. “Cigarettes are hardly the worst thing you reek of.” 

“That so?”

Cradled in the curve of the tub, he says, long suffering, “Oh, please.” His nails come down against the side in a neat line of click, click, clicks. “Sometimes you reek like antiseptic.”

Ais nods empathetically. 

“And others? You smell like fucking Leander, which is what I suppose you’d been doing.”

“More or less.”

Vere scowls with a too warm face that betrays him otherwise, ears sloped like he’s loath to speak a want, even obfuscated, aloud. “But you always come crawling to me—you always fuck me, Ais, stinking like a massacre at the fish market.” 

Ais’ smile grows fangs. “Is that the way you want it?” he murmurs, starting to pull. 

It’s like sealing his lips to a bottle and trying to drink deep: hypoxic, black at the edges unless he lowers his guard and he does. The small ones unfurl first from some lightless place behind his back. Just three. They come easiest, coaxed onto this plane, where there is dark and damp and he’s tired enough that reality feels like a liminal space. Cold is preferable, but he makes it work.

Vere senses the distortion. He must. Might even smell the brine stink from beneath the water where the misappropriated limbs stay tight to Ais’ body, remoras to their shark. 

His dagger-sharp eyes narrow when Ais’ smirk doesn’t loosen and settle out. “Don’t you dare,” he snaps, “touch me with those,” like the liar he is, because there’s an auburn ripple beneath the surface. Ais feels it: the kelp-like sway of Vere’s sopping tail. Twitching. Interested. 

Grey as they are, like slickened hematite, like the blood-wet ashes of worlds subsumed, the tentacles aren’t subtle in the water’s diffuse murk. Beneath the overcast window, what light it offers, they’re plenty visible snaking down Ais’ flank and thighs in a way that’s… familiar. He hums, thickly pleased, as they bridge the scant distance to Vere’s calf. 

“No?” Ais asks lowly. His ears are ringing. 

Vere’s eyes cut to the side. His lips part. 

And Ais realizes, dimly, that he's not sure if Vere actually said something. There’s a cresting swarm of whispers—yes; no; maybe; please—that beat like insect wings, everywhere and nowhere, that make it hard to tell. He calls Vere’s name gently, with a coolness that belies the sibilant thrum of partial words, of mangled voices, that only he has started to hear. “Look at me.” 

Vere says, instead, peevishly, “I had plans today, you know.” 

“Mm,” Ais nods. Much like his were to sleep until the sun reached its zenith: “Not anymore.” 

The first tendril reaches up from beneath Vere’s thigh, and Ais—elbow knocked on the rim, cheekbone to his bruise smeared knuckles—just watches. It’s all he can do. The input doesn’t connect one-to-one; the pleasure in this doesn’t derive from sensation. It’s all from Vere’s sandstorm eyes melting down to watch it curl toward his cock. It’s in the way he wets his lips again. It warms to life with the shudder that wracks Vere, breath and body, when the slick, tepid cups grasp his shaft with a tactile curiosity, spooling gently around the curve of him like diaphanous silk. 

Vere lurches forward then, slack-mouthed, capricious, the wild-eyed way he does when he wants to climb into Ais’ lap and taste his teeth. Doesn’t get far, though. 

With the velocity and violence of mast ropes snapping, a set of leviathan arms erupt through the shadows puddled on the floor. They come as if called by some chemical dog whistle deep in his brain. The dense, writhing meat of them lashes Vere’s forearms before Ais ever truly registers the intent to deny him—to restrain him. But it is what Ais wanted.

(Isn’t it?)

Vere thrashes with his pretty, vulpine face steeped in blush, sheets of water heaving over the edge. Something clatters to the floor, small and wooden. His furious growl carries a hot, primordial frisson of electricity, but the shadows keep still and his teeth lock to his lower lip, scraping it pink and raw—the sort of wicked smile that asks to be devoured.

Ais shushes him, an easy sound that trails like smoke, and allows one of the roving limbs—mine, its, ours? he thinks—to slither back, to dip into Vere’s ass. Just the tip. 

A low hiss bleeds through the pearly gaps of Vere’s teeth, but he spreads his legs that much wider; cants his hips toward the soft-bodied intrusion. It goes easily enough, tapered and secreting something Ais will never question. Vere’s mouth falls open with the softest little ah as it undulates into his tightly drawn body. Deeper, deeper still, until the tension in him snaps off clean. 

With a wounded noise, Vere melts over the edge of the basin, his long, loose hair spilling in ribbons like viscera. Another tendril twines against its like, using that boneless give as a wedge to slip into his body seamlessly. Vere’s fists clench in their squirming bonds when he realizes it’s two against one vying for space inside him, though technically it’s three if you count the one toying with his cock. Four if you count that Ais has control. Five if only he noticed sea glass churning in his periphery and gave it any credence. 

Ais doesn’t ask because he wants to know. He asks, “Feel good?” entirely because he’s an asshole, in a voice that is almost, almost gentle enough to hide it. But not quite. 

Vere lifts his head, caustic as he grits out, word by word, “You know that it does.”

Which is true. It’s good—completely fucking divine—that clever, roiling touch, the dexterous stretch that’s better than meat wrapped bone only three joints flexible, though infinitely more strange. Ais feels a heady pull as his cock twitches and a sluice through his skull like a fractal hum, like a laugh. And he hears himself say in the darkest register of his voice, sonorous as a many-tongued echo, “It likes the way you taste.” 

Vere’s ears swivel flat. His heavy-lidded expression sobers into something hard and searching. 

But Ais, whose memory has the retention of a wide-set sieve, suddenly can’t understand what there is to look for or why Vere’s jaw ticks like he’s grinding a choice between his teeth. 

Maybe Vere doesn’t find it. 

Maybe it doesn’t matter that he does. 

Because the tentacles in his ass, ribbed to delirium, drag a spot Vere can’t ignore. The unease collapses with his skittering groan, and that thready sound, what it means, strikes like a matchhead to Ais’ hindbrain. 

Coiled around Vere’s cock, the tentacle that’s stroked his flushed, weeping head constricts like a snare, strangles the base so he won’t—can’t—come. The shock of it is an axe to his spine; Vere arches severely, skin scraping across his ribs. They heave as he writhes, hips churning the water, too full and yet not full enough in the right places, not enough to satisfy. 

Ais draws a long breath, considering his rings and the result he decidedly wants, only to breathe back out a level demand. That is: “Beg me.”

Viscid muscle holds Vere steady so that there’s no slinking away from the mortifying ordeal of being known and seen and wanted in a way that, for all the centuries he’s notched, will ever be humiliating. “Can’t imagine,” he huffs, mastering himself, “why I would.” 

But Ais has always had the wherewithal to force blood from a stone. He drags himself up to crouch over Vere, to cup Vere’s slender neck in his hands, carotids thrumming beneath that snap of black leather decoupled from the chain and harness. He kneels in the space his tentacles shift to create, but there is so, so little to begin with. He shudders—just his breath, just barely—to feel a hundred points of discoid contact fold around his thighs, weaving him into a dripping knot of limbs. 

Sharp-eyed, Vere tsks, making pity look smug as only he can. “You want to fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid.” 

It’s a want to taste that sloppy contempt that has Ais dip down and crush their mouths together. It’s a ‘yes, but…’ that goes unspoken. It’s that same unfortunate affection that he can’t force down Vere’s throat quite like other parts of himself, but Ais tries, kissing him rough and deep with such thorough brutality that Vere can’t help but chase it when he pulls back. 

Ais grips the rim behind Vere’s head and smooths back the damp snarls of auburn clinging to his diamond-jawed face. “Wanna try that again?”

“Not particularly." 

“Mm.” His voice, what he hears of it, is forked with a displeasure that’s not his own. “That’s a shame.” Though it isn’t, really, because threatening Vere is a fucking delight. A delicacy. He throbs, triplicate. 

“Wonder how loose you can get…” and the thought unfolds eagerly in his brain, wicked visions of sleeving himself in writhing limbs, fitting into Vere’s ass as lucky number three. “How many times I can get you up to the edge,” he muses, placid as deep, dark, empty space. 

The grip on Vere’s cock softens to looping, ribbony muscle, pulling his overwarm skin in gossamer strokes. The breath he can’t hold hitches and spills, washing Ais’ lips in hot-house humidity. 

Which makes Ais think: “Bet I can ruin a few,” as that tentacle firms back to a vise grip, tight and still. All of them still. His thumb drags a too dry arc from the corner of Vere’s agate ringed eye, down his cheekbone, as both irises flash flat, malevolent red. “Or,” Ais very nearly laughs, “I could leave you with nothing. Could let you sit until you’re nice and ready to cooperate.”

Vere smiles. A nasty, bone-white, fuck you smile. 

But Ais knows: “Won't be as good if you get yourself off.”

The smile gets nastier. 

Ais knows, too, that he’s not the only source of a good time in this fear-choked city. Leander could be, willing and able and shamelessly easy, so blind with desire for beautiful things that don’t want him back that he’d hardly care if Vere put a bag over his head and called it a blindfold. There’s Mhin, who is hard and has a knife, which is more or less of a good time depending on where they stick it, and is exactly the kind of quicksilver chase that Vere likes to whet his teeth on. Even that nameless, faceless Hightown lutist Vere’s grown so taken with could blow his back out on a bed of roses and half eaten hearts for all Ais cares. And he really, truly doesn’t. 

However.

His grip on Vere’s chin isn’t soft or sweet or kind. “None of them,” he murmurs, bearing down with terrible gravity, “will fuck you like I do.” He thumbs the plush of Vere’s lower lip before his hand slips lower and he hooks a finger through the collar’s adamantine ring. “Beg—” it cinches “—me.”

As though it’s his neck in a crush of leather, stygian motes leak from the edge of Ais’ vision, threatening to meld into weightless, thoughtless, midnight nothing. That’s how he’ll remember it. Still, he aches, a cottony, full-bodied pulse at the frustration dredged up from the depths of Vere’s hysterical lungs, at the slick lustre of tears clotting along his lashline like lymph from a wound. 

Vere opens his mouth again, gasping around words that melt into the cicada chatter of disembodied voices—stop; don’t; more; please; not; there; harder—until it all dies in silence because his mind is a forest and something is so very wrong. 

It’s pressure like deep water bearing down on the wrong side of his eardrums—

Ą̶̫̠͓̀̌̆͛l̴̷̩̪̱̘̤̯ͩͣ̐̏ͧ̑̓̔͢l̸̶̶̢̧̘͎̰̰̺̥͙̟̣ͬ̓ͦ̀́͑̈́ͣ̆ͮͮ͘͡ m̲̦̱͎̲̤͗͑͌͐û̡͙̣̲͕̖̈ͣ̌ͣͮ͒̚̕_̴̤̞̜͓̙̮̗̘͇̖̜͉̄͆͌̎ͭͩ̿̇̿ͥ͆͌͂͛͘͞͝s̷͎̱̱̝ͭͥ̀͒t̵̢̝̮̬̜ͭͭ͗͆̋̏̎ͬ̑͌͑͘͞ s̲̝̱̝͉̤͍̙ͤ͋̽ͭ̊̓̾̽̋͗̍ͮ͂̚_ͦͦͧ͌u̢̡̧̥̰̻ͣ̉̓͂͌͟͢͟͟b̠̬̹ͧm̧̢̳̪͕̦̲̖̞̻͉̔̆̉ͧ̌ͤ͛͂ͪͩ̚i̾̃ṱ_̥͔̱̱̫̯̣͐̈́ͨ̇ͥ͂̀͛͜͟͡.̷̵̧͍̺͔̬̼̥̲͓̫̼̰̪̔ͬ̇͗ͭ͌̄ͬͤ͡_̿̄ͥ 

—Ocudeus’ voice.

With a harsh breath, Ais clenches his eyes shut against it, locks his teeth tight in an unwitting snarl. 

It’s due its time. 

In the deaf, unfolding dark behind his eyes, his skin tries and tries to sift apart sensations, to ground himself in the here and now before he wakes in the later. The water is… tepid, now. It’s rhythmic. He’s a wave break battered by soft, supple things. He’s aware that he’s white-knucking the lip of the bath to bear his weight, that he’s heavy between the legs. Body-warm copper presses up to meet his knees. Vere’s tail curls behind them; its medusal, wet-silk strands float weightlessly, rocking in a tide that laps his thighs with a thirst to wear his skin. And he’s tired. 

Always tired. 

He feels himself sag like it could catch him tenderly, but there is only Vere, his chest of sun-baked stone to Ais’. Their skin sticks and drags like an open-mouthed kiss. His pendant rolls between the teeth of their ribs; the cord saws his nape, ripping out tender wisps of new growth. It hurts. Not like it should. He starts to feel in mismatched fragments, in echoes of suffering out of place and time, and has just enough reason left to know that this is Ocudeus prying up one finger at a time from his grip on the edge. 

A bone that grows like bladed crystal, flaying his soft tissue from within.

A shallow lungful of burnt cedar and hot ash. And another. And another. 

A shank between the skin folds of his belly—across, down. 

A lightning strike reaching down through his body to kiss the earth, fulminous, like the tight finality of cardiac arrest. That’s how it should feel. It feels, instead, like tripping in a lucid dream.

Like catching himself as he wakes.  

Ais jolts, the whole of him congealing top-down into tinnitus and breathlessness and the when-where-why-the-hell-am-I…? sort of vertigo that makes him want to drag his hands down his face, but he can’t. It’s—he’s kissing Vere. His legs ache and his lungs burn and his core feels warm and split, and he’s supposed to be kissing Vere. He tries. With his slack, gasping mouth, his pins-and-needles fingers matting into Vere’s hair, he tries to keep a pace he didn’t set or negotiate or—

Vere hushes, “That’s it…” across his tongue. 

Ais breaks off sharply. He hears himself rasp, “Fuck,” with a voice he didn’t overuse, and sinks his teeth into the crook of Vere’s shoulder to choke the shattered groan that follows because, fuck is right: somewhere in the fugue he—it? they…?—came. 

All that’s left is to chase the overstimulation like a dog after scraps. He does. He tries. Curled over Vere, practically in his lap, Ais ruts against the tentacled bind around Vere’s soft cock where it must’ve caught his over and over and over, just stimulus divorced from want. But a profound unease creeps in and starts to weigh him to a stop, because Ocudeus does want something and Ais can’t always pretend to understand what that is. The shape of its loneliness is pelagic, so unknowable that the feeling he falls asleep beside, wakes to and walks with is unrecognizable by comparison. 

When all that’s left is heavy breath and a slow drip into the cloudy bloom between them, Ais sits up. He swipes his bloodied lips with the back of his hand, easing back onto his haunches. The tentacles fall away, spooling into darkness, but in their wake, there’s a sour undercurrent—a stink like adrenaline sweat, a taste like fear. Ais all but spits over the side. His mouth really does taste of metal slag, heavier than blood; his skull feels just as dense. And he’s tired.

Always—

—fucking—

—tired. 

“Well,” murmurs Vere. Heavy-lidded, he sags into the curve of the bath like wrung out silk; his unbound arms slip down the edges. Those white-ringed pupils tick over Ais’ furrowed expression in a way that makes him itch for a walk and a cigarette—makes him miss the Seaspring in his own awful, grudging way. The abyss may stare back, but never with so much careful scrutiny. “Look who’s back.”

Ais takes it like any other punch in a fight or poison in his drink. It’s instinct. He feints, “You sure about that?” as if this were a bar brawl, not a whispering gallery. They don’t talk about this part. It won’t change anything. He made a pact, Vere made a mistake, and the horrors of it all are as much their own as their ends will be. 

Vere only hums non-committally. He casts his eyes down like an invitation to follow, to look. The long shadows of his lashes sweep his even cheekbones. There’s his raw, bitten lips. Lower still, the damage blooms, old and new, but his arms… They’re a bruised mosaic, a maypole of fat plum craters that taper closer to his neck than Ais remembers them being. Vere splashes filthy water down his arms as if to rinse it all away, but wet, the color deepens. 

Familiarity churns through Ais. It’s just as quick to slip away, trailing wet fingers down his spine that feel terribly real. Except click, click, click go Vere’s carnivorous nails. The sound is warped beneath the waterline—strange, hollow. Also familiar. Ais opens his eyes—when had he closed them?—to the expectant slant of Vere’s head. 

He does what’s easy; Ais smirks and says, “Never really left.” It’s a technicality he’s gambling on, it’s the belief that Vere would call him on it if this really mattered, if this was a deal-breaker. If I hurt you, he starts to think, too tenderly to appreciate that Vere, whose shadow is long and savage and cleaves even bone like the softest clay, was only as bound as he cared to be. 

(Right?) 

But more than anything, Ais says it because he wants it to be true: that he was—is—entirely himself. That he is in control.  

Vere lets out a short breath, nearly a laugh. “Of course,” his voice lulls, haughty in its deference. “Of course,” he repeats, a little quieter, too knowing. There’s a nasty glimmer in his eyes. “We’re playing in your fantasy, after all,” he says, and Ais, who loves Vere for his cruelty, for his cunning, for his awful mouth, would’ve let it go. Easily. He would not have let it under his skin, crowded as it is, if not for that cold, fractal sound echoing through his skull again.

Like a hum.