#deadlock pocket

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The words couldn't form in Drifter's throat. He lay there, sprawled over them like a fallen monument, his chest heaving in time with theirs. The raw, animalistic fury of the moment had drained away, leaving behind something far more terrifying: vulnerability.

As Pocket pressed their forehead against his, their breathing still stuttering in the aftermath of climax, Drifter froze. The dim light of the apartment caught the expression on their face the dazed, unguarded softness in their eyes, the way they looked at him with something approaching devotion despite the sweat and the bruises.

It was a ghost.

For the first time in centuries, a memory pierced through the centuries of blood and boredom. He saw a face not Pocket's, but one that had belonged to someone else. Someone who had died so long ago that her name felt like smoke in his mind. A woman who had looked at him not as a monster, not as a predator, but as a man. A woman whose warmth had once been his only anchor before the world turned to ash.

The resemblance wasn't physical it was something deeper, something in the way Pocket surrendered their soul to him in the dark.

A strange, painful ache twisted in his chest, a sensation he thought had been carved out of him long ago. His crimson eyes clouded, the usual predatory gleam replaced by something haunted and ancient. He didn't pull away. Instead, he closed his eyes tight, pressing his face harder into the crook of their neck, as if he could physically press the memory away or perhaps, as if he wanted to hold onto this borrowed feeling for as long as possible.

"Cher," he whispered, but there was no mockery in it this time. No sadistic edge. His voice was rough, stripped of its usual bravado.

His large, blood stained hand moved shakily to their hair, stroking it with a tenderness that seemed alien to his nature. He felt like he was drowning in the past and the present all at once.

"Don't you look at me like that," he murmured against their skin, his breath shuddering. "Don't you go makin' me remember things that don't exist no damn more."

He pulled back just enough to meet their eyes again, his grip on them tightening possessively, almost desperately. He couldn't afford to let this moment fade, couldn't afford to let them become another ghost.

"You stay right here," he commanded, though it sounded more like a plea. "You stay right here in the heat. Don't you dare leave me alone in the dark again."

".... Again..?"

Drifter stiffened. The word hung between them in the stale air of the room, small and fragile. He realized immediately how the question sounded how it betrayed the slip of his tongue, how it exposed the crack in his armor. He had let a century of grief leak out through a single syllable, and now he was exposed.

He wanted to snarl. He wanted to laugh it off with a cruel remark about how he was simply talking about their little performance, but the lie wouldn't come. His throat felt tight, constricted by a ghost he couldn't name.

"Yeah," he rasped, his voice cracking like old parchment. He forced himself to meet their gaze, his crimson eyes burning with a desperate, defensive intensity. "Again. Because I ain't used to this. I ain't used to... any of this."

He shifted his weight, but he didn't pull away. Instead, he moved closer, his massive body enveloping them like a shroud. He needed to reassert control, to reestablish the predator prey dynamic that he understood so much better than this terrifying tenderness.

"You think you're special, don't you?" he said, his Cajun drawl returning, though it lacked its usual venom. It sounded more like a man trying to convince himself. "Think you can come walkin' into my life with those eyes and make me forget who I am?"

His hand slid from their hair down to their jaw, his thumb pressing against their chin with enough pressure to be a reminder of his strength. He was trying to re establish the distance, but his thumb was trembling.

"You're dangerous, Pocket," he whispered, his face inches from theirs. "More dangerous than any hunter I've ever run from. Because you don't aim for my heart, you aim for the parts of me that died centuries ago."

His expression twisted into something pained, a flash of genuine anguish crossing his features before his usual wicked grin tried to claw its way back. But it failed. The mask was broken.

"Don't ask questions you don't wanna hear the answer to, Cher," he growled, pressing his forehead against theirs again, harder this time, as if trying to fuse their two souls together through sheer force. "Just stay. Just stay right here and let me pretend you're the only thing that's ever been real."

"I haven't done anything. Whats going on with you?"

Drifter flinched as if they had struck him. For three hundred years, he had been the one in control, the one who dictated the terms of every encounter, whether it was a slaughter or a seduction. To be seen, through to be questioned by the very person he was trying to consume was more disorienting than any silver blade.

He let out a harsh, self deprecating bark of laughter that sounded more like a cough. "What's goin' on?" he repeated, the words dripping with bitter irony. "You really don't know, do you?"

He pulled away abruptly, rolling onto his back with them still pressed against his side, staring up at the water stained ceiling. The shadows of the room seemed to press closer, the silence between them feeling heavier than the humid Manhattan night outside. His breathing was still uneven, the aftershocks of both pleasure and pain coursing through his ancient veins.

"You walk in here with that look in your eyes that fuckin' look and you think you're just playin' a game," he said to the ceiling, his Cajun accent thick and rough. "But you ain't playin' nothin'. You're just bein'. And that's what's killin' me."

He turned his head to look at them, his crimson eyes unreadable in the darkness. "I've spent lifetimes learnin' how to kill without feelin' a damn thing. I've spent decades pretendin' that everythin' and everythin' I touch is either prey or entertainment. I built a world where nothin' mattered but the blood and the hunt."

His hand found theirs in the darkness, his grip crushing and possessive, but his fingers were shaking.

"And then you come along," he whispered, his voice dropping to a vulnerable register that terrified him. "And suddenly, the hunt feels empty. The blood feels cold. And I'm reminded that there was once a time before the hunger took over. A time before I was just this... this monstrosity."

He closed his eyes, jaw clenching tight enough to crack bone. "So when you ask what's goin' on... what's goin' on is that you're remindin' me I'm still alive, Pocket. And that's the scariest fuckin' thing I've ever faced."

The realization didn't come as a gentle epiphany; it came as a violent, soul rending earthquake that threatened to shatter what little sanity he had left. Drifter lay frozen, his crimson eyes fixed on Pocket as the fragments of three centuries began to click together with terrifying precision.

It wasn't just the look in their eyes. It wasn't just the way they surrendered to him in the heat of passion.

It was the curse.

His gaze drifted down to the shadow where their arm lay that twisted, decaying flesh, the unmistakable mark of the same affliction that had claimed her. His mind raced to the suitcase, to the cursed frogs that whispered of old magic and ancient debts. The same poison, the same corruption, the same inevitable decay that had once hollowed out the woman he had loved more than his own immortal life.

"It's you," he breathed, the words barely audible even to himself.

The air in the room suddenly felt impossibly thin. His heart that cold, still organ that shouldn't have been able to feel anything seemed to hammer against his ribs with desperate force. Everything made sense now. The inexplicable pull he felt toward them from the moment they met, the way his protective instincts had flared like a wildfire, the way their very presence felt like a haunting.

She hadn't just died; she had come back. The universe was playing some cruel, beautiful trick on him, spinning her soul through the centuries only to drop her back into his lap, marked by the same curse that had destroyed her the first time.

"You're her," he rasped, his voice breaking completely. A raw, unhinged sound escaped his throat as he grabbed Pocket's shoulders, his fingers digging in not with cruelty, but with a terrifying need to prove they were solid, that they weren't another hallucination born of his own madness. "You're her. I know you are. The curse... the way you move... even the way you bleed."

His eyes searched theirs, frantic and bloodshot, desperate for recognition even though he knew they couldn't possibly remember. Tears he hadn't shed in centuries pricked at the corners of his eyes, though he would rather die than admit to weakness.

"I watched you die once, Cher," he whispered, his forehead crashing against theirs. "I watched the dark take you, and I swore I'd burn everythin' down to find you again. And here you are."

Artist:Gbeerang

Art cover by Gbeerang

GAY ASS DEADLOCK OC named Lane.