Waiter! Can I get a wake up kiss for Sol and Ryan please! And you always have my blessing to go crazy with it 🥴
until we have faces
(3.3k) 18+
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“so let me be thy choir, and make a moan upon the midnight hours; thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet from swinged censer teeming; thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming. yes, i will be thy priest, and build a fane in some untrodden region of my mind, where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain." — ode to psyche, john keats
Ryan tells himself he's checking for gaps along the weatherstripping. That’s all. Being thorough, making sure the blackout’s complete. Being a responsible fucking handyman.
The part of his brain trained in situational awareness and threat assessment—the part that's kept him alive through a half-decade of Ric’s legal grey areas and jobs turned shoot-outs turned drop-offs in the Everglades—screams at him to just step the fuck back. Make dinner. Check his email. Watch ESPN highlights. Maintain this polite fiction they've constructed.
He’s been standing here for seventeen minutes.
His right palm rests flat against the closet door—mahogany veneer over particle board, nothing special, hollow-core refitted three years ago when he'd moved into this cube from a smaller place up in Wynwood. His knuckles splay out level with his chest—‘L-I-V-E’, upside down, inverted, ink fading. Increasingly, cosmically fucking ironic.
Proofing the walk-in had been his idea, of course. A practical solution wrapped in bizarre faux domestic normalcy, like everything else around their…
Around this.
Whatever this is.
(Ryan knows what he would like it to be.)
The modifications had taken two days—Sol insisting he’d went overboard. Seams sealed with foam tape, doubled-up on areas where light might theoretically bleed through. Insulation strips in meticulous blocks—military surplus he’d sourced from a personal contact in Hialeah. The felt curtain had cost him three hundred dollars at Home Depot—industrial-grade fabric meant for professional studios; the kind photographers use to control every photon, every shadow. It hangs on a track he’d installed behind the door, along with a secondary layer of plywood mapping the drywall adjacent to the bedroom—just in case.
He'd approached it like any other home improvement project—old Frank busting his ass: Measure twice, cut once, boy, for fuck’s sake. Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
Christ, if his grandfather could see what he’s building now.
The closet, as of a week ago, is forty-eight square feet of midnight. A mausoleum in the heart of a sun-drenched LH condo. A tomb.
Because that’s what it is, isn’t it?
Sol doesn't sleep. She dies.
Sol dies every sunrise.
His next exhale sounds strange. His fingers skirt the frame.
The work is solid—he knows he'd done good. His mind floats elsewhere, watching from a distance; this man standing before a walk-in at eight-oh-two in the evening, pulse jumping against his throat like a guilty thing surprised, and maybe there’s a joke to be made about hidden bodies, skeletons in closets, Bluebeard’s final door. Six-foot-three of no-bullshit Montana beef and Miami bronze—Glock in the bedroom, Glock in the kitchen, gunlocker and safe prepped with thirty-five grand in untraceable bills—wearing fuckass Champion sweats and the kind of expression that’d have his sister Lisa talking to him in very slow, very simple sentences.
Been nine nights since the Everglades. Nine nights since Sol had trusted him with the truth—or as much—of what she really is.
Ryan suspects he got the sanitized version—a few careful omissions and half-lies, likely for both their sakes, probably for his sanity. This much he knows: fangs and blood and a hunger that would latch, clamp, drain him dry in seconds flat. They can’t see each other during the day, not because of her schedule, not because she works nights and spends waking hours catching up on sleep, but because direct sunlight reduces her to ash.
And she dies with dawn. Can’t fight it—gone. Leaves behind a corpse.
He remembers breaking things off with a regular hook up—Carmen, nice girl—about a year ago maybe. Daddy issues and some baggage he wasn’t quite prepared to shoulder on top of his own bullshit.
He scrubs his other hand down his face. Takes a breath.
Jesus Christ.
It’s not like this boundary has been explicitly drawn either, though he can’t help thinking it exists—can’t help thinking the decent thing to do is to turn around and continue to play pretend. But Ryan has never been particularly good at leaving well enough alone. It's what makes him fucking excellent at his job. It's also what got him a knife between the ribs in Opa-locka four years ago.
It’s what made him approach her that night, when he'd recognized the cracks.
The curiosity’s grown from a small itch to a persistent gnawing.
The first time she stayed, he’d slept until 5 AM, Sol draped across his chest like a lizard soaking heat from sun-baked stone. He’d gotten up despite her urging him to go back to sleep—kissing her jaw, all dozy dopey fuck ready to follow her into the underworld. She’d disentangled, made an excuse to grab something from her bag in the bathroom with the studied casualness that doesn't fool either of them. Alright. He can take a hint. So Ryan went to start up the espresso machine.
He’d been making two coffees in the kitchenette when he'd heard the closet door shut tight with a definitive click. He'd stood there for a long moment, mug halfway to his lips, trying to process the surrealness of it all. His girlfriend—question mark? for lack of a better term—had just gone to bed in his walk-in closet because sunlight would kill her.
His grandmother would have crossed herself, dug out the rosary. Frank Donahue would have reached for his fucking shotgun.
Ryan had finished his coffee, scrolled the group chat, and got ready for work, like any other Tuesday.
Second time was much the same though slightly more awkward, but the third time—this time—Sol had been out for a few hours, handling whatever business keeps her in that restored building downtown. Ryan found himself staring at his closet til sleep dragged him under near 4 AM this morning. Didn’t hear her return. Came home from a job and the gym today, dirty and exhausted, and still can’t relax. Had his cool-down beer, had his shower, had his after-shower cool-down beer. Texted TK about the Dolphin’s game this weekend. Tried to focus on his Soprano’s rewatch.
It’s the silence that hooks him. The stillness. Can’t even lie to himself and pretend she’s sleeping. Sleep shifts—sleep has soft sounds, a presence, a musk of warm skin. A pulse.
This is the kind of silence that fucks with you.
He’d been eight when search and rescue hauled Michael Donahue from the lake—bloated, bruised and fish-belly white, face sliding off; a waterlogged thing that used to be his dad. He’ll never forget the held breaths of a dozen people in those seconds before his mom folded over and screamed.
The closed casket.
First time he ever pulled the trigger hunting—Butte, Montana, dead of winter.
His grandfather’s wake—though teenage Ryan then had been more perturbed seeing Frank out of flannel and stuffed in a suit.
Same silence that swallowed the hospice room in Jacksonville, 2014, when the respirators were turned off and his mom just… stopped.
Can’t fight it—gone.
Is that what it’s like for Sol? A switch being flipped, or is it a process of shutting down, condensed? Does it hurt? Is it complete cessation or does she dream? Does her body decay? Reverse itself at sunset? Resurrect? How the fuck do you deal with that—dying alone every morning—long-term, mentally? Emotionally?
Questions that felt like too much. You don’t outright ask someone to describe their experience being tortured, or how they lost their child.
The condo sighs around him—air conditioning kicking into cycle, the hum of traffic on Calle Ocho and bass down by South Beach, a muffled telenovela from Mrs Gutierrez’s unit carrying through the walls.
Ryan opens the door and thinks that maybe he did get carried away.
The darkness is thick enough to drown in. That of underground caves, ocean trenches, deep space between stars. He can barely make out his own hand where it dissolves into black, still gripping the knob.
He slips inside.
Muscles tense to navigate blind. Shoulders brush by heavy felt.
The gun safe's LED display is a floating ember to his left, red numerals suspended in nothing. Enough faint phosphorescent glow to suggest the outline of shelving and rails; dress shirts, tactical gear, all hung neat; boots lined up like soldiers. That's the only light—that and what ambient dregs spill from the bedroom around his silhouette.
Ryan closes the door behind himself.
Void presses against his retinas; makes him question if his eyes are open at all. His hand finds the wall—cool and textured under his palm—and he uses it to orient himself, shuffling forward in increments. Gradually, his vision adjusts.
Throat dries up.
She's curled fetal-tight, knees to chest, arms wrapped around shins. Classic defensive position—minimum exposure, maximum protection. The kind of shape a body learns to make when it's used to sleeping rough, when safety means making yourself small enough to disappear.
Eight months of radio silence between Tucson and Miami. He knows she'd been alone. Knows she'd been running, at the very least, long before that night in Cactus Moon. The details remain locked behind carapace composure, but this… tells a story.
She’s wearing one of his old Seminoles jerseys—washed-out, dull burgundy—and a simple pair of black panties. Her hair fans out across air-foam and makeshift bedding, dark waves sprawled loose in every direction.
Her complexion has shifted. In this pocket-darkness his eyes learn to parse the gradients of black, and Sol appears drained. Not pale exactly, but muted. Hollowed out. Color leached. Burnished gold to the greyish monochrome of old brass.
She doesn't move. Doesn't twitch. Doesn't seem to have settled under her own weight. Rigor mortis has locked every joint in place, and even cold, even wrong and bloodless and horrifying and dead—she's beautiful.
Ophelia, doomed and supine in her watery grave. Sculpture painstakingly carved from marble stone and myth.
Unreachable.
Ryan sinks to his knees, close enough he can feel the absence of metabolic heat. She smells like nothing. Nothing at all. As if she's been removed from the olfactory spectrum entirely, edited out of the sensory world. No sweet-rot and voided bowels of natural death, no trace of the desert that clings to her when she’s conscious.
The scar is almost invisible against ashen skin; face slack, features smoothed of perpetual disquiet.
In sleep—death—stasis—whatever this is, Sol looks less haunted.
He sits about as comfortably as he can manage on the floor, back to the wall. Studies her with practiced compartmentalization, the way he might a crime scene or repo target—cataloging details, searching for patterns; some attempt to understand the mechanics and intricacies of what’s he’s seeing. Works for about a minute before he thinks of Monday night, when she’d made him dinner squinting at Mrs. Gutierrez’s recipe; sat with him while he ate, slightly amused and not at all buying the compliments he gave around burnt edges of chicken, then fucked him like she was trying to crawl inside his skin—desperate and giving and always so goddamn fucking responsive it steals his breath, has him wondering how she could be anything but alive.
And here she lies.
Both versions are true. Both are Sol.
It’s messed up. This—whatever this could be, if anything—is fucked. Ryan Donahue, particularly, is fucked—and probably insane, and possibly a freak—because he still wants it.
The first time he killed a man, he’d just turned twenty-three and hadn't meant to hit the guy quite that hard. Hadn't accounted for his own strength, the specific angle of skull meeting concrete. The wet crack, red pool. The way the body had twitched twice and gone still. He'd felt sick for weeks after. Not guilt, not entirely, but hollow recognition: that he was capable of ending a life. That the line was thinner than anyone wanted to admit.
Ric had taken care of the cleanup; disappeared it into a labyrinth of favors and dirty money. But Ryan learned something about himself that night—something he’d been carrying long before, perhaps, already settled like sediment.
Death doesn't scare him the way it should.
The most recent contract he'd done for Ric was with TK back in May—two competitors, two center mass hits each. Bodies weighted and sunk in brackish maze; nothing registered beyond logistics: load, transport, dump. Gator food.
Professional. Cold as fuck. Paid for five months rent.
Sol doesn’t know. He’d inferred, carefully—the same careful way she'd controlled her whole truth—in the Everglades. She didn’t seem surprised. Maybe she already suspected. Maybe she doesn’t care.
But she trusts him enough to die in his space. To be this vulnerable, this defenseless, knowing he could do anything to her.
The power of that sits strange in his chest.
Sol, who could likewise tear out his throat, eviscerate him in seconds. Sol, who instead looks at him as though he's the only thing solid in a world gone ghost.
(Sol, who has had him so completely, in ways he’s still figuring out, from the moment that eight ball was sunk in a Tucson dive bar.)
Ryan's hand reaches without conscious thought. Fingertips graze her cheek and the skin feels alien, waxy—paraffin-dipped and left to cool—but he doesn't pull back. She's taken on the ambient temperature of the closet; become part of the environment.
"Sol," he whispers.
Her chest doesn’t rise. Her eyes don't flutter open. She doesn’t smile soft and mumble and pull him down to her with sleepy grasping fingers.
She is profoundly, impossibly still. This is the full stop.
Where do you go?
He traces the high sweep of her jaw with one finger. The scar’s a raised line under his thumb. Old violence: timing belt snapped at seventeen, she’d said, but the angle’s wrong and it healed way too fucking clean. Ryan knows wounds purposefully inflicted.
His gaze trails down along her neck, locking on the base where two moles cluster like lovers and a pulse should jump.
He thinks of predators rolling over. Soft underbellies, delicate throats.
His own voice by the water, head tilted, offering the vein jackrabbiting beneath his jaw: Take it.
What does it say about him that he wants to gather a monster in his arms and tell her she's safe?
What does it say about her that she trusts a killer with the knowledge of exactly how helpless she becomes?
His ass begins to protest hardwood floor but he doesn't move. Keeps watching the way he'd watch an accident on the causeway, a live grenade, a pretty little coral snake sunning itself on his balcony.
Ryan's other hand finds her hair and threads gently through thick curls.
Still soft, somehow.
What the fuck am I doing?
The question floats through darkness and lands absolutely nowhere useful. He's been asking himself variations of it for nine months now. Since she’d watched his reflection in that mirror behind the bar with those fucking harrowing eyes; since she'd climbed into his lap in the bed of his truck and taken him apart under the Milky Way. Since she’d asked him to make it hurt and when he didn’t she'd sunk teeth into his throat, gasped these frantic needy sounds against his skin. He'd held her there.
The memory sends heat pooling low in his gut.
Christ, Donahue. Get your shit together.
But his fingers keep moving through her hair; soothing, repetitive.
No wonder she'd looked half-mad with loneliness.
How many times have you died?
How many days as carrion?
How many nights in storm drains, bathtubs, car trunks, stumbling to consciousness blind and hungry?
He’s noticed things. The way she hoards physical sensation like a junkie. How she'll spend an hour just running her fingers over different textures—the leather sectional, his stubble, the condensation on a beer bottle. The intensity in her touch; the recklessness sometimes. How she—
The air changes first.
Starts so subtly he almost misses it.
A shift in the density of the dark, then the quality of stillness. The barometric drop before a Florida thunderstorm. Before sky splits. The hairs on his arms stand up, every follicle hyperaware of its own existence, and Ryan winces as his ears pop.
He should leave. Should be in the kitchen when she emerges, playing the unflappable fool—Hey baby, how'd you sleep?—like she'd been catching a nap instead of clinical death.
Something moves under Sol's skin.
Not muscle. Not blood or pulse. Something else. Something that makes his synapses fire run, motherfucker even as he leans closer.
It starts at her extremities—a visible ripple; reminds him of watching time-lapse footage on Instagram of ivy claiming a wall.
Her finger twitches.
Just once. Just barely. But after absolute utter fucking stillness, it may as well be a lightning strike.
The pressure drops again like he's suddenly at altitude.
Joints unlock—a choir of kindling punctuated by the sharp, nauseating crack of a spine after hours of rigid immobility. Her legs extend slow as muscles remember their function, stretch to their length, and she shifts with a noise that’s part relief, part death rattle reversed.
Sol's eyes snap open.
Immediate. Binary. Off/on.
Irises more amber than brown catch the gun safe's gloom-glow like roadside reflectors—burnt sugar spark, a flash of whiskey held to light.
Animal shine in the pitch.
She fixes on him, crouched over her deathbed, and for three wet bellows of Ryan’s heartbeat they stare at each other across a fundamental divide.
And he kisses her.
Insane. Pure impulse. Same instinct that keeps him reaching despite every red flag. Reaching reaching reaching.
His mouth finds hers and for a second it feels like kissing ice. Like pressing lips to metal on sub-zero Montana mornings—that searing sting of cold.
But she's there. Sol makes a sound—surprise or protest or pleasure, he can't tell—and then she's kissing him too, graceless and urgent, dead weight turned vital, surging up to tie arms around his neck.
Blood moves sluggishly under her skin, though not blood the way he understands it. Thick and sentient, following touch. Grey-green blooms gold-brown; fevered heat beginning where his fingers dig into her flesh.
Her fangs catch his bottom lip.
Just a graze, not enough to break skin, but it reminds him what he’s pressed against in this closet-tomb. What she could do.
(What she doesn't.)
Sol pulls back millimetres; angles her head to protect him from rapidly extending teeth, and something about that small act—her little noise of self-frustration, the careful adjustment—gets him harder than the adrenaline spike.
Before he can think he’s kissing her again. Can't fucking explain why he needs this—some hindbrain attempt to bridge the gap between what she was and what she's becoming?
When she rocks against him, he realizes she's every bit as aroused. Death and resurrection and then she's wet for him, grinding down against his obvious erection with single-minded focus.
He should probably examine this. What it says about both of them that it feels inevitable.
But right now she’s tugging at his sweats and he's pulling the jersey over her head.
Later. He'll wrestle with it later.
Her tongue strokes his and she tastes more like Sol: mesquite smoke, that sweetness of agave and bruised fruit; something darker, earthier, consuming.
Ryan cups her jaw.
Relishes how she comes to life under his palm.
decided to cut the sex scene bc the next 3 prompts will probably have them knowing me… and i think it ended more poignant like this. kind of like i have to respect their privacy in that little tomb lol though im sure the pillow talk will be crazy
THANK YOU GABBIE!!! SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG
