#soapfics

And it really is sloppy. Wet, messy. Your poor cunt swollen and dripping, leaking so much that it starts to puddle on the starchy sheets below. His Lieutenant is a big man, and he feels a pinch of sympathy swell at the fuckin' sight of you—limp, like a doll; wrists bound above your head, skin inflamed and chaffed from struggling to get out.

On the end table, he spots a water bottle and scattered tablets. Sleeping pills, he's sure. Something to keep you docile and quiet while he's called away from the divine split of your lax thighs, and sent halfway across the city by Price. Leaving you all alone, unattended. Unable to do anything except wait for him to get back so he can stretch that sore, messy cunt on his cock all over again, fill you right back up—

Poor thing.

But he can't really deny that the modicum of sympathy he feels is scrapped together from the sludge at the bottom of a dry well. Just droplets in the palm of his hand, and honestly—it's more jealousy that Simon got to you first instead of real pity because he'd be lying (hand on a Bible, fingers gripping the beads of a rosary—i shall not lie) if he said that the sight of you hasn't been haunting him since the moment they wandered into the diner. His mind spinning debauched thoughts of you—dressed up pretty in soft pink and chocolate brown—from the moment you wandered over to his table, looking like a dream. Like a cutout from a porno magazines his dad hid inside the shed in an old shoebox.

Just the sweetest little thing.

And he's not the only one.

They've all been prowling around you a little bit since landing in your sleepy-eyed town—asking for more coffee even though it tasted like shit and was burnt to hell, just to keep you close. To keep you coming back to their table as they soak in their fill.

Price dropping rasping sweetheart's and love's and thank you, darlin's that they all pretended not to hear. And Simon—

Well. He sees now where all those lingering stares, the ones that made Johnny's hackle raise, hair standing on end, led his Lieutenant, and what they meant. He thought it was wariness at first—or maybe that's just what he told himself late at night when he pulled his shirt up his navel, fingers grazing the thick trail of course hair to the soft, sensitive patch of skin at the base of his cock. Thinking about the way his Lieutenant looked at you. A whisper in the back of his head that screamed wrong and no and look away, she's fucking mine; little bites, nips, he couldn't hold back even when his hand curled around the base of his thickening cock, drawing twisted, ugly fantasies of what Ghost might do with a pretty thing like you.

And fuck—

What that did to him. Does.

It would be another lie if he said he's never thought of it before. Got off on the idea of it. Something that started as a cut—just this little papercut that he kept scratching and scratching until it tore, splitting further apart. Opening wide, like a chasm. This gaping hole that pulsed around the thought of his Lieutenant. A sick little thing that throbbed around the shape of him. The absurd width and the way he moved—like a mean, old dog Johnny would sometimes find prowling corners on the outskirts of town. A grizzled tiger with broken teeth, snapping it's maw at anything that got close enough to eat. Just this awful, mean looking thing in size and shape and temperament. Hard, jagged lines. Solid like a brick. And then—

You. Recoiling when he curled a massive paw around the cup of coffee. His palm swallowing it whole when you could barely get your fingers to meet around the thick of the base. The size difference clicking in a way it sometimes did when pretty, feisty things would try to step toe to toe with him and have to glare up, up, because they barely even reached his chin.

The urge to overpower. To claim. To tuck something smaller and softer than himself beneath the bulk of his body, hiding his kill from view.

He's always been the driver, not the passenger. The one in control. The main character, not the one watching from the sidelines, though—

But he really can't get the thought of Ghost swallowing up someone the way he did with the cup. A stomach-churning thought. Just a sick obsession burning in the back of his head—the massive brute rutting against you. The juxtaposition between the big, nasty beast and the pretty thing beneath him crying out because he's just too big burns him sometimes.

And he should help you.

Wants to, too. Really, he does. Wants to be your knight in shining armour, rescuing you from the big, scary man who tied you to his bed and ravaged you like this, made that poor, little pussy ache when he stretched you on his fat cock. Wants to so bad—

But he wants a taste even more.

Wants to lick your messy, abused cunt until his Lieutenant isn't dripping from you anymore. Until the only thing glistening on your folds is his spit and your slick. Maybe—if he has time—slide inside your poor pussy and fill it up again, like he wasn't even there in first place. Ghost wouldn't even know the difference, would he? Would come back to you leaking all over the sheets, just like he left you. Ready for seconds (or fifths, sixths, considering the fuckin' mess between your thighs, and goddamn, if that isn't one of the hottest sights he'd ever seen—); pretty little cunt ready for that fat, thick cock to split it apart again, stuff it full of cum all over again—

He palms his cock, thoughts of calling for help dissolved into a keening in the back of his head; just this unignorable, urgent need to eat. Hunger like he'd never felt before, strong enough that just looking at you splayed out like the helpless little victim you are, leaking and messy and full of fucking cum that isn't even his, is making his belly growl. He'd cut his own arm off at this point for just a fucking taste—

And he gets it. Drops to his knees at the edge of the bed, wrapping his hands around your thighs before he pulls you into his mouth for that first, scorching lick—

And it's salty, bitter. Thick. Ghost's cum tastes pretty fucking gross, really (something he isn't too surprised by considering the man's diet mainly consists of barely cooked red meat, Marlboros, and bourbon)—or maybe he just doesn't have the acquired taste for it—and he winces, a little, thinking about the dried remnants of it around your mouth, how many times you had to drink down the same, briny taste; but it's not—

It's not enough to make him stop.

Underneath the brine of it, the fuckin' smell of you and his Lieutenant dense in his nose, he can taste you. Sweet. Earthy. Slightly metallic—like the first lick of a papercut, and it makes him whine in the back of his throat, rasping out a muffled, slurred, poor baby before laving his tongue over your abused cunt, soothing the ache Ghost must have left behind. The stretch that was probably on the wrong side of too much, turning his milky cum a pretty strawberry pink.

You poor fucking thing—

He can feel just how swollen you are when he splits your bruised folds apart with his fingers, peeling them away so he can dig his tongue into your tender, chaffed hole to scoop out a mouthful of pink-tinged cum that pools inside of you. Salty and bitter and so fucking perfect, he could almost weep. It spills down his chin, stains his shirt, and despite the several swallows he takes, feeling the slimy, thick cum oozing down his throat, there's still so much of it. A thought that makes him whine, that has him rutting against the side of the bed like a dog because god, you're so fucking full, aren't you?

His hand presses against your pelvis—fingers pushing into the space between your lower belly and mound to push more cum from your cunt, sitting like an eager fucking thing between the split of your thighs, mouth open, tongue out to catch anything that spills from you. Fingers pushing and pushing. Swallowing it down, one mouthful after the other—

Ghost, when he'd changed after a mission that got him a little too messy, was just this jumble of scar tissue and thick pelt, and that's where it should have ended. Eyes politely averted, maybe a crass joke at his Lieutenant's expense (handsome, my bloody arse), but he couldn't stop looking at the thing dangling between his gnarled thighs. The way it hung there, swaying between his legs. Thick and fat and uglier than anything he'd ever seen before. The urge to ask—fuck, LT, how do you ever get pussy with a hideous thing like that?—crawling up his throat as he stared and stared and—

got harder than he'd ever been in his entire life, coming so fucking hard, that his belly ached after

—and he thinks of it now. Almost the width of his wrist soft, and how much bigger it must have gotten when he peeled your panties away, unveiling the pretty, slick split of your cunt. His hand slides up your belly, resting above your belly button where he knows the tip of Simon's cock would reach by memory alone, and how deep he'd speared it into you. Stretching you out around his fat cock, making this pretty pussy swallow every fuckin' inch—

He cums, then, rutting against the side of the mattress, head fuzzy with nothing but the thought of Simon ruining your cunt, coming inside of you over and over again, the taste on his tongue—sweet, wrecked pussy, and bitter, cherry-tinged cum—

He grunts, groaning into the swollen mess of your cunt before shoving his tongue as deep inside of your fluttering, swollen little hole as he can get, and still, somehow, finding the taste of Simon even after his belly feels stuffed full with it.

A dream, he thinks, rubbing his mouth and chin over your messy, wet folds; the silken, swollen split of a tender, well-fucked cunt the most heavenly thing he'd ever felt against his skin. And the fact that all that pink-tinged cum soaking into his stubble belongs to his Lieutenant is something that just wrecks him more than he thought it ever would. A fantasy spinning behind his eyes as he imagines the way you'd have cried and thrashed and screamed when slid that hideous fucking cock inside of your tight cunt, balls slapping against your seam hard enough that he feels the irritated, burning skin above the plush dents of your ass cheeks. How terribly he must have treated you, such a sweet little thing, as he heaved above you, hands curled around your hips, maybe digging into your waist, as he pulled you back into each thrust just to make sure this sweet cunt he risked so much to fuck, to ruin, took every, hard earned inch. Rutting into like a beast, a man starved. The way he looked down at you probably taking on the same shape and colour of that look Johnny saw in his eyes when you turned your back to the table, shoulders tensing like you knew there was a tiger hiding in the bushes behind you.

Pretty, dumb little prey too bracket by the idea of safety indoors and the cellphone inside your pocket to notice the behemoth of a man luring in the shadows after you clocked out for work, following you to your car before he scooped you up and slaked his hunger on this little cunt Johnny can't stop fucking with his tongue either, too eager for another sip despite how sore he knows you must be. Stretched wide around something thicker than his own wrist, insides feeling like the same papercuts he itched to madness in the back of his own head.

Poor thing, he thinks again when you stir, letting out a sluggish little whimper. But it's a muted sense of sympathy. Like the oooh and ahhh of an ambivalent crowd; humming along in obligation instead of real pity because despite how tight your little hole gets around his tongue when he curls it inside, and the darkening of that pretty, pink-tinged cum to rose-red, he's too hungry to stop.

This is the first real meal he's had in years, and no matter how much you wince and whine, he knows he has to take what he can before the predator returns to finish off your bones.

Later, with his belly full and his lips sticky with dried cum and slick, he finds his way back to the diner with the document in hand, ignoring the piercing look Ghost sends him and offering up an easy grin.

Lax and nonchalant because the man will find nothing amiss when he gets back to his room because Johnny had no reason at all to go into the bedroom at all. He'll open the door and see you splayed over the mattress, pussy wet and messy and still leaking cum—

(pink-tinged, of course, because Johnny got a little carried away himself by that sweet clench of you around the thick of him. something he'll coo about and apologise for later when he sneaks back inside for another taste—)

But what he forgot was the keen eyes and sense of smell on an apex predator, and when Simon snatches him up by the scruff of his neck before shoving him against the wall with a hungry, snarling, teeth-clacking kiss (that's more of an eating, really; a devouring that makes Johnny's cock throb and his stomach whine in longing), all he can say is whoops when Simon growls out,

ADDITIONAL TAGS: descriptions of injury. implied head trauma. bearded Soap. smut. this is my love letter to NWT and a what not to do in a national park.

BABY TRAP MASTER LIST | AO3 LINK

It happens in an instant. 

The trek up the fjord narrows suddenly. Chossy growing slick from rainfall the night prior. You pace yourself, stepping carefully on the wobbling slate, testing its resilience before you take another step. Climbing higher. Higher.

There's a storm brewing in the distance. Its burgeoning pace grows rapidly, nipping at your heels as cool winds whistle through the steep valley below.

The park wardens at the visitors centre warned you about it when you set out into the rugged wilderness of Nahanni this morning. Brows pinched, wary, when you'd come to them—all alone—and signed your name on the barren ledger collecting dust on the counter. A fact that drew your attention when you flipped through the empty pages. 

Don't get too many visitors around here, the man murmured, eyes cresting in apprehension at your question. Not the most isolated or remote, no. That's probably higher up. Quttinirpaaq, maybe? Heard from some buddies up there that they had no visitors last year. We do pretty well. About one thousand a year? Usually filmmakers and the like. Adventurous types. Gets kinda lonely up here. Ain't no Banff, that's for sure.

They added that the weather was unpredictable this time of year. All year, really. Nahanni is known for sudden swells and white-outs, for weather that can turn in an instant, going from calm to cataclysmic within seconds. 

(“Storms,” the man huffs, and you think the sigh was meant to be a laugh. One that falls flat when he takes in your hiking boots (too big, but the sales lady at the sporting goods warehouse assured you it was fine, that you would grow into them), and your cheap Lululemon knock-off tights. Your flimsy rucksack. The tinge of green around your ears; the stench of an overeager novice. “And, uh, it’s urban legends.”)

Valley of the Headless Men, he intones, squinting up at you when you ask about them. Adding: be careful out there when you turn to leave.

Dauntless, you still set out into the park, determined to at least make it to your campground before it set in. But the majesty surrounding you on all sides distracted you from your pace. Eyes caught on the Xanadu of an untempered wilderness slowing your trek to a crawl as you took in the steep, rolling batholiths reaching high into the aether, their sides sloping down in a dizzying, vertiginous drop to a lush valley below of scheele’s green below. It all looked so perfectly symmetrical from the high point in the valley where you stood, breathing in the scents that perfumed the air. With the rugged mountains cupped around a winding white line where the river sawed through. 

A lone moose grazed at the bottom of a rolling fell. The sight of her stopping you in your tracks long enough that the plume of darkened clouds—all a terrifying burnt sage—had time to catch up to you, crackling overhead as thunder rumbled through the canyons. 

Your campground is at the top of this ravine. Three nights spent inside a cabin with nothing but yourself and several paperbacks for company. Into the Wild amongst them—a morbid parting gift from a friend on what not to do—and its inspirational predecessor, On the Road. 

You won't read it. You never do. But it sits, a humourous paperweight, in your rucksack as you clamber up the ravine. An anchoring comfort. A piece of home. Something that reminds you you're not completely alone even though you are. 

The book, your friends, and the encroaching loneliness that you feel prickling behind your eyes, all weigh on your mind. Spooling out before you in loose, loop threads. You follow them eagerly, glad for something to abate the unnatural silence, and—

A sound.

It comes from the left, hidden in the thick tangle of furze. A click. It shatters through the eerie quiet of the sprawling boscage. An animal, maybe. Hopefully. 

It must be, you think, heart hammering thunderously in your chest. There's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You hold your breath. Eyes glued on the thatch of green shrubs lining the base of the dense forest. 

Nothing happens. You blink, shifting on your feet—

A red line pierces through the gap between the leaves, aimed straight at your ankle. It's thin, diaphanous. Slips over the scraggy rock like liquid.

It's so out of place here that it takes you a second to familiarise yourself with its unexpected presence. A laser—

An explosive boom fills the ravine the moment the thought connects. A rifle. Aimed right at you. It happens fast. The world turning over itself, spinning right off its axis. You fall against the ledge in a crumpled, heavy heap, legs so close to dangling off the precipice. 

Gravity is a choking weight on your sternum, pushing you down, down, toward the jagged, rocky shoreline. A fall like that—

You curl into yourself instinctively. 

“Ah, shite—” is all you hear amid the roar in your ears. “Y’alright? ah didnae see ye thare—”

In your tear-stained periphery, a man appears. He stands into the glare of the waning sun, limned in a halo of gold. There's a pinch between his dark, thick brows. A steep ravine.  He's ragged. Wild. Tuffs of black hair hang loose past his ears and nape, curling slightly at the ends. It blends, almost seamlessly, into his thick, scraggly beard. He pushes a hand through the top, grabbing a fistful in his palm.

“Easn't expecting anybody oot 'ere. Nae this far intae th' woods.”

He seems to be speaking to himself more so than he's talking to you. There's anger writ in the fine lines of his face, but this ire isn't turned toward you. It's inward. Self-admonishment. His eyes darken when they flicker down to your ankle, as if reminding you of the hurt there when you'd been so focused on how out of place his accent is in the Northwest Territories.

The ache in your ankle brings you crashing back into reality. The pain seems to vibrate from within your marrow, riveting up your bones. 

You chance a glance—

You swallow down the drum of panic. A trick of the light. It must be. 

A dream. A nightmare. 

But the man appears. His hand falls onto your knee, holding you steady. 

“Ah will hae tae put oan a tourniquet. Will hurt a lot, doe.” 

Absently, you nod. Keep nodding. Can't stop. 

There's a hole cut through your ankle. Tore thro' yer Achilles, he's saying, words water in your ears. He instructs you to wiggle your toes.

"Ah know it hurts, but just dae it fer me, okay?"

You do. You—

Nausea buds in your guts, churning your stomach. The apple you ate earlier is choked out into the bushes dotting along the ravine. Insides purging themselves, replacing everything—food, water, coffee from earlier, bile—until nothing but shaky panic remains. It tastes like iron in the back of your throat. 

“Ah know, doe,” he's saying, fingers knotting into your slick hiking trousers. Lululemon knockoffs from an outdoor warehouse in the city. A pocket knife follows, and cuts a seamless line inches below your hip. 

Sad tae see ‘em go, he murmurs, accent thickening around the words. Saturating them in a drawl that's too liquid for your unpractised ears to catch. He makes a mournful sound when he slides the blade down your leg, adds, “hugged yer arse like a dream, doe.”

Another trick. The mountains do funny things to sound, you know. It must be all in your head. All—

“Don't worry,” he's shushing you now as he peels the fabric off your legs, groaning low in his throat. “Ah have ye. Ah will take care o'ye, tae, doe. Bonny thing, aren't ye? a' alone. Nae anymore, doe. Jus' me 'n' ye now. Jus' us —”

You always thought you'd have your wits about you in a traumatic situation. Be able to think clearly, rationally. Make appropriate decisions that befit the situation unfolding. Life saving ones. Practical. 

To gear up for this trip, you watched survival videos on YouTube. How to make a fire. How to make drinking water. How to build a shelter. Tips on weathering down for a sudden storm. Tucked it all inside your head, and thought, I got this. 

Had to, really, because everything you've read about Nahanni says it's unpredictable. Calm weather, gorgeous views one moment, and then a sudden deluge the next. Snow falling quicker than you keep up with. Animals blend in seamlessly with the landscape. Slips, falls. It's so easy to get lost, someone wrote. 

But as he uses the scrap of your trousers to wrap around the wound on your broken, mangled ankle, you realise all that planning was for nothing. This was one of those moments when you discovered just how much you bit off. That panic made you mute, made you freeze up. 

The pain is almost secondary to the surge of adrenaline. Fear.

You need to go home. You tell him this, slowly. Muttered through numb lips. 

There's something almost like pity in his eyes when he glances up at you. 

There was a mix-up, he says, slowly. Cautiously. You got yourself turned around in the opposite direction. There's no campground on the fjord above. All the lodges and cabins are in the opposite direction. 

Y'got lost, he tells you. Turned the wrong way out. Ye'r in th' backcountry.

“I'll go back,” you press, urgent. Insistent. Panic is acidic in your throat. Corrosive. It burns when you swallow. “Please, just tell me which way to go, and I’ll—”

"Cannae dae tha'."

“Why?”

“Storm,” he points in the distance where a plume of cloud gathers. So dark, they're almost black. Ominous. “Gonnae skelp solid. Na choice but tae git oot."

“I don't have anywhere to go—”

He rakes his hand through his hair. “Ah kin take ye tae mines. Git a cabin in th' woods. Juist ootdoors o' Nahanni Butte.” 

“No, I—”

His hand squeezes tight around your ankle. The pain makes itself known in a visceral, awful throb that travels up your leg, curdling at the base of your spine. Wrong, wrong. Something is wrong. Your body is trying to reject the agony. The breaking of your bone. It's foreign, it doesn't belong. But there's nowhere for it to go. 

Pain pulses in tandem with your heartbeat. 

You don't realise you're screaming until you hear the echoes of it rebound against the limestone walls. And then there's a whisper in your ear. You feel the scratch of his beard against your cheek.

"Shush, bonnie. Cannae let ye go oot oan yer own. Gonnae take ye home, yeah?"

Home. Home. You nod furiously, and it's only when the scraggly black curls covering his chin and jaw catch on damp skin do you realise you're crying. 

He leans away from you, arm stretching toward the rucksack behind him. 

The rifle leans against it. You feel sick all over again. 

“Drink this,” he says, unscrewing the cap. “It'll make ye feel better.” 

He presses the lip to your mouth, a hand slipping over the back of your head, tilting your chin up. “Drink,” he says again, and it's firmer this time. A command. “Ah promise ye'll feel better, doe.” 

It tastes bitter. You swallow it down. Keep swallowing.

“Good,” he rasps, hand sliding down the length of your spine until it rests against your lower back. “Keep drinkin’, sweet thing.”

It pools in your belly, sloshing uncomfortably when you move, but it washes the bitterness from between your teeth. You keep drinking. Swallowing it down. You know you shouldn't, that you might get sick again, but it's a distraction from the mess that is your ankle—bloody, twisted, mangled—

Nausea swells. You choke it down until you can breathe without feeling as though you were going to be sick again. 

“You'll be okay,” he's saying, moving around you with a practised efficiency for something so broad. It's almost graceful. Agile. 

He patches you up as much as he can with the supplies he has, but you refuse to look again at your ankle. It's broken, that much is clear. You can feel your bones grinding, sliding against each other. The sensation is horrific. Wrong. You turn your head to the ledge you were standing on just to distract yourself from the agony of it all. 

You're surprised you're not crying. Screaming. The urge is there, just beneath the surface. But for some odd, unfathomable reason you find you can't. Your chest feels heavy. Lungs sluggish. Slow. 

It must be an adrenaline crash, you think. Why else would you feel so tired, so exhausted. 

“I'm—” you start, but you feel dizzy. “‘m—”

“Shush, doe.” He mutters, and it sounds far away. Garbled. “You need yer rest. Had a traumatic accident. But don't worry. Ye can trust me. A wouldnae let anythin' ill happen tae ye ever again."

“Yeah,” you breathe, nodding. Nodding. You can't stop, can't—

“Lay back. Git some rest. A'm almost done, 'n' then ah will hae ye back home in no time—”

You come to on a groggy whimper, head buried in the messy locks curtained over his nape. There's a soft, pulsing thud in the back of your head when you try to lift it up. It feels heavier than it should. Leadened. You groan again, fighting against the currents dragging you back down to those soporific depths—

Your head is a slurried marsh. Thoughts ephemeral, broken. Fragmented. They slip through your fingers when you reach for them, diaphanous wisps you can't seem to catch. 

“Don't worry, doe—” your world quivers when he speaks. Words vibrating through your chest, catching on the heavy rails of your ribs. The seismic vibrations rumble in your ear, coming to life as a mere echo in your head. “Ah will keep ye safe.”

It's comforting. A raft in squall, something to cling to as the waves make futile attempts to drag you under. Your arms, dangling loosely over his shoulders, sluggishly flatten to his chest, linking over his chest. 

He grunts at your touch, palms slick on your skin. 

“Thank you,” you slur, words thick in your throat. Sluggish. “Thank you for helpin’ me. Fer savin’ me—”

Your body shakes when he trembles. With your forehead against his nape, you hear his thick swallow. The air ghosting out of his lungs in a soundless whisper. 

His hands flex around the backs of your knees. Squeezing tight. The man doesn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, the pursuing somnolence catches up to you. It digs heavy fingers into your eyes, dragging you back down into the sticky, thick tar. 

Sleep finds you in an instant. 

You try to read his words in the quiver of your bones when he speaks. Make sense of the tremble reverberating through the hollow gaps, tangling in the pulpy mess. 

But there's a mistranslation somewhere. A missing decibel. A forgotten wavelength.

It almost sounds like he says—

“Wouldn't leave mah wife alone in th' woods like tha’.”

How funny, you think, and hide a giggle into the hardened ridge of his shoulder blade. 

Cognisance is a transient flicker.

You're not sure how long he matches through the thicket with you on his back, navigating the unending chaparral with an ease that feels innate rather than practised. You stare down at the ground, world hazy around the edges, and think, suddenly, intrusively, that you ought to remember the steps. Every left, every right. 

You get to seven lefts, three rights—a small ravine, a flattened coppice; a gnarled spruce sat alone in a valley of lush green and clumps of topaz podzol—before your eyes are too heavy to keep open. They slip shut. And you think, only for a moment. Just a second, I just need to rest my eyes, and then come to at the sound of a groggy engine growling to life. 

The world morphs from a dense forest intercut with sheer cliffs looming, indomitable, in the grey distance, to the faded beige felt covering the ceiling of an old truck. 

Your blink is a slow crawl, lashes weighed down by anchors dredging over the seafloor. Gritty, raw. It hurts, now, to hold them open. A furious throb jabs at your temple. It aches like a bruise. But it's nothing compared to the nauseating agony that floods your core each time your foot is jostled. Nerves being lit aflame in an endless throe of pain unlike you'd ever experienced before. 

Your mouth feels sealed when you go to speak. Lips glued together. Sluggishly, you squeeze your tongue through the crack between your teeth, licking along the seam. 

A plastic bottle appears in your periphery, nozzle tipped toward your mouth. A hand curls around the body of it. Fingers overlapping. It looks small in this big hand. Tiny. Long wisps of black hair cover their ruddy knuckles, spreading in a dense crop up their forearm, growing thicker at the wrist. 

Their skin is pale, tinged slightly pink. Even through the brume, the lambent light of the sun catches on their skin. Illuminating small scars, cuts. Little scratches from the snagging furze. 

Their hand shakes. The dark veins that branch off from the white-capped peaks of their bent knuckles pulse under the thin skin when they move. 

“Drink, hen,” he murmurs, bringing the bottle to the jut of your lower lip. “Ye’ll need it.” 

A plastic bottle is an odd choice to bring into the backcountry, but as you peer through the translucent skin, you find the water inside is cloudy. Chalky. 

“Donnae worry—” he gives the bottle another shake, disturbing the sediment congealing at the bottom. “It's electrolytes, ken. Nothing fishy.”

Your teeth ache from the cold when he slips the rim between your lips, prying them apart. With your head already tilted back in the seat, the water slips in. A slow trickle. He feeds it to you, humming in appeasement when you swallow. 

“Tha’s a good girl.” 

It carves a jagged tunnel through the murk in your head. The praise slipping in, liquid, until it coats your burgeoning trepidation in a sudden swell of endorphins. With their unpractised, gauche hands, they paint a mockery of Sargent in the gaps of your synapses, stuffing the spaces between with oversaturated hues of teal, white, yellow, orange, and pink. 

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. 

But despite the shoddily crafted pastiche, it works. 

Your eyes flutter, bones growing heavier, heavier, as they're forced to carry the weight of your liquified flesh. This molten heat in your chest turns your insides into putty.  

Water dribbles down your chin. He sees it and coos.

“Ah, doe. Right mess ye are now. Ah will hae ye home in no time. Git ye a' cleaned up."

The idea of home melts you further. You sigh in the seat, soft and drawn out, and shake your head slowly when he wriggles the bottle in front of you again. 

“Get some rest, doe,” his hand falls, heavy and warm, on your thigh. Thumb stroking along the curve of your leg, fingers curling into the seam, digging deep. Resting there. 

It's too high to be appropriate. You know this. Went through lesson upon lesson in school of bad touches and what's considered friendly, polite. But when you try to open your mouth to say something about it, you catch the spread of his palm over your flesh. Wide, broad. Masculine. It catches in your throat, and gets tangled in the mush at the base. 

It should be fine, you think, dizzy over the way his hand swallows you whole. He saved you, after all. 

But it burrows. Digs deep. Some sense of wrongness permeates out from the firm grasp he has on you. It feels possessive. The sort of thing you might expect between people who are intimate with each other. A couple. You've known him for—

Hours, maybe? 

Most of it was spent in a pain-induced hypnagogia. 

It curdles in your stomach. Rotten, spoiled milk. 

But—

He saved you. 

You'll choke yourself on it if you keep thinking about it. So, you don't. You push it down. Cover it beneath the sediment, and bury it deep. 

He's just a man. 

Kind. Helpful. 

As you dig a hole for this unease, he keeps his hand fixed on your thigh. The other is pressed against the steering wheel, the ball of his palm under the curve at the top of the wheel. Relaxed. Easy. You try to adopt his nonchalant disposition and glance out at the blurry world around you. 

You feel exhausted. Unsettled. The sort of fatigue that comes with a raging fever. There's sand in your mouth. Your throat is dry. 

You don't ask for water. 

In the lull, he pitches the truck forward with a grave rumble. The silence is broken by the crunch of vegetation and gravel beneath the wheels as he ploughs forward. 

There are public roads to get to Nahanni. The floatplane you entered into the park on was chartered by Parks Canada. And yet—

He commandeers the truck around a flatbed of rock and dirt. Muskeg dots the tops in some places, and he veers expertly to avoid them. 

It's less of a traditional road and more so a forged desire path. You know the highway has to be close by, the link between Fort Liard and Fort Simpson, but as you peer out the window, the world around you looks overgrown. Wild. Alien. 

Sloping hills in lush green stretch out into the distance, meeting with the dense montane forests dotted along the stretch of land. The grassy coppice under his wheels is matted down, and interspersed with clumps of brown, wet muskeg and crushed slate. 

Over the grey peaks of the mountains in the distance, a thick, black cloud looms. The sky turns gunmetal, almost indistinguishable from the monoliths jutting beneath them. 

At some points, he takes his hand off your thigh to navigate winding turns better, but it always ends up back on you. And always a little higher than it was before. 

Your mouth is filled with lead. Tongue thick, malleable. Tensile like mercury. You can't speak. So you just ignore it. Dig your crown into the headrest, and breathe in the woodsy scent of him. Laurel, tree moss. Coumarin. Rotting pine. Sweet acacia. It tickles the back of your throat. Sticks there, glued in the syrupy mess. 

You'd hoped it would get easier to ignore, but it stays there, a constant weight, even as the world outside fades into a hazy twilight. 

In the hush of the cabin, he squeezes your thigh. “Cannae wait tae get ye home, doe.”

Against the staggering backdrop of a black, jagged mountain, a doe stands in the talus. Her fawn fur and tuffs of white spots stick out against the charcoal-coloured cliffs, and you watch, some distance away, as she bends down to fossick through the scree in search of food. 

With the looming clouds of gunmetal and ash gathering around the craggy peaks, her presence here feels dangerously out of place. Jarring. She shouldn't be here. She doesn't belong. 

But the beauty of this moment is breathtaking. Mesmerising. You stare in muted horror, awe, as she grazes in the rubble, slender neck bent in a graceful arch. The sloping handle of fine china. Her wet, black eyes are so open, so kind. Puddles of ignorance, naïvety, as she flicks her tongue out against the desolate rock, a fruitless search for grass in which to mull on. 

Thunder crackles over the snow-capped ridges. Her ears flicker, but she doesn't run. You should warn her. Scare her away. But you can't move. Can't speak. You're a mute spectator, a piece of dross on the ground watching the approaching calamity without a mouth. Horror churns. You want so badly to tell the doe to run—

An impossibility, you know. It's much too late for her to do anything at all. 

Around the doe’s leg is a shackle. 

Your skin rips, tears, as you force your jaws apart, blood pooling in your mouth. If you can make a sound, she’ll—

A boom echoes through the canyon's cradle. 

The scream gurgles in the back of your throat. 

Agony rips through your leg—

—you wake with a gasp. 

Sputtering, choking on the saliva pooled in your mouth. It tastes bitter, brackish. You feel something gritty between your teeth. It sticks to the backs, granular specks that dissolve, sour and chalky, on your tongue when you run it along the ridges of your gums.

You swallow it down, grimacing at the acidic taste. 

“Awake, aye?” His voice chips through the dense fog. You blink the haze away, glancing sideways at him through bleary, heavy eyes. 

His profile is lit by the harsh glare of high noon. The sharp jut of his ball cap. The curve of his nose set in the thick bushel of his scraggly beard and moustache. His broad chest concealed most of the view from the driver's side window. The lax bridge of his arm, knuckles loosely curled around the steering wheel.

He tilts his head toward you. “How're ye feelin’?”

Sluggish. Awful. There's sand in your eyes. Cotton in your head. You feel like you've been left out in the hot sun all day. Dizzy and sunburnt. Feverish. Heatsick. Your throat is dry, but you don't ask for water. You don't answer him at all. Can't. Your tongue is laden. Lips numb. 

It takes you a moment to reorient yourself, squinting through the glare of the sun—

That reels you back. Breaks through the fog. 

You know that the concept of day and night in the summer is different here. Twenty hours of daylight with twilight lasting all night. But even with the skewed perception of time and the heavy molasses thickening around the edges of your cognisance, you know that something is wrong. 

When you left the park, it was close to five in the evening. It should be twilight, not—

Your gaze lists sluggishly to the clock on the dashboard. Through the haze, the unmistakable gleam of one-fifteen stares back at you. 

It was the right time last night. 

“Wha—?”

You're not sure what you're asking. It's not even really a word, but a garbled sound. A noise of distress, confusion, in the back of your throat. 

He seems to understand it all the same. 

“Park had a bad storm,” he answers, pitch far too light for the severity of your situation, of what you're feeling. It makes you frown, sharp and sudden. “Washed through th’ river. Where ye were—well. Wouldnae ‘ave made it out, ye see. Would’ve gotten all torn up in th’ storm—”

You read that storms in Nahanni are vicious, sudden. Weather can turn in an instant, going from moderate to devastating in a blink. But—

What he's saying doesn't make sense. You remember bits, pieces, from earlier. He said you got turned around. Wandered too far off the trail, lost in the deep wilderness of Nahanni’s sprawling valley. 

“Where are we?”

“Nearly home.”

You push the wave of nausea down. “I need to go to a hospital.”

“Can't dae tha't'.”

“Why not?”

He doesn't answer for a beat, eyes fixed on the dirt path. Unblinking. 

Finally, he mutters: “had tae leave th' park oan th' opposite side when th' storm came in. No roads take us tae town.”

“I have—” you're not sure where your bag is. You hope he had the wherewithal to snatch it up after you fell. Hope. “I have a satellite phone. I can just call—”

“Sorry, hen. Yer bag flew off th' ledge. Ah coudnae grab it 'n' ye. Ah dinnae hae a phone oot 'ere. Never needed one—”

Hopeless. Hopeless. 

“How—how could you survive out here without one?”

“Nahanni Butte is a few hours awa'. Go intae town when th’ winter road is open. Inaccessible now. Th’ rivers flooded it. Cannae cross it. Can hunt, 'n' ah hae everything a'm needin' oot here.”

“So…” the reality of your situation is beginning to dawn on you. Helpless. Hopeless. “I'm stuck here until—winter?”

“Ah hae a friend flying oot fae Yellowknife. Comes tae drop off supplies 'n' th' lik'. He'll be 'ere in two months—”

“Two months?” This whole situation feels impossible. Wrong. You're so close to people—Fort Liard, Nahanni Butte, Fort Simpson. How could you be stuck here for two months? The idea of it is absurd. “You're not—you can't be serious.”

“Aye. I am.” 

There's a pinch between his brow. You wonder if it's meant to convey the severity of the situation, but as it grows deeper, deeper, you have the sudden sense that it's not an emotional decree of his sincerity. That it's, instead, a sudden twist of anger. 

It scares you. 

“I want to go home.” You mean for it to be forceful, but it comes out in a whimper. 

The man nods. The punch in his brow lessens. “Aye, me tae.” 

“Where are you from?” You pry, needing the distraction from the endless trawl of green and slate and permafrost enclosing in on you. “You're not from around here, are you?” At the gentle raise of his brows, you add, hurried, rushed: “you just. Have an accent, and I—”

“Fae Scotland,” he answers, and there's a quick grin on his face. Roguish. Charming. The sight of it has your start thudding in an uneasy gallop. “Edinburgh."

“Oh. Far from home.”

“Aye—” the grin fades, twisting into something ugly. “Had an—accident,” he spits the word out, brows pinching once more. Anger is writ in the hard clench of his muscles, his jaw. His knuckles blanche around the steering wheel, and you think you should have just kept your mouth shut. “Sent me here.”

There's a multitude of questions you want to ask. Vying for the top is the most obvious—why did this happen? why isn't he letting you go?—but what comes out instead is, “why?”

Just that. Nothing else. 

“Military.” 

He adds nothing, either. 

“Military?”

A nod. “Go’ hurt. Had rehab. Sent me here tae clear ma heid, and well—” his eyes flicker to you. You can't read his expression. “Got a fresh mission, dinnae I?”

“You don't—”

“I cannae leave ye. Both oo' us are stuck 'ere 'til someone comes tae pick us up, 'n' take us home.” 

The idea that somehow he's just as trapped as you are hasn't occurred. Why would it when he has a rifle, a truck, freedom—

But what good is all of that when you're landlocked in a place known for winter roads. Permafrost. The forced shift in perspective doesn't quell the anxiety roiling in your guts, but it lessens it. Somewhat. 

“Two months?”

He nods. “Aye.”

“And you have no cellphone? No satellite?”

“Ye can check it—” he makes a flippant motion toward the glove box in front of you. “Deader than ever.”

You hesitate only briefly. Long enough to level him with a searching look that yields no results before you reach for the compartment, gingerly pulling it open, and—

Sometimes, things get overlooked by their surroundings. Swallowed in the vacuum. Blending seamlessly into the muddle, the commotion. 

This isn't like that. 

It sits on top of a manila folder. Sleek black and cold silver. You're not terribly well-versed in guns—the extent of your knowledge stemming mostly from formulaic crime shows aired late at night; CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds—but you recognise this one instantly. Some sort of handgun. Police issued, you think. It's bigger than you'd expected. Looks heavier, too. 

Your heart stutters. The air galloping out of your lungs in a stammering rush. 

He makes a noise, soft and nonchalant, as if keeping handguns in the glove box of his old, burnt orange truck is perfectly normal. 

“Fer protection,” he mumbles. You catch the jerk of his chin in your periphery. “Forgot I had it in here. Been usin’ th’ rifle fer huntin’ mostly. Or th’ shotgun.”

Three guns. You swallow. “Why—” your voice comes out in a brittle whisper. You clear your throat. “Why, um, why do you need three?”

“Not fae around here, are ye?” He echoes your words with a wry twist of his mouth, eyes slanting in the sunlight. “Tha’,” he takes his hand off your thigh to jab his finger at the handgun. “Is fer wolverines.” His index finger falls, his thumb juts out. He jerks it over his shoulder. “Tha’ is fer huntin’. The shotgun back home is fer bears.” 

You try to move out of the way when his hand falls back to your thigh, but the pain radiating up your leg immobilizes you. There's not much you can do in this situation but endure.

Military. Wounded in action. Three guns. Touchy. 

You're not sure what to think. It would be easier if you couldn't. 

“What do you hunt?” You ask instead, glancing out the window to the barren landscape rolling out around you. There doesn't seem to be much in the jagged hills, and towering mountains. 

“Gettin’ hungry? Donnae worry, doe. Go’ tha’ pesky hare I was tryin’ tae shoot oan th' ledge fer dinner tonight.” 

It's not much of a comfort. The idea of being injured—by accident, he claims—to such an extent over a rabbit makes you feel a little sick. 

“That's it?”

“I can make a mean steak oot o' anythin'. Stews fer tougher meat. Fish—whitefish, arctic grayling, and lake trout. Learned how tae make a nasty fishfry from th’ locals in Nahanni Butte. Bannock, too. Got berries ‘round ma cabin. Caribou, Moose. Taste better in tacos or burgers. Mountain goat, Dall’s sheep. Been eatin’ better ‘ere than ah did at home.”

“And you're—just allowed to hunt them?” The website advised about a permit through some special outfit needed to hunt when you requested your pass into the park. Said that only aboriginals were allowed to do so. “You're not—”

“Aye,” he cuts you off with a small nod. “No huntin’ in th’ park. But. We're nae in th' park anymore.”

“Where are we?” You ask again, firmer this time. 

“I told ye. Nearly home.”

“And where is home?” 

The way he sucks his teeth makes you recoil slightly. Wet. Irritated. As if he's tired of this conversation already. 

“Close.”

You don't let his flat tone deter you. “Are we—are we still in the Northwest Territories?”

“Thereabouts.” 

It's not an answer. It doesn't reassure you in the slightest. 

You open your mouth to say so, words curling on your tongue when he jerks his chin toward the handgun, brow furrowed. 

“Thought ye wanted tae check oan th' satellite phone.”

His tone is severe. A growl curdling the ends, pitching it down, down. Displeasure, irritation, blooms in the gnarled petals of witch hazel when he narrows them into slits. 

You swallow, wrenching your gaze from the storm brewing over fields of wheat, and set your jaw. Masking your fear for annoyance. Confidence. 

But your hand shakes when you reach for the black box shoved into the corner. Palms slick with sweat. You try not to touch the gun, doing your best to curve around it. It feels—

Real. 

A real gun. In the real world. In a place you came to get away for a weekend, experience something you'd never had before. Freedom. Reliance on nobody but yourself. And now—

Somewhere in the Northwest Territories. Injured. Locked inside of a truck with a man who wavers between warmth—an unending heat, a furnace; a beacon of light—and severity like a swinging pendulum. You feel safe with him. You commit every turn to memory. He's in the military. He's going to take care of you. You think he's lying to you. He'll—

He'll let you go. 

You're sick. You're paranoid. You're taking all of your grievances out on this poor man who is just as trapped as you are, turning him into a monster for no reason at all. At the end of this, when he drops you off at the airport in Yellowknife, you'll have to grovel on your knees for his forgiveness. Sorry I thought you were a bad man. 

It could be worse, you suppose. He hasn't done anything untoward to you—touching your thigh like he's owed the right aside—and you shove it down. A problem to deal with later even though the suspicion tucks itself into your head, folded up against your skull. Metastatic. It eats all of his expressions, turning them over and over again for hidden clues. 

If he does something, you'll run. 

You'll—

“Almost there,” he murmurs, and you hear the rasp of exhaustion glued to the hinge of his jaw. You wonder how long he's been driving for. And why didn't he just go back to Nahanni Butte. Flooded he said. Too deep into the park. Never would have made it. 

If that's the truth, you suppose you should thank him. 

It sits in the back of your throat. You swallow around it, reaching for the phone instead. 

There's a small thread of hope in your chest that it'll work. That he's wrong, doesn't know how to work it, and all you have to do is press a button and it'll crackle to life. Freedom within reach. 

But when you press down on the button, the phone doesn't even whimper. Broke, as he said. Dead. 

“Can you—can you charge it?”

“Tried. Must’ve blown somethin’ inside. Fried it.” 

His words are a prison sentence carrying a punishment of two months. You knew this, of course. He said so himself. But the reality of it breaking over you is different from blind belief. The realisation of your predicament is a jagged knife cutting through tissue, letting corrosive panic entrench you as it spills out. 

This is the sort of thing you’d only read about. Novels, and biographies. Memoirs. Movies. An extraordinary event that could never happen to you. Never. 

And you're aware of it. Optimism bias. The not-me fallacy. But everything in your life thus far had been so unequivocally mundane that the possibility of it not happening seemed to eclipse any chance of it occurring at all. 

The crux of the bias, you suppose. Though it does little to stem the disbelief surrounding it all. Even when you told your friends, and your family, that you were going on this trip, the most mordant of them said you'd get eaten by a bear or end up lost in the wilderness. 

Injured, unable to walk, and stuck with a man you only marginally know (trust) seems like the plot of a lifetime movie. 

But—

Two months. 

You're sure in the meantime, someone will notice your absence. Raise the alarm. Call the police. They'll launch an investigation, and come searching for you. It's just a waiting game. 

And—

(You glance at the man once more, his profile limned in a halo of gold. The rim of his hat casts shadows over his face, eyes concealed in the thickening tenebrous that enshrouds him down to his broad chest, dense with corded muscles. Athletic. Trim. Big.)

—staying alive. 

Survival. 

If only for just two months. 

But the facts are cold, unforgiving. You are alone with a man you don't know. A man with three guns. Military. His experience in this wilderness vastly eclipses your own. 

He's fine. Fine. Touchy, sure. But he hasn't asked for anything. 

—his hand is on your thigh—

You'll be okay. 

It hurts to swallow. “Thank you,” you murmur, hoping the conciliatory lilt eats the panic you feel. “For saving me.” 

His gaze darts to you so sharply that the truck veers slightly to the left, tires crunching over thick beds of furze that line the forged road. The action is sudden—surprised, maybe, by your reedy gratitude. A deviation from the demeanour he'd shown you so far—calm friendliness. Affability. It jars you. Scares you. You grip the seat cushion tight in your fists as he mutters something sharp you can't discern under his breath. 

It only takes him only seconds to correct, rippling his hand away from you to commandeer the truck back into the centre of the beaten path. Even keeled now. Almost as if nothing amiss had happened at all. 

But it's undeniable. Congeals in the air, tense and unignorable. A vacuum that siphons the breath from your lungs. It sits in the whites of his knuckles, arsenic bones jutting from thin, rough skin, demanding to be seen; the terse set to his shoulders. To the grind of his jaw as he clenches his teeth. 

You take him in with bated breath, swallowing whole each microcosm that buds to the surface of his demeanour. Wary. Watchful. Squeezing the satellite phone tight in your hands. But he doesn't meet your wide-eyed stare, choosing instead to keep his gaze fixed on the dirt road. Knuckles popping, brows furrowed. Silent. 

But it's heavy. Oppressive. The same unrelenting chill as outside. You fight back a shiver in the blooming cold, wishing you'd packed more than just a pair of hiking tights (in tatters, now) and a thermal windbreaker for the trip. 

The hum of the engine, and the cracking of rock and muskeg crushed under the wheel, are the only noise that fills the cabin. You stifle your breath. Hold it in your throat. Skewer your eyes to the landscape yawning out around you. The deep, thickening sense of unease grows in the pit of your stomach. Metastasizing. 

Outside is a sprawling taiga forest. Emaciated spruce, balsam fir, jut out from the muskeg, dusted in a sparse layer of sphagnum. You can almost hear the trickle of a stream. The dirt road is wet under the tires now. A creek must be close by. A river. Flat River. South Nahanni. Further out might be Slave River. The Liard. Little Buffalo. Great Slave Lake, even. 

Narrowing it down seems impossible when nearly the entire south corridor of the Northwest Territories is wet marsh and snaking bodies of water. 

It both worries and reassures you at the same time. Getting to Nahanni alone was a challenge. With most of the surrounding area limited to a few year-round highways, there are not many places he could go without reaching dead-ends or winter roads closed for the season, inaccessible in the warmer summer months as the snow melts. 

Though—these highways arch as high as they can. From Yellowknife to Tuktoyaktuk, right on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. 

But he hasn't driven on any stretch of highway since you woke up. The road is unpaved, wild. You're confident you're still south, but the exact location eludes you. Northwest Territories. Yukon. Northern Alberta. It's overwhelming. Daunting. 

You try to commit the geography to memory. Sifting through an endless trawl of nothing to find something familiar. A mountain range. A sign. Anything. Anything—

“Ye mean tha’?”

The sound of his voice draws your attention, raspy. Hoarse from disuse. 

He swallows. There's something raw in his expression, fractured. Yearning, you think. For something. What that something is, however, you can't place. 

It stays on as he slowly slides his tongue out, licking over the bristles of hair covering his lip. 

You offer a shallow nod, unsure why this matters to him suddenly. 

“Yeah, I'd be—” 

You pause, words turning to smoke in your throat. Uninjured, is the first thought. Without him, your leg wouldn't be—

Whatever it is. Ankle broken. Achilles torn. A gunshot wound clean through tendon and tissue. 

But at the same time—

All turned around, he said. Lost. He was hunting, too. You must have somehow wandered outside of the park limits. Must have because the sound of a rifle would have drawn attention from nearby wardens. They'd have come to investigate. 

You swallow down the bloom of unbridled panic. The aftertaste is bitter in your mouth. The thought of being outside of the borders, all on your own—

“I’d be dead if it wasn't for you.” 

The hush that falls is immediate. Your own mortality dangling by a thin thread. Happenstance keeping you alive. 

He clears his throat again. Your fingers tighten around the metal until it hurts. 

“Names Johnny.” He twists in his seat, facing you. “Johnny MacTavish.” 

It's a bit late for introductions, but you take it in all the same. Johnny. Johnny.

(saviour—)

His eyes grow wide when you slowly, haltingly, breathe yours out. Letting it sit in the air where it dissolves into the silence, the weight of it somehow more damning than being alone in the woods. There's power in a name. In knowing it. Military. You're not sure why it matters, but it does. 

You fight another shiver when he says it back after a beat, much too fond, adoring, for the sparse companionship you've barely begun to build. 

“I'll keep ye safe,” he says your name again, accent curling in between the bridges of each letter. There's a heat in his eyes; pyretic. A sickness. “Don't hae tae worry aboot anything.” 

He turns back slowly, angling the wheel around a sudden bend in the thicket. The path is clearer here, looking more like an established dirt road than a sparse coppice. It twists upward, cutting a meandering line through a dense cropping of spruce. The canopy above—as thick as it is—curls over the road, enclosing it in a bed of conifers branching overhead. Concealing it from view. 

The sight fills you with a new bloom of unease. How quickly the wild swallows you whole, shielding you from prying eyes, prickles against the nape of your neck, dripping like hot oil down your spine. 

“Where are we?” It comes out in a whisper. 

He makes a noise in the back of his throat. In your periphery, you see him lift his hand off the wheel, but sit, paralyzed, when he brings it down to your thigh, giving what attempts to be a pacifying squeeze. 

“Home,” he answers, making the turn. 

A log cabin comes into view. It’s situated at the end of the clearing, covered by the same dense tangle of trees as the path. The forest seems to bend around the single-storey home, enclosing in a cradled embrace of intermixing wry jack pine, bold tamarack, dark spruce, and white birch. Trembling aspen peaks above the heads of the other trees, hiding the smoked black spruce roof from view above. 

It might look homey under different circumstances, but the thick, stripped logs—made of varnished white spruce—jutting out half-crescents to form the walls seem brooding. Claustrophobic. It's small—just a storey and a half. A camper's cabin not meant for longtime use. It wears its age in wood rot and peeling varnish. The scent of wet wood clings to the air when he rolls the window down, coming to a stop a few paces away from the single step leading to the porch. 

Firewood stacked high to the awning on both sides of the blue door, encased in metal to keep it dry. Moss-covered concrete foundations lift the house off of the ground, keeping it from melting the permafrost below. The remains of a snuffed, charred campfire is perched to the left of the winding path leading to the door. Felled lumber lays on its side, the top whittled down onto a seat. A wooden rack leans against a tree close by. The hide of an animal is stretched taut across the panels. Leather-making materials sit in a bucket beside it. 

A metal box—bear-proof, you're sure—is half-buried in the soil. Storage, perhaps, for the unusable remains of the animals he hunts. 

It's fairly standard for a cabin up north, you think. But something about this place makes you feel anxious. Trapped. You can't see anything at all through the dense cluster of trees, but you can hear the sound of running water. A river, maybe. A stream. It splashes against the rock, the current too quick for you to even think about swimming in it. 

It only adds to your unease. 

“This is home,” he says, jerking his chin toward the house. 

Home is a cabin nestled somewhere in the unorganised wilderness of the Northwest Territories. Nahanni National Park is several hours in another direction. Too few communities exist on highway seven for you to even stumble onto them—

Assuming, of course, that you could walk there to begin with.

The lingering pain in your ankle, the heavy bandage wrapped around it—it's an immediate certainty that you can't walk. Broken, you know, from the glimpse you'd taken before. Milkwhite against raspberry red—

You don't think about that. 

You don't think about much at all. 

“Right.” You murmur. This place is the furthest thing from home you could imagine. 

He moves in your periphery, reaching for you. You jerk back, driven by instincts. The need for distance, space—

The jostling of your foot makes you hiss in pain, and he offers a conciliatory hum. 

“Ye’ll be alright, bonnie. Lets jus’ get ye inside now.” 

The inside is made of varnished wood. A mix of black and white spruce. It's cosy, you suppose. 

It opens up to a living room immediately upon walking in the door. A mat sits under your feet. A small closet to the right with the door slightly ajar. Along the length of the left wall is a doorway spilling into a small kitchen. From your vantage point, you make out a sink, and then another door to the right. 

Along the back wall beside the arching doorway is a brick fireplace. Soft fur is spread out on the ground in front of it. An old, weathered couch is pushed against the left wall, a shawl tossed over the back. 

There's no television. A stack of books and magazines sit above the couch—used more for an end table than entertainment, you note, spotting the glass of water resting on the pile. A pack of cigarettes beside it. An ashtray on the floor. Bottles of beer sit on the small table shoved under the window. One of the chairs is covered in clothes. 

It's lived in, you note, but lifeless. 

There are no pictures on the wall. No personal artefacts littered around. It's—

Perfunctory. 

He comes home, shucks his boots off by the front door, and drinks warm beer on the couch until he falls asleep. An inference, of course; but as he carries you further into the house (his insistence—ye cannae walk oan tha’, doe, stop bein’ stubborn and lemme carry ye), your notion gains credence. It's sparse. Threadbare. 

There's a single plate in the sink. The old stove, separated from the sink by a small countertop, is covered in a layer of dust. A fridge is pushed against the back wall. 

The door you glimpsed in the kitchen leads to the washroom. It's tight. A shower, a sink, a toilet. No windows. A towel is hung over the curtain rail, still damp from his shower before. A single mat covers most of the tiled floor below. A tube of toothpaste sits in the porcelain basin of the sink. 

Beside the washroom is the master bedroom. The bed is unmade. An untouched glass of water is left on the end table beside a worn leather book and a bible. 

An open closet sits across from the bed. The window is open. The breeze flutters the old, jaundiced curtain. 

He gives you his room and says he'll take the couch. Under normal circumstances, you might have fought it. Insisted that he sleep in his bed. You're a guest. You couldn't put him out like that. But the door has a lock. 

“Thank you,” you murmur, and he seems to tremble at your words before nodding. 

“O' coorse.” 

Johnny places you on the bed before he sets to work rebandaging your ankle. You're all too aware of the fact that you need to know. You need to see what you're dealing with, and how bad the damage is, but the pain that cuts through you when he rests your ankle—as gingerly as he can—on top of an extra pillow makes you yowl in agony. 

It's vicious. Whitehot. The pain rattles through your bones. 

He shushes you as he unwraps the clumsy brace he put on in the park, murmuring incomprehensible things under his breath that you think must be Gaelic. Words of comfort, perhaps. 

You feel none of it except an uneasy dread pooling in the empty pit of your stomach. 

“How bad is it?”

He hums, brow pinching tight. “Th' hare took most o' th' damage,” he says, eyes tracing along the congealing blood on your ankle. Dark cherry red. You swallow down a gag. “Tore yer achilles, though. Clean. Doesn't seem tae be any fragments. Broke your ankle, though. But,” he taps your calf, just above the bend of your foot. It doesn’t hurt. “It’s a clean break. Maybe just a fracture. Shuid heal up in no time.”

“And what about infections?”

“Got some stuff oan hand if that happens,” he leans back, and gives you a wink. It feels out of place considering the severity of your predicament. Garish, almost. “But ah was a good nurse. Patched ye up nicely.” 

You don't ask anything else, and silence trickles in as he refocuses his attention back to cleaning your wound and redressing it. The bed is soft under you. Giving. You lean back, staring up at the log ceiling, and will yourself not to think at all. Each slight jostle of the wet cloth running along your ankle feels like fire licking at your skin. If you had anything at all in your belly left, you might have thrown it up on the side of the bed. 

This pain is consuming. Persistent. 

Your fingers knot into the soft blankets below, gripping tight until your knuckles ache. A futile attempt to exchange this pain for a lesser one. Something you can ignore, forget. 

Through the open window, you can hear the playful caws of a raven searching for food. You want it to distract you, to pull you away from the sickening sensation of your ankle separating from the heel, but it doesn't.

All you can think about is the fresh pain. Your flesh ripped apart. Torn achilles, he'd said. You feel it as he moves, washing away the dried blood, the viscera. The break in your tibia. It's a nauseating feeling. Visceral. It screams at you that something is wrong, reverberating through your bones. 

The raven caws again. 

“Gonnae ‘ave tae stitch yer heel up.” 

You make a sound—a pathetic whimper choked in the back of your throat. 

“Fine,” you rasp, tensing. “Just—”

Get it over with. 

Johnny seems to understand, offering a consolatory pat on your shin. “Ye'll be fine. Ah know what am doin’.”

You glance back at him, avoiding whatever is happening below his elbows. Refusing to look. 

He reaches up, fingers stained pink with your blood, and pulls the ballcap off his head, shaking the matted hair loose. His hair is thick, curling at the ends. Dark brown. Soft. You take in his expression, him, as he works, using it to churn your thoughts away from the prickling sensation of him pressing your torn skin back together, readying it for the needle. 

He's intense, focused, as he works. Eyes lidded to half-mast. Long lashes fanning out over the dark circles beneath his eyelids. Bruises that speak of long, sleepless nights. The empty bottles of beer and the full ashtray within arm's reach make a little more sense as you see the extent of his fatigue. 

It doesn't concern you. You rip your gaze away from the thin, twisting rivers of red that snake through the jaundiced whites of his eyes; the possibility of his vulnerability notches something inside your chest you don't want to think about. Can't. 

Your saviour, you think again, veering sharply on the edge of too cruel—

“Might pinch a bit, doe,” he mutters low, soft. His thick, even brows pull together at the centre. You feel the prick of the needle pushing through your skin—

Down his brows. The oblique curve of his nose. Bottled to a point. The thick bed of hair beneath his nostrils. Thin, pink lips jutting from the thatch of black bristles. The wisps curl down the slope of his neck, thinning at the hollow below before thickening back into a dense crop on the scant patch of his skin visible from his unbuttoned shirt. 

Another prick—

A thin, gold chain loops around his neck. Tucked against his sternum is a Latin cross. It's plain. Traditional. Solid gold, maybe. But not purely for decoration. Where the arms meet the body, the surface is smoothed down. Worn. In the reflection, you can see the thin, circular lines of a fingerprint. 

The bible on his dresser makes sense. You glance over at it, taking in the folds and creases on the leather cover. Aged and well-loved. Used. Pages are dog-eared. Waterlogged. Scotch tape holds the spine together. 

The Holy Bible gleams in faded gold lettering. Douay–Rheims is etched into the surface. 

The sight of a worn-down book and thumbed cross shouldn't relax you, but it does. A good ol’ boy, then. You turn back to him, eyes caught on the gleaming gold flush against tanned skin. It's tight to his sternum. Hung delicately around his neck. 

Seeing it now feels a touch voyeuristic. It wasn't intentionally bared to you. Wasn't offered up willingly for you to gawk at, mind looping around thou shalt not kill and do unto others as you yourself would want done unto you, and finding comfort in the ordered morality of its symbolism—however fickle that could end up being. 

You know a man is not as moral as his religion demands of him, but he looks devout. 

A good Catholic boy. 

Still—

You peel your gaze away from his chest as the thread slides through. The sensation is uncomfortable. Ticklish. Forcing your attention back to him, well above the neckline. His nose. Nostrils flaring when your knee jerks. His hands close over your shin. Mouth parting slightly just to say, keep still, doe. Donnae want tae hurt ye. 

His hair is slightly greasy near his scalp. Sweat from earlier dampens his locks, flattening it tongue head. It's longer at the top compared to the sides. An odd, asymmetrical hairstyle that doesn't feel like an aesthetic choice at all. Maybe he had a mullet. Or—

You see it when he tilts his head down, chin angled toward your foot. 

A scar stretches from his temple back, thinning the hair that lines his scalp on the right. The flesh is jagged, uneven. Cratered. It forms a ravine. The canyon walls clumped scar tissue. The nullah in the centre is all pink and raw. 

You think of a shooting star. Meteor showers in the indigo sky. 

You think of his words from earlier—ah know what am doin’—and the depth of his medical knowledge. It stands out now. You suppose he would, wouldn't he?

The thought has shame dripping down your spine like hot, slick oil. Burning. Tarry. You remember what he said in the truck about being wounded in action, the misery in his words, the anger, and choke yourself on the regret that swarms your throat. 

He looks up, then, catching whatever awful amalgamation of self-hatred, shame, and regret makes of your expression, and the words—sorry, I'm so sorry—tear through your throat until it's bloody and raw. Pulp. Unspeakable, now. 

It dampens his brow, but there's no embarrassment in his eyes when he holds them to yours. Nothing except an intense, dizzying sense of curiosity. Of—

Intrigue. 

It doesn't have a place here, and the sight of it is sobering. 

Why is he looking at you like that when you're gawking at his injury? Confusion knots deep. Uncertainty coiling around your ribcage. Maybe he didn't notice. Doesn't care. 

Is too used to it to worry about whatever conclusions you might draw from the jagged skin barely knitted back together. But his eyes flash. Understanding edging out the unfathomable greed lurking in hazel plains, nestled, restive, in the shade that falls over the sloping boscage. 

You almost miss the shadow when it appears. Wrought with Leashed ghosts. Tempered anger. Wild, frenetic. The chains holding it at bay tremble. Shake—

And then it's gone.

Dissolve back into passive cordiality. All ire stayed behind a wall. 

You want to apologize, but the words are ash in your throat. Unspeakable. Johnny doesn't address it. He dips his head down once more, silently refocusing his attention to your ankle, and offering no explanation for the scar on his head. 

You don't ask. Don't pry. It's not your place. But your eyes are still glued to it. 

It's a horrific injury. Survival from such a terrible wound seems like an impossibility. A gunshot, you're sure. Seeing the small chasm carved into skin, narrowly missing his eye socket, fills you with a blistering sense of pity for this man, and you quietly, quickly, peel your eyes away from the jagged surface, letting your gaze run across the room. A meagre sense of privacy, you're sure, but it lets you breathe a little easier when you can't see the way his temple split apart to make room for a bullet—

“Had a mohawk,” he says. “They cut it off when this happened.” 

A mohawk. The asymmetry of his hair makes sense now, and you can almost picture it as you stare at him. The edges shorn, the top long. Unruly. His hair has a slight curl to the ends, but is mostly straight for the first few inches. 

As wild as he looks now—untamed, rugged; the thick tangle of uncharted wilderness—the mohawk must have made him roguish. Boorish. With his broad shoulders, thick biceps, and piercing blue eyes, the mohawk would have added to the playful appeal. Boyishly charming with his cropped hair and puckish grin. The draw of a bad boy, a vandal. 

But as you try and shape this around him, you catch the strain in his shoulders. The terse set to his jaw. 

“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“Was shot.” 

It's said without a preamble as if he was waiting for you to ask. But the words are spat out like they're something foul in his mouth; like he's ridding the taste of it between his teeth. The anger, the aggression cows you slightly, but you offer a small, warbling smile you hope is conciliatory. Apologetic. 

“I'm sorry,” you offer around a stuttering exhale. You can't imagine what that must be like. Shot in the head. The idea is unthinkable. Improbable. And yet, the evidence slashes across his temple; a meteor shower carved into his flesh. 

He lifts his chin, staring down at you from the bridge of his nose. “Wasnae yer fault, doe.” 

“I know, I just—” 

Johnny gives a nod in response, ending the bubble of words and apologies building up behind your teeth. It is what it is, he mutters when you blink at him, flummoxed. This sort of reveal seems like it should necessitate a bigger conversation, a deeper one. Questions buoy to the surface—from prying (how did it happen, how did you survive) to intrusive (what did it feel like, does it hurt still)—but you trample them until they sit, a building mass lodged in your throat. 

He seems content, then, to continue with what he was doing, and says nothing more about it. And it's not your place to pry. To chisel into his trauma. 

You let it pass. Let it moulder. 

The raven caws once more. You lean back in his bed, staring through the fluttering curtains, mind reeling at this discovery. 

Stupidly, you feel more at ease in his presence. As if this show of vulnerability somehow negated the distress of your predicament, and the infeasible nature of how you ended up here, in his home. Gazing through the thick canopy of green to the golden sky above. A whole world away from your home. Broken. Injured. But the cross, the thumbed-through bible, and his human fragility seem to curl along the vicious dread curling inside your guts, soothing over the distrust with gentle, sweeping brushes. 

Quelling a frightened child after a nightmare. 

How strange, you think, but let yourself relax in his presence all the same, breathing in the scent of stale smoke, sweat. Coumarin. Tree moss. Fresh pine. It smells like the valley. Soft, waning detergent. Masculine. 

You pretend you're watching for the raven as you sneak small glances at him. Taking in everything with a new perspective. The broadness of his shoulders. The thickness of his waist. There's power in his arms, in his thighs. Sculpted musculature, honed and refined. Despite the thickness of his fingers, he has a delicate touch. Deft and sure, as if he's used to working his bulk around small parts. 

He's unkempt. The ballcap hid most of his dishevelled state, but he's not sloven. It reminds you of the outdoorsy explorers. The hikers you met on your trip out. Roughhewn and unconcerned about their overgrown beards and their tousled hair. 

There's something potently masculine about it, and you can't deny that even with the garish wound on his head, all mangled scar tissue, he's handsome. Rougish. The scar elevating it somehow—a testament, perhaps, to his resiliency. 

He catches your stare on the next glance, holding it as he leans back with a quirk of his lips. It's not quite the grins he aimed at you before, but the shadow of it lingers. 

“Now,” he utters, the severity in his tone makes you flinch. Sobering quickly under the weight of his solemnity. “Th' bad part.”

“Bad part?” You echo, confused. “What could be worse than that?”

He taps two fingers against your swollen ankle, urging you to look. You swallow and force yourself to glance at where he rests his fingers. 

With your split heel stitched up and wrapped in bandages, the sight of your leg doesn't make you want to curl into the fetal position and cry. But it's still horrifying to look at. 

A mass half the side of a baseball juts out from your skin. 

“Ankles dislocated,” he murmurs, sliding his fingers over the mound. “Gotta pop it back into place.” 

“That's not—” you shake your head. “That's impossible.” 

“S’okay, doe. I gotcha.”

“That's not the point. That's not—”

“Look,” his pitch lowers dangerously, firm now. “Gotta do it or you'll have problems later on. Much worse than a bit o’pain.”

“But—”

He inhales sharply. “Can't let it go, doe. Gotta fix it.”

You understand the logic in that. Leaving a dislocated ankle will undoubtedly cause problems later on. But—

“Will it hurt?” 

Your fear quiets the irritation brewing in steeled hazel. “Aye. I won't lie tae ye, doe. It will hurt.” 

You swallow around a whimper. 

“But,” he leans over, his hand sliding over your cheek. Cradling your face in the palm of his hand. “I'll do mah best tae be quick. Ah won't hurt ye, doe.” 

It must be the way he carries himself that puts you at ease, so assured in his abilities; confident in what he can do without any sense of grandiosity. 

“Fine.” The word is juttered out of your chest. “Just—”

His thumb catches the tears that spill over your lashline, swiping them away with a tenderness that makes you shiver. 

“Ah’ll be quick.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two chalky white pills. Tylenol, he mutters, catching the furrow of your brow. It abates the unease somewhat, and you let him drop the pills into the flat of your palm, rolling them over with your thumb as he grabs the water on the end table. They're circular with a slit down the middle. 

“It'll take the pain away.” He says, holding the water up to you. “Ready?” It's uttered so severely, so seriously, that your breath hitches in your lungs. Mirth blooming between your teeth. 

“As I'll ever be,” you rasp out before popping the pills into your mouth, cradling them on your tongue protectively as you reach for the glass he holds out. They're bitter. 

You wash it down with a mouthful of stale water before leaning back on the bed, letting the scent of his sheets wash over you once more. 

Outside, the raven trills. 

The pain of popping your ankle back into place leaves you a weeping mess in his sheets, but Johnny doesn't seem to mind the shuddering sobs. He pets down your back, shushing you quietly under his breath as he mutters something in Gaelic that you're sure is meant to be soothing. 

“Ye’ll be fine,” he says, tracing figure-eights down your spine until the Tylenol kicks in, and the agony tapers off into an aching throb. “Jus’ breathe. Ah’ll get ye somethin' tae eat.”

He leaves soon after. You let the numbed, drowsiness of the pain medication lull you into a doze, listening to Johnny move in the kitchen. The squealing slide of unvarnished wood rubbing against old metal. The thud of a knife. The scent of hot oil. Muttered curses. A playful raven's caw. 

You're not sure how long you slip in and out of this dreamless state, but Johnny appears in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the frame. He watches you with hooded eyes, a small, secretive smile tugging on his lips.

Blearily, you yawn, somehow still exhausted despite how long you slept between yesterday evening and today. Trauma, you suppose, and say nothing at all about it when he helps you sit up in the bed. 

Dinner consists of leftover bannock—the fried dough soft in your mouth, the flavour buttery; smokey—and hare stew. He pulls a chair from the living room into the bedroom, eating on the edge of the bed with you. 

He's sloppy about it. Slurps all the meat and potatoes out of the bowl before sopping chunks of bannock into the gravy, shoveling it into his mouth with a grunt. It dribbles down his chin, and dirties his beard. This slovenly display might have churned your stomach before, but you're just as ravenous. 

And it's good. 

The bread leaves grease stains on your fingers, but the toes on your uninjured foot curl when you bite into the crispy surface, teeth sinking into the pillowy dough below. 

“This is bannock, you said?” You ask, dabbing the napkin he offered with a wink when you finish. At his nod, you continue. “It's good.”

“Aye,” he grunts around a mouthful. “S’the best. Make it every mornin’ so ah go’ fresh bannock tae go.” He swipes the back of his hand over his mouth, slurring out: “s’good wit’ jam.” 

“Did the locals teach you how to make it?”

He nods. “Scottish dish, originally. Made wit’ oats. Drier, too. But—fuck. S’good—nae. Better like this. Ol’ couple taught me when ah first came. Paler ‘n’ shite, they said. ‘n didnae ken a fuckin' thing about surviving oot ‘ere. Big man, Jim, taught me ‘ow tae hunt. Where tae fish. An’ ‘ow to cook it. Made this cabin, aye. He, ah, and his son. Offered ‘er up tae me when they realised ah didnae come wit’ shite all but a bad attitude.” 

“That was nice of them.”

“Most folk up ‘ere are. Quiet, ken? People take care’a ‘emselves, most. Take care’a others, too.” 

You mull over his words as he leans back in the chair with a satisfied groan, legs spread wide. His hands folded over his belly. The picture of ease. Contentment. This freedom of motion makes you slightly envious. 

“An’ wha’ about ye?” His eyes are lidded, leonine, and fixed on you. The intensity is always on the side of too much. Too dizzying. Consuming. 

You stamp it down, running your thumb along the inseam of his gingham throw. “What about me?”

“Why’d ye come here?”

His question throws you off balance. “It’s a pretty park,” you offer with a shallow laugh. “Who wouldn't come here?”

“Lots of pretty parks. Why this one?”

“Dunno. It was—”

“‘ave ye ever been tae any other parks? Anything like this?”

“I hiked a bit, and, um—”

He sucks out a piece of meat from between his teeth. “A bit, aye?” 

“Yeah. A bit. Why—”

“Ye came all the way here fer what? A pretty park? With no experience at all? And alone?”

The shift in his posture reads as angry, irate. You blink, bewildered by this sudden change. 

“Well. It was supposed to be an experience.”

“An experience, aye? Survival skills of a lemming.” 

It's derisive, cutting. You bristle through the sting of humiliation, grappling through the slurry of fatigue to cobble together some form of defence against this lambasting of your—admittedly—ill-thought adventure, but he's already moving on. Fingers tapping an off-rhythm beat against his belly as he levels you with a sober look. More serious than you'd ever seen him before. 

“An’ yer family? They just let ye come here oan yer own?”

The mention of your family makes guilt well to the surface, buoying above the indignant anger at his mocking words. Cowed, you shrug. 

“Sure.” 

Something cracks in the severe mein he carries; fracturing through the blatant disapproval. Cutting it like a knife. 

He sighs through his nose before reaching up and scrubbing his hands over his face. “Shite. Ye really needed me, aye?” 

You blink at the odd choice of words, brows drawing together in a tight knot. It's indefensible, of course. In many ways, he's right. If he hadn't found you—

Well. 

You temper that thought before it forms. You're too out of it, spatially unaware and unmoored, to let yourself fall into an existential pit of despair when you know you won't be able to climb out. Thinking of your assured doom out there, all because of a misstep somewhere along the path, makes dread bloom in the pit of your stomach. Nauseous, roiling. It froths over the basin, ready to spill over and drag you under. 

Swallowing around the surge of panic—mortality a fickle thing in a place like this—you offer a despondent shrug in response. Unable to scrape together any sense of a defence that won't make you sound childish and idiotic. 

You ready yourself for more mockery, having become the very thing the park rangers tried to warn you about when you showed, alone, in hiking boots much too big for you. 

But then he's shifting, expression clearing. The anger folded back behind a quick grin. 

“Pretty here, isn't it?” 

You're not sure what to make of his mercurial temperament; emotions cascading by, quicksilver and sudden. The flashes of anger, intensity, curiosity, and this, all happening within such a short period. It's overwhelming. 

It unsettles you. But—

“Yeah,” you mutter, unable to stem the awe from leaking through. 

The change in conversation is freeing. Sometimes it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, and that's exactly what you do. Tucking his odd behaviour behind a plexiglass of indifference, pretending it wasn't there, lurking just out of sight. Something to unravel later, when your heart wasn't on the verge of buckling under the strain of your anxiety. When your chest didn't feel like it was slowly being crushed. Your stomach is all twisted up in knots too tight to untie with your bare hands. 

It's easy to let yourself heave through jittering lungs, and pretend you couldn't feel the rot festering on the sides of them. Eating holes through delicate tissue. 

The majesty of this place hasn't quite worn off, and you use that as an excuse to drift. To close the doors on the overwhelming deluge of hysteria creeping up on you. 

You still think of the jutting fjords instead. The steep ravines, the moose in the distance—her colours sharp against the green backdrop—and let the untempered sense of reverence split you down the middle. 

It comes out in a flood, then—as if you've been biting back the words this whole time. 

You tell him about the valley. The waterfall. The white river. The marmot you saw poking its head out. No bears, you sigh; the forlorn lilt to your tone seeped with a touch of relief, an aspect he pokes at with a crooked smirk until you huff, rolling your eyes to the ceiling at his gentle ribbing. Huffily, you admit that as much as you want to see a bear, you're not quite ready to face them in the wild. 

Lots’a bears ‘round ‘ere, he taunts, rolling his knees out further as he sinks deeper into the chair. 

He dodges your next question of where, exactly, is here with a silky grin and a need tae know rolling off his lips before they tug downward in a sudden frown. 

You must be acclimating to the strange ebb and flow of his emotions because the lour grimace on his face doesn't deter you as much as it did moments ago. You pick up the slack when the conversation lulls, telling him about the places you've been and how they compare to Nahanni.

“They just—don’t.” 

It's hard to encapsulate the scale of it all into simple words; digestible pieces someone else can swallow. The park isn't too far from Yellowknife, and yet it feels like a world on its own. The remoteness, the vastitude of it all, is hard to describe, but Johnny seems to understand. 

He listens with a slight quirk to his lips. A smile you'd almost call fond. He gets it, you know. The words you can't say. The ones that feel too lacklustre when you do. 

“That really why ye came?” 

You hesitate for a moment, looping a loose thread around your finger. Contemplating. Mulling it over. You've never told anyone the reason for the trip outside of a new experience for yourself. Testing your mettle. But with Johnny—

There's a sense of kinship, you find. An understanding. 

“It seemed so—” he waits for you to find the words. “Lonely, I guess.” 

“Lonely,” the way he says the word is ruminative. Rolling it around between his teeth; testing the weight of it. “Ah suppose it is.”

“You don't think so?”

“It's—” he pauses, eyes listing to the side as he mulls over what he wants to convey. 

He does this sometimes, you think. Gets lost. Loses himself. Retreats inward. You can't help but wonder if this is a manifestation of his trauma—a head injury such as this would be classified as a traumatic brain injury, wouldn't it? You're not well-versed in this area, and it feels a little mean, cruel, to have this thought, but it blooms as his eyes fog over. As he struggles, almost, to find the words he wants to say, to give voice to what he feels, thinks. 

“Lonely, aye,” he grinds out after a beat, but he looks frustrated about it, and glares down at his lap, silently fuming. Annoyed. “Big.”

The word is ripped out from between his teeth, and you nod, hastily, to both quell the looming anger brimming in the terse set to his shoulders and to let him know you understand. Can read between the lines—if only just. 

“Is that why you came?” 

The shrug he offers is noncommittal but you can see the tension pooling in his brow despite your efforts to quash it. “Couldnae go home after this—” he lifts his hand, tapping his fingers against the scar tissue on his temple. “Wasn't safe. Had tae give up everything after. Maw. Da. Sisters. Cannae ever see them again.”

It doesn't make sense. None of it does. The innate understanding between you is shattered by the impossibility of this moment, and his half-formed words. What you gave up seems paltry in comparison to what he's confessing to. His family. His whole family—

“Might see them one day. Once that fuckin' prick is in th' ground, but 'til then—” he shrugs again, easy. As if the look on his face wasn't cataclysmic in its anger. It's rage. Sorrow. Hatred. You flinch back as if the blackhole of these awful emotions will eat you alive. 

Johnny sees it, and reaches for you, making soothing noises under his breath as his hand wraps around your thigh. “Ah, doe, don’t worry. He wilnae find us—” 

You're not sure what to say to that, but the grip he has on you is firm. Unyielding. There's a scowl etching over his lips, as if the mere thought of such a thing fills him with disgust, fury, and you shake your head slowly. 

“I'm not—I’m not worried.” You don't know how to tell him that this phantom prick from his past isn't what made you reel back, but the intensity of his wrath. The sudden infliction of his ire. So you don't. You give in with what you hope is a conciliatory smile. “I, uh, I trust you.”

It's loose. Shaky. Your conviction wanes around the edges, falling flat and hollow when it trembles out. If Johnny notices the brittleness around it, he doesn't show it. If anything, he seems to take it as a sudden gospel. 

“D’ye—” There's a crack in his voice. He swallows, then. Adam's apple bobbing harshly against the skin of his throat. You wonder if you've upset him. Angered him. But he's leaning down, eyes widening. Feverish. Blue lagoons. “Ye trust me.”

It's not a question, but he poses it as such. You nod slowly and unsure. 

Johnny ducks his head, then. Lifts one hand to rub at the bristles around his chin and upper lip. Lost in thought, maybe—

It's when he reaches around, scrubbing at the nape of his neck, do you see the flush peeking out from beneath the thick bed of hair covering his cheeks. The sight is jarring. Unexpected. 

You're not sure what to make of it. Of this strange reaction. But it passes almost as quickly as it started. The red is replaced by a wide, blinding grin. He squeezes your thigh. 

“Hah, doe. Ye really know what tae say tae cheer me up—”

You haven't said anything at all, but this, too, goes unacknowledged. And before you can even try to draw attention to it, he breathes in deeply as he sits up in the chair. 

“Ye finished?” He motions to the bowl and plate on the bed. You nod. “Alright. Ah'll put ‘em away. Get ye some tea.”

“Oh, I'm fine—”

“Nah, hen. Tea is good for ye. Will help ye heal.” 

He leaves without another word, carrying away your dirty dishes. The unfinished conversation lingers in the air around you, but beneath the loose strands of everything unsaid, you feel something tangle inside your chest as you replay his words in the back of your head. 

All alone in Nahanni, unable to see his family. You're sure the prick he's referring to is the one who gave him that horrific scar, nearly taking his life. 

Somewhere in the loop, a knot of pity begins to take shape. 

Johnny brings you Labrador tea—a speciality he learned how to make from Ethel and Jim, the couple from Wrigley who took him in. It's good. It tastes sweet, earthy. Honey and pine. You sip at it as he grabs sleep clothes from his dresser, watching him with a muted sense of listlessness. 

You can't imagine the next sixty days that loom before you. Restlessness, claustrophobia—it coalesces into this strange, itchy feeling that sits, uncomfortably, atop your chest; an increasing pressure. You wish you could pick it off like a loose scab. Dig your nail under the hard clot and tug—

Peel it all off until just silken new skin remains. 

Johnny looks antsy when you finish the tea. Eyes bright. Wide. 

As you contemplate the surrealism of your predicament over Labrador tea, he grins like a shark and tells you he only has one toothbrush. 

“Dinnae mind sharin’, doe,” he offers, too jovial, eager, for the notion of lending his toothbrush to a stranger he met less than twenty-four hours ago. Ah ‘ave good hygiene, he adds, as if that might make this any better. 

Putting away the disgust, the idea of sharing a toothbrush feels much too intimate to you. Something befitting a long-term partner, or kin, before a man you know only the bare bones of. 

But like most things lately, what choice do you have? 

Johnny grins brightly at your acquiescence. All teeth. He hands you an old sweater—his favourite football team, he adds with a wink when you blink at it—and then moves toward you with a wicked gleam in his eyes you try to pretend is just overeager hospitality. 

“Wait—” you start, jerking back instinctively as he looms over the bed. “What are you doing?”

A dip forms between his brows, and he cocks his head quizzically at you. “What're ye talkin’ ‘bout, doe? Need'tae brush yer teeth, don't ye?” 

“I—I can walk—”

He snorts. “Oan yer broken ankle? Will only hurt yerself more.” 

Despite the truth in this statement, the flippancy in his voice stings. Prickles under your skin. Your loss of mobility, of being wholly dependent on another person, is a bitter thing to try and swallow. Especially when you're here for the literal antithesis of it. To be free. Self-reliant. 

Not needing anyone at all except the grit in your bones and the determination to see things through. 

Having all of that ripped into pieces in front of you, by a man who says it with such nonchalant disregard—as if your efforts were meaningless, insubstantial for what it got it—is humiliating. 

You can't remember the last time you needed someone for something so simple as walking to the washroom to brush your teeth, to wash up. The loss of this minute freedom makes you want to cry; to break down. Rage. Break things with your bare hands just to show the world you still can. To fight against these shackles locking around your ankles, and run—

Johnny's hand falls on your knee, thumb brushing the torn edge of your tights, grazing the skin beneath the loose threads with each pass. 

“Don't worry. Ah'll take care 'o ye.” 

That's the problem, you think, chest burning. This awful feeling inside is churning. Frothingly acidic, corrosive. You don't want him to. You don't want to need this man at all. Ever. For anything. 

But—

“Thanks,” you choke out. It tastes like iron. Like defeat. 

He carries you to the washroom, cooing the whole time about how ye ‘ave nothin’ tae be embarrassed ‘bout while you blister from mortification, from shame. 

You came here to be self-reliant. To grind your mettle against the wilderness and come out on the other side victorious and better for it. But what you've accomplished so far is getting lost, getting hurt, imposing on a man you barely know—

One who has to sit down on the ledge of the bathtub with you cradled in his lap like a child, injured foot elevated on the lid of the toilet seat. He cups his hand under your mouth as you scrub at your teeth, trying to catch any of the foam from the toothpaste that spills from your mouth. 

It's mortifying. 

You've never felt so vulnerable in your whole life. 

“Sorry,” you choke out around the brush—his brush—as he slowly commanders the weight of you around enough to spit in the sink. 

He waves you off with a noise. “S’alright, doe. Ye can lean oan me all ye like.” 

So he says. But you feel the rapid inhales behind you. The soft pants spilling from his lips, lungs expanding, broadening his chest into your back. Exertion, you think, slightly cowed and humiliated. Desperately trying to hold some of your weight on your uninjured foot. 

“Nah, ah,” he breathes, arm slinking around your middle, tugging you firmly into his lap. “Ye jus’ worry about gettin’ ready tae go tae bed now. Ah got ye.”

He soothes his palm up and down the length of your arm as you finish up in a fruitless effort to calm your nerves, but it doesn't work. Can't. Because you know what's coming next. 

“Can I, um—” your tongue is thick in your mouth. “I need to use the washroom to–to, uh, washup, and stuff—”

His thigh jerks beneath you. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than normal. “Okay.”

But he stays where he is. 

“I think I can do it on my own—”

“And if ye step oan yer leg?” He tuts, arm tightening around you. “Only gonnae hurt yerself more, doe.”

“I'll be careful, but I really have to—” 

“S’okay,” he coos. “S’only me.” 

That's the problem, you think wildly. Hysterical. That's the whole problem, isn't it? 

“No, you don't understand. I need to, um, go.” He makes another noise, soft. Agreeable. Fuck. “I need to pee.” 

It comes out in a hiss. Feral, like a cat. Embarrassment turns you into more animal than man. 

Again, he hums. “I know, doe. Donnae worry, ah’ll hold yer leg.”

“Can't I just keep it, um, on the ledge?” 

“No, no. If ye put weight oan it, doe, ye’ll be in serious trouble. Dislocated. Broken. Jesus, ye cuid slip the bone out of place—”

No. No.

The idea of him holding your ankle as you piss is beyond any measure of shame you've ever felt before. You like your privacy. Crave it, sometimes. You don't think you've ever done this in front of someone since you were a child. 

You need—

A moment.

Time. A pause. 

But he doesn't give you a chance. 

Johnny's other arm loops under your knees, and with a small huff he stands, holding you aloft with an arm anchored across your belly. It's quick. Mercilessly so. He steps back and lifts his foot to toe the lid off the toilet seat, unbothered by the loud clang it makes when it hits the tank. 

“There we go,” he mutters, and sounds almost breathless for it. “Let's get ye ready.” 

It should be awkward. Clumsy. But he moves with a surprising agility that belies the firmness of his muscles, the bulk. He lets your uninjured leg drop to the floor, murmuring for you to put some weight on it as he cradles your shin in his hands, careful not to let your foot move more than it needs to. 

The strange dance ends with him holding your shin in his hands, stretching your thighs out more than they'd ever been before. An image that might have been comical under different circumstances but just makes you flounder at the suggestiveness of the pose. Added, in large part, by the firm hold he has on you. There's not an ounce of give. No threat of falling. 

You gasp when he moves, shuffling backwards to pivot you around until the back of your shin meets the cold porcelain. 

“Alright now, doe,” he motions toward the seat as he slowly bends down to a crouch on the floor, your foot still held in his grasp. 

You follow him down until you meet the seat, trying to avoid his gaze as you clumsily paw at your tattered pants, slipping the down your thighs in a hurry. Your panties follow after a moment of hesitation. 

When his breath catches, you say nothing at all. Pointedly avoid whatever face he might be making as you stare, fixed, at the panels on the wall behind his head. Wallpaper. Probably moisture-resistant. It's peeling in some places. Decades ago, it might have been a soft canary yellow. 

His breathing is shallow. You ball your hands into fists and press the flat of your knuckles against your thighs. 

It's hard to focus when you can feel the scorching heat of his body bleeding into your leg, your knee. Close enough that all he has to do is bend down a little more, and his face would be pressed against your thighs. 

There's no room, no privacy. 

You close your eyes and pretend you can't hear how his breath seems to fill the entirety of the small washroom, ghosting over your skin. Virginia Falls comes to mind—a roaring rush of water—but even in the solitude of your mind, you can't ignore the way his stare drills through your skin. 

You swallow. You can't do it. Can't do this. 

“Can you—” back off, go away. Stop breathing so heavily because you might get the wrong idea, like this whole thing excites him somehow—

His voice is rough when he speaks. Ragged. “Cannae ah what, doe?”

“Turn the tap on? I can't—I can't concentrate.”

“S’only me, bonnie girl,” he murmurs, but does what you ask. Leaning over you, broad torso swallowing you up entirely under his bulk. You can feel the soft give of his belly on your knee as he presses it into you, but it only lasts a second before you meet a wall of solid muscle beneath. He braces a warm, rough palm on your naked thigh, leaning in as he reaches over to the sink above. 

It's barely a fraction of his weight but the drag of it makes you blink in surprise. His skin is burning. Redhot. 

Opening your eyes brings you close to his chest, nose only a hair away from the tanned skin stretched over his collarbones. The metal chain gleams in the flushed light hanging overhead, sitting in a golden contrast to his sunkissed flesh. Its reflection casts beads of glittering lambency over the slope of his neck. 

Pretty, you think, watching as it coruscates in a mesmerising dance each time he moves. 

The faucet turns with a metallic squeak, breaking you from your reverie. Water gurgles up from the pipes, spitting into the basin with a hiss. You pull back, twisting your head to the side as heat floods your chest. 

“Thanks,” you mutter, unable to meet his stare.

His fingers tighten around your flesh. His voice is raw when he mumbles, “anytime.” 

The trickling rush of water reverberates around the room, and it's easy to close your eyes and pretend you're alone.

So that's exactly what you do. 

His palm grows slick on your skin. Damp. But you ignore it, focusing on nothing but the urgency of getting this over with as quickly as you can. It works, marginally—

(Johnny makes another noise in the back of his throat. 

That, too, you ignore.)

“Finished?” His voice is thick, wet. You nod slowly, peeking out from the sliver between your lashes to paw at the wall for the toilet paper roll. “Here, ah’ll help ye out of fer pants—”

Your head feels heavy. Limbs laden. The embarrassment crushes you into a fine powder; malleable, putty. You let Johnny take the lead after. Let him slip your tattered tights down your thighs, and say nothing at all when too much of his palm glides along your skin as he pulls. Needlessly, of course, when just two fingers would do. 

But it's fine. Fine. Maybe he's never taken off tights before. Maybe the material is too thin and he's worried about it catching on the scrapes over your knees, the bandage wrapped up to mid-calf. 

Your shirt, too. When he slips his fingers under the hem, splaying them wide over your belly before dragging them up until it bunches around his wrist. Tugging, tugging. Hands gliding over your skin, fitting along the contours of your body.

He keeps one hand moulded to your neck, fingers brushing your jaw, as he gingerly pulls the shirt over your head. The ragged pants in your ear, the soft groans when you slip into his old shirt—

It's exertion, really. Must be. He's tired from holding you up the whole time you brushed your teeth, washed your face in the sink. It's all fine. He's being gentle. Doesn't want to hurt you.

He's just being nice. 

(And when you notice that your panties are missing from the pile of dirty clothes he shoves into the corner behind the door, that, too, you ignore.)

Exhaustion takes you soon after Johnny tucks you into bed, dragging you under once again. He tells you he'll be on the couch. To holler if you need anything. Sluggishly, you nod. Thank him when he places a glass of water on the bedside table for you. 

(Bite your tongue when he brushes his fingers over your cheek as he bids you goodnight.)

Through the gossamer of sleep, you can hear the floorboards creak in the doorway, but when you look, there's nothing there. Just an empty kitchen. The soft flicker of the fireplace smouldering in the living room. 

Nothing, you think. It's nothing at all—

There's a weight on your chest. 

Warm, searing. It dampens your skin where it sits, heavy, on your breast, cold air ghosting along the sweat building up each time it moves. 

You stir. The pressure takes shape. A hand. A man's hand. Rough, calloused, and hot. In his palm, he holds your breast, thumb brushing along the curve of it. Sliding, sliding—

You come awake with a gasp. 

There's a twinge in your ankle when you move, and the pain grounds you, silences you. His thumb twitches on your nipple, but he, too, stills. Quietens. An impasse. 

And you suppose this would be where you'd scream. Rage. Slap him across the face, rip his hand off your breast. Curse at him for being a creep, and a pervert, and nasty, disgusting man because there's nothing at all that could justify the reason for why the shirt he gave you to wear to bed is tucked up over your chest. The bruising press of something hard digging into your hip negates any excuse he might try to give. This is unmistakable. You should scream, cry, and—

Leave. 

This is what glues your lips together. Keeps you from moving at all, from making a sound. Where would you go? How would you even get there to begin with? 

It's this—the uncertainty, your vulnerability—that paralyzes you. Keeps you still, silent, as his hands brush over your skin, touching, fondling. His palms are rough, calloused. Pyretic. He squeezes, kneading your flesh in his sweat-slicked hand like he's owed the right to touch you. Like he's allowed. 

He pants against your temple, breath warm, humid on your skin. Heaves like a dog in your ear, grunting low as he ruts his hips into your side, smearing something hot, tacky across your skin. Something you try not to think about, to inch away from. But he catches you quick, and stops your meagre protests before they form. 

His thumb and forefinger close over your pebbled nipple, pinching softly at your budded flesh. The shock of pleasure is unwanted. Awful. It churns your stomach, and you fight the urge to weep—

He leans up, ragged exhales growing heavier as he moves until milk-warmed breath shudders over your bare breasts. His excitement throbs against your hip. You swallow down around the sudden wave of disgust, the sickness knotting itself together in your belly. It devours the lingering pity you'd felt earlier. The safety, the comfort, that brimmed inside of you for him. 

(bleeding heart—

he gorges himself on it.)

Stay still, you think. And maybe he'll go away. 

But he doesn't. Of course, he doesn't. 

Johnny leans down, mouth closes over your nipple. It's all searing heat. Wet, soft. A sudden jolt of pleasure shoots down your spine when he sucks in tandem with the soft, rolling pinches he doles out on your tiger nipple, and you hate your treacherous body a little bit more for it. For how good it makes you feel when he flicks his tongue over your hardened peek, laving it sloppily. Messily. Drooling all over you—the big fucking dog—

You wonder how long he's been doing this. Touching you in your sleep. The thought sits like hot oil in your guts; sloshing against the soft lining of your stomach until it aches. Burns. You blame it on that when he grunts against your breast, the vibrations send a shiver down your spine. Have to, don't you? Because the alternative is to admit that you're slick, soft between your thighs already; folds soaked, inner thigh damp. Wet. Blame it on him, and the burden in your chest eases when you feel the stirrings of desire, lust, thicken in your lower belly. Bodily reaction becomes your clutch, your lifeline when he lays his upper body against you, the weight, the heft, of his bulk forcing the air from your lungs. 

Johnny lifts his head suddenly, eyes drilling into yours before you can feign sleep to avoid looking at him. You don't want this. Your body thrums with reluctance, with fear, but you can't drag your gaze away from him. The rapturous look in his eyes, burning in the low simmer of a never-ending twilight, is paralyzing. Electric. You can't remember a time in your life when another person has ever looked at you with such raw want. Desire. Need. It's covetous. Ugly. Marbled with heady streams of hunger, of awe, as if he's not sure whether or not he wants to eat you alive or savour you for aeons. Taking bites, nibbles, when this urge becomes too burdensome to bear; when the ravenous chasm in his guts threatens to devour itself, bones and all, like a man-made black hole. Under this heavy, unrelenting stare you wither. Submit. Your head rolls until your cheek is pressed against the pillow, neck bared. Offered up to him. 

(anything, you think, to run away from the naked want on his face. because with his mouth slack, lips slick, glistening with spit, he looks predatory like this. animal. bathed in gloam and flushed a deep roseate.)

He props himself up on his elbow, watching you. Feasting. Your quiet submission makes him moan; hips juttering at the slow reveal of your vulnerable neck. A paroxysm. As if he just can't help himself to hump against you like a beast in rut. 

He swallows. You watch his throat work from the corner of your eye, Adam's apple bobbing up and down, up and down—

Then:

He lifts himself up higher, angling his body until it's bracketed over you. Sliding between your legs until your slit is pressed against the coarse hair that covers his thighs. He keeps his elbow propped on the pillow, sliding up, up, until his forearm comes to rest beside your face. It boxes you in completely under his weight, and the position forces your legs to spread open to accommodate him. Not given up freely, of course; but your compliance in this is inessential, it seems. He moulds you how he likes, mindful of your injured ankle the whole time. A kindness that makes something molten thicken in your throat, stifling the scream that claws its way up your esophagus. 

You try not to stare when he clambers over you, chest bare against yours. Hips chiselling a gorge between your thighs wide enough for him to fit. To press his fattened length on the insides of your sticky thighs; groins drawing together. Your legs slung loosely around his tapered waist. A dreadful pastiche of lovemaking. Intimacy. 

But even as a mockery—bastardised as it is—it’s embarrassing how easily you open up for him. Legs falling, spreading further apart. Hot, sticky at the apex of your thighs. Wanting. 

Blame it on sleep, on this endless hypnagogia you've been feeling since he leaned over you on the cliff edge, and said, pretty thing, aren't ye? All alone. No’ anymore, doe. Jus’ me an’ ye, now. Jus’ us—

You swallow, fighting the urge to cry. Blinking rapidly against the tears that pebble against your lashline, but you're helpless to stop the flood even though the levee doesn't break, doesn't spill over. It just sits, a sorrowful lagoon with nowhere to go. 

In your attempt to hold back the deluge, you let your gaze wander away from the piercing blue that drills into your face—seemingly unbothered by the tears in your eyes, the ones that clot over your irises, stinging and hot—and stare down at his broad chest. A mistake, maybe, because you catch sight of the gold cross dangling around his neck. Like a pendulum, it swings. The motion is mesmerising. Hypnotic. 

It distracts you for a moment. Or maybe you've just grown accustomed to his touch, to the heat of his hand on your skin. Whatever the reason, it's enough to pull you away from the feverish trail his fingers leave as they make a steady drag downward. It's only when they dance over your belly button do you realise the muted tickle is Johnny, and by then—

“Shush, s’alright, doe,” he's cooing, warm breath ghosting over the plains of your face. It might be comforting if he didn't rest his weight on his elbow, freeing his other hand just to bring it over your mouth, thumb brushing under your eye. A warning maybe. Don't scream. “Ah go’ ye. Ah’ll make ye feel so good—”

There's a fever in his eyes. Wildfires spreading through the yawning boscage, burning everything in sight. The heat is hot enough to char bone; to blacken meat into a dessicated husk. Eating away at everything in its path. 

You know, almost immediately, that Johnny's beyond reason. Or, rather—

He's gone, turned inward; delusional enough to think that this is something he has to do. 

You'd seen all the warnings of the kindling fire before. Something you'd decided to ignore even as the hunger in his eyes surged; as the shape of it morphed into a frothing devotion that felt ill-fitting for two strangers stuck together like this. 

Stupidly, you thought you could outrun it. That he was a good man beneath it all, and wouldn't succumb to touching you in your sleep, to lulling you into a false sense of security—

Except. He hadn't, had he? 

He'd been blunt about it all since the beginning. My wife—

How silly, you thought. 

But the humour fades when he teases over your hips, resting his palm over your mound, middle finger perched above your clit. Just holding. Touching. The possessiveness of the action is unmistakable, unignorable. 

It shouldn't send a shiver down your spine when you'd rather he didn't touch you at all, but it does. There's something about him, you think. Electric. A lightning storm. It crackles in the air around you, humming low in the atmosphere; this unavoidable surge, natural phenomenon. Maybe that's what he is. 

More storm than man. A force you can't outrun, but can only endure—

His eyes flash when he slides his fingers further down your slit and finds your skin soft, hot. Drenched. When he groans your name out, it sounds like a prayer. An orison. 

“So wet, doe,” he's heaving out in a whisper, eyes nearly rolling back into his head as his touch grows bolder, more insistent. As if the softness of your flesh, the wetness that sticks to your inner thighs, is all the consent he needs. “So fuckin’ wet fer me, aye? Been waitin’ fer this, haven't ye?” 

You want to shake your head no but it's futile. He drops his head to look down the chasm between your bodies, watching his hand slide along your skin. Legs spread around his waist, inviting. He curses foul under his breath when he sees how wet his fingers are from just a touch, words mangled in the back of his throat. They sound less coherent as he roams your body, parting your folds and stroking through the slick spilling out of you, dragging it up to your clit. 

His voice is closer now. Lips bruising against the shell of your ear. Butchered English. Gaelic. An amalgamation of low whines, and rasping grunts. He sounds more animal than man. A booming thundercloud groaning above you, as if touching you is enough to please him, too. Siphoning it from your body as he presses his fingers against your clit, circling, stroking. 

It’s good. So good. And that's the problem, you think. It's easy to give in like this when he pets your pussy like the feeling of your fluttering heat on his hand is enough to make him cum. No one has ever touched you like they were starving for it. Needed it as badly as you did. 

The sensation is almost too much. The notion of it getting tangled in the back of your head, looping around the part of you still screaming to run. To go home. To push him away. 

(your arms are laden. your tongue is a puddle of mercury in your mouth—)

But just as the pleasure blooming in your belly raises with each pass of his thumb, he pulls away. Slides down, down—

Circles your hole with the tips of his slick fingers, petting with the same desperation he showed your clit until he deems you soft enough for him. He slowly sinks his finger inside of you to the knuckle, stretching your walls around him as he moans into your ear about how good ye feel around him, all tight. Hot. So fuckin' wet, do. So wet fer me—

He pulls out just as slowly, shushing the soft gasp you make when the ridge of his palm catches on your clit. 

“Ah told ye, didnae ah? Ah’ll take care’a ye.”

He presses two fingers inside of you as he peppers kisses over your cheek, cooing low about how badly you need him. Only him. 

Johnny fucks you slowly on two fingers. Gently. Deeply. Sliding into the last knuckle, petting against your slick walls, like he's owed the privilege and not touching you in your sleep.  

He brings you to the edge, takes you right there, and—

Pulls away. His fingers slide down as your hips flit, lifting to make them catch on your clit again. It's embarrassing how badly you want him to touch you. Shameful. 

He leans up and catches your mouth in a messy kiss. It's all tongue, wet, no finesse. The wild, unkempt tangle of hair abrades your skin, rubbing it raw as he devours you. Scoops out your tongue with his own, enticing it into his mouth. His teeth close on the thick of it, lips pursing. Sucking on the tip. 

His kisses are doglike and obscene. Leaves drool dribbling down your chin, soaking into your neck. He can't seem to decide what he wants to do, so he tries to do it all. Everything. Biting your lips, trying to choke you on his tongue. Slurping up the taste of you until his mouth is stained with it. Beard matted down, drenched. 

Despite it all, he's a good kisser. His pace is fast, breakneck. You can't keep up, but you try. Struggling along as he seems hellbent on eating you alive. But it's sporadic. He pauses just long enough to settle into an easy rhythm that makes you arch into it, silently begging for more as he fucks you on his fingers. Nips your tongue as he slides in a third, swallowing the gasp you let out, savouring your moans between his teeth. 

Johnny ruins you with just a kiss. Leaves you panting, unmoored. Mouth slack, open wide for him to do what he pleases because the taste of him is divine. 

“C’mon,” he urges, spreading his fingers inside of your cunt until you keen, whining his name. “Suck my tongue, bonnie.” 

It's disgusting. You do it, anyway. 

Your quiet acquiescence makes him moan, hips rutting against you. The hard press of his cock into your skin is bruising. It aches. Your inner thighs are tacky with your slick and the smears of pre-cum he leaves behind as he humps against you. 

He sounds mournful when he pulls away, mouth messy with spit, and whispers, “fuck, wish ah could taste ye again, doe—” You don't know what he means until his eyes drop down to his hand, working insistently between your thighs. 

Your stomach drops. Plummets. You thought this started when he was touching your chest, when you woke up to his hand on your breast—

“Ye didnae wake when ah did it before,” he says, as if sounding mournful, sad, over the fact that you didn't wake up to him eating your pussy while you were asleep, was normal. “Must’a had too much tea—”

You wish, so suddenly, so viciously, that he'd stop talking. You can't hear this. Can't bear to listen to him confess to all the needling worries that bloomed in the back of your head, ones you stamped down with a heavy foot and a potent sense of guilt, shame, for condemning a man who was just trying to help. 

It makes you want to cry. 

“Oh, doe, don't cry—” he coos the words out, contrite and conciliatory, but you can feel the way his cock twitches against your thigh. The unmistakable heat mushrooming in his eyes as the sight of tears streaming down your face. 

He seems to take it as misery over not feeling his mouth on your cunt, a plaintive assertion he whispers into your ear (poor thing, jus’ wannae feel ma mouth on you, aye? wannae feel me lick yer sweet pussy again?), and decides to rectify your sorrow by kissing his way down your body. 

His fingers slip out when he moves, resting them on your knee as he kneels back on his haunches. 

You spare a glance toward him, nervous with trepidation, and—

This whole time, his cock had been this phantom sensation against your skin, bruising and hot. Leaving wet smears over your thighs. Hidden from view. But like this, it's the first thing you see as it hangs, heavy and thick, from between his thighs. 

The sight is—

Something. 

You don't want to think about the heat in your belly. The nervous flit of your heartbeat. 

A pearlescent strand dribbles down the weeping, slick head, dropping to the sheets below. The shaft of his cock is similarly drenched, smeared with what seems like a copious amount of precum. It gathers at the base, a startling contrast of thick, black hair and globs of milky white. 

Something about it makes you recoil. Almost instinctively, primal. 

Your flinch just makes his cock twitch, spitting more out. 

The motion seems to unveil more of it to you, adding to the growing unease you feel because his cock is the furthest thing from pretty. 

It's flushed a daunting vermillion and purpling like a bruise around the engorged glands. Thickening at the base. Streaked with dark veins that run the length of it, like rivers intersecting and jutting up from his skin. Blotches of red, pink, purple, and peach make up the colouring of it. Marbled like a black eye. A busted lip. 

It bobs when he moves. Ugly, garish. You don't want it anywhere near you—

But Johnny’s wet hand on your knee keeps you from moving. Holds you in place as he bends down, resting on elbow to bring his face as close to your pussy as he can get. 

Johnny stares—unabashedly—at your bare cunt when he finally settles between your thighs, widening them further to fit the broad stretch of his shoulders. Eyes lit with a heady greed, a hunger, that knocks the air from your lungs. 

“Missed ma mouth, didnae ye?” 

For a moment, you think he's talking to you. Confusion colours the panic you feel, dampening the dread down until it's flattened by sheer bewilderment when you realise his eyes haven't left your slit. 

“Such a bonnie girl,” he purrs, breath ghosting over your cunt. “Been so lonely without me, aye? Poor thing.”

It heats you up from the inside out. The mesmerised, almost unfettered look of pure adoration shaded alongside the raw want on his face twists a sense of desire inside of you. Has anyone looked at you with such naked need on their face? As if the idea of not having a taste was somehow the most agonising thing they could experience? The way Johnny looks at you is enough to make you ache. And with anyone else, having him address your pussy instead of you would be awkward, humiliating, but somehow, him doing it makes you burn white-hot. Makes you want—

“Johnny,” you whisper, paper-thin, and his head shoots up, brows inching high on his brow. You're acutely aware that this is the first thing you've said since this started. Since you woke up to him groping you, touching you, in your sleep. And it's his name. Johnny. 

Not no, don't. Stop. Please. Just—

“Johnny.”

It's not consent. You're not sure you're fully capable of doing so right now, if ever. But it's the closest you think you could come to saying yes. Admitting that you want his mouth on you, even though the situation leading up to this still makes something ugly and awful twist in your guts, is as much as you can give. He seems to see this. To know. 

But Johnny takes it between his teeth as an unequivocal yes despite that, groaning low in his throat, midnight eyes rolling back into his head. The hands on you tremble. Shake. 

He breathes in deeply through his nose, the sound whistling as a great plume of air is forced through small channels, filling his lungs. Perfuming them with the heady scent of you, of sex, clotting in the air. 

“Fuck, doe. Gonnae give ye what ye need.” 

And then he bends his head, eyes lidded still, half rolled, and without any preamble, glues his lips to your drenched slit, forcing it between your soft folds. 

The first touch of his tongue is molten. Soft, tensile, he laves it over the whole of your slit from the sensitive skin beneath your hole, to the crest of your clit. Digs his tongue in, swirling it over and under your folds leaving no part of you untouched. Feasting. Devouring. 

It makes you mewl. Your back arches off the sheets, ankle throbbing in a heady, pulsing pain at the sudden movement, adding to the shrill whine in your voice. 

He notices, and pets your knee once before sliding his bicep under your leg, looping his hand around to secure your thigh in the crook of his below. Locked in tight. Immoveable. The other he pushes down with the flat of his palm, until your joints ache from the stretch. Your knee is almost flush with the mattress. Widening you further for his searing, eager mouth. 

If his kisses are dogish—wet, messy; sloppy with drool—then the way he eats your cunt is foul. Slobbering down his chin, slurping up the mess he makes with a series of chewed-off moans and muffled whines. He paws at you as if he was denied the pleasure of drink for aeons, feasting like a man half-delirious and starved. There's no finesse. No skill to speak of. Just a desperate man lapping at you like a beast. Worshipping you. 

He nuzzles his chin and cheeks against your cunt, drenching himself until his beard is matted to his skin. The feeling of his coarse hair grazing your sensitive flesh is overwhelming. Too much. Too ticklish. But—

It feels good. 

The contrast of his fleshy tongue rolling over your clit, and the rough brush of his hair when he nuzzles you with the point of his chin, cooing softly about how pretty this little pussy is, getting him all wet, is cataclysmic. The heat floods your belly, and you clench around nothing. Achingly empty. Moaning at the feeling of him bringing you right there, right to the brink, with nothing by the hair on his cheek. It's unreal. Inescapable. Your head drops, mouth lax, open wide as you pant and whimper through the madness of Johnny MacTavish trying to find a way to suck your clit and fuck you with his tongue at the same time. An impossible goal, you know, but he doesn't seem to care about logic or reason with his head buried between your thighs, mouth never leaving you once. He merely nods his head up and down, refusing to pull away.

It's divine. It's worship. It's—

He pushes two of his fingers inside of you, lapping at your taut rim to stem the sting of his sudden intrusion, and you think, for a moment, that you see Nirvana behind your eyelids. 

It's embarrassingly how quickly he brings to you the brink, slurping messily as he drills his fingers into your hole, petting against your walls in a mockery of what he'll do to you once he's had his fill. Satiated his hunger with the taste of your pussy. 

Something he can't seem to get enough of.

Your thighs draw together, crushing him between your legs. Arching into his mouth, nearly smothering him as you rut clumsily against his face, moaning at the rough scrape of his beard against your skin. You're not normally so aggressive, but he loses himself in it, eyes rolling as he grabs your hips and pulls you closer to his wanting mouth, encouraging you to use his tongue, his lips, to meet your end as you see fit. Riding his face as much as you can with your leg locked tight between his shoulder and bicep. 

And it's in between his loud grunts, his whines—almost caterwauling into your slit—where you shatter. The sound of his pleasure, the feeling of his mouth on you—it’s all too much. You break when he sucks your clit into his mouth, keening in the back of his throat as he works another finger into you. It feels good. Too good. 

Johnny works you through it. Lets you take, and take as your muscles spasm with the force of your release. Fingers digging into his shoulders, fisting the sheets. He moans along with you, eagerly lapping at your cunt until you whine, begging him to stop. You've had enough. Can't take anymore—

He only pulls away when you melt into the sheets, shuddering with the aftershocks bubbling through your body. Leaning back on his haunches once more, the hair around his mouth slick and wet. The evidence of your pleasure dripping down his chin, droplets still clinging to his beard.

He crawls over you once more, eyes boring into yours. Pits of coal. An endless black hole.

In this strange space, liminal, you lose yourself. Shed pieces of who you were before when he slots his hips between your thighs, cock heavy in his hand, and presses it to your slit. 

This is happening. He's going to fuck you. 

You wish the thought didn't make your knees fall apart a little wider for him. Make your hips flit, lifting slightly into the air. Eager. Hungry for it. For him.

It's loneliness, you think. Desperation. 

Madness is addictive. It feeds itself and infects those around it. Noxious. An all-consuming black hole that eats, and eats. It must have bitten you, too. Dug infectious teeth into your skin, severing flesh to imbed its jowls in your marrow. Clinging. Poisoning you from the inside out. 

There's no other reason for why you reach for him, hands sliding over his sweat-slicked skin as he falls into the open brackets of your arms, grunting when the head of his cock catches on your rim. He's a wall of heat. Firm muscles. Your nails dig into the thick cords of his shoulders just to feel the reluctant give of his skin. 

Nothing about this man is soft. His waist, his thighs, his chest, his arms, the hard ridge of his cock. It's all unyielding muscle. Burning. Searing into your skin when it drags against his. 

“Gonnae fuck ye, doe,” he whispers, words pitching low. Damp wood, felled timber. Rough. You shiver from the heat of it. The warning, the plea; both extremes coalescing together to make truism more potent. Weighty. “Gonnae fuck this pretty pussy, and yer gonnae beg me fer it.” 

Despite the surety in assertion, he doesn't wait for you to plead with him to split you apart, taking the initiative instead to sink the head of his cock into you. The stretch stings already, and only his glands have sunk in, a fact he grunts into your ear as he drives forward another inch. Another—

You don't think you've ever been this unmoored before. Rendered this docile. A mere domicile for him to burrow inside of; to carve a home from the sanctum of your walls wrapped tight around him. And carve he does. Splitting you apart as he grunts with the efforting of forcing his cock into you, feeding it further with blunt jerks of his hips, his hands feverish on your skin. Sweat slicked already even though he's barely halfway inside of you. 

“Feels so good,” he slurs into your ear, face pinching. Twisting up as pleasure blooms over his brow. “So fuckin’ good, doe, fuck—”

It does. Beyond the blunt pressure of him forcing his cock inside of you, the sting of the stretch, there's an intense, dizzying pleasure in the fullness you feel. In the press of him notching against something inside that makes heat bloom in your belly, turns your bones liquid. It might be the previous climax rendering you oversensitive, but the feeling of him splitting you apart is euphoric. 

It's aided by the moans he lets out as you take more and more of him, as if the sound of his pleasure is funnelled into yours. By the look on his face, eyes widened, feverish, as he darts his gaze between your face and your pussy, unable to decide if he wants to watch his cock disappear into you or watch your face, pinched up in pleasure, in flickering pain, as you take him fully. 

This sort of bliss, this pleasure, is addicting. Narrowed down to the sharp nudge of his cock grazing places inside of you that light your nerves on fire, burn through your synapses until your thoughts are muddled, mush. No coherency, no logic—just the fat length of him bludgeoning into your walls; the tap of his heavy, full sack slapping against your ass as he finally, finally, roots deep.

He must feel it, too. This strange, overwhelming pleasure loops around your lower belly, twisting itself into knots because when he pushes the last few inches inside of you, he nearly collapses on top of you, his whole body shuddering. Trembling. Presses his damp face to your cheek, matted, slick hair tickling your skin, and groans from deep within his chest at the feeling of you wrapped around him. The noise shivers through you. His pleasure is enough to make you clench down, tightening up around him. Already on the verge and all he did was slide his cock inside of you. 

A fact he seems to luxuriate in, huffing shakily into your ear as he quenches himself on the soft, fluttering pulses of your walls around him. Content to grind his hips into yours in shallow gyrations that make your eyes roll into the back of your head. The tension in your belly coiling tighter and tighter, the pleasure ameliorating the shame you'd felt before, burning it into cinders. 

As long as he keeps his cock inside of you, as long as he keeps pushing the blunt head into that spot that makes your vision whiteout, you think could cum just like this. Right now—

He doesn't. 

Johnny lifts himself off of your chest, elbow coming to rest beside your head, taking the brunt of his weight. His eyes are bright, burning. He stares down at you, and the look of sheer adoration on his face is daunting, overwhelming. It threatens to eat you alive. Devour you whole. Pure rapture. Devotion. 

You flush, face stinging with embarrassment. Prickling with unease. No one has ever stared at you like this, so hungrily, and the fact that it's him makes your head spin. Looping endlessly in circles of disbelief and fear. 

He might be omnipotent, you think, with the way his lips tug sharply downward, brow bunching together as if he can hear your thoughts, taste your disquiet in the air. 

Johnny rolls his hips back slowly, inching out of you with a hum until just the tip remains. The loss has your hands scrambling down his chest, fingers tangling in the coarse, drenched hairs at the soft incline of his belly. The other sliding around the thick breadth of his ribs, nails digging into the slick skin covering his spine. Pressing. Biting. 

More, you don't say. Please. 

The knot in his brow dissipates. Eases into something almost playful, impish. 

“Want ma cock, doe?” He whispers it waggishly, like a cloy secret, and you pretend the tease in his voice doesn't make your heart lurch in your chest. “Didnae anyone teach ye some manners? Gotta ask politely.” 

You won't. You won't. 

Your reluctance makes him sigh. The chain around his neck swinging when he moves. His hips pull back, and he reaches down with his free hand, and grabs his cock, pulling it out of you, and sliding it against your slit. The head bumps into your clit, and you nearly choke on the gasp that's ripped from your chest. The pleasure is too much, too—

He pulls away, denying you the euphoria of release. 

“No, no, please,” you babble, resolve crumbling into ash. “Please, Johnny, please—”

“That’s more like it,” he coos, and lets his cock dip back inside of your fluttering hole, rim stretched taut around him once more. The sting is lessened now, but still there as the thick glands force you open for him. “Sound so pretty when yer desperate for ma cock.” 

He leans down, catching your mouth in another sloppy kiss as he slams his cock back inside of you hard enough to bruise. To make you see stars. Cockhead bludgeoning into your cervix in a dizzying amalgamation of pleasure and pain that makes you whine, the whimper snatched up between his teeth as he burrows them into your lip with an echoing groan. 

He fucks you hard, working his cock into you at a maddening pace. Bestial, now. All animal. The tenderness from before dissolves into an choppy desperation. An eagerness to seek his own end as you fall to pieces beneath him, shaking from the force of taking him over and over again, each piston, each hard thrust driving the thoughts from your head until all you have left is sensation. An absence of everything except the way he feels above you, inside of you. 

Sweat builds up along your hairline, gathers at the base of your spine, and soaks the sheets below. You feel liquid under him. A ragdoll for him to sink his jowls into, to toss around as he likes. 

Johnny is all sensation and a cacophony of sound. 

He ruts into you clumsily, groaning in your ear. Moaning out how good you feel around him. Pretty pussy made just for him. 

“Oh, fuck, doe—” he moans, arching into the next thrust. Drool dribbles down his chin when he curves his spine, dropping his forehead onto your temple. “Feels so good. Feels like my cock is meltin’ instead ye—”

The lewd squelch of his cock pistoning into you seems to echo through the room, louder somehow than the ragged moans that spill from his mouth. 

“Been so long,” he shudders against you, rooting his cock deep. Burying himself inside of you as his cockhead bullies into your cervix. The flash of pain is whitehot, blinding, but the bloom of pleasure eats it whole before it can pollute the puddle of bliss pooling in your belly. “Been savin’ it all jus’ fer ye—”

His hand slides from your hip, burrowing between your bodies as rubs at your clit. It feels so good that it nips sharply into pain, into agony. Too much, too much—

But he doesn't relent. Fingers toying, circling your clit in time with each jarring thrust, tightening the coil inside of you until it whines from the tension, the pressure—

It snaps when he growls into your ear—cum fer me, doe; wannae feel this pussy squeezin’ ma cock—and releases in a flood, a deluge of molten heat. Back arching, toes curling. You're barely cognisant of the ache in your injured foot, the throbbing pain. It's swallowed by the surge of endorphins roaring through you, ringing in your ears. Blotting everything out except the way you pulse around the thick of him still lodged deep inside of you. 

You barely have time to come down before he starts again, forcing you to take him as he thrusts in harder than before, mindlessly seeking his own end as you gush around him, nails raking across his flesh. 

He's babbling above you, spitting words into your ear about how he's going to take care of you. All of you. Take you back to Scotland with him so you can raise your children—

It slices through the haze, ripping a hole through the fog clouding your mind. 

“No,” you whimper, devastation flooding your chest alongside the vicious pleasure still rolling around inside of you. “No, please—”

Children, he breathes like you hadn't spoken at all. Lots. Lots of them. Brothers and sisters. Two, maybe three, of each. But he's not picky, bonnie, he'll take whatever you give him. And keep fucking you over and over again until he gets what he wants. A whole family to raise. To surround himself with. Been lonely, you think he says. Needed something to keep him busy. 

You don't want this. Can't. But he doesn't stop, doesn't relent. He breathes life into the picture he paints with the soft flutter of your cunt clenching tight around him at words, once again betrayed by your own body. 

Despite the nausea that bleeds to the surface at his words, your eyes roll back into your head once more, driven mad with the thunderous pleasure that rips through you as he forces every last inch of his cock into you. 

Johnny grinds his hips against yours, moaning, loud and untethered, muscles jerking, twitching, as he cums deep inside of you. 

The aftershocks of his pleasure make him tremble, body spasming as he drives himself tight against the seal of your womb. A new heat grows inside of you as Johnny slumps against you, panting in your ear. 

“Ah’ll be so good tae ya,” he promises in a rasping growl, shoving his head into the crook of your neck. Gyves close around you as he nuzzles his mouth into your flesh, licking at the sweat that beads on your skin. 

“All mine. All fuckin’ mine—” The confessional is tainted with the sickness that leaks from the craggy hole chiselled into the side of his head. Obsessive devotion hewing ruinous dogma into the fibrils of your head. Tenderised, softened, by the blunt, unyielding touch of his hand. A slurry that this polluted notion slips inside, tainting your resolve until it's thickened into his whim. His wants. 

You sob into his chest as he wraps you up in his arms, shackled against the man who carved a place inside of you just wide enough for himself to fit. Who spat poison in the hollow crevasses, and called it absolution. Love. 

All you can do is heave through corrupted lungs as he smothers you under the weight of his madness. 

“No’ gonnae let anyone touch ye. Ah'll kill anyone who tries to tae take ye away from me, doe—”

The conviction in his tone is bound in steel. In feverish blue. 

“Ah’ll take care’a ye,” he rasps, voice thick in his throat. “Donnae worry about a thing, doe.”

“Will you let me go?”

He doesn't answer at first. Just digs his nose into your hairline, breathing in deep until the wide breadth of his chest expands across your back. Mulling it over, maybe. Coming up with an excuse for his behaviour. Something to negotiate with on reasons why you shouldn't call the police the moment he does. 

And for a moment, a startling, terrible moment, there's hope. The assurance wells on your tongue. Some unfathomable amalgamation of please and i’ll never tell. Maybe you were going to tell him he was an honest man who did something bad. That there was still good within him. All of those hideous clichès bubble up through the cracks—

But it's all dashed when his hand drops down from its perch beneath your bare breasts, sliding over your skin until it curls possessively over your lower belly. 

He breathes out and the hope inside you is snuffed under the gale of delusion, his obsession. “Why would ah do a thing like that?” He prompts, and the genuine confusion in his voice makes you shiver, as if the idea of it is so outlandish, so absurd, it negates everything he'd done to get to this point. You feel hollow. But not—

Not empty. 

As if he hears the thought thundering in the ruins of your mind, he presses a tender kiss to your temple that you think is meant to be soothing. Shushing you softly when you begin to shake. “After it took me this long to find ye, doe. Am no’ lettin’ ye go fer the world, ken. Yer mine. All mine.”

And then he closes his jowls around your throat. 

Time feels artificial here. 

You wake up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, but the sun doesn't seem like it moved from where it was perched last night at all. Fixed in place. Lost in some strange, eternal twilight zone where the sun is a warden, watching you tirelessly through the window. 

Cardboard cutout hung amongst the stars.

Your ankle aches horribly—an agonising throb. You must have turned in your sleep, jostled it. You're further away from the spot you were last night, too. Rolled over in your sleep, maybe. The burn brings tears to your eyes that you swallow down with a groan. 

As you awkwardly settle your leg in a way that hurts slightly less than it did before, you let cognisance slip back in to keep your mind off of the horrible ache that tremors through your bones. Your neck. 

Between your thighs—

It's then that you hear Johnny. 

He's whistling in the kitchen. You peer out through the crack in the door, catching the broad expanse of his naked back as he works over the stove. Flexing. Muscles bunching. He hums a tune you can't recognise as he scrapes the spatula over the cast iron pan. 

His grey sweats sit low on his hips. The divots above the hem—dimples of Apollo, you recall—are stark against the hollow ravine of his spine. You can't help but stare. Gawk. Limned in the soft light of the morning sun that spills through the open window, he looks almost ethereal. Unreal. Like something out of a magazine and not the middle of nowhere in Canada where the sun doesn't set this time of year. 

He feels surreal. A man too good to be true. All sculpted musculature that looks like it could just as well be handmade by an amalgamation of both David’s by Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. All sharp, angled lines; beautiful in their fluidity. 

It's unfair, you think suddenly. To be stuck with a man you feel nauseous thinking about but can’t seem to take your eyes off of. Some paradoxical madness. Retribution for a time in a past life where you swindled fate and got away unscathed. All of your karmic sins pile down on top of you as the events last night flicker past, drenched in seafoam. Ghosts linger in the cracks; in memories. 

The phantom weight of something slung over your waist, knotted tight between your breasts. Scorching heat glued to your spine. A heavy hand cradling your lower belly. Words whispered into your nape—

He turns, then. Catches your eye like he knew it was there the whole time. Stands there like the picture of ease, of a satiated man puttering around a small space while his sweetheart lounged in the bed, lazing the day away. 

Like this wasn’t illegal. Immoral. He treats you like a lover even though you’d only met less than a day ago—

And already his cum was drying on your inner thighs, thick and sticky. His madness pooling in your head, words uttered into your ear about this cabin he has back home, back in Scotland. He’ll take you there, he said. It’s time he came home, he thinks. His head is on straight again, and he finally feels like he can breathe without shattering into a million pieces—

(He put your hands on his head last night, palm cradling the ugly scar on his temple, and whispered, fervent and insane, ye keep ma head together, doe. Ye make me feel whole again—)

Knows a man, he told you. A good bloke who’d help him get you home, too. 

His smile is bright. Blinding.

additional tags: vaginal fingering, anal fingering, rimming, anal sex, p-in-v, double penetration, heavy implications/discussions of double anal and double vaginal penetration.

AO3 MIRROR

Surrounding the dense thicket is a deep riparian zone with a vicious undercurrent. It acts as a moat, almost, separating the woodlands from the glade that makes up the town. 

The serene surface belies a nebula of underground caves, eroded by the harsh runoff of a waterfall deeper into the forest. It runs in an almost perfect circle along the exterior of the town, serving as both a defence from outside attacks, and—

As a cage. 

With the dangerous waters that cut a circle around your town, it leaves little entry points to escape from. 

But, you suppose that doesn't matter because leaving is not an option. It never was. 

You sometimes wonder if your ancestors knew this before cultivating the barren lands, learning through trial and error just how deadly the seemingly protective waters were. Or if the land was purposefully terraformed to lure would-be settlers into its maw, forever entombing them with a dangerous fosse and an unforgiving forest. One with an insatiable appetite.

The only means of escape—if it could be called that—is a grove in the treeline where a giant taiga fell several decades ago. It sits across the river, covered in a bed of lichen and moss, and makes up a bridge—of sorts. Crossing it is precarious. The tree is old—archaic. It wears its age in the softness of its waterlogged wood, bloated from the runoff of the river passing below it every day.

Any day now, they say, it'll break into pieces and drift down the river. Stuck in an endless circle, an inescapable ouroboros, unless it can squeeze through the canal that opens up to a confluence on the opposite side of the forest. 

But it holds—just very prejudicially. 

Those who try to cross it without propitiation from the gods find themselves lost to the undercurrent before they can place the other foot on the lichen-covered log. 

It seems almost mythological. A story told in the dark about haunting beings, gods, who keep humans locked inside of a barren landscape like cattle, only allowing those deemed worthy enough to be a yearly sacrifice to cross. 

But it's the reality. Your reality. 

The truth is very much that your own home is a slaughterhouse for rapacious beings lurking in the forest. Ones who demand a sacrifice. Meat.

You know this, of course, because you've seen what happens to those deemed worthy. 

They leave, dressed in silk, adorned in gems, and return as a pile of bones. Ones stripped, picked clean. Hollowed out. The milky surface bears the marks of scars in the shape of teeth. False starts, gnaw marks—the gods feast on your people, they satiate their hunger on the townsfolk, and in exchange the land blooms. 

This facet is the most important—especially when you spend most of the year on the verge of succumbing to starvation. 

It’s said that the garish tradition started after a devastating wildfire tore through the forest. A given, since boreals are wont to burn. Thrive, even, on the raging fires that crackle through the thicket. It burned for seven days, and decimated the local wildlife to half a fraction of what it once was. The accumulation of charred wood and ash left behind a thick, desolate stratum of podzol that suffocated the once fecund land—irrevocably changing things for the worst.

Without any fertility in the soil to grow crops—an already arduous task with the floor of the coppice being covered in a thick layer of dead leaves, pine needles, lichen, and moss to begin with—the primary source of food was dwindling. The wildlife had either perished in the vicious fires, or fled to higher ground near the base of the mountains, leaving behind an insubstantial river with a low population of fish, and whatever happened to linger—mainly small, burrowing prey. 

It wasn’t enough. Isn’t. Not in these subarctic temperatures.

And in their most desperate hour, their prayerful sobs were answered the next morning. 

(how benevolent of the gods—)

After the bones are returned, deers stand, placid and docile, in the open field, as if waiting to be taken, eaten. The charred husks of the berry trees sprout, blossoming year-round. Highbush cranberry, cloudberries, bearberries, bog blueberries. Foraging lush bushels of chokecherry, and wild mushrooms—great swaths of fairy rings, birch milkcap, musutake, black moreal. The peatland becomes mineral-rich. Harvests of hearty vegetables—potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots and other hardy vegetables.

You quench your hunger on the bountiful offering, ignoring that it was grown in blood. It's easy to ignore the empty house, the space where someone you grew up with once occupied when your stomach is full.

But it never lasts. 

Everything dies eventually. The gossamer falls. The deer meat hung on the drying rack rots. The hares flee, and the berry bushes perish. The potatoes rot. Turn toxic. Anything jarred or stored makes you sick.

You're at the whim of the gods.

And then—

Another bone appears beneath the spruce tree. Another body snatched from their bed in the dead of night. 

—rinse, repeat. 

It’s an honour, they say with rotten meat between their teeth, and a gaping hole in their bellies. You should be honoured that the gods picked you. Deemed you worthy.

You can't bring yourself to see it that way. It always felt like living inside of a cage. Being fattened up, prime for the picking. But it doesn’t matter much what you think—there's no escape. Not even for those lucky enough to be chosen. 

They're revered, canonised, and utterly unenviable because the reality is that no one wants to die. At least not without the freedom of choice. And this doesn't just strip it away—it flays it. Carves it from bone. 

(but oh, what little choice you have, anyway—death by hunger, starvation; death by drowning; or—

Sustenance for the gods.)

And as they lay wreaths of gold and emerald on their head, you can't help but picture a shackle instead. 

But you don't dwell on it much. You raise hens for a living, and sell their eggs in the market. What good would a chicken farmer be to a god? 

It'll never be you.

Until it is. 

They come for you at dusk, and it's every bit of the wild tales you've heard as a child, right down to the small details. Men in black, billowing cloaks lead you to a temple made of sandstone and iron. A monk chanting about the sorry state of your poor soul.

(maybe the gods have mercy on us all—

and may they choke to death on your ribcage.)

You're pushed into a chamber, stripped of your rags, and thrown into a large basin filled with scented oils of jasmine, waterlily, and amber. They scour every inch of your skin, and tut about the dirt under your nails as if you all weren't in the same sorry state as each other.

It's decidedly clinical for something that is supposed to be such a great honour. Detached. You feel less like a sacred offering as the evening passes and more like a descaled fish, ready for the fryer. It eats at you. This fear pulses wetly in your throat. 

The horror might come later—at midnight, when you try, and fail, to sleep. Thoughts plagued with all the unknowns lurking just out of sight. A paltry few hours spent being primed and plucked and decorated—not unlike your chickens that end up on a spit being roasted over an open fire. Trussed up with butter, garlic, thyme and rosemary.  You wonder if they, too, felt sacred when you'd snatched them up after spending a whole season getting them perfectly plump on lettuce, chard, and fresh grains.

The parallels feel almost ironic, and you wither in the glare regret casts as you sit in front of a large vanity, staring at your clean cheeks—not yet painted on with the dizzying assortment of blushes and crushed pigments the woman said they'll use tomorrow when you're ready for it (as if you ever could be)—and trying not to fall into abject despair. 

Death this time tomorrow. 

You suppose it's only your fault for thinking yourself differently from the rest. Unpickable. A joke in hindsight.

You spend your last night on earth staring outside your window, gazing at the pale moon, and trying to avoid the shadows in the forest. The ones that drool, and bark—singing for your blood. 

Something is out there. You can feel it in the air like a burgeoning storm. Feel it's eyes on you from the sprawling treeline. Waiting, hiding in the shadows; some rapacious beast on the prowl. 

You're just not entirely certain it could be likened to a god. 

The guards, your escorts, are led by a man who introduces himself as Graves, as if he hadn't met you before. 

Under the watchful eyes of the elders, he's a near-perfect gentleman. Careful in the way he regards you, considerate to a fault. Friendly. Open. He bows his head when he speaks to you, and it's always hushed. Softened. Respectful. 

It's only when they turn back toward the village that the hand on your forearm tightens. 

“Now,” he drawls, tugging you toward him. His tongue pokes against the inner skin of his cheek. “We got, ah, some ground rules to go over, sweetheart. Despite what they might have told you, tonight is a very special night for us.”

You've heard it all before. Offer a nod in response. 

He steamrolls through it. “Truth be told, I don't know what's going to happen when you wander through those trees, but what I know isn't going to go down is you trying to make a break for it. See, we're pretty, uh, experienced with this. We've got men all over the place. Dogs ready to hunt you down.”

His hand snakes around your wrist, squeezing tight. You feel the grind of your bones, and try not to wince. To show fear. It's too early for that yet. Not when you haven't seen what lures within the thicket. 

“Don't make us have to hurt you, sweetheart,” he croons. “They don't like damaged goods.”

It's with that warning that they bring you to the rotted remains of the old spruce tree. Water froths around the log, spraying icy mist over the vibrant green moss. 

One slip, you think—

Three years ago, a teenager decided to test the currents for himself. He waded into the water until it was chest deep, laughing with his friends back on shore. It's fine, he hollered. It's barely pulled me at all—

And then, as if a hand from below grappled his ankle and yanked him down, he was gone. No flailing. No screams. He didn't buoy and bob the water, struggling against the unseen current, he was just gone. Taken. 

His body was never found. None of them are.

(a little part of you is convinced an equally malevolent being, god, lives in those depths, devouring the hapless fools who try to test what happens when you battle against a starving river.

this, though, has never been proven. and most just think you're a little mad for it in the end.)

You think about him as you feel the cold water spit against your bare ankle—

Bare, because the gods have little need for clothing on their dinner, and they dressed you in nothing but a thin, silk robe. No footwear. Maybe because that, too, isn't needed on a meal or because they're worried that once you scramble across the log, you'll try and run through broken pine needles and stinging furze. 

How silly of them, though.

Trying to survive a subarctic forest that thrives on setting itself on fire this time of the year is not something you planned on. 

You think of that boy who drowned, and—

“And I'm supposed to go through here—? Just walk across this log?”

One of the guards brushes his fingers over your nape, muttering prayers under his breath. It shudders across your skin. 

Graves nods, looking contrite, but he can't quite hide the fervid excitement in his withering gaze. “Yep,” he drawls, popping the p. “Straight on through, and if you're good enough, the rest of us will have a nice year.”

Acid pools on your tongue. If you're good enough. You swallow it down. “And if I'm not?” 

“I'll, uh, have to hunt you down. And you won't like what happens when I find you.”

“Can't be much worse than what's going to happen to her soon,” someone jeers. It lands like a punch to your gut. 

“What's going to happen to me?” Your voice shakes. 

Graves shrugs. His smile is all teeth. “You'll meet the gods, of course.”

“An honour.”

You baulk. “Right.”

His eyes roll, listing toward the midnight sky. The moon is large. The ring around it looks red. 

“It's time,” he decides and places his hands on your shoulders. “Now, get moving, little girl. And you better be on your best behaviour, now.” 

The or else is unsaid. You hear it like a gunshot through the unnatural silence of the forest, anyway. 

“And if I fall in?”

“You best pray you don't. I'll come in there myself to get you.” 

“Accidents happen—”

There's a howl. It cuts through the air like a knife. 

“What was that?”

“You're pissin’ them off—” Graves’ fingers tighten around your wrist once more. “You aren't the first to try it. Won't be the last. But let me tell you one thing: it never works. Ever. They'll drag out, and I promise, it'll be so much worse for you when they do.”

The howling grows louder. Closer. You tremble. 

Something blooms in your hindbrain, a once dormant piece of yourself coming to life under the pale moonlight. Roll over, it whispers. Submit. 

You swallow down acid on your tongue, and fight the urge to dry heave into the bushes. 

You don't want to roll over. You want to run—

Graves lets go of your arm, and gives you a shove. “Get to it. Don't got all night.” 

Shakily, you step onto the log. The soles of your feet sink into the lichen. It's soft, porous. Damp. The air around you is electrified, smelling strongly of ozone. Something heavy, atmospheric. The air before a lightning strike. It congeals in your throat, thickening on your tongue. 

Had you not caught the fresh scent of death clinging to the air beneath it, you might have found it enticing. An ambrosial cocktail that tickled along your synapses, curled, protectively, over you. 

But rot is heavy in your nose. The smell makes you nauseous. 

“Go on,” Graves goades, sounding irritated. “Before I drag you there myself.” 

They murmur prayers as you place one foot in front of the other, crossing the narrow log. Maybe their hymnals reach some higher power because you find yourself stepping onto a soft bed of upturned soil and moss on the other side, the raging river a distant memory. 

Too bad, you think, feeling dazed, overwhelmed, as you gaze into the unfathomable black forest that yawns out beyond you. You wish they choked on their prayers. You wish you fell in. 

“Keep going straight,” Graves calls, his voice a mere echo against the howling winds and the roaring river. “And if you try to run, I'll hunt you down, little lamb.”

The forest carries an almost unnatural silence as you trudge through the thicket, weaving around towering white spruce and gnarled Jack pine. Fireweed and lupine nips at your heels. 

Its absence of sound is jarring. No birds, insects, animals—not even your footfalls make any noise, covered by the lichen blanketing the forest floor. All you can hear is your haggard breath as you traverse through bushels of dense cloudberry, and ferns. 

This feels purposeful—the world falling silent in the face of a deadly predator—and you wish there was more light streaming through the sparse treefall gaps in the canopy where threads of thin moonlight spill in. It barely grazes the most eaten floor, and you rely most on a trail of rowans and willows to serve as your guide. 

Unease is a malevolent friend digging talons into your neck. 

It warns you, in clandestine whispers, of the unimaginable horror that lay before you. Urges you to run, to escape. The highlands, the mountains, can offer sanctuary. The white death might take you first, sure, but is that worse than becoming dinner for gods?

Gods. Beasts. Monsters. Some abomination that lures in the shadows between the towering white spruce, in the weeping willows that droop in sorrow as you pass.

You can see them, it hisses. Feel them in the underbrush. In the dip of the aspens. The lurch of the oaks. They're waiting, hungry—

You should run.

You want to.

Succumbing to hypothermia over being roasted on a poke—if they even bother to cook their meat before they eat it. This line of thinking, this thread, makes you wonder what will happen if they just eat you alive. Like the grizzlies that used to hide in the forest.

Your heart thunders. Something in the unfathomable dark growls.

Run. Run—

As if privy to your skittish thoughts, the forest itself seems to bend, opening up. A treefall gap illuminates a small grove in the thicket. You hear something outside of your own breath and the unnatural, guttural snarls for the first time since you entered: running water. A waterfall.

You step into the clearing, heart pounding in your chest. The heavy tenebrous of the forest yields to the harsh moonlight spilling, intrusively almost, into the coppice. In the sudden visibility, your eyes adjust, minutely, to the ethereal divide of nature.

Despite the garish nightmare you're about to experience, this small patch of land is breathtaking. Even through the horror, the fear, its beauty is inescapable, and incredibly out of place. 

A secluded basin is nestled between a dense forest with a winding stream cutting through the middle. A boulder juts up from the lip, large and imposing, and it's there where things begin to shift. Tilting your world sharply on its axis. 

At first, you think there must be a mistake. 

Instead of a monstrous being, an unfathomable god, there are just two men in a clearing. 

Two normal men. 

The first is sitting, relaxed and spread out, on the boulder. One hand is wrapped around his knee pulled up loose to his chest while his left dangles off the face of the rock. His other hand is pressed flat to the rock behind him, holding him aloft as he reclines. 

The dangling heel kicks off the rock, sending his leg into a lazy swing. He repeats it. Mindless. The picture of languor. 

And that's what he gives off—

An airy sense of impish ease. 

It's reflected in his mien as well. From his hair—wild and untamed, coiffed into a messy mohawk with the sides shorn down—to the small grin he wears, lips crooked up into half a grin as he, too, takes you in. Playful, you think. Puckish.

He's big, you note. Broad shouldered. A tapered waist. His biceps bulge. Thighs flex. And you know, then, that he could crush you with his bare hands.

He leans forward when you appear, eyes latched on to you, wide and unblinking. An eerie sense of foreboding begins to permeate your guts as his unrelenting stare continues.

“What is this—?” You start, but the words are stolen from your mouth when you glance to the side, suddenly aware of the behemoth leaning in the shadow of the boulder. 

You thought you knew what fear was before. Eyes in the dark, whispers in empty rooms. Shadows tucked into corners, moving silkily along the walls. Footsteps echoing yours. Your name hissed through the weeping leaves of the draping willows. The clock ticking down the final minutes to your death. Graves and his warnings—run, little rabbit, and we'll hunt you down. Fingers twisting on your arm, bruising bone. 

None of that compares to this. 

The majority of his body was hidden behind the boulder, angled perfectly to downplay the sheer, unimaginable size of him. He’s cut from obsidian, bathed in black. The tight trousers he wears do little to hide the way his thick thighs, wider than the trunks of the firs behind him, bulge when he walks.

Seeing him walk out without making a single noise, deadly and silent, has your heart rabbiting in your chest. Something primal rears. A fear that curdles inside your chest. 

He wears the shape of a man—a pastiche, a masquerade—but the fit is uncanny. It's a farrago, a mosaic, of what a man should look like, but where the imitation ends is in his eyes. Black holes. Pits. 

You think of the Sheol. Purgatory. These awful, wretched places folded, condensed, and forced into devastating, abyssal blue.  He says nothing, just stays silent. Looks almost bored as he takes you in. Impassive.

The impish man introduces them after a beat—Johnny and Ghost (fitting, you think, for a man who looks like a wraith)—and says nothing else about what this is, what they are. 

Not human. Not in the slightest. You can see tendrils of smoke curling off their skin, wisps of something diaphanous that coils in the air around them. Silken, black strands. It's mesmerising. Hypnotic. 

It's in this strange dissonance between their preternatural appearance and the shadows that congeal around them, ephemeral, static, that your unease takes root. Something is off about this. Something is wrong. 

The wires in your head fire. The electrical jolt bellows at you to run—

As if he hears these thoughts, the man cut from Everest shakes his head, agitating the wisps of curdled smoke pouring out from around him. 

Fear gnarls over you. Keeps your feet from moving. 

A good thing, too, because the other man—impish, dogish—grins at you, all daggered teeth, deadly canines, and takes a step toward you. The way he watches you is keen. Sharp. Hungry. 

There's no escape.

Cheekily, he calls you hen, and doesn't seem particularly bothered to learn your real name. But you suppose no one ever stops to know the name of the pig they're going to eat—they just enjoy the roast. 

(The thought makes you shiver.)

He holds his hand out after a beat, eyes drilling into yours, and waits for you to slip your palm into his. Maybe you're meant to. The way he holds his gaze on you is expectant. Eager. 

No one bothered teaching you the proper way this was supposed to go, but you've seen the aftermath. Cleaned, picked bones. Teethmarks digging deep into the surface. Insides hollow with the marrow sucked out. 

They were gnawed on—something everyone seemed quite eager to ignore. 

(it's an honour to be chosen—

you fill in the blanks. colour in the lines with the sharp edges of his teeth as they gleam, deadly, in the jaundiced light. 

—and eaten.)

It fits. The way they look at you is famished. Starved. As if they hadn't a meal in aeons, and you—a sweet, tender lamb—stumbled upon these rapacious wolves in the dead of night, all vulnerable and soft. Easy prey. 

In the middle of the clearing, his hand wavers. His brows pinch. 

You've done something wrong. Broken an unspoken rule. 

Roll over, roll over, roll over—

But you can't bring yourself to touch him. 

There's a chasm between the threshold of his open palm and yours, a gaping maw. Step over the line, and doom yourself to the whims of this Cimmerian beast and his Stygian king. 

You'll go back as bones. Ones buried with all the others as the people in your village plug their ears and cover their eyes, pretending they can't hear the growling through the forest. The screams. They'll parade you around for a little while, just long enough for the fervour of your massacre to wane, and the promise of luxury tomorrow to settle in. 

They'll have a feast in your honour, and eat the things you no longer can. Telling lies over cherry pie to fill in the blanks when they realise they have no idea who you were until your name chiselled into bone became the most important thing about you. 

It angers you. 

Fuck them. You take a step back. You'll run if you have to. Shake off them and the dogs. And if you don't, if you can't—

Well. Either way, you'll be eaten alive. 

Johnny's brows crease further. A gorge splitting between them. You think he might be disappointed by your choice. Hurt, even, when you flinch back from his reach. The human emotion he wears looks real enough that you could easily trick yourself into pretending not to see the sharp flush of anger on his cheeks when you, a mere mortal, refute him, a god. 

Almost. 

But it's there—hidden behind hazel parapets.  

Though, he hides it much better than Ghost. 

There's a crackle. Ghost huffs, his broad chest expanding with his exhale. It's a reminder of how massive he is. How imposing. 

He lifts his hands and you know that he could crush your skull without any effort at all. Like pinching an insect between his thumb and forefinger. 

You shudder. 

“Tryin’ to run, pet?” He drawls, crossing his arms over his chest, and the low timber of his voice curls around your hindbrain like smoke. 

It's not quite anger that permeates the air around him despite the ice in his tone. No, this is muted. Rougher. Saturated with mirth. 

You suck in his breath. He finds this amusing.

“Need to be brought to heel, I reckon,” he's saying as if you were an untamed animal instead of a person. Housebreak the feral cat before it pisses all over the place. 

You glare at him, bearing your teeth. 

“I'm not a dog—”

“Nah, dogs ain't half as lippy as you.” He volleys, rolling his thick shoulder back like he was readying himself to take a swing. “But you'll learn soon enough that this cheek isn't going to get you any rewards.”

You don't want any of his rewards. Angrily, you swipe at your stinging cheeks, as if to wipe the humiliation from your skin. It's on the tip of your tongue to snap back, vitriolic words curdled milk in the back of your throat, but he doesn't allow you to spit it out. 

“What's this?”

His tone is peculiar. Flinty. He stares at your wrist, stone-still. 

And it's this, the unnatural silence that permeates around him as he glares holes into your skin, at the burst blood vessels underneath your flesh, pooling thickly in the form of a handprint that decidedly is not theirs, that it all seems to hit you. 

This whole time, you've been battling with this sense of cosmic dread, trying to fight yourself on whether or not you have the mental resilience to fully give in and believe the things that flaunt itself in front of you. 

The curls of smoke drift off their bodies as if their actual size is much too vast to fit in the skin they picked, and it leaks from their pores. 

Seeing him go eerily still reminds you that despite the same tongue they speak in, they're still monsters beneath the façade. Something archaic and unknowable. 

Johnny leans over, and before you can move, his hand lashes out, taking hold of your wrist. His fingers trail over the damage buried beneath your skin, and something shifts, fractures, across his face. His grip tightens. Fingers shackle around you. 

He looks very much like a snarling dog when he feels the contusion under your skin—fangs bared, canines sharpened to find points. You stumble, but his iron grip doesn't leave much room to fall. 

“Who did this?” it's mangled in his throat. Rasped out between clenched teeth. 

You don't understand their concern, their anger. “What does it matter? You're going to eat me, anyway—”

“Gonnae eat somethin’, hen, but it won’t be you.”

“For now,” Ghost's tone is still measured, firm, but the way he looks you up and down, like the centrefold of a feast, makes you shiver. Has heat licking across your skin. It feels like condemnation. A basin of sin. 

They're meant to be gods, you think, distant and unsure. And yet, you'd quicker liken them to something demonic, Mephistophelian, than to anything holy. 

“They didn't leave us much choice, hen,” is what Johnny says when screams erupt through the dense forest, rattling the treeline. You startle, jumping back. Johnny grips you tighter. 

“Don't worry—” be not afraid, you think, a touch hysterically, hand flying to the hollow of your throat when you meet the mirth-saturated eyes of Ghost. “We won't hurt them,” Johnny snorts behind him. He shifts. “Much.”

It's added as an afterthought. The skewed afterbirth of their mordant humour.

You don't have much time to dwell on it. Through the mouth of the clearing, a face emerges, gaunt and ashen. One by one, they march. Driven by an instinctual tug you can't begin to fathom until the treeline is filled in with the faces of the men who brought you here. They stare back at you—terrified, uncertain, angry, accusatory, as if this is your fault, and you shiver harshly in the arms of the men who paraded them here because you know, deep down, it is. 

You're not sure why they're here, but the contemptuous looks thrown your way make you think they don't, either. 

Graves steps forward first, his brown eyes sweeping across the clearing, calculative, assessing, before landing on you. Something ugly twists across his expression, hidden by the shadows that drape over his brow. It's fleeting. Brief. And then it's gone, tucked away. His pallid demeanour is a mask hiding that viciousness below—something the bruises on your arm know all too well. 

“What's this?” He says, and you commend him on the unaffected lilt in his tone as he stares Ghost right in the eyes. “Finished with your dinner already?”

Beside you, Johnny shifts. His body coils. Tenses. An angered cobra rattling out its warning trill. He moves closer to you, shielding you with the bulk of his body as if these men—mortals—were more of a threat to you than himself. 

On the opposite side of you, Ghost just watches. Frigid, unmoving—eerily so. A predatory tiger low in the grass, stalking its unassuming prey. 

“Didn't, ah, like our offering this year?” He's asking, hand sweeping out toward you. “We have more. Prettier ones with less bite to them. If that's what you prefer.”

They talk about you as if this whole affair is transactional—cattle sold on the side of the road. You think you've given away hens with more dignity and respect than these men seem to have for you. 

“You've hurt her,” Johnny's tone has gone soft. Low. “We told you, didn't we? Untouched.”

He looks nervous. “She's a wily little thing, you know. Tried to make a break for it. We had to get her here, didn't we?”

It's a lie. The echo of it rents the air.

"Wrong thing to say."

Someone moves. You'd have thought it was Johnny who struck first, with how tense he it, but when you glance back, he's beside you still. Holding your arm, eyes widened. Wild. Feverish. 

When you turn around, Ghost's massive frame seems to have doubled in size. The shadows you'd seen curling around him congeal, turning corporeal. 

The men run, scattering through the clearing. 

They don't get very far. You can hear the crunch of bone when Ghost disappears behind them. The screams—

“Stay here,” Johnny whispers, hazel eyes blazing with an archaic hunger you can’t begin to unravel. “We’ll get him. I'll skin him alive for hurtin’ what's ours.”

You crouch behind the boulder with your hands over your ears, childish and terrified, and try not to think about the sounds you can hear echoing through the clearing. Ripping, tearing. The crunch of bone. Something falls by your feet. You squeeze your eyes tight. 

Monsters. They're monsters. No god could ever do the things they do. 

You bow your head, as if in prayer, and try to ignore the way some wires in your head begin to misfire. Because the thing is: you should be afraid—are afraid—but a broken part of you can't help marvelling at the majesty in the way they move. 

There's something to be said about the way a man eats, you think. And they're absolutely foul about it, feral. 

You shiver. Something slinks out, oozing tendrils wrapping around your head, digging talons in your mind. Poisoning you from the inside out—

Or maybe just waking up. 

“Good. You didn't run. Y’don’t have to be afraid, hen.”

Johnny's wiping his bloody mouth with the back of his hand when he walks around the boulder to get you. He holds a gore-drenched hand out for you to take, the same one you refused earlier. You slink back, and stand on your own. It throws him. You can see the brief frown beneath the viscera covering his mouth. 

Ignore it, you think, curling your hands into fists. His disappointment doesn't make you ache. 

“We're not gonnae hurt you—”

“Would hav’ been stupid to try. I'd have hunted you down,” he eyes the tremble in your hands, a nasty smirk pulling at the corners of his bare mouth. “But maybe that's just what you needed, eh, sweetheart? A good chase and hard shag in the dirt? Fuck the disobedience right outta you. Maybe I ought to.”

“He's a softie on the inside,” Johnny drawls, and it's fond. Fond. As if he hasn't heard the horrific things that slipped, oily and corrosive, out of Ghost's mouth. “Just gotta be good, hen, and we'll be good t’ya, too.” 

They speak to you as if you were a wayward child in need of corporal punishment, and not an adult whose life was irrevocably changed in a matter of hours. Who just watched men turn into monsters and devour someone whole while they tried, futilely, to run away. 

It angers you, but you don't let it take hold because deep down, you know it's hollow. Graves is no one to you but a face in a sea of people.

The thought sticks, tarry-slick, to the walls of your chest.

They let it pass, speaking to each other in low tones. The chase, the slaughter, seems to have some effect on their moods. Johnny is restless, and agitated. He skirts around Ghost, taking swipes with his words; their idle banter filling the clearing as they regal the thrill of the hunt. 

Ghost, too, seems filled with frenetic energy, but it's mild compared to Johnny. He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, jaw gnashing under the skull mask stained with blood. 

You're not sure what their relationship is, but it feels ancient. Unknowable. The way they look at each other holds so much weight that you feel the pill of it even several paces away from them. As if they're the only two in the world, and everyone else is just getting caught up in their gravity. 

Why, then, they chose you is a mystery. One you will doubtless get any answers to. 

But the conversation loops back to you before you can ask (what are you, why me, who are you—)—to your bared teeth and tense shoulders; your disobedience—and you fight back the urge to flee as it leaps up to the surface. Get away, get away—

“But she was good,” Johnny is saying, and there's a strange lilt to his tone. Softer than when he spoke about the damage to your wrist, than when he told you to stay put. It's featherlight. The echo of it is a comfort. “So good for us, eh, Lt? Good girls deserve rewards.”

“Good, huh?” Ghost drawls. “Then why don't you give her some pats on the head, Johnny?”

It makes you bristle. Flinch. “Don't you dare—”

“There it is again. That bite.” Something sparks in his dark eyes; a fire on the edge of an alluvial fan. “Gonna have to do somethin’ about it, aren't we, pet?”

There's madness in the arsenic white of his eyes. A fever. The heat spreads, the blaze catching everything in its path. Johnny stands beside him. You watch as that field of hazel and elm begins to burn. 

“We'll be good t’ya,” he's saying, and something inside of you—old, archaic; an ancestral toll—starts to ring once more. 

Stay still, it says. Bare your neck, your belly. If you're good, if you're quiet, the predator won't eat you whole—

Reluctantly, you submit. 

“Good,” he purrs. The satisfaction in his tone is a dagger cutting through the fraying strands of your crumbling resolve. “Don’t worry, love; we'll cut them out of your chest and fill the hole with ourselves.”

It's Johnny who touches you first. 

His hand presses softly to your cheek, fingertips brushing the curve of your cheekbone. Reverent. Delicate. There's blood on his hands. He doesn't seem bothered. Doesn't seem to care at all that it's leaving broken smears on your face, fingerprints from the men he—

Ate. Consumed. Butchered. 

(but your home was always an abattoir, wasn't it?)

It's tacky. Cold. You can feel it drying, rotting, on your flesh, and you want to be sick—are nauseous from it, even—but Johnny's leaning down, as if he knows, and steals your mouth in a bloody kiss before you can move. Run, flee. 

(you wonder how far you'd get before they caught you. or if you'd even get very far at all—)

Is it Graves you taste when his tongue snakes past your lips, running across yours? Playful. Coy. Or perhaps the officer who brushed his fingers along your nape, murmuring words of prayer as they led you here. 

Maybe it's all of them. All of them. 

Oh, god—

Johnny pulls away. 

“Don't worry about them, hen,” he breathes across your numb lips. “Just focus on us—”

As if to reinforce his words, you feel Ghost move behind you, bracketing your body in. Caged between their mass. Imprisoned under their attention. 

His hands settle on you, one falling on your waist, pinching your flesh to the bone. Tight. Unyielding. You know, at that moment, he wants it to hurt. An admonishment, perhaps, for thinking of the people they threatened to carve out of your chest. The other curls around your neck and the broad expanse of it swallows you whole. 

“Easy,” he mocks when he feels your pulse hammering against his palm. Skittish. “Do as Johnny says, pet. I promise you'll like it more that way.”

The underlying command is ever present in his tone. A constant. Brassbound. Or else. Or else—

You shiver when he leans down, masked chin nuzzling against your crown. His hand squeezes once. Good job. 

The silent praise thrills you. It shouldn't. You're too aware of what they are, what they do and what they've done, for it to fill the barren hole in your chest, the one they threatened to stuff full of themselves, but, oh, does it leak. Seeps down the split edges, pooling at the bottom. A small, serous layer filming over. Congealing. 

No, no—

You don't want this. God, you do. Damn you, you do—

“Thas’it,” Johnny is slurring, wet and messy, across your chin, tongue snaking out to catch the spittle that dribbles down the corners of your slackened jaw. “Let us in, hen. We'll be so good’t ya. So fuckin’ good—”

“Johnny.” 

Simon utters the word and it sounds like a warning. A threat. But maybe much of everything he says has that quality to you because Johnny doesn't whimper, or answer the command. He doesn't stop—

He groans, low and throaty, and then he's kissing you again, drowning you. Stealing the air from your chest. Sucking it straight out of your lungs. His tongue presses into yours, playful licks turning demanding, harsh. He's devouring you. Feasting. 

You'd seen this man—beast monster creature demon—eat people. Break open skulls and slurp on grey matter. Rip off limbs and eat the tissue, the muscle, like it was a delicacy. Gouge out eyeballs, and swallow them whole. Fingers, toes. Tongues. He'd sucked out the marrow and then threw the hollowed bones of Graves at your feet. 

(Ghost tossed the hand that touched you after, completely skeletal as he'd chewed on the cartilage like it was grizzle—)

They're horrifying. 

And yet—

You kiss back. Are kissing him back. Chasing the softened band around the tip of his tongue with yours, brushing the flat of it over his taste buds, curling over his teeth. It's strange, odd, you're not sure what is happening to you, just that he tastes divine. That the blood between his teeth is ambrosial on your tongue. Heady. The texture is thin, watery, and you whine low in your throat, wanting more of it, more of him—

But there's screaming in your head. You don't want this. Shouldn't. 

His tongue glides over your bottom lip, and then he's sucking it into his mouth, biting down into your soft flesh with blunt teeth. Moments earlier, you'd seen those teeth crush bone. There's fear, but it's far away. Muted. It feels like it's hidden underwater, trapped beneath the flood of endorphins that lash through your veins, white-hot. 

It's good. You like kissing him—

His hand slides up your waist, coming to rest on your heaving breast. The roughness of his palm gliding over your nipple has your toes curling. There's an ache inside of you, desperate to be filled, and you feel it pulsing in need when he traps your hardened nipple between his thumb and forefinger through the silk of your robe, pinching, tugging. You want his mouth on you. Want this wicked, sinful tongue all over your body. You need it—

Need him, need him, them—

Johnny grunts, the noise vibrating across your lips. The itching tingle under your skin is a shock. It jars you. You come back to your senses with the taste of warm blood on your tongue. Of Johnny rutting his hips into yours, his erection pressing hard, heavy, against you.  It's them. It's him—

He's making you lose yourself. Pulling at the splintered pieces of your resolve, your control until it comes loose, breaking away from the fractured wall that is your sense of self. Your agency. Your autonomy. 

You're struggling to catch up to the thinning threads of anger, disgust, fear, but they dance out of your reach. All you're left with is this emptiness that screams at you to satiate it. 

Johnny's hands drop to the sash around your waist. “Wrapped ye up, nice and pretty fer us.”

He leans in close, and you catch the scent of ichor. Of iron. It churns your stomach, and sours through you. You want to be sick. Want to turn away from him, but something keeps you in place. Something soft, warm. 

A sun-scorched cornfield after a rain shower. Coumarin. Something earthy, mild. Warm. You bask in it, leaning in close. Wanting more, more—

Ghost's massive frame moulds to your back, and the heat of his body is an inferno nearly as oppressive as his presence. It jars through you, shaking the reverie that fell, soft as snow, around you. 

If Johnny smells of life, of fresh bloom, then Ghost, by contrast, smells of death. Rotting leaves. Damp soil. 

Their smells are sharp. You breathe them in, letting their scent stain your lungs. 

He slides his bearish hand over your cheek, and the way it spans the entire length of your face has soft shudders rippling through your body. He's a mountain. A behemoth. You feel the power in his body as he rests it against yours, fragile. Vulnerable. The contrast makes you sick. 

The way he touches you, too, makes you feel nauseous. The way they both do, like they're owed the privilege. It's possessive, familiar. Reverent, in small shades. It makes that oily thing that slinked out in the wounds trauma wrought preen. Purring under the attention. Under their anchoring gaze. 

The part still feebly clinging to the old way of your life, when you'd play by the hungry shores and pretend you could not hear the rapacious growls from within the forest, rallies against it, knocking battered fists on the walls of its gilded prison. You shouldn't feel special in their arms. 

You're not the first, after all. 

The thought is a knife to your gut. A twisted, rotten feeling wells in the brutal aftermath.

You wonder if this is what they do to everyone they pick. Stripping them bare, ridiculing them—making a mockery of something that’s meant to be sacred, pure. It tugs at your chest, needling inside the empty space they promised they’d fill. 

“Do you always play with your food like this?” 

You didn't mean for it to slip out—especially not so fragile. Made of thin glass. 

They go still before you. 

Johnny's brows furrow. Ghost drills holes in the back of your head.

“Our food?” Johnny's asking, as if your town wasn't built as a banquet hall for them to feast on. “What are you on about, hen?”

“Jealous, are we?” His voice is a rasp. Gravel. “Guess we'll have to show you your place then, pet.”

Your place. You want to ask if that's by his foot, kneeling before him, or if it's on a platter, but he doesn't give you the chance. 

Your head is turned sharply to the side, fingers digging, harsh and unforgiving, into your jaw until it drops open to alleviate the ache. 

As Johnny works on taking your robe off, growling at the welts that line your skin, Ghost dips his fingers into your mouth, petting your tongue, nearly making you gag. Choke. 

“Stick it out,” he growls, and you're quick, mindless, to obey his command. “Good.”

He tastes of leather and gun oil. Briny from the blood under his nails. The dirt. 

It's the furthest thing from godly. 

The searing aftertaste of something ozonic, calcined, seeps down your throat. Sinful, wicked. You think of brimstone, ichor; ashes from psalms, and try not to gag. 

He takes a moment to stare at the soft, pink flesh held in his massive, scarred fingers, gaze darkening with something that looks like it might burn if you get too close. 

And then, satisfied with whatever he finds, he leans in, and spits on your tongue. 

You flinch, body jerking in their hold, but you're stopped from going too far by their hands keeping you in place. Shackled. 

It's hot. Wet. You feel it land in a thick glob in the middle, right above the blackened nail of his thumb. It begins to slide down the side when your lip wobbles under the weight of your shame, your embarrassment. 

It's degrading. It's awful. Gross. Your eyes flood with searing, angry tears. A watery, black distortion of yourself, drenched in lachrymose, glares at you from the domed surface of his ink-black eyes. 

“Swallow it,” he warns, letting go of your tongue. “And you better not waste a drop.”

There's char in those eyes. Something inside of you rears, the lingering remnants of an atavistic fear of the things that might burn you. It begs you to obey, to roll over and show him your soft, vulnerable belly. 

Something about this man makes you want to bare your neck in submission. 

You swallow. It burns going down. 

Your place, you think, tasting something vile on your tongue. 

“You're disgusting,” you spit, glaring at him. Both of them. 

“Mouthy little thing, aren't you?” 

“You spiton my tongue—!”

“Ungrateful, too.”

Johnny's fingers drag up your inner thigh, catching the slickness that drips from your core. He brings it up, letting Ghost see the glistening slick that coats his fingers. He spreads them, cheeks flushing at the strands that pull apart. 

You bristle, hot and full of shame, but the evidence of your arousal staining his fingers is damning. 

“Think she liked that, Ghost,” he whispers, reverent. His fingers twitch, body buzzing with a strange, kinetic energy. 

He hums. It's guttural. Low. “All bark, and no bite.” 

Johnny reaches for your robes, nodding along to Ghost's words. “Gotta tame the little hen,” he murmurs, but it's distant. Absent. His gaze turns molten when he looks at you. 

Tame. Like an animal. Like you're some untrained beast. More of that shame wells up inside of you at the sheer degradation of it all. You're rendered into nothing but a pet for them to toy with and then devour. 

Sickeningly, desire pools alongside the loathing. Uncontested by the slick dribbling down your thighs, the bare ache of your cunt clenching down around nothing. 

It's them, of course. Rewiring your head. Hewning you into a shape that fits their interest. A little pet for them to play with. 

You shudder. Wish it was only because of the chill on your skin as a drape of midnight silk falls over the forest around you, and the horrible shadows these monsters cast in the pale moonlight. But there's an eagerness in your pulse. A sense of anticipation that can't be blamed on fear alone. 

Deft, bloodstained fingers strip your robe off your shoulders, letting it fall to the lush grass below. His eyes are burning amber when they run the length of you, now bared to them both. 

“Gonnae fuck you now,” he's rumbling, desperate and hushed, and for a moment, you could almost trick yourself into thinking it's a plea. That he is begging for this, pleading to have a taste, but you know when Ghost pulls you back, letting Johnny drop to his knees on the forest floor, eyes fixed on the apex of your thighs, that the idea of asking never once crossed their minds. 

You should be honoured. 

The wicked gleam in Ghost's flinty gaze seems to reinforce this notion, cementing its place as a brassbound truism, a gospel for you to bend and pray at. 

Johnny unzips his trousers, and the sound of it cutting through the unnatural stillness of the forest makes you antsy for something you can't begin to let yourself think about. His clothes are left in a messy pile as he lays down on the grass, beckoning you closer. His gaze skirts away from you, to Ghost looming impossibly large over your shoulder, a silent conversation you don't understand—don’t think you ever could—and then Ghost moves. 

The heat of his body tattoos itself along the length of your back, searing and firm. You bump into him, and there's no give at all. It's solid. Unyielding. His chest rumbles. He drops his arm, looping his massive bicep around you, fixing it snug beneath your breasts, and pulls you flush against him. 

This close, you catch the scent of the woods lingering in the obsidian shadows that blanket him like a cloak. Cedar, pine. But there's something heavier beneath it all. Wet. Humus. Loam. Moss-covered rocks. Freshly dug dirt. He smells of the forest after heavy rains snuffed out a scorching wildfire. Calcine. Char. 

His hands are soft when he holds you. Gentle. Or, rather, as gentle as a man like him could be. He drags you down, perched above Johnny's cock—long, fat, and veiny—and the sudden deluge of trepidation that edges so softly into fear rears, makes you whine. 

“Stop—!” You gasp when your knees hit the soft grass, one teetering an inch off the ground by the breadth of his hips. “I've not—I’ve never—”

You can't bring yourself to say it. 

Ghost begins to purr. “Sweetest little thing, ain't you?” 

Johnny whines. “Gonnae make it good fer ya. Fer waitin’ for us.”

You want to lash out at that. Bite back. You didn't wait for them. 

But he's not listening. His eyes are buried in the place between your thighs. 

“Bring her here.” 

Ghost complies with a rough noise spilling from his chest. “Gonna get yourself a taste, Johnny?” 

“It's gonna be heavenly, Lt.”

They're not listening to you anymore, and really—they haven't been at all. Ghost pushes you further up the length of Johnny's chest until your thighs are being pried apart by the width of his face. Hovering over him like, bare, fills you with a keen sense of embarrassment. 

You sound shier than you'd like when you tremble, asking: “What if I hurt you?” 

Ghost chuckles. “Death by drowning? I think he'd thank you for it, pet.”

“S’okay,” Johnny's slurring, humid breath ghosting over your slit. “Won't hurt me, hen. Just—fuck—just sit on my face, pretty thing. Need t’taste you.”

It's the only warning he gives before he's pulling you down, letting your cunt rub against the stubble on his cheek. When his mouth is flush to your slit, he breathes in deep, and moans. It's filthy. And then he opens his mouth and his tongue presses between your folds, licking a long, rasping stripe up to your aching clit. The feeling ignites a heat unlike anything you'd ever felt before. An electric shock. A soft, wet heat. 

Johnny licks at your cunt like a man starved, grunting and groaning into you as if it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. His hands keep you anchored in place, unable to wiggle away from the scorching kisses he peppers over your clit—a little tease, he murmurs, for being so good. 

It's too much—this pleasure, unknown to you, is endless. Overwhelming. You gasp wetly, choking on your spittle as it leaks from the corner of your mouth. Everything is notched up, heightened, and then condensed to just the feeling of Johnny's mouth on your bare cunt, feasting. 

He devours you with a ferocity that leaves you breathless, punches a hole straight through your lungs until all the air you feebly gulp down slips out with a whine, a wheeze. 

You think you might fall. Might drop off the steep precipice, and shatter at the bottom. Broken. Unfixable. They'll take you apart—

And then you’re falling forward from a shove against your back. The only thing that saves you from hitting your face off the ground is Johnny's firm hands on your hips. You catch yourself on your palms, bracing them against the grass. Gasping at the suddenness of the assault, and the way it exposes you further, pressing your cunt harder into Johnny's face. 

“Ain't that a sight?” Ghost’s voice is pure sin as it washes over you, leaving goosebumps in its wake. 

Johnny takes the new position in stride, adjusting himself as he sickles on your clit. Your hand lifts, and settles on the length of his mohawk, fisting it tightly in a white-knuckled grip. 

Something is knotting inside of you, being pulled tight. Ripped asunder. 

Ghost's fingers are long, and thick. He circles them around your rim, softly. Teasingly. And then he's pushing one inside, stretching you. 

“Tight,” he rasps, and it sounds like praise. “Gotta loosen you up, don't we?”

A single finger feels like more than you can handle, and you flinch, tightening around him. His breath rushes out on a groan. 

“Ease up, pet.”

Easier said than done, you think, whining when he curls his finger, stroking your aching, sensitive walls. This, Ghost knuckle-deep and Johnny circling your clit cruelly with the tip of his tongue, is too much. It edges sharply into pain, into too much, too intense. A tug-of-war on your body, pulling you in the direction of sinful pain and unrepentant pleasure. 

You whine with it, hips squirming. You're not sure if you want to get closer, to take his fingers deeper, or to get away. And then adds another, pressing it in along side his index. The stretch is different, new. You mewl, fisting the blades of grass between your fingers. 

Johnny licks down, the tip of his tongue slicking Ghost's fingers as he scissors them deep inside of you. All the way to the last knuckle. He pisons his hand against your sopping, aching cunt, and the wet, lewd squelch has the tips of your ears burning. 

You're wrapped tight around his digits, and he coos mockingly at you.

“Takin’ two for me, pet. Good girl. Now take another—”

His ring finger circles your taut, raw rim. You flinch, keening. Johnny soothes the ache with his tongue, dipping it sloppily inside your aching hole. 

“C’mon,” he husks, pressing, pushing. It's tight. You feel the ache of the stretch deep in your belly. “Take it—” something gives. You gush around him, yowling in that heady mix of pleasure-pain. His knuckles knock against something inside of you that has your toes curling, your back arching. “That's it. That's my good girl—”

His voice is pinched, strained. The sound travels down your spine, liquid and white-hot, leaving you quivering in the aftermath. 

Below you, Johnny groans into your drenched pussy; the sound is wrecked, ruined. You tremble when the vibrations roll through your clit, nudging into that coil that spools, tightening inside of your belly. 

“Gonna come for me?” 

He quickens his pace, fucking his fingers into you with a raw aggression that makes your spine feel liquid, pooling with bliss. 

It knocks the air from your lungs, and makes you quiver. A plucked bow pulled taut—

Johnny's lips close around your clit, bullying it mercilessly with his tongue. It brings you to the brink, belly knotting. Twisting. Something coils, spools—

Then Ghost is leaning down, the mask pushed up to the bridge of his nose, and he sinks his teeth into your nape as he brutally fucks his fingers against a spot inside of you that makes your vision turn to static. 

It's the singeing pain and the blistering pleasure that makes you clench down tight on his fingers as he rides you through the high of your climax, howling some amalgamation of their names into the blood-scented night. 

“That's it.” The words are mangled in his throat. Bitter, charred. “So pretty when you come around my fingers like that.”

The taste of your blood is thick on his breath when he pressed his bared mouth to your sweat-slicked temple. The humid breaths ghosting across your damp skin has you shivering, body still buzzing with the heavy release of endorphins. It makes you feel heavy. Laden. You go slack in his arms, worn to the bone mentally and physically. Everything seems to catch up to you at once. 

It's almost as if they were expecting it, waiting for the crash. 

They pull you back, and you go easily in their arms. All soft and malleable, perfect for them to mould how they like. Ghost holds you aloft over Johnny's hips, fingers biting into your flesh. It burns. You press against it, embracing the ache. 

Johnny lines up, the weeping head of his cock pressed taut to your slit, sliding across your slick folds until he finds the place you burn hot, wet. He notches against it, the mushroomed tip dipping inside of your drenched hole, opening you up. 

The hands on your hip twitch, tightening. It's almost too much, and you whine into Ghost’s mouth, muffled slightly from the hard crank in your neck as he turns your head sharply, smothering you in those too intense kisses, the ones that feel like you're being slowly boiled alive. Cold, icy to molten in a steady incline that leaves you feeling so far away from yourself, lost amid the unrelenting simmer of his heat. 

He presses down on your hips. Johnny breathes out heavily when you take more of him in, your wet cunt stretching over his glands. 

Your eye cracks open, vision hazy, blurred from unshed tears that pebble along your lash line. It burns. It feels like you're being split in two. 

Johnny's head is angled off the soft mossy floor of the forest, chin pressed tight to his sternum as his eyes glued to the sight of you above him, narrowing in—unblinkingly, wide-eyed, and wild—at the place where he disappears inside of you. 

His eyes flash, liquid gold, when you're pulled down, flush against his pelvis. Swallowing him whole. Johnny twitches inside of you, cockhead pressing taut to your walls. You wail at the feeling of him pressed in deep.

“Fuck, hen,” he's whispering, reverent. “You look s’fucking good like this, don't’ye? Simon, oh fuck, Simon, have a look at’er.” 

You feel Ghost shift behind you, hooking his chin on your shoulder to stare, openly, at the place where you take Johnny into the root. He rumbles at the sight. You feel the reverberations rattle your bones. Dislodging cobwebs that weave over your common sense. 

“Look’it that,” he coos, all false warmth and softened edges. It brews a storm inside of your cunt—crackling heat, searing electricity. You clench, needily, on Johnny, and sob at the white-hot heat simmering in your core. “Stretched so pretty around your cock, Johnny.”

“Fuck, yeah,” he slurs the words out, drooling slightly. It makes Ghost snort, mocking. Cruel. His hands tighten around you. 

“The nights barely started and you're already panting like a dog in heat.”

Johnny bucks his hips with a groan, setting a sloppy rhythm of grinding his cockhead against an untouched place inside of you that fractures your vision into pieces and makes you throb. 

He's every bit of the dog in heat Ghost mentioned, pistoning into you like a man starved for it. Selfish, greedy, but there's a softness to his pace that belies the eagerness of his rut. 

With the sting of the stretch dulling to a sensation of fullness, pleasure licks across your skin. A damning feeling in the pit of your stomach, all liquid heat that threatens to drown you if you're not careful. 

The noise of him fucking into you from below is lewd and shameful, and sounds like it could fill the whole forest. The loud smack each time your hips meet; the wet squelch when slams his cock inside of you, balls slapping against your ass—the happy noise of a purring cunt, Ghost rasps, mouthing over your nape. 

But it's nothing, of course, to the litany of moans that are forced out of your mouth, high-pitched and desperate. 

“Thas’it,” Johnny's slurring, laid out beneath you like sin incarnate. Your hands scramble along the firm length of his chest, struggling to find purchase as he ruins you. “Feels good, aye, hen? Like it when I fuck you like this, don't ye?” 

That part of yourself that's still hurriedly looking for exits, for an escape route, wants to protest his claims, but there's a fire in your belly. The smoke billowing up your esophagus is choking it. 

Emotions whiplashing between fear, loathing, and something soft, something affectionate—a paradox you can't begin to unravel considering you barely know them. But it sits there, gleaming amongst the pleasure-pain that ripples down your spine. 

You want their approval, even though their attention sits in your stomach like a stone. Weighing you down. Anchoring you. The duality of it all crosses wires in your head, and makes you yearn for something. For them. 

You think hate it. Know, deep down, you should hate it more. 

Ghost cups his hand over your mons, fingers brushing over the flushed, tight seal of your rim. Having the bearish palm of his hand cup you like this, rough fingers stroking, petting, is too much, and you sob from it. From the intense heat, the searing pleasure, the biting pain, of it all. Pleads get tangled in your throat, caught on the warring sensations wracking your body.

You flinch back, and he coos, mocking and mean. You hate him, you think, hate this (hate, even more, that you don’t), but your silent curses go unheeded. Ghost curls around you like a boa constrictor, a noose—tight and unyielding—and makes a pleased noise in his throat when he spans the width of his hand over your pelvis and finds that the length of it swallows you whole. 

His size is immeasurable in a way that scratches at your hindbrain, almost as if he's changing his shape, flexing limbs and mass hidden from your mortal eyes. It makes you feel impossibly small in his arms, and there's fear—to be expected—but something prickles in the back of your throat when you see just massive, how ungodly, the sheer dearth between your sizes truly is. 

He's huge. A mountain. 

The fire is only fuelled further when his thumb gentles a rhythm over your clit, as if to distract you from the steady pressure he puts on Johnny's cock, forcing the stiff length into your back wall. The sudden stretch makes your knees tremble. Has a new, dizzying heat licking up your spine. 

“Ghost—”

The ache has you whining. Has Johnny's hands scrambling up, holding tight against the sides of your ribcage. He grunts, back arching when it makes you go impossibly tight around him. 

“Oh, fuck, hen—! Feels so fucking good—” he's slurring, cheeks flushed. Eyes hazy. He looks so devastatingly beautiful, laid out for you like this. A feast. 

It's easier to pretend with him, you find. 

Unlike Ghost, Johnny has an uncanny ability to seem human enough for you to blind yourself to the tendrils wisping, gossamer-thin, off his skin. Nearly translucent. A soft, satin cream to Ghost’s heavy, moody charcoal. 

You could almost make yourself believe that the smudge under his eye is just discolouration instead of the rotting blood of someone you used to know. His nails, his fingers, are all stained with the juice from strawberries you'd enjoyed during dinner. 

That the shadows in his eyes, the ones that coil and roll like a caged serpent, is just a trick of the light. 

Could, you think. But can't. 

Can't because he burns much too hot for a human man. Feels like chiselled stone between your thighs. 

And the hunger. 

It paints his expression a deep, forest green—rapacious, greedy—and brims from something that feels older than the earth itself. That ground you sit on a mere infant to the primordial being beneath you. And it might be. 

Neither of them has said what they are, but they've shown you enough. Ripping through a group of people in seconds until all that remained was discarded limbs, and torn appendages. Broken bones. A horrific bloodbath, over by the time it took you to whisper their names in a fractured plea. 

Ghost bit through muscle like it was tissue paper. Ripped apart guns and knives as if they were flimsy, plastic toys. 

It terrifies you. 

“You're so wet,” Ghost chides, as if he knows the trail your thoughts turned down, and wants to rub your disobedient nose in it. “Just a messy little cunt, aren't you?” 

The airy baritone of his voice has heat pooling in your lower belly. 

“No—” you try to refute him, try to fight back, but his thumb just presses harder into your clit in torturous punishment. “Ah, don't—”

And then he's pushing in, worming his finger in beside Johnny. 

The shock of it is electric. It buzzes through your nerves until they're charred, singed, with the thought of it alone. The burn in your cunt, the harsh, too-much stretch, the pressure, is dizzyingly sharp, and unshakeable. It aches. Makes your pussy throb—

“Makin’ room fer y’erself, Si?” 

Ghost grunts, the sound thick and raspy from the bend in his neck as he leers over your shoulder, watching the slick run down the back of his hand as he works his forefinger into your cunt, sliding it along Johnny's cock. It's neither a confirmation nor a denial, and the uncertainty has your head spinning. There's no way—

“Like that idea, pet?” 

“You won't fit, you won't—”

Humid breath curls across your cheek when he huffs, the airy chuckle bursting with unrestrained mirth. Ghost chides you with an abrading tut; a gentle admonishment for a cheeky child. The embarrassment of it all, the humiliation of being reprimanded like this, makes shame turns supernovae when he rubs his thumb, approvingly, over your clit when your protests fall silent. You can feel your muscles relax just a bit more, letting him worm the tip of his middle finger in with a searching stretch that makes you keen, whining at the white-hot burn of it all. It's too much—

You throb, shivering, at the wet, sinful squelch your drooling cunt makes when Ghost manages to push both fingers in together. 

“Good girl,” he drawls, and it's poison. “Won't fit, eh? I don't dunno about that, pet. Your little cunt seems eager for it, don't you think?”

“Oh, fuck, Si—” Johnny's hand comes up, cupping the back of Ghost's hand where your slick runs down to his wrist. “She's got ye all wet—”

You can't refute it. Not when you can see the slickness drenching his back hand, spilling all over Johnny's quivering stomach. 

Ghost chuckles again. “Could drown in it, Johnny.” 

“Ah, fuck, dinnae tease me like that—” 

He bucks into you slowly, and the sensation nearly makes you weep. With his cock rubbing against you, filling you so deep, and Ghost maliciously toying with a spot inside of your cunt that has you seeing stars, has molten heat pooling in your belly, you teeter on the brink of overstimulation, body pushed past the very edges of your mettle. 

Something has to give, has to break. You're glass in their overeager hands, fragile sides pressed upon by rotten, greedy fingers. The pressure has cracks forming, splinters. You feel raw, fractured; there's a pressure inside of you that grows laden with each jerk of Johnny's hips, each cruel swipe of Ghost’s thumb, tightening. Tightening. 

And then it pops. Breaks. You're coming around them, cunt throbbing like a heartbeat, drooling mindlessly at the rapturous pleasure buzzing through your marrow. 

They shatter you into basal parts, broken fragments. 

Neither seems particularly bothered to put you back together again. 

You come to—unaware, even, that you had passed out—with your head resting on a firm chest, ass pitched in the air, hips held in place by strong hands. There's pressure against you, inside of you, but it's different from before. 

Johnny groans into the spread cheek of your ass when you whimper, answering your feeble call. It's all so animalistic, primal. You tense. 

Beneath you, the chest you're splayed on top of rumbles. “Careful, pet. Johnny's gone through such trouble to stretch your little ass. Be a waste if you tensed up now, wouldn't it?” 

He rubs his bearish paws up and down your arms for a moment, in some twisted pantomime of comfort, before making his intentions known when he continues further down on the last stroke until he has one hand sliding around your hips, resting on the cleft of your ass, and the other curling beneath you, cupping your tender, messy cunt in his palm. The fit of them around you, in such intimate places you'd only ever dreamed of giving away to the person you love brings out a strange, sickly feeling in your gut. It's not a perfect fit. The hand he shoves between your thighs digs painfully into the bones of your inner legs. His fingers fold over themselves just to squeeze in.

But the rough, scorching hand on you is possessive. His dark eyes burn with it.

Mine, mine, ours. 

The hand on your ass slips lower, to where Johnny has your rim stretched taut around three fingers. Circling the stinging skin with the tip of his index. 

Johnny makes a low noise in his throat, and leans forward, his warm breath whispering across your sensitive flesh. Ghost's finger lifts. Johnny's chin rests on his knuckles. 

There's a wet, sucking noise. A gag. A muffled groan. A pop, then—

“Fuck, Si. Can still taste her on you—”

“Yeah? Go on, then. Lick her off me, Johnny. Clean me up.”

He does. You feel the whisper of his tongue as he licks Ghost's finger, sucking on it with a particularly lewd moan. 

Johnny pulls off with a pop. “Got you nice and wet."

Ghost presses his slick finger to your stuffed hole, petting around Johnny's knuckles, and maybe it's muscle memory from the last time he had his finger against you, but your body relaxes. Knows, immediately, what his intentions are. There's no sense fighting it. Not when you know what the pinch feels like when you do. 

He feels the way you slacken in his hold, and he purrs. 

“Quick study, huh? Good girl.”

He growls the last part out, a mangled tease in the thick of his throat. Rasping, pitched low. It licks across your hindbrain, coy and sensual, and pressing into that place inside of your head that aches at the mere notion of approval—especially from men like him, like them—and you can't help it. Can't stop yourself. 

You whine, arching back into it. Folding your body against the lines of praise skirting across your spine. A cerebral pleasure unlike anything they're doing to your body now. Being praised by someone who cuts his body into the mocking shape of a man, but leaks madness and apathy into the air like a poisonous gas should not bludgeon into that stupid little place inside your head that quivers at any semblance of approval, and yet—

Damn you, it does. 

Beneath you, Ghost’s eyes darken, sharpening with intrigue. Wet with his hunger. A starving beast on the prowl. You can see his mind whirring, locking in on this piece of vulnerability you dangle in front of his muzzle like a scrap of meat. 

He hums, chest rumbling with the low decibels. Content, for now, with this weapon you hand him, sharpened to a fine point to better flay your skin. It's a nasty look in his eyes. Full of something you can't name—something far too animalistic, primal, for your domesticated senses to hone in on, to interpret. 

That alone—this unnameable thing that flickers across blue scar tissue, dark and damning—makes you shudder, and you hate yourself for it. 

(but hate, even more, that you stopped being able to tell the difference between desire and fear with them; the two opposing sensations merging into a Frankensteinian beast with dangerous claws dipped in fresh poison.)

His reward is the tip of his finger pushing into your hole, cooing the whole time about how good you are, how good you take them, so pretty like this, ain't you? all loose and fucked stupid—

The stretch is sharp. Stinging. You wish it would ground you in some way. Shake loose the cobwebs that seemed to have knit over your dormant sense of self (agency, autonomy, propriety, respect—) until you come back to yourself, back to the fire you felt all your life. The one that burns like a wildfire in your veins. 

Maybe that anger might be enough to get you out of this, away from the jowls of the beasts who look at you sometimes like they want nothing more than to tear into your flesh, and gnaw on your bones. To ruin you. Gnash your atoms between their teeth, and snuff out the embers crackling in your misfiring synapses until you're a husk, a shell. 

Perfectly hollow so that they can stuff themselves in the empty space. 

You won't, won't—

But Ghost leans up, the veins in his neck bulging under the strain of keeping his head aloft, and he starts to nuzzle his masked lips over your nipples. The heat from his mouth bleeds through the cloth, and the contrast of warmth and the starchy scratch of his balaclava grazing your sensitive flesh has you mewling out, thrashing to get loose. 

He grunts, tightens his hand on your hip to keep you from moving, and bites your nipple, hard, through the fabric. A reprimand, you know, for daring to try and pull away. 

Johnny huffs behind you. “Cannae do that, hen. Might hurt you with all that squirming, so sit still.” 

He pats the hand—not currently three fingers deep inside of your ass—on your cheek as he says the last words. It's sharp, and stings. You blanche. 

You've grown accustomed to Ghost’s prickliness. The way he edges between being mocking, mean, and slightly cruel, to offering small morsels of praise and softness when you bend so prettily to his whims. He's had a firm hand in most of this. Commanding, leading, directing. Content to push you around into the shapes he likes best, ones that you've grown to like, too. And when you don't comply—he’s rather adept at showing you his displeasure (in almost equal measure to his rewards). 

Having Johnny scold you, however, is worlds apart from the brutish dominance, the flat apathy, you've come to expect from the man who leers at you, smirking and mean and nasty, while calling you their good girl, their pretty pet. 

Where Ghost is the firm hand, Johnny has been the comforting embrace.

This little tap to your ass is somehow worse. You bow to the shame that rips through you. Dragooned into obedience by their hands, this disappointment from Johnny is painful. You whimper, hating how easily they make you bend. 

Johnny makes you want to be good.

“Sorry,” you whisper, voice paper-thin. “I'm—I’m—”

“S’alright, hen,” he's cooing instantly, rough palm stroking the stinging skin gently. Forgivingly. “Jus’ worried about ye.”

They play you like a marionette. Pulling on all the right strings to make you dance. Johnny whispers words of adoration against your flesh, the soft embrace to Ghost’s firm hand. It makes your head spin. 

They fuck your hole with their fingers, cooing nonsense at you, at each other—promises made to fuck this hole together, too, in the future (“very, very near future, pet, you can bet on that—”), to take turns tonight to fill you to the brim, until all of your holes are drenched in them—and the rhythmic motions start to drag you down to that place again, the one that turns you docile and stupid. That has your logic, your common sense, dribbling out of your ears until all that remains is white noise, static. 

Ghost fits his whole finger inside, and Johnny teases your rim with his tongue. The sensation of pleasure and pressure is almost too much for you to bear. 

It's then, when you wobble on the brink of passing out again, that Johnny pulls back from your ass, panting. Decisive. “Think she's good to go, Lt.” 

“Yeah? Get her nice and loose, Johnny?”

As if to prove it, Johnny slowly pulls his fingers out, moaning low in his throat when your hole gapes slightly around Ghost's finger, stretched out and ready for him. 

You burn, burying your face further into Ghost's chest to avoid the white-hot shame of it all. It's dirty. Awful. 

You feel empty without Johnny's fingers inside of you, too. 

Ghost laughs like he knows, and it sounds just like a tree breaking apart in a forest fire. Consumed by ash, charred beyond salvation. It glues inside your head, sticking to that Frankensteinian place that lights up, nuclear, whenever you can't tell whether or not you're terrified or aroused. 

(The unbearable ache in your empty cunt calls you a liar.)

Johnny's cock isn't small by any standard—a truism your aching cunt can easily attest to—but when Ghost tugs harshly on his trousers, and his cock springs free, you're hit with a dizzying sense of fear at the sight of it. 

Ghost is thick, uncut. The tip is flushed a deep red, leaking prespend. It arches up toward you, brushing the soft skin of your stomach as Johnny, mindless to your sudden nerves, shuffles you into position.

Despite the tendrils of fear coiling over you, when it droops under the heavy weight of itself, coming to rest along his broad abdomen, a rush of saliva fills your mouth. 

It feels a bit like a betrayal when your cunt throbs, achingly empty. Desperate. 

“Like what you see, pet?” He scrapes the words out of his throat, and the smell of smoke is heavy in air when you breathe them in, brimming with dark promises. 

Your lashes flutter when he reaches down, gripping his cock in his hand. Jerking it toward you. A tease. You whimper, wanting it so viscerally that your hips begin to wiggle, arching back. Desperate to be filled again. To be taken part all over. 

He huffs when your slackened jaw grows slick with drool. 

“Greedy thing, ain't you?” 

“I’m–I’m not—” It's hard to protest with the evidence running down your chin. 

There's a nasty crinkle in his eyes. He taps the fat head of his cock against your inner thigh. “Don't worry. I'll let you get a taste later—plan on fucking that cheek right out of your mouth.”

“Don't be too rough on her, now. You know I like it when she begs.”

“Oh, she'll beg—” he punctuates it by pushing you lower on his lap, until your pussy sits right above his dribbling cock. “Just might not make much sense when I'm gaggin’ her on it.” 

“You're a bad man.” 

Ghost growls. “The worst, Johnny.”

The head of his cock presses against your throbbing clit, and hysterically—stupidly—you can't help but to think of a chaste kiss with the way the weeping tip nudges into your flesh. But the flash of pleasure spiking down your spine when Ghost slides his hand over his length, pushing it harder against you, dashes the garish, misplaced innocence of the act from your mind. 

It leaves a wet smear of prespend when he notches it lower, finding your messy, wet hole, and pushing inside. 

Ghost seems to savour the way your rim clenches around him—starving for it, he snarls—content to just tease you by popping the head in until it's swallowed up by your eager cunt, only to pull out barely a second later. It's torture, this. 

“Please,” you're babbling, begging. It's unbecoming, and had your sense of awareness not leaked out of your ears, you might have felt something like shame over it. For pleading with this brutish man—this monster—to stick his cock inside of you, splitting you open, and pressing up tight to the place you ache the most. 

“So pretty when you beg,” someone is slurring, and you think it might be Johnny, but there's a slurry in your head again. That awful static. 

Ghost digs his heel into the soft ground under his feet and hefts his hips up at the same time he pulls you down, roughly meeting you in the middle. The impact is brutal. The angle has him battering into a spot inside that nearly makes you pass out from the blistering pleasure rocketing through your core. It's a whiplash—pure euphoria ghosting along your veins that is chased, in a terrible pursuit, by the pinching sting, the intense pressure, of Ghost's cock forcing its way inside of your cunt, stretching you to the very brink of what you think you can handle. 

He lets your hips rest flush against his, balls pressed tight to your perineum, a momentary respite, but it doesn't last long. Ghost is impatient for you in a way that feels undeserved. Mean. He waits until you're breathing in before rolling his hips, eyes crinkling at the corners when you choke on your gasp. 

“What? Thought this is what you were begging me for, pet,” he's chiding, but the liquid desire in his voice sullies his mocking words. “I'm jus’ givin’ you what you asked for.” 

Johnny snorts. 

You want to refute his words if only because he sounds so satisfied with himself, but he doesn't give you the chance to bite back. He lifts you up, and snaps his hips into you again. Harsh, demanding. He gives you no time to rest before he's setting a terrible pace that leaves you clawing at his chest, scrambling to find purchase amid the unrelenting torrent of this horrific pleasure-pain that burns through you. 

Ghost slows his pace as Johnny's hands settle on your waist. 

“Ready for me, hen?” He's asking, soft enough that it melts some of the trepidation choking you when you remember what all the preparation was for. “I'll be gentle. You'd like that, won't yeh? All stuffed full of us.”

Ghost hums when you're pulled flush against his pelvis. “Pretty stuffed already, I reckon.”

“Bet she is, sir,” he drawls, mouthing wetly over your bruised nape. 

The honorific is new. You hadn't known monsters had hierarchies. 

“C’mon, then,” Ghost teases, moving his hands to settle on the curve of your cheeks. 

You feel like little more than a toy when he spreads them apart, showing Johnny your slick hole, ready for him, and the taut stretch of your cunt swallowing Ghost’s cock, his balls resting, heavy and hot, against your holds. It's obscene. Lewd. 

He whines like a wounded animal. 

“Steamin’ Jesus, Lt,” he breathes, panting. “Give a damn warnin’—ah, fuck, hen, look’it yeh—”

You can imagine the sight you make, and burn, blistering under the weight of his gaze and the deep ache in your guts, the want. There's embarrassment, a touch of anger, but—

The absence of shame prickles against you. 

They don't give you a moment to unravel that thought. Johnny braces his hand on your hip, and feeds his cock into your slick hole. 

It's a blunt pressure, unlike their fingers, his tongue: it spears you open, wrenching your rim apart to fit. The head pops in, slipping inside, and you think you might break, might shatter once more into tiny fragments, broken by the devastating stretch of their cocks before your body gives in, yielding. It's almost as if he was waiting for it, for this soft submission. The moment your body relaxes around him, he pushes forward, and doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He ploughs through you until your cheeks are flush with his hips. 

You're so full, indescribably so. Stuffed to the brim by their cocks, seated so deep that it almost feels like they're reaching all the way up to your throat, and you swallow reflectively, tasting the brininess of your spit from the lingering blood in Johnny's kiss. 

“Fucked nice and sloppy,” Ghost rasps, twitching inside of you. His cock jerking against your walls makes you keen. 

You feel them move together, separated only by a thin wall of tissue, and it has your toes curling, your body coiling. Too much, too intense—you can't tell where Johnny begins and Ghost ends. The slow simmer in your belly is notched up, all rationale and thought turning into a slurry in your head, leaking out through your ears. You teeter on the precipice, unable to do anything at all except take. 

They match paces with each other, slowly taking you apart. Unmaking you. You catch stars in Ghost's eyes when his gaze jumps from you to Johnny, and back again; the ethereal glow of an event horizon, too far past the brink to escape it. It snares around both of you, trapping you in its inescapable pull, and you know, then, that this feeling inside of your chest is rotting hope. 

There's no escape. 

Bullied between them, stuffed to the brim, and used for their pleasure—it breaks you, shatters the tenuous grip you had on your resolve until it's wisps of smoke slipping through your fingers. 

The hushed reverence from before is gone. Snuffed out between claws that sink into your flesh, digging through tissue and tendon to swipe at your bones. False starts laid out in their namesakes. They fuck you like an animal, docile and trapped between them, and wholly at their mercy. There's no give, no inch—they take; ripping into your feeble body with frenzied teeth and bestial growls, trying desperately to quench their insatiable appetite. 

It's messy, primal. They fuck you the same way they feasted—with animalistic brutality until you're bloodied scraps at the altar of their desire. A second sacrifice gifted by beasts with barbed wire claws and poisoned tongues. 

In a way, it's almost punishing. As if they're going out of their way to bruise your walls and batter your cervix, bullying your insides until you're raw and tender, pulsing with the fill of them. An ache you'll feel for aeons. 

And maybe that's their goal. To galvanise you into a fine powder, to split your atoms between their teeth. Crushing the part of you that draws divisional lines between yourself and them, them and you. To cave it all in until the delineation isn't just blurred but destroyed. 

With the last vestiges of cognisance being fucked out of you by Johnny's sloppy, short thrusts, and Ghost's merciless pace, it already begins to blur when you think about it. About separation. Their quest to batter you into submission, to soften your edges enough so they can reshape you into their likeness, their image, is working. Damn them—

It doesn't take much to send you reeling back to primalism, to shred the scar tissue sealed over your hindbrain, and leak over your atavistic fear of those dormant instincts churning inside of you. The urge to run, and hunt, and eat—gorging yourself on prey animals crushed under your heel, torn apart by your teeth. 

The clandestine whispers in your ear, hissing to you about how you were made for them, born to be laid out between their bodies, and fucked stupid by their cocks, to be filled by them over and over again drown out the part of you that wants to rebel. That wants to flee. 

Johnny runs his hands over the plains of your stomach, palm pressing against the bulge of Ghost's cock outlined on your stomach. The shock of it, of his fat cock showing through your skin, gives way to a nebulous pleasure. A want you didn't know was ever there. Filling you so deeply that your body changes with his shape. 

“Gonna fill you up,” it's uttered as gospel. Ironclad. Apodictic. “Gonnae make a mess out of ye, hen. Gonnae make ye swell wit’ it.”

He paints a future for you with the air itself as his canvas. Something hot thickens in the base of your throat. You choke on it.

“Gonna come, Johnny?” His hands are searing when they drop to the back of your thighs, spreading you open. It forces Johnny deeper inside of you. “Go on, then. Come for me.” 

It's all it takes for him to rut into you, groaning low in his throat as he takes, takes. Grinding his cock into you with a near maddening desperation. 

His feverish pace pushes you down the precipice, fingers scrambling through the colluvium that breaks under your touch. It's intense, blisteringly so. Your body is a tinderbox. Between their intense heat, you burst into flame..

Your release rockets through you like a shockwave, and you gush around Ghost's cock, clenching down around them like a vice. 

“Oh, fuck, hen—gonnae—!”

Johnny spills, molten, inside of you, grunting, whining, wetly into your nape. He holds your hips tight against his pelvis as he fills you, thighs trembling with the force of his release. 

Your body throbs, aching in a way you've never felt before, and you mewl when Ghost begins to fuck into you harder, chasing his own end. It's too much—

You babble nonsense against his chest, drool leaking from the corners of your mouth. Johnny runs his hands over your quivering belly, murmuring into your nape. Take it. Go on, take it, hen. You can do it, you can be good for us—

You want to. Badly. Ache the need to be so, so good. It sews itself into your hindbrain, the feverish need to be perfect for the two of them. In the slurried mush that remains of your head, you remember two words only. Please, Ghost. Please—

Johnny fills in the rest. “Come inside her, Simon. Fill her up. She's gaggin’ for it—”

He grunts at that, jaw clenched tight. The veins in his neck bulge through his skin, pulsing with his heartbeat. You feel his cock twitching deep inside of you, nudging against a spot that makes something deep in your belly ache. 

He hones in on it, pushes deeper, presses into it mercilessly. It's a jolt of pleasure, of pain; the two seamlessly intertwined together. It's overwhelming. Too much—

Johnny's hand drops between your messy thighs, bullying his thumb over your clit, fingers stroking along Ghost’s cock as it pistons in and out you. And then there's static—white noise. 

You think you come again. 

His arm tightens around your waist when you gush around him, and he hisses through clenched teeth, calling you greedy. 

Comin’ again? What a greedy little cunt. So desperate for my cum, are you?

He bullies his cock inside of you, desperate and sloppy, once, thrice, and then he's groaning into your bared throat, nails digging harshly into the skin of your hips. He presses his cock tight against your cervix, pulling on your waist to make you take him as deep as possible, not relent until his balls are flush against your ass. He comes like this, cock jerking, pulsing with his release, painting your insides with his virile spend. 

With you boneless between them, barely clinging to sanity, Johnny catches Ghost’s mouth in what might be a kiss, but it's full of growls, snarls, and too much teeth. A punch with his bloodied lips. It's aggressive, bestial. You shudder under Johnny's body, burrow your cheek into the damp fabric of Ghost's cloak. 

Seeing them aim to maim each other with teeth, tongue, and claws digging into their vulnerable, thick necks, fills you with a potent heat. Unshakeable. Unquenchable. You want more. More of this, of them—

“Fuckin’ hell, Johnny,” comes a wet rasp, drought on the taste of him. “Haven't had enough?” 

“What?” It's full of breathless mischief. “Cannae keep up, ye old bastard?” His hands fall, hot and heavy, against your back, fingers dipping soothingly into the knobs of your sweat-slicked spine. “Gonnae have to. She's rarin’ t’go again.”

Ghost levels you both with a flat look, but the pools of liquid obsidian give way to a fresh heat. Something ugly curls inside the basin. Possessive. Damning. 

“Insatiable, aren't you?” 

His softening cock gives a feeble twitch inside of you, belying the implacable lilt to his tone. You mewl with it, walls too battered and bruised for anything more. 

Ghost’s gaze drops to you. A pendulum swings through the ink. Something shifts. Breaks. That madness you'd seen earlier rears, snakes out from the rivers of blood cutting deep rivulets through the whites of his eyes. The confluence is shattering. 

His hand lifts from your hip, and disappears over your shoulder. You hear the rustle of fabric, the heavy breath that spills from his wide chest as he breathes in deep. The sound is different this time. Unencumbered by the cloth around his mouth—

The pieces are put together for you when a searing mouth with razor-like teeth bites down on the meat of your neck. 

Pain—sharp, poignant, and vicious—rips through your body, making you yowl into the empty, dark forest with your misery. 

This doesn't feel like the bites given by Johnny earlier—ones that, now, feel almost playful, gentle, by comparison—and you think of Graves, of the ashen faces of the soldiers as they ripped into them, and you tremble, body thrown into a paroxysm of sudden, unadulterated fear. 

He'll eat you—

“Ah, c’mon,” Johnny's voice cuts through the terror clotting in your pounding head, and you cling to the sound of his voice like a comfort. Sick, wrong—you mewl desperately, hands twitching for the safety of his arms. He coos sweetly at you, but doesn't steal you from Ghost’s grasp. “Said we weren't gonna do that now.”

Ghost's jaw unhinged from your flesh, tongue rasping over the fresh wounds, drinking your blood up with a horrible slurp. His fattening cock jerks inside of you, swelling along with his hunger. 

It dawns on you, then, as the pain dulls into an achy throb that this wasn't him consuming you—it was much, much worse. 

This is him claiming you. 

It's a bloodied brand on your throat, a perfect ring around your pulse, for the whole world to see, to know, that you've been laid claim to. Collared. 

He makes a noise, a pleased hum, as if he can hear your thoughts before pulling away with a suckling pop. 

“You said, Johnny boy,” he drawls wetly, bare mouth smearing against the deep wound in your throat. He sounds drunk, words slurring out in a loose tease. The bite seems to unravel something inside of him, and he buries his face in your neck, scarred lips and teeth tugging at your bruised, sore flesh. “Best start now, I reckon. Before this pretty head of hers gets any stupid ideas.”

You're panting from the pain, dizzy with it and nearly nauseous, before Ghost purrs against your pulse, tongue laving over the deep tattoo of his teeth forever embedded in your skin. 

It feels a bit like betrayal when Johnny tilts your chin, exposing the untouched side of your neck, and presses a gentle kiss to your pulse before sinking his teeth into the spot opposite of Ghost's. 

“Ours,” he growls, and for the first time since you've met him, he sounds everybit of the inhuman monster you've easily likened to Ghost. “Gonnae take such good care’a ye, hen. Gonna take you from this place, keep’ye with us.” 

Madness loops in Ghost's gaze when he raises his head, eyes cresting in a deep, satiated pleasure as he takes in the possessive arm Johnny keeps around your waist, his head buried in your neck, whispering terrible things in your ear (“ours, ours, ours—forever, hen; never gonnae leave ye. never gonnae let ye go—”). Whatever he finds in this awful embrace makes him relax beneath you. Has him stretched out and purring, content to just take in Johnny's promises, and the way you feel (trapped) in his arms. 

The jowls of a double-headed beast close in around you, keeping you caged in the wet, fleshy maw of a monster that thinks it's saving you this way.

And maybe it is. There's nothing left of the place you called home. They bring you to their haven—an impossibly large cave at the base of the mountain—and tuck you into a bed of furs, humming over your laden form at the way you fit so perfectly into their home (“just where you belong—”) before leaving to make good on their promises. 

Everything inside of the cave is silent, but, oh, how the ghosts in your head scream. 

home, you’re home—

get out. get out. getoutgetout—

But there's no escape. 

The madness that leaked from their pores, that poisoned miasma, must be contagious. Or maybe they're remaking you. Shaping you into their likeness. 

Your gums ache. There's a gnawing in your guts. An emptiness that bellows into the dark, begging to be filled. 

As if hearing the call, they return to you reeking of blood, death, misery. It stains their skin red. Taints their touch with the aftertaste of carnage. 

You kiss their scarred lips, licking the ichor from their teeth. Satiating yourself in the sin they force down your throat as they fill that howling emptiness inside of you. 

(“over and over again, hen—until you forget what it's like to be without us.”)

They cradle you in their palms—wolves taking dominion over a lost little lamb. 

(“we'll carve them from your chest, and fill the barren hole with nothin’ but ourselves.”)

The scent of wych elm and smoked cedar fill the back of your throat when you breathe in. The cloying richness tickles your nose; the heft of it is familiar, heady. Your head—fuzzy and thick from sleep—swims with the visceral sense of comfort that settles deep in your lungs when you pull it in. You know this smell. 

(Have a piece of it tucked under your pillow.

Did you see where my shirt went? The one I got from Aubin? I went runnin' in it this mornin', hen. Can't find it anywhere.

Maybe it's in the wash. 

Aye, maybe. 

You shoved it under the one he used, tucked it there for those nights that never seemed to end; when you always found yourself missing him the most.

Your secret to keep.)

You're caught in the middle of sleep and wakefulness; a purgatory where the world does not yet exist outside of the soft sheets dragging over your skin. Torn between the dream you were having that is still within reach (the taste of alder on your tongue, a hand across your pulse), and the cognisance that seeps inside: the birds outside of the window chittering, the cars driving across wet cobblestone, honking in the distance. 

And then—

There is a weight on you that—like the smell— doesn't belong. 

You'd gone to bed alone. Have done so for months now. The only company you keep is just the shirt, whose enticing scent has long since faded. 

You feel it, now. 

A weight. A presence. Something notches on your shoulder, a blunt pressure digging into your neck—a heaviness securing you to the bed, locked over your chest, and across your thighs. 

Your blankets could never be so firm, so warm. 

The dream slips into the recesses of your mind when your eyes crack open. A little sliver. The world bathed in bright gold. 

A rasp of something gritty and sharp scratches over the soft flesh below your shoulder, above the swell of your breast. The graze of it makes you smile. Makes you lull your head to the side until your nose meets wry curls that tickle your lips. 

You breathe him in. Sweat. Aged wood. 

He must have snuck in sometime during the night. 

(Finally, finally—)

The world resumes in pieces. The top of his brown hair under your eyes, his face nestled into the crook of your neck, soft plumes of humid breath on your throat, his grip over your ribs. Thighs tangled together. 

Like this, with your head dazed and spooled with the gossamer of somnolence, you can't begin to know where he ends and you begin. You merge together. A mess of limbs, heavy and thick with the scent of sleep. Warm milk. Honey. 

Johnny sleeps like a child. Always grasping out, reaching for you. He clings to you; body wrapping around yours as if he was trying to merge atoms. 

He might be. Johnny is a cuddler. The kind that sticks to you like glue, and refuses to let go. 

A slow, languid smile curls on your lips. Your arm laid on the pillow he's supposed to be using lifts, and falls gently to the top of his head. Nails rake through the coarse hair, scratching his scalp. His shorn sides are a little longer than you remember it, tufts of hair the same length as your fingernail. He'll need a haircut. 

You follow the trail of his mohawk, sliding down the nape of his neck, the knob of his spine. Real. Solid. 

You'll never tell him, but when he's gone, you often dream of him at night. The sweetness of it carries into the morning where it's ground into pain when you remember he's gone. When your fingers slide through the sheets in search of the man who isn't there, and meet the cold, barren emptiness across from you. 

He never sleeps in his spot, anyway. Always somehow wrapped around you instead. 

But this—

Waking up to the smell of him thick in your nose, the taste of him on your fingertips—it's the closest to heaven you think you'll ever get. 

At your touch, Johnny moans, low and rough. The sound drenched in sleep, and needy. A heat—soft, fluttering—spumes in your belly. The weight of his knee pressing into your hip bone makes you take a sharp, deep breath. 

It's been too long since his skin touched yours. Since the heat of him seeped to your marrow. 

Your nails dance down his spine, relishing the feel of his hard muscles under your palm. Johnny makes another noise—a soft husk, full of sleepy longing—and it goes straight to your core. His body flexes, coiling over you. He snuggles in deeper, as if that was even possible. But you know Johnny. 

Any gap, any space, between your bodies will be sought after and conquered. 

His nose pushes into your pulse point, stubble chafing your skin. The weight of him is solid. Comforting. Johnny's hand curls around your ribs. You melt into his embrace. Soft, gummy. He's sickly sweet—your gruff military man.

His knee stretches when he moves, his hip nudging into you. 

He's naked. You feel the thickness of him twitching against your side. Wetness leaks, dampens your skin. 

You burrow your face into his crown, and catch the scent of gunfire and polymer that clings to the tips of his cropped hair. 

He didn't even shower. Stripped down, sleepy and jetlagged, and slipped into your bed. 

Nails rove over his broad shoulders until you're locked into some parody of a hug. You feel the heft of his bicep beneath your hands. The weight of his burning flesh over your body. Clad in only panties and a loose top, you feel the fever billowing inside of you. 

There is something intimate about waking up next to someone nude. A stark thing that settles in your ribs, clotting in the brackets between them. 

The flavour of vulnerability. Touches of domesticity. It leaks into your marrow, bringing with it something soft and tender. 

Illicit. 

It brims up. Buoying to the surface. A low-grade fever itching under your skin. The blunt press of his hard, leaking cock on your skin is nothing short of enticing. 

Your thighs part as much as they're able to with his weight on you, hand slipping out from under the pillow. You take a moment to run your fingers over his forearm, nestled snugly under your breasts. The weight of him makes your chest flutter. Heart seizing when he squeezes you tight to him. 

The coarse hair of his thigh on your navel feels good under your palm. Muscular. He told you once when he brought you to a football game that he used to play. Still does when he has the time. A group of his old schoolmates on a rare Saturday when everyone is around. 

You can feel it in the thick bulk of him. Years of practice, training. 

But now—

It's in the way. 

His thigh is too thick for you to slip your hand over. 

Your core throbs. The sticky press of his hard cock against you does little to abate the ache growing inside. 

A huff spills from your lips. His hair flutters. Another noise spills from deep within his chest when you push at his leg, trying to slip it down lower so you can sink your fingers into your aching pussy. 

It doesn't work. He tucks himself closer to you, and rocks his hips into yours. 

A wry twist of your lips. At least someone is getting off. 

You try again, wriggling. 

He moves, pulls his hand out from where it's caught between the bed and your chest, running his warm, rough palm over your skin.

The movement makes you pause, hand falling still on his knee. You went to bed late last night, having stayed up watching trashy television until the early hours. He must have snuck in sometime after. 

Your eyes skirt to the clock on the wall. It's barely mid-morning. 

He needs sleep. 

Did you wake him—?

He dips under the hem of your cropped sleep shirt, and cups your breast in his palm. 

"Johnny—," you breathe, just barely a whisper.

He groans low. Flashes fan over your collarbones. "Couldn't wait for me?" 

His accent is thick in the morning, groggy and flooded with sleep. You shiver, hips lifting slightly off the bed. You're stopped, of course, by the weight of him. 

"You took too long," you murmur, panting into his hair. 

He grumbles; the noise reverberates through his chest. "Sorry, bonnie. Got my girl all worked up. Needy for it."

His fingers brush over your nipple. The flash of pleasure makes your toes curl, his name leaves your mouth in a breathless plea. 

"I know, I know…" he husks into your neck. "I'll take care'a ya, bonnie." 

"Wanna make you feel good—"

"Nah, dove. Just be a good girl for me, aye?"

"Johnny—"

His fingers rub your nipple until your peak hardens, pinched softly between his thumb and forefinger. His cock presses into you—little cants of his hip that make you burn for it. 

It's been so long. 

Your nails dig into the meat of his shoulder. "Please, baby, I can't take it—"

His laugh huff across your neck. "Needy little thing."

His thigh slides off your waist before you can snap something back, lips pressing to your pulse. It makes your breath catch when you feel the graze of his warm mouth, his tongue; it laves over your skin, carrying the flash of teeth. A tease, a nip. Between the burn from the stubble, and the soft bites to your skin, your neck will soon be a mosaic of his devotion. 

Your thighs part, desperation pooling inside of you with each brush of his warm, calloused fingers over your nipple. You want it, ache for it—

"Fuck, bonnie." His hips rut into you, cock so hard you think it might bruise your flesh. It leaks prespend over your skin until you're tacky with it. 

Your mouth waters. You wonder if he'll taste of the beach—

Your head lulls, nose nuzzling his crown. "Wanna taste you later, baby. Missed having your cock in my mouth—"

"Steamin' Jesus, bonnie—," it's bitten off in a moan. A desperate rut. His fingers spasm over your breast. "Cannae say shite like that when I haven't had this pretty mouth in months —"

"You should learn to be quicker with the missions then." 

His teeth sink into your neck, and you sputter, thighs snapping shut to stem the deep ache.

Johnny's tongue snakes out, laving over the indents left behind by his teeth. "I come home to you as quickly as I can, bonnie."

Your voice is barely a whisper. "I know." 

He groans into your neck when he moves, his hand slipping out from under his body, and resting on the pillow. His head raises, your eyes meet. Golden honey, rich and thick and full of want, gazes at you from under heavy lids. 

His smile feels like the dawning sun curving over the horizon. A flash of teeth. His forehead drops, presses to yours. Noses brushing. You breathe in him. 

"Hey," he murmurs against your lips, the barest touch. "I missed ya, hen." 

Your hands curl over his shoulders, knees parting to let him closer. A smile, soft and gentle, pulls on the corners of your mouth. "Hiya. Missed you, too."

He ruts into the seam of your thighs, heavy cock sliding over your clothed cunt. "God, bonnie. Thought about ya always. Couldn't get you outta my head." 

"You say that every time you come home."

His head ducks down, muzzling his stubble against your cheek. You feel the press of teeth under your jaw. "An' I mean it every time."

"I'm already gonna fuck you, babe. No need to try and charm me into it," you taunt, nails raking softly down is back. A tickle. A tease. His hips jerk into yours, a groan slipping from his lips. 

"Charm? Oh, bonnie—," his voice is rich caramel, thick and sweet in your ear. "I'm just fuckin' crazy for ya, cariño."

You huff. "Cariño? That's new." 

"Sí, mi corazón." 

Your brows raise. "I love how even when speaking a completely different language, you still sound incredibly Scottish."

"Aye," he nips your chin again. "You can take the Scot out of Scotland, but you can't—"

Your mouth presses to his, catching teeth. "Just shut up and fuck me, already, Johnny."

His mouth captures yours, tongue delving into it with a groan. He tastes of thistle. Your breath comes out in sharp pants against his cheek. 

Your hand slides down his arms, reaching under to tug at your panties. When he feels you move, he laughs low in his throat, lips clumsily glued to yours. 

"Gonna pull 'em to the side for me? That desperate, mi reina?"

"Very," you breathe, eyes lidded and heavy. "I only had my fingers, you know." 

He looks good like this—bathed in the gentle sunlight, sunkissed from his adventure in Mexico—and leaning over you, eyes hungry. Right where he belongs. 

"Yeah?" He rasps, swallowing thickly. His hand follows the path set by your own, fingers curling under your knee. "Was it good, bonnie? Did you fuck yourself senseless and think of me?"

"It was good," you whine, back arching when his cock brushes your wet cunt. The head taps against your clit. "But it wasn't you." 

"Gotta give my girl a proper pounding then, aye?"

"Yes," you hiss, eyes fluttering when he takes his cock in hand, and thrusts it through your drenched folds. "I want it, Johnny."

"Push 'em to the side, bonnie. I need to be in your cunt, now."

Whimpering, your fingers hook on the gusset of your damp panties, pulling them back. Opening yourself for him, and desperate for it. 

"Wanna fuck you proper later on," he rasps, his cock nudging against your cunt. "But I can't wait, dove. Fuck, the things you do to me—"

You're not wet enough for it to be seamless, but it's been months since you felt him split you apart, and the burn, the sting, of him stretching you open all over again makes your toes curl. It rides the edge of indelible pain and pleasure; an amalgam of being both excruciatingly good and too much all at the same time. Overwhelming. Perfect.

Your legs hook on his thighs when he nudges the head of his cock inside of you, opening yourself wider for him to take. 

He breathes out your name on a shuddered rasp that makes your cunt clench, pulsing with the delirious ache of having him within you once more. Hair dampened with sweat, his upper lip is slick when he presses his mouth to you; you taste salt on your tongue when he licks into your mouth. Your hands roam his back when he pushes in deep, flushed against you. 

"Gonna move, coriño;" he slurs into your mouth, eyes fluttering shut. "Can you take it?"

"Give it to me, Johnny."

Before Johnny, you'd never known fucking could be so intense when it's slow; just languid rolls of his hips, his mouth fixed on yours, devouring you. It's not rushed: he isn't fucking you as hard as he can. It's—

Tender. Sweet. 

Johnny fills you deep, the head of his cock nudging something inside of you that has your nails digging into his shoulders, whimpering against his mouth. The slow drag of his cock sliding out of you has your walls singing from the blunt pressure. The torturously deep thrust back in, hips jerking lazily into yours. It all pools together, an endless coil of pleasure that makes you moan, that has you panting into his ear, begging him for more. 

The equinox of it all comes when he rests his forehead back on yours, noses pushed together. There is no space between you—face to face, chest to chest—and he ruts into you like this, his eyes molten suns, nearly blinding, as they gaze at you. 

Johnny makes you melt. Makes your veins pool with liquid bliss, your core tightening with each sharp thrust against your gummy walls, and every slow drag out until only the tip remains. He hits deep, fills you completely, and it's good—it's so good —but it's this you can't get enough of. 

The way he covers your whole body with his, tucked into every corner and crevasse until all you can see and feel is him. He shares your breath; each exhale is his inhale. Eyes fixed on you; dark lashes fluttering when you tighten around him. 

These moments with Johnny make your head spin—a realm carved out where only the two of you exist; where you meld together and become one entity feasting off of the other. 

His cock, heavy and fat inside of your pussy. Your hands running along his back. His mouth sealing over yours, panting deep and ragged until all you can taste and smell is him. Until all you can see is the caramel depths that gaze at you—love in liquid; flecks of affection in gold. His pupils blown wide from pleasure, nearly eclipsing the stunning brecciated hazel. His lids lower, cresting in euphoria.

He's close—you can feel it in the way his thighs tense, his back trembles; in the sloppy way he fucks into you, mouthing along your lips. Lost in a white haze of pleasure, and too drunk on the way you tighten around him to notice. 

Your nails dig into his shoulder blades when his thrusts become choppy, harder. Legs spread wider to take him, ankles crossing over his tailbone. You melt into the sweat-slicked sheets, body liquifying with each snap of his hips. 

His chin rakes over your cheek, stubble grating against the skin. He murmurs apologies into your ear, tongue dipping out to taste the mess he made of you. 

"M'so fuckin' close, hen," he slurs into your temple, the bulk of his upper torso sliding over you. You're trapped under him, forehead pressed into the column of his throat as he bends your knees to your chest. "Fuck—!"

The light catches on the gold chain around his neck. The cross swinging like a pendulum between you. It draws your eye, and fills your chest with a deep spume of inexorable affection. Something so mundane, but so him; a little thing he always carries, keeps with him. A little piece of familiarity after months of loneliness. 

Seeing it outside of just a bittersweet dream brings tears to your eyes. 

You missed him. The heavy cedar scent, the way he kisses you like he can't get enough of the taste, how he clings to you at night, glueing himself to you in a futile effort to merge together into one being, his stupid haircut—

"Fuck," you choke, head full of nothing but him. "I missed you so much—"

"Me, too, hen," he groans into your crown, fucking deep into you. "Fuck, bonnie. I need you to cum for me. Need to feel you cumming on my cock—"

His words congeal inside your core, pleasure rippling from the base of your spine to the tips of your fingers that you bury inside his flesh. The thick heft of him makes you dizzy, makes you feel that tight coil pulling taut with each sloppy thrust he makes against it. 

His body sags into you, head burrowing into your neck. The grind of his pelvis against your clit as you spasm around him, clenching tight as he works you up toward nirvana, rutting deep, and breathing heavy into your collarbones. Glued, once more, to you. 

Johnny holds you steady, firm. His whole body cresting over yours, and keeping you locked to bed. Under him. Sheltered from harm. From the ugliness he keeps at bay. 

My hero, you once whispered to him playfully in a pub when you first met. Coy and teasing and high of the confidence that comes with a gorgeous man looking at you like you hung the stars in the sky. You feel it, now, nestled deep inside of your chest. Your hero, finally home. 

It's the soft chants of your name, the choked-out confessional about how much he missed you, thought of you all the way on the opposite side of the globe, and now that he has you, it feels like heaven. How you have Nirvana nestled between your soft thighs, and he can't get enough of it. Of you. He's drunk off the taste. 

It's a slow ascent with Johnny. Never rushed, never hurried. He takes you like he's savouring you, like he'll never have the chance to again. 

(On your first date, he took you hiking.

And years later, it still feels like you're climbing a mountain.)

A slow, lazy incline. A soft, feathery descent. 

"M'goin' crazy fer ya, cariño—," he pushes in deep, the head of his cock kissing your cervix. His voice is shattered, broken. The fractures in his words, the hard roll of his hips pressing down on your clit, all push you over the edge. Head full of that white pleasure that dances in front of your eyes like little galaxies in the cosmos. 

The pulse of your cunt around him makes his hips grind into yours, cock twitching as he spills himself inside of you. A low moan slips from his reddened lips, and he stifles it when he catches your mouth, sharing it with you. 

(It tastes of sugared milk and cinnamon.)

He stays like that for a moment, hips rocking against you as rides himself through, your pussy clenching around him, milking him for everything—every drop. 

Thistle heavy on your tongue, his moan nestled in your throat—it feels a bit like waking up again. A yawning crest into wakefulness. A slow roll into cognisance. 

He pants against your mouth, and you can feel the stretch of his grin—a languorous, satiated smile like the sunrise in the winter. All dark, endlessly so, and then suddenly—

Johnny feels like dusk. The first breach of the morning over the lands; a sleepy haze of light eating into the tenebrose that shrouds everything around you. A steak of ochre, gold, in a world of darkness; the varicoloured smear of pastel clouds breaking over the horizon. 

Being with him is a little bit like cupping the sun in the palm of your hand. 

His eyes slide open—a slow, shuddering roll—and you see morning dew in the whites; golden rays in the hazel. There are shadows, proof of a hard-earned victory, but he is not the type to let it linger. 

(You're not the type to let him.)

Sleepy, dazed from pleasure, he grins again. Nose pressed to yours, heart thundering against your chest. 

"M'not leavin' again for a while, now," he breathes into your lips, nose sliding across yours. He nuzzles his cheek your raw flesh, already scratched from his stubble. His voice is naked bliss when murmurs: "and I intend to stay inside this pretty cunt all day."

You huff, head listing as you let him smother your cheek and neck in affectionate kisses, nips. "You need a shower. You smell like Price. And sweat."

Teeth to your pulse. "And sex. Your sweet pussy—"

"You need a haircut."

"Thought you wanted me to grow it out."

You pretend to consider, hands sliding from his back to the nape of his neck. "I want something to pull."

"You can." 

"It's too short." 

He's shaking his head, temple knocking into your chin. "Nah, you can still pull. You can steer me later when my face is buried in your—"

"Is that why you came home?" You tease, curling a lock of his hair around your fingers. "Surely there were pretty girls in Mexico."

His head lifts. Rising suns, molten honey, meet yours. "Nah, got the prettiest hen squeezing my cock right now."

"God," you huff, walls fluttering around him with each gentle movement he makes. "You're incorrigible." 

"M'a man starved. Kept away from my girl for too long." 

His words are teasing, but his eyes—

Your breath catches, and stutters in your chest. "Johnny."

"Can't get enough of ya, hen." He confesses, words muttered into your chin. "Don't plan on lettin' you go. Ever."

"You won't ever need to." 

His smile feels like coming home. "You can bet on that."

His hand reaches under the pillow, eyes playful. "Now, about you stealin' my shirts…"

Your cheeks heat when he pulls it out. "How did that get there?"

"You're a cheeky little thing, ain't you?"

You place your hand on his chest, lashes fluttering. Coy. Kittenish. "I just miss you sometimes, is all." 

His eyes are pockets of slate, chiselled deep with a heart-wrenching affection that blisters through you. "Oh, hen."

Open, raw. He descends on you, mouth catching yours. Kissing him is always intense, always—

He pulls away. A flash of teeth. A smirk. 

It starts in university. 

Start, of course, is an operative word. It's an incipient event: a slow burn in the back of your head that gets hotter and hotter, but you can't quite discern why. You just feel wrong. Shaken. The foundation in which you walk wobbles. Crumbles. 

There is an unseen precipice under your feet covered by cobblestone. You know it's there—are aware of the yawning chasm that wants to swallow you whole, but you don't know where it is. 

And then—

There is no phone call, no blunt condolences for any particular loss, just—

A knock on your door. It's just your flatmate, but the rhythm cuts through your head, right down the middle. 

Agony. The world around you flips, topples off its axis, and just keeps spinning, spinning, spinning—

It hits you with the force of a tsunami. A deluge of biblical proportions that uprooted everything you'd ever know, casting you out into a frothing abyss, ravaged by mountain-tall waves that left you asunder. Awash in a tumultuous sea.

It would make sense, you suppose, had you lost someone, but you haven't. 

The most you've lost was a pet. 

And yet—

You sob, scream, and claw at your chest until your skin is torn and shredded, trying futilely to get to where it hurts the most. It's agonising. Brutal. They sedate you—no choice is given when you're so frantic, so desperate. The world slips away. The pain abated. 

But it doesn't stop it. 

They call it grief, and you don't know why. You haven't lost anyone. Mum, dad, gran, grandad. All alive and well. All there, standing clustered around your hospital bed (admitted when you wouldn't stop screaming) looking quite bewildered by you. By the things you say—missing something, someone, gone, just gone—and the way you're acting. 

And it scares you just as much as it does them, but you can't just push it aside, let it go. There is a gaping hole in your chest, one punched straight through your sternum. It's gangrenous, and rotting; the stench makes you dizzy, makes your head spin. Your heart is necrotising between your ribs and spine, but no one knows why. No one understands the agony you feel because everyone is alive. 

They all say the same: we don't know. Depression, perhaps. You just need time. 

Time does nothing to heal the wound. You can't run from the hurt—it's never-ending—but you get better at hiding it, at dealing with pulpy remains of your still-beating heart that slugs on despite the mouldering wound ripped open in the centre. 

They tell you it's Thursday, now. 

Before you'd throw something, thrash, and scream yourself hoarse because what does it matter when your heart is dying, decaying inside of your chest. 

Now, you just nod. Thursday, is it? 

Time doesn't exist to you anymore. It's just an endless stream of days and nights that get easier to withstand as the foreign clock on the wall ticks down the seconds you don't feel. 

The world is a murky haze of confusion and pain. You move on only because you have to. 

Things—

Well. They don't get better, but they get bearable, and you suppose that's the same thing, isn't it? 

And then you dream. 

They come in flashes. Snippets. Little moments of a place and time that doesn't exist, that isn't real. This life was not one you lived. The taste of elderberry has never graced your lips, but you think of the sweet, tartness like it's an old comfort. 

It makes you ache. 

Simplicity bleeds into familiarity into love into—

—you should… you should sit for this—

Crushing heartache. It carries the flavour of gunpowder, and is soaked in charcoal; the soot stains the tips of your fingers when you reach out, curling them in the rough lapels of a gunmetal grey jacket still carrying the scent of ichor, and loss. 

—i… i can't promise you forever, but i can promise you now—

You dream of a man. Of hands on your body. Eyes gazing at you—an alluvial fan in hazel, green, and gold; the shadows cast in the shallow valleys make you yearn for something. 

Something, something—

You wake up, hand to your splitting chest as the agony rips it into pieces. Heartache, grief. It drapes itself over you like a storm cloud. Looming there, ever-present, and ready to chisel open a deluge of pain so visceral you weep. And weep. And—

Your pillow is wet. Nose stuffed, eyes gritty. You've been crying, sobbing, in your sleep again. 

It's a cycle. Memories flood your head until it's splitting apart at the seams, making room for that life it wants to force you to remember, acknowledge, and pretend exists, and one you're in now. 

It breaks something inside of you. Cracks the levee. In the midst of crumbling concrete, and a roaring deluge, you hear a voice. 

(You stare at the bottles lining the shelves in your vanity, and tell no one.)

—excuse me? You dropped this—

HERE

There is a tavern on High Street. 

It's nothing special on its own. Just a building, just a pub. You pass it twice a day on your commute to work, and it should be background noise. A blur of scenery and objects as you stroll through the streets. A melding of the world around you, an inconsequential smear of cobblestone and brick. 

And yet—

Your eyes keep finding it, seeking it out. It's involuntary. Automatic. You pass the grocer and the pharmacy, head angled down toward the grey stone below, and then, like an unignorable force, a gravitational pull, your head lifts. The fairy lights are strewn around the outside coruscate in the gloom. You nearly trip. 

It's strange. Odd. 

It's just a building. Just a tavern. 

—got some of the best brews in town—

But you remember it. Are familiar with it in a way that makes absolutely no sense. You've never gone inside, never heard anyone speak about it. It's a building on a street of many. Ordinary. Plain. Nothing about this place should stand out to you. It isn't eye-catching or garish. It's—

—cosy little spot—

It's an anomaly. Much like—

Well. Much like everything in your life. 

There is a gnawing in the pit of your stomach, one that's so achingly familiar that your head swims from deja vu that shouldn't exist. It fits inside like an augur. A portant. 

How can the unknown be a comfort to you? How can it blister your heart with such ferocity that you find yourself pawing at your face to stem the deluge of tears that cascade down your cheeks in rivets? 

Whatever it is, it's calamitous and entirely unignorable. 

Your life is asunder, in shambles because of it yet each hiss in your ear addles your thoughts until you become overwhelmed by it all. Until the echoes that tell you to wander down a random side street, sign a lease for an apartment you can't afford, to leave the safety of your home country, and—

On a whim, you packed your things up on the behest of that strange, Eldridge feeling eating you alive that made you cut ties with your old, peaceful life, and book the first plane ticket to Elgin. No plan, no money. 

(You'd call it an afflatus had it not been so drenched in the unknown.)

It's paradoxical: you cry when you see that stupid church in the distance, your feet drag you to places you've never been before, and now. 

Now: 

You can't stop staring at a nondescript pub in a sea of many. 

Ignore it. Leave it. You take another route, head down, hands shoved deep in the pockets of your jacket to keep them from trembling. It'll pass. It'll go away. 

It doesn't. 

It pools in the pit of your stomach, noxious and rotten, until you wake up drenched in sweat, hands grasping for a phantom who no longer exists—

—wanna come with me?—

You break on Saturday. 

—i like when you wear that dress—

You wear it, and hate yourself a little bit for it. It's stupid, and out of place, but you do it, anyway. 

—booth in the back is where i always sit, want to come join me—

The inside of the tavern is just the same as you remembered it—

No. No. 

You've never been here before. 

You smell malt in the air; the same amber that spumes in your veins. You dance in circles between the tables, giggling at the people who smear by in a haze of gold and red. 

A hand reaches, snags your waist. "Where are you going, pretty thing? Wanna come sit with us?"

It makes you laugh, and laugh, and—

"There a problem?" Heat against your bare back. Ironclad arms around your middle. His voice is a rumble. A thunderclap. "She's with me. Go on now. Get."

You pull away from him, smirking, and—

The air is punched from your lungs. Longing sits in your throat, heavy and thick. It aches. God, it aches. A phantom pain that never quite dissipates. A raw wound left to fester; exposed and open to the elements. It never heals. Never scabs. It oozes grief and headache into your bloodstream and makes you feel lost. Dazed. Confused. 

It's silly. 

Stupid. 

The warm blends of burnt umber and gold make you tremble. Everything inside is—familiar, in all the ways it shouldn't be. 

You can't be here. Can't—

Something quivers inside of you. The sting of a guitar being plunked by indelicate hands. It snaps, breaks. You turn, eyes wild, wide—

—hey, where are you—

"...goin'—?"

A chest. Warm. Familiar. 

Your neck aches when you jerk your chin up, hands beaded against the hard, firm flesh of a stranger who feels all too familiar, too—

Hazel. A boscage in spring. Warm milk—

"Honey…"

It's out before you can stop it. 

Green and golden widen until they're drowning in a sea of arsenic white. An island of bloom, spring, carved in the middle of a barren, icy land. Lids fall, lashes dust across the shadows of the valley smeared beneath the red seal of his lower lash line. 

Your breath catches when they slide open, a slow crawl over a varicoloured plume of witch elm and wheat. 

—dark eyes, a furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips—

No. No. 

It's different. This isn't the man who haunts your dreams and whispers sweet nothings into your ear. This is not the cut of a man who once curled his fingers over your hips, lips glued to your pulse as he spent himself inside of you—

Heat sears your cheeks. 

His mouth opens, and closes. Opens again. No words spill out. His confusion is an oppressive silence. 

You swallow down the bitter tang of panic that pools on your tongue, nails digging into the soft fabric of his shirt. 

This isn't that man. 

He just—

"Sorry," you think you say, but it's all a blur. There was a blue ravine in his eyes, one with shallow shores, and crystalline waves that rippled with the breeze. You're sinking in those waters, now. Dragged down to the murky depths of blue, blue, blue that once made you see samsara with just the brush of his lips. Everything sounds distorted. Hollow. 

—you make me crazy. make me want things i shouldn't. Riley thinks i'm whipped. kinda agree with him, but i can't let you go. i can't get you outta my head, and i don't want to—

"Sorry—," you choke, the words a crumpled piece of paper lodged in your throat. Papier-mache seals over your trachea. 

You push away from him, stumbling out of this paroxysm. Flames lick at your heels, carrying you further from the laps of blue that flicker over beige. 

He chases after you. A warm hand around your wrist stops you on the corner outside of a pharmacy. The streets are dusted in white. It trickles from the sky in a thick hail of cosmic dust. 

His breath plumes in front of him when he breathes, pure white tendrils ghosting into the midnight blue silk that covers the town. 

"Hey, you alright? Can I—call someone for you, or—"

"No." You gasp, shaking your head so fast, you're nearly sick with it. 

"Hey, hey." His hand moves, perches itself against your cheek, eyes brimming in the flushed lamp overhead. His brow is drenched with concern. With confusion. And anger. Anger—why, why—

"Did someone drug you? Did you drink anythin'?" 

It rips a bark of laughter from your chest. "Drugs? No. I'm just—"

Spiralling. 

You make a vague motion with your wrist, and hope it's enough to convey the absolute travesty of your life. It meets the mark. 

The divot in his forehead softens, eyes creasing in the corners. Full pink lips knot to the side. Something passes his expression that looks a little too much like understanding to ever sit well in the pit of your stomach. 

You swallow down the acrid residuum of panic, and nod. Why—who knows. It just feels appropriate. 

"I need to go—"

"—I like your dress."

The words tumble over each other, barely coherent amid the amalgamated syllables, but ring with distinct clarity in your head. Your dress. Your brows knot, eyes dropping to the stupid little thing you'd picked out in a shop you had no business being inside. Led by the nose. A puppet on strings. 

You scoff. "I hate it."

You don't. You'd have picked it out yourself if you had that funny little thing called freewill; that precious little something you'd left behind in a dorm on a university campus you haven't thought of in years. 

"It's, ahh—," he rubs the back of his neck, eyes skirting toward the bar you fled from. "It's pretty."

Pretty. 

"Oh…," you say, quite intelligently. "You can have it if you want." 

It's only when his brows buoy to his hairline do you realise the innuendo within that. 

The fire inside dies. Doused with the waters of Acheron.

"Sorry—"

"—'dunno if it'd look as good on me as it does you, bonnie."

Bonnie. Your veins crackle with ice. Bonnie. 

"What—what did you call me—?"

He blinks. "Oh, it's not—," his hand slides away from his neck, scrubbing over the stubble on his jaw. He looks bashful, almost. The man in your dreams is—

Reserved. Cool waters. A rock. 

"It's just a nickname, it's not—it's not anythin' weird, I promise."

A nickname. You should have known that, you suppose; but like many things, it slips, silken and liquid, through the cracks wrought by paradox. 

"Right." Your nails dig into your palms, cutting the flesh until your fingers puddle with something warm, wet. Tacky. The breath you suck in between clenched teeth is a sharp hiss. "I should go."

"Ah, yeah," his brows tighten again, jaw ticking. He looks uncomfortable, unsure. Concerned. His arms come up, folding over his broad chest. And that—

That is familiar. 

You swallow down mildew and honeysuckle. Heart lurching in your chest, a painful crescendo that echoes to the whispered beat of soft words in your head. 

—you should stay, bonnie. stay with me—

"Can I at least make sure you get home safe?"

You can't. You can't—

There is a tavern on High Street that you've been to before in a dream, where you are taken to by a man with a distance in the crook of his smile; a degree of separation that makes you yearn. It pulled you in, gravity and magnetism and that primal something that they often talk about in wordy biology papers you can't understand. 

Maybe it's the chemical slurry in your head—dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin—all mixing together, and polluting your rationale, but it made a shade of roseate fall over your eyes; veiled like a Magellanic cloud. Through the startling nebulae and cosmic radiation, he loomed. Your fingers reached out, latching on to him, and you pulled him into your orbit. 

The reservations slipped, dulled by the way you fit against him. A missing piece. A complimentary artefact. His edges softened until he looked at you with nothing but warmth, affection. 

And then—

Then:

Three knocks in halted succession. Military precision. Boom, boom, boom. 

A man stood before you, achingly familiar in his mutton chops and hat. The gleam of his metals—chest candy—caught in the setting sun. Ochre, gold. You think of him, and you smile. Was smiling when you peeled back the curtain to greet him. 

It wavers. Your heart aches for that person standing in the doorway; you from a dream. 

It drags in slow motion. He takes his hat off, and cups it on his chest. 

—look, i don't… i don't know how to tell you this—

Then—

"—don't." The word startles you as much as they do him. You baulk. "Just… no thank you."

Something rings in the cognitive dissonance that shrouds you. 

It's your turn to walk away.

And so, you do. 

(He doesn't follow. You don't know why you expected him to.)

—be patient with me, Bonnie. my job is my life. my everything, but you–you're my—

It doesn't rain—a rarity in Elgin—but the scent of wet soil, petrichor, clings to the air. 

It isn't raining, but it feels like it should.

You don't expect to see him again. 

And why would you? There are so many people in Elgin, so many men. The chances of finding him again—shaggy mohawk; kind, amber eyes—were nearly impossible. Infinitesimal, really. 

So, you push him to the far reaches of your mind, and try not to dwell on the stranger that smells so strongly of coumarin that your head still feels dizzy from the scent of golden wheat fields in the spring and sycamore when you breathe in some mornings.

Out of sight, out of mind. 

A familiar stranger in a foreign land.

But you should have known better than to expect anything in this strange purgatory you’ve slipped inside where dreams are sometimes a reality, and you can’t stop comparing a hazy figure in your mind, someone you might have loved in a distant life you have no memory of, to a stranger who slots himself into your path like he was meant to be there all along. 

It starts three days later. 

You tuck a book under your arm, and walk the unfamiliar path to a small cafe you’ve never dreamed of, have no lingering sense of recognition in the small building. 

Safe, you think. 

And then—

Blooming honeysuckle. The heady scent of coumarin. Salt, amber. 

He crashes into your life again, and again, always with the same expression of happy surprise when recognition bleeds into wheat-tinged eyes. 

He offers a wide smile, a little wave, and seems unbothered by a dizzying sense of unease that sweeps through each uncanny meeting, each strange divergence of paths always, always, leading to each other. 

In the produce section of the grocery store halfway across town, he holds an unripened apricot and grins at you over the yellow sign above (30% off!). The colourful anchor in Cooper Park, where he stands with his hands in his pockets, eyes listing toward the swans in the background, drifting idly over the dark water. At the counter in a Turkish restaurant, laughing at something the waiter says as he takes his bag of takeout. 

You turn down a random sidestreet, trying to navigate the tight, claustrophobic streets of Elgin, and he's there, suddenly, at the end. Legs thrown over the seat of a sleek motorcycle, fingers toying with the clasp of his helmet. Wander into a shop, and he's already sat at the table. Reach for a carton of eggs in Tesco's and his hand bumps against yours as he tries to grasp the same. 

You hear his voice crackling through the concrete. A whisper in the back of your head. The grit, the cadence, is so different from the man you dreamed about, the hazy spectre who haunts you, that you know, instantly, that it's him. The man whose only resemblance to the ghost latching onto you is his eyes, the hairstyle. The scent. The familiarity blooms in his proximity. Two strangers sharing the same essence of a soul. 

He drives past you on his motorcycle, wanders down the same alleyway, boards the same train, and gets off at the same station. 

A living phantom. 

It's always the same, too. His eyes always shift, somehow catching yours. Easily, effortlessly, finding you even in the midst of a crowded shop, a bustling park, or a loud eatery. 

Each time, you run. And keep running. 

And then once, you catch him. 

He leans with his forearm resting on the railing of a mezzanine at dusk. His wrist resting on the iron, fingers gripping the nozzle of a lagger that dangles over the edge. 

Behind him, music spills out from inside the flat. French doors spread wide open, leaking the whisper of a party into the warm air. 

No one joins him. He doesn't look back. 

His chin is pointed up toward the varicoloured sky streaked with lavender and pink and blood orange. Eyes glowing brightly in the darkness. A field of wheat against the midnight blue gloom of an approaching storm. 

It's mesmerising. 

Despite the urge to run, you stop. Can't help yourself, really. Not when your heart cracks at the expression on his face, eyes drawn tight, brows pinched. Full of—

Longing. 

Like a magnet, then, his gaze drops to the ground where you stand, clutching your book so hard, your joints ache. 

His hand lifts, fingers still curled in a loose fist, and he gives you a lazy wave from above, lips pulling back into that same wide, infectious, grin. Happy—for some inexplicable reason—to see you, his own little poltergeist. 

You hesitate for a moment, burning the image of him in your retinas where he'll stay, a permanent scar, in the black puddles for you to see again when you close your eyes, or look into a mirror. Another ghost. 

And then you turn. Run. 

(He doesn't try to stop you. He never does.)

It is almost clockwork.

The same soft hazel eyes creased lightly in the corners. Broad shoulders are hunched as he gazes down at his phone resting on the countertop. His brows are furrowed today. Irritation bleeds in the crevasse. 

Your fingers itch. You want to smooth it out. 

(It doesn't surprise you that you can feel the phantom warmth of his finger under your flesh.)

It's strange. All of this is. Paradoxical, really. 

You know him. You don't. You've never met him before. You know he'd taste of honeysuckle. 

There is a war in your mind. A long, drawn-out battle. 

(No victor in the carnage.)

You should walk away, leave, like all the times before when you'd spotted him, and ran, but:

Frozen. Paralysed. 

You can't move. Can't—

—maybe, you're just tired of running—

—maybe, i'm just waiting for you to catch up—

His head lifts, and he catches sight of you before you can run. Hazel flashes in recognition. Spotted, you think; but it doesn't matter, it doesn't. 

He isn't waiting for you—

His chin lifts, a smile crooking on the corner of his mouth. 

—you'll be waiting a long time, Bonnie—

You want to run, but you can't. Can't. All you can do is watch as he slides out of the booth, hands shoved into his pockets, and makes his way to you. Tucked into the corner near the counter, away from everyone, everything, but he still spotted you. Still noticed. Still—

"Hi," he greets, low and cautious, like he's trying his best not to startle you. His eyes crinkle. "Didn't expect t'see you again."

You shouldn't be here. "Yeah," you say, instead, huffing. "I, uh… life is pretty funny that way, isn't it?" 

His brow furrows together at your words, eyes darkening with something you can't place. An unknowable emotion, hidden from your prying eyes. You think of him, then, and see the similarities you tried so desperately to ignore each time you saw him. Each time you ran. 

"Aye, it does." 

You should leave him here. Turn around, flee. Forget this place, this microcosm that blooms, and spreads over parts of Elgin you know so intimately; sure, somehow, that you'll find your fingerprints smeared across the ruins despite never having been there before.

Little pieces of yourself. Shedded skin, hope, dismay, peace. Longing. Laughter. It echoes through the tight webs of cobblestone buildings, bouncing playfully off of the pilasters and balustrades, the wrought iron fences, the fanlights, forever embedded in the grout. 

If you go there now, in that beautiful divisional line between new Georgian and old Baronial, you'll hear it whispering through the alcoves, a tantalising sound that rents the air in two. 

But it shouldn't. Can't. 

You've never been there, or here, or anywhere else that wasn't the winding path from your rented flat to the tavern, and the place you eked out from stone to support the vagary of moving to a whole new place for a dream. A feeling. 

And yet—

You taste malt in the air. Smell the barley, the sickly sweet scent of wet dirt on the slick pavement. 

It's familiar in your olfactory senses. Petrichor. Loam. Humus. It congeals in the slick mortar, clinging to the moss that weaves over the old concrete. 

If you looked down, you'd find a little weed growing through a crack beneath your feet, and so, you fix your eyes up, ahead, and try not to weep when the swooping sense of deja vu nearly knocks you off your feet.

But the only thing ahead of you is him. Expectant, curious. He looks at you like he knows you, like he can peel back the skittish layers that cling to your skin until you're shiny and new again. 

It's too much. Intense. Hazel. 

Your gaze drops, fixed on the rounded points of your shoes. There is no pavement beneath your feet—just scuffed linoleum. 

"Do I, uh, know you from somewhere?" 

His voice carries that same heft, that same weight, as the look in his eyes. A strange approximation of wariness and steeled scepticism, blanketed together by intrigue. Curiosity. Concern. 

"No." 

It sounds uncertain. A white lie that crackles in the air between you, nestled amid the sound of chatter muted in the background, as if someone turned the radio on in a different room. Everything seems to contort, and shift around you when he's near. 

A little microcosm eked out inside a cafe you've never been to but know, innately, what you'd order, and what you would recommend. 

"Well," he dips his head like he's trying to catch your eye, and when you lift your chin, the flash of teeth nearly makes your knees buckle. He's softer when he smiles. "How 'bout lettin' me get t'know you then?" 

It's a bad idea etched into the cold marble of a headstone.  

Your mouth opens, but the word that chews through your teeth isn't no, but yes. 

And fuck—

Something in his gaze shifts. Noctilucent eyes widen, staring down at you like he somehow didn't expect a yes at all, and was bracing for the harsh impact of no. 

"Well—" he starts, but the words fall into ash when you duck your head to avoid the crevasse of hazel washed out in flushed gold. "What's your number? I'll call you when m'free next, and we can—"

"Sure," you cut in, hand sliding into your pocket. The cold metal of your phone burns the tips of your fingers when you pull it out. It feels a little bit like a mistake when you hand it over, but he says nothing about the way your hand shakes when he takes it from you. 

His brows draw together in a childish concentration as he taps away at the screen. The artificial light, dimmed as low as possible, brightens the craggy ravines that cut across an emerald tinged boscage; sunlight splitting a lush valley of yellow and green. His puckered lips, the flash of a deep red tongue swiping across his sun-chapped mouth, seems designed to appeal to your baser desires. The one that knows how he'd taste if you pressed you let your tongue grace the tip of his, and can feel the weight of his hands on your flesh. 

He'd hold your hips like he was anchoring you to the earth: tight, warm, and a little bit desperate as he devoured you whole. 

You shiver, and try to ignore the way his pupils bloom into pits of black eclipsing lightened hazel when his gaze settles, hot and heavy, at the brief brush of skin when you reach for your phone. 

"I'll call you," he says, low and strained, like he was choking on the words he wanted to say. "I'll call you as soon as I can, bonnie." 

You nod. It's all you can offer with your heart scrambling up your throat, pulsing furiously against your trachea. 

His nails scrape the skin of your palm when he curls his fingers into a fist, and pulls away. 

"I'll see you around." 

It's not a choice, you want to say. You nod instead. Choke out an equally strained, yeah, and fight the urge to follow him when he finally pulls away. 

"Are you ready to order?" 

The world bursts back into sound, colour. You blink rapidly against the light that seems harsher now than that it did when he was blocking out the sun. 

"Uh, yeah—"

The taste of freshly poured coffee blooms on your tastebuds. 

You order tea instead. 

(It tastes like defeat.)

You only stop running when you can't anymore. When the murmuration in your head turns into screams, and the white-hot agony of grief, of yearning, threatens to make your knees buckle and your bruised heart give. 

You stop, letting him finally catch up. 

(Somehow, somehow, you feel lost and found at the same time.)

His name is Johnny MacTavish. He tells you this over dinner at some upscale restaurant that feels out of place on the old side of Elgin where the walls bleed history, and stink of old bones, and funeral dirt. 

Over a steaming dish of shrimp scampi and burgundy wine that makes your head spin and belly churn, you wonder why it doesn't feel new to you when he murmurs it. 

(A bit late, you find, since you've been texting rather infrequently since you gave him your number three days ago.)

Names never mentioned. Somehow, they didn't have to be. Until now. Until there was emptiness at the end of his question when he posed it, hazel eyes bright and blooming under the hushed yellow glare of the coruscating chandelier hanging above your heads. 

It feels a touch too late when you share your names over dinner despite already knowing he's in the military—opinions clenched between aching teeth and a strained smile that doesn't reach your eyes—and that he normally adorns a Mohawk when he's on missions, but grows it out, rather haphazardly, when he's home. 

Everything between you and him seems to happen in reverse: fears, wants, and worries are known before his given name; the touch of his skin on yours, the taste of his lips, the brush of his tongue, the weight of his palms holding your hips as he buries himself as deep as he can go in a haunting sequence of memories that bare their teeth at the starkness of reality holding them at bay. All of this before you've ever even touched him with your bare hands. 

There's a strange listlessness that envelopes you—a tangled web that spools around you, trapping you in this realm of hypnagogia. The lines between reality and dream blur until they're indistinguishable from each other. Knotted threads married together. Parallel. Concurrent. Where one begins and the other ends is as lost to you as the unfathomable uncertainty of the unknown universe. 

It's not meant to be this way, you think, watching as he feigns not knowing the name that slips between your numbed lips in the same manner you had only moments ago. Traps surprise in the tilt of his chin, but the display is largely done out of some unspoken agreement that this paradox does exist, and the emotion is fleeting. Temporal. He cloves it down the middle, and discards the excess as soon as you look away. 

(Your name fits in his mouth better than it ever did your own, like it was made for his mouth, preordained to play with the soft coil of his tongue.)

He knows more than he lets on, but you don't begrudge him his secrets—not when you have to turn your gaze back to the curled shrimp on your plate to avoid reminding him he prefers fish over crustaceans when he makes a face at the steamed scallops, and should have ordered the Maple Crusted Salmon instead. 

Like he didn't before, in a life you've never lived. In a place that mirrors this world. 

(It isn't something you should know, but you do. You do.)

You know more than that, too: whispers late at night when he couldn't sleep—internal clock still stuck halfway around the world—and urges you into playing a dangerous game of asking questions of each other when pieces of truth buoy in the dark like bobbing for poisoned apples in a barrel. 

You have to erase the words when you type them out, preemptively answering questions he'd never asked yet, and filling in the blanks to ones you posed yourself. 

Odd, you think. Strange, and weird, and macabre in that way that only deja vu gnarling between the broken crevasse of your grey matter can imbue. 

People don't just—

Know each other. 

And yet—

"They call me—"

"Soap." 

Your eyes snap up. A misstep. A grievous one. You've both been content to ignore this paradoxical magnetism that draws you together like eager poles, unable to stay away (not by choice or freewill, but some design that has no place in rigid structures of reality), and you broke it. Trampled over the unspoken rule left to linger in the foreground while you navigated around it like some misshapen elephant in the way. 

He tries to hide the suspicion, the surprise, but it falls between the empty space of his plate (food he only ordered because he's never been here before despite the familiarity that bleeds from the walls like condensation in June) and the ledge. A proverbial precipice that you leaped down; the steep incline filled with detritus and broken shale sharp enough to carve skin, muscles, from shattered bone. 

You want to swallow the words down, but they sit—innocuous and damning—between the salt and pepper shakers where his hand twitches, curls into a tight fist, knuckles bleaching under the strain of reeling himself in. Joints, cartilage, bulging through translucent skin. Reddened around the angry peaks of distrust and wariness; a summit you're not sure how to descend from now that you've crossed the arching tops. 

(Stuck, forever, at the peak.)

"How—" his voice is gravel, lavascape. Jagged rocks. Lakes of sulphuric acid. "How did you know that?" 

His accent thickens when he's angry. You wonder if he knows that. 

"I—" 

Excuses float like moots in front of you. You reach out, grasping for one, but it dances away in the turbulent wake you leave behind. You bite your tongue until it tastes of oxidised pennies, and then shrug. Nonchalant. Indifferent. Fear curls in your gut. Military, right. You wonder what you'll say if they arrest you for treachery. That you dreamed about him? Stupid. Stupid.  

"You told me," you murmur, eyes downcast and heavy, fixed on the bloody cup of wine you don't like, and trying to find solace in your downfall. "I think. I just remembered it from somewhere." 

It makes no sense, and the weak explanation would crumple like damp papier-mâché if he pressed, even just slightly, against it. A single touch, and the house of cards you built from the ground up on nonsensical lies will come crashing down around you. 

He shouldn't entertain it. Shouldn't let it go. 

"Yeah." But he does. "I must'a, huh?"

When you look up, you catch keen hazel eyes, sharp and pointed like the curved talons of a hawk. Johnny MacTavish is many things, you learn, but stupid, guileful, naïve is none of them. 

"Yeah," you echo hollowly, and give another shrug. "Guess so. It's, ah, an interesting nickname."

The clumsy barb seems to break the surmounting tension, and the pieces fall around you like poisoned raindrops, staining your skin. 

A reminder, then, when it crawls down your throat, that this balancing act can't last forever. That, eventually, your excuses will run dry. Empty. They'll be picked at and poked until they burst like a waterlogged, bloated corpse drifting aimlessly down the Nile. 

"Not the only thing that's interesting about me, bonnie," he says in a way that bleeds boyish charm, but his grin is wide, wild, and untamed. White teeth, sharp canines. You think of a wily fox on the prowl, and reach, reflexively, for the glass of wine, swallowing it down like a lifeline. "But I'm beginnin' t'think y'know that already, don't ye?"

It's a threat. A warning. 

You stare down in the half-empty glass of burgundy, the same colour red as the papercut on your index finger, and try to read the beads of crimson that run down the glass in a bloodied rivulet as if the answer could be found somewhere in the liquid. 

(Crystal Ball. Crystal glass. It's all the same, isn't it?)

"Not really," is what you eventually settle for, hedging through the murk that swims before you, an unsettling fen of unknowns and praeternatural happenings that you no longer than chalk up to happenstance. 

Kismet. 

Horror. 

Some cosmic merging of the two. 

It's all—

Absurd. 

And when you politely whisper to him that he should have gotten the salmon, you can't help but notice the ravines in his eyes widen slightly, the chasm growing and gaping, and taking on new shapes in the boscage that blooms like a familiar friend. 

(Kismet, indeed.)

He tries to pretend he doesn't know what the maple salmon tastes like, but slips up when the waiter passes by, and says it was good the last time. 

You fight the urge to chew on your glass like rock candies between your teeth. 

He stands with his hands in his pocket, rocking back and forth. The uncertainty in his brow is swallowed by the tendrils of pleased excitement that knot over his expression, unable to hide his glee when the hazel of his eyes glow brighter than the sun. 

Isn't this strange, you ache to say, words painted with the aftertaste of brine—sea, salt, and sand that are so uniquely him—but they, too, are swallowed down. 

The urge to lacerate the bubbles of complacency, feigned normalcy, are eclipsed by the raw shock of seeing him happy. Of wanting to make him happy. This stranger in a strange land. 

So, you offer some facsimile of a smile when he asks, words pushed out through a wide grin; infectious, if you had a good time. 

"Yeah," you say, and know that this word, this blase affirmative is quickly becoming your faultline through this mess. The thread keeping you sane, keeping you steady. 

It's at the curve of the word when everything else in the world is devoured by the shadow cast under his magnetic glow. The bright yawn of the sun in shades of white teeth catching on some ephemeral magic still dancing within the aether. Atoms spark. 

You try to run from it, ignore it, but your core teeters on the edge of instability. You think of neurons. Protons. Criticality. Something inside of you heats to almost half of the degree of the sun, sweltering and unrelenting. Pulsing, blue-hot. 

"That's good," he husks, eyes lidded and heavy. "I did, too. Whaddya think about doin' it again w'me?" 

It blooms. A great, scorching mushroom cloud plumes in midnight black in the milky white of your eyes.

You shuffle through the darkness, the artificial, comic night, and try to pat at the walls until you find something familiar in terror, the gnawing sense of loss that permeates through your pericardium, thrumming like a mourning toll. 

Sightless, you nod. "I'd love to."

And you mean it, too.

(Damn you. Damn you—)

Despite that tangled web that snakes around your jugular, twinning threads between the two of you, Johnny MacTavish is relentless in his pursuit. 

Where someone else might have shivered at the ghosts that brim in the tenebrous of your pupils, lurking in the untouched corners where your fingerprints stain the sediment, he lingers. Stays. Fixes himself in your path, and refuses to acquiesce to the whims of the world that keep stringing you along like reluctant puppets to some unseen, unknown marionette. 

It's almost charming in its own right, and really—when has a man fought so hard just to simply coexist in the space you deign yours? When has he torn nails from their beds, clawing at the walls that stand tall and proud, a protective tower of ashlar and dread around you until it starts to give. Until the stone crumbles away under his bloodied fingers. 

But as potent as his statement is, it gnarls inside your stomach like a poisoned seed. 

Bending to the demands of whatever this paradoxical realm goes against every fibre of your common sense that you recoil, almost, for just allowing him the scant space he occupies in your proximity. 

It's a deranged pantomime with some unseen force at the helm, conducting the madness with fingers drenched in whimsy and fate. Notched between its knuckles is the mockery of freewill and choice as it pulls you around a soundstage set in a place you've never been. It makes you dance. Amused god, eldritch horror. It takes pleasure in your discomfort, and glee in your fickle humanity. Weaving webs of tangled kismet until the silken threads are pulled taut and there is no more room, not a single atom, between your body and his. 

A nameless, faceless playwright with you as its shining star. 

Hapless leads stuck in an unending beat, a cantastoria, waiting for the shoe, the curtain, or anagnorisis to drop. 

You want to run again, but your feet are glued to the floor. Tangled in webs, threads of abstract concepts your mind threatens to come undone at the mere thought of. A cosmic sense of surrealism: crushing helplessness. 

This is horrific and terrific in equal measure, but the ache, the agony, of distance hurts more. And so, you stay. Watch as the curtain shudders over his eyes. As the etchings of complacency seem to gnarl in the tussock that line the expansive valley. He looks at you and doesn't see the awful truth nestled in the scant distance between your flesh, unable to be apart for too long. He sees you, somehow, and for him, that's enough. Enough. 

Johnny smiles at you, seemingly unbothered by the precariousness of this dance you're caught inside. In this strange equinox where you can answer questions he hasn't asked, and know things he hasn't said. Where you catch yourself leaning closer, starved for a touch you haven't forgotten despite never experiencing yourself. 

He's content, then, chasing the whims of a ghost, reaching for a fantastical dream in the head of another. 

But as content as he is, Johnny MacTavish is a hard man to catch, you think, noting the distance in his eyes, the arm's length of space he keeps between the version of him not haunted by the wants of ghosts, but such an easy man to love. To fall for. 

He balms the panic—that world-ending sense of uncertainty that nips at your heels—and makes you forget, sometimes, that there is more to him, and more to you, than anyone else could ever know. 

He's kind. Charming. 

A little space inside of your head is eked out just for him, and you find yourself hating that person for falling for some version of him first. Loathe them just a little bit more with each effortless grin he sends your way for tainting the experience of knowing him yourself. 

But you wonder, when he turns away, hiding the shadows in his eyes, and the pinch in his brow, if you really, truly know him. 

Or if the face he's wearing belongs to a phantom.

The dance continues. 

Your feet move to a soundless beat, steps preordained in a sequence lived world's ago. Nothing can feel surprising when you know a man so intimately without more than a touch, when you feel the burn of winter's chill in the middle of summer, and long so desperately for someone you just met. 

Nothing is new, and yet everything is novice. A paradox awakening with each gravitational pull to him, this man who looks only vaguely like the phantom who lives in your head, and tastes of longevity between your teeth. 

An arranged romance. Possession by ghosts who want to drive your bodies until they can live again, and love in tandem, vicariously through your living flesh. 

It makes sense to you, then, to call for an exorcism. 

(It just surprises you that Johnny does it first.)

Johnny has his secrets, just like you have yours. A small morsel of agency after autonomy has been stripped from the bone. 

You see the shadows of those hidden things etched in the topography of his valley-filled gaze, crevasses and canyons that pitch themselves in the tenebrous, uncrossable to even you. 

He reaches for you through the murk, fingers threading through your own, hands trembling with the shock, the electric current that sizzles through your blood at the brush of bare skin against quivering flesh. His hands are rough—worker's hands—and chock full of callouses and cuts, multitudes of scar tissue packed tight on top of each other, a thick layer of a life you will never know. Don't want to know. 

He seems settled when you touch, finally, thumb brushing your skittish pulse point as if he could somehow calm the acrid panic in your chest. 

(And damn him, damn this, he does. He does—)

Magnets fixed together, locked tight. You feel like a conduit to his frenzy, his hidden mania, and feed your own through the line, the red string that ensnares you both in a tangled web, until it's buzzing with shared panic and serenity and joy and helplessness. A feedback loop of emotions too extreme, too flighty, to catch. They run in droves along the lines, weaving into your skin, your chest, your head, and then pulling away to do the same to him. 

His eyes are heavier than steel when he gazes at you, expression caught between relief and longing and fear and—

Something, something. You can't pick it apart. Can't undo the tight knot until it spools, open and known, in the palm of your hands. Some unseen distance. It feels like standing at the highest peak of the valley and trying to make sense of the men in the tussock who look like mere ants from this high above. 

Is it happiness, you wonder. 

(Or maybe it's the same reluctance that wraps it's boney, gnarled fingers around your neck—)

It becomes too much. Too soon, too sudden. In the back of your head, you see images and flashes of a life not yet lived, a world still taking shape. You see him and you and a clock above some blue, broken bed. You see his smile, wide and elated, caught on the dawning sun spilling from the open curtains before it disappears under the covers, taking your laughter with it, stuck between his teeth. 

You see the past, the present. 

And your future. 

Cold. Barren. Three sharp knocks echo in the emptiness of your head. A man, a familiar stranger. You don't know him. You'd die for him. He rents the air in two. Your world in cloves. They fall to the ground, leaving you stranded and alone in the middle.

Future. There's no future. 

Your chest twists. You let go of his hand and find bloody crescent moons embedded in a ring along his flesh, knuckles whitening under your harsh grip. He said nothing about the pain. The flicker of worry across his face is genuine, you think. Real. Current. 

You smell funeral dirt in your nose. The mud is called under your nails. 

You pull away. He lets you go. 

"I, uh," he breaks off into a soft huff, injured hand lifting to scratch at the back of his shorn nape. His eyes slide away from yours, listing seaward. Avoidance undercuts the arch in his brow, the sheepishness in his mien. It's his turn to run, you realise. 

"Glad I met you," he says instead, and it's a confession and a curse. 

A bonfire burns in the river that runs through the valleys in his eyes. It's pitched on the sandy shore: an ochre flicker in the cobalt hue that saturates the land. You see the dark peaks of the rolling hills in the distance, black shapes in draped blue. 

The river is calm. The fire burns a smear of orange across the tranquil surface, meeting the milky white glow of the moon. 

It makes you think of those nights in the zenith of summer, the ones that feel neverending. Timeless. A piece of your history etched in balmy melancholy. Alone in the great expanse with nothing but the trill of cicadas, and the echoing chirp of the crickets hidden in the lush grass below. 

The sky shifts. His eyes plume with lavender-tinged stratocumulus. 

"I really like you, bonnie." It's whispered in your ear, and you wish, oh, how you wish, you couldn't hear it. That you could block the words, and the world, out so that it never reaches you again. 

Sweet longing. Beautiful agony. 

Your heart races, and you wonder how an empty space can beat at all. Can feel anything when it's just a hollow chasm. 

A heat blooms under your skin, desperate and aching. This, this, is everything you've been looking for since your heart split free from its fleshy prison, and ran away to find him, tucking itself in the boscage that glows in the flame on the shores. It's hidden somewhere. The palpitations sound like a song. You could follow it, you think, and find its lovelorn shell nestled amongst the grass that sways to its beat, and tuck it back into your empty chest where it belongs. 

(But it belongs to him, now.)

And you—

You hesitate. 

The words well on your tongue, but you think of fate, of choice, and swallow them down. 

The flames in the distance flicker, growing dimmer and darker as the moments stretch on, unbroken and barren until it's snuffed out. Gone. 

What can you say? What could you say? 

Instead, you say nothing at all. 

Johnny leaves a piece of himself on the table when he walks away. 

(You don't pick it up.)

Johnny doesn't say anything at all when he brings you home, when he stands outside of the archway to your flat, eyes lidded and pensive. A smile snakes across his face, but it's brittle and full of uncertainty, and your fingers ache to smooth the rugged lines in his brow, in the stress in his shoulders. You push it down. Smile for him instead. 

"I'll see you later," you say, and wish the ghosts wailing in your head would drop dead. 

The valley is drenched in ink when he nods, catching your gaze. 

All black, black, black. 

No sounds escape. 

"Sure, bonnie." 

You dream, and when you dream, it's of him. 

He stands at the top of a hill, and when he smiles it's full of starlight so bright it could eclipse the sun. 

In his hand, you see a pair of shears. Your mouth opens, but no sound escapes.  

He says just one word—your name—and then he lifts his hand, and cuts the rope. The sutures knit your bodies together, the string that holds him to this mortal plane, falls in swaths of golden thread to the ground where they're devoured by the earth, dissolved into nothing. Gone, forever. 

There's distance now, and separation. Nothing ties you to him except space. 

You wake up with the ghost of a scream on your lips, and the feeling of silken threads dragging over your flesh. You reach for them, and catch nothing but air. 

Palm pressed to your chest, you feel the rapid pulse under your fingertips, and know that it's back. Back where it belongs. 

Belongs, but doesn't want to be. 

You think of Johnny. 

And you weep. 

He sends a text message, and for the first time since you've met him, it surprises you. Nothing should shock you with him, anymore. You know everything, anything, about him. 

Gonna be away for a bit. Should talk when I get back. 

You reach for answers but they slide like mercury out of your hands. 

You don't dance, and you don't dream. 

You wander down the streets of Elgin, and for the first time since you woke up screaming in your bed with ghosts wailing in agony inside of your head, you get lost. 

Johnny comes back a week later, eyes heavier than you'd ever seen them, and shoulders drawn tight together as he asks you why—

"Why'd'ya keep runnin'?" He asks, words pitched and heavy with something lour and aching, a phantom pain you know all too well. There's desperation in his eyes, a low keen settling in the depth of his throat, echoing with the clamour of his despair. "If you don't want this—;" don't want me: "—then just say so, bonnie, 'cause I ain't forcin' ya t'be w'me, I ain't gonna make you stay. You wanna leave, you can just go—"

Can't. Can't. 

"Johnny—"

"No, none o'that, now. You make up your mind, 'cause I ain't makin' it for ya. I ain't makin' ya do somethin' you don't want to, and I ain't—"

He's pleading, you think. Begging—

For this, this strange thing. This awful, broken calamity, this abomination in the face of free will and autonomy. Despite the rage that hums in your veins at the idea of being controlled, manipulated, he finds something worth chasing. Worth running for. 

Why?

And what?

And—

It comes in flashes, snippets. Fragmented pieces of bright eyes—brighter, maybe, than the sun—and warmth, one hot enough to burn but it doesn't, it won't, it soothes instead. Eases coiled muscles, and absorbs the lactic acid that leaks from shredded, knotted fibres. Hands on your body, on your skin: the press of rough fingertips over prickling flesh. A whisper of curiosity, the slow descent into affection, adoration. Plush lips pillowing sharp teeth, too reverent to ever leave a mark behind—part in fear of marring fragile skin, and—

Letting the ghost of permanence fester, take root, inside his chest where his heart beats—

Jus' f'r you, bonnie. Jus' you.

For once, the phantom touching your body isn't a dream, a half-lived fantasy in another world where a man-made you whole and then ripped you into pieces, letting the scattered fragments blow with the sharp winds howling through the highlands. You know the touch, remember it. Felt it. New, and tangible. A touch that never lingered, too afraid of letting something, something, stick. 

For once—

The snaps flashing, blindingly, through your synapses are not made of dream dust and kismet. 

And—

All at once, it shatters.

—you know, i never thought i'd say this before, but i—

(You were lost in Elgin, but when you see his face, you feel found—)

THERE—

There is a lot to be said about Johnny MacTavish. 

Good things—kind, dedicated, driven—and bad things—bold, stoic, dogmatic—but one thing neither have in common is tardiness. Broken promises. 

So, when Johnny calls you in some distant land you've never heard of, and says: 

Things got bad. I might not—I might not be coming home.

You believe him. 

But the thing is: there's a difference between believing the words being said to you, and understanding their meaning. Your mind is not equipped to latch onto devastating blows with the same swiftness you do ignorant bliss. 

So, when you hear I might not be coming home, you think, instead, of tardiness. Of a missed anniversary dinner. 

(Of all the ones that came before it, and will come after it.)

And you smile. Smile into the receiver with your heart drifting down Lethe. 

"Okay, Johnny," you say, and those words will come back to haunt you three days from now, when John Price shows up at your goddamn door, stupid bucket hat tucked tight to his chest, and rips your heart into pieces. 

But for as much as you are blissfully ignorant, your mind still understands nuance. They used to call it foresight, a sixth sense; hindsight. 

You add, softer than you've ever said the words: "I love you." 

His breath stutters through the line in response. A brief pause. And then—

"If anything happens—" you hate him a little for even saying it; you really do: "just know that I love you, too. And that I hope—ah, Christ, bonnie, you got me all stupid, now—but, fuck, I hope we meet in another life."

It knocks something loose inside of you. Some primaeval thing that nestled in the safety of your ribs, moulting along your moon-white bones and glueing to the soft tissue that pulsed around it. It's shaken. Dislodged. 

It feels a little bit like your soul is being scraped off of bone. 

"Johnny—"

"—gotta go. We haven't heard from Roach or Riley in a while. I probably won't call tonight. So, don't wait for me, bonnie." 

The line clicks before the words I've been waiting for you forever fall from your wobbling lips.

You hate Johnny a little bit for this. For digging his roots deep into the soft chambers of your heart where it gnarled around your pericardium. A perfect little knot. A bow tied nice and pretty just for him. 

It makes it so much harder to bare when John fucking Price knocks on your door, stupid fucking bucket hat tucked tight against his chest, ghosts in his eyes, blood on his hands, and rips your heart into pieces until nothing but the rotten, dying roots remain. 

"I hate you so much right now," you hiss at the tombstone—the only thing you have left of him. "I hate you and I miss you and I wish you were here so I could—"

John finds you with your forehead pressed against the brass plaque, cheeks raw from the rivulets of tears that feel endless—a baptism in grief; in your tear ducts, Noah battles the biblical flood, and loses. 

Eyes that can't see past a shimmering hinterland of death and abject dismay are fixed, broken, against speckled granite. 

It's agony. The kind that makes it feel as if the marrow in your bones turned into a corrosive liquid, molten and devastating, and burst through brittle, hollow bone. 

Price, you've come to realise, seems to know things beyond what you tell him. Always picking up the shedded skin that falls from the people around him. Little pieces of them that he shoves in his pocket to ruminate on when he's trying to put together the puzzle of who they are. 

Words won't penetrate through the haze in your head. It filters in like water through a rhyne, back out to the open sea. 

(He knows this, of course, because you've been shedding pieces of yourself around him for years.)

It doesn't surprise you, then, when he says nothing. When he just falls to his aching knees in the soft humus, resting beside you as your world crumbles into ash and heartache. 

You sit in numbed silence until the sun is swallowed by the dusk that creeps across the sky. The moon itself seems to mourn along with you, hiding her eyes behind a nebulous veil of gunmetal. 

Price, without a word, helps you stand when the gravekeeper comes and ushers you out. He shepherds you into his Jeep and brings you back to the place that reeks of loneliness and dinners for one. A place that still carries the ghost of his presence around every corner, tucked away in each alcove and nook.

He might be gone, but his shadow still lives and breathes the dank, funeral air that clings to your sallow skin. A miasma of loss that tangles itself in every atom around you. 

Price seems hesitant to step inside, but you'd rather sleep on the patio with the chirping crickets and the weeping moon than be inside where the echo of his voice whispers through the halls, and he knows this, because he knows you, and so he brings you in before you can entomb yourself in grief, lost to the elements. He sets you down gingerly on the couch, body now more fragile than fine china, brushing your tangled hair from your forehead. It catches on his weathered hands. You barely feel the pull. 

He looks at you like you're a battle that can't be won. 

"Take care'a yourself, yeah? It's what—" he chokes, then, and you feel the hiccup like a white-hot knife to your gut. "It's what he would've wanted."

What he wanted is gone, and it's dead—just like him.

You don't say these words, but you wonder if he knows them, hears them, anyway. He must, you think, watching as the ashy, smoked cedar of his beard twitches. His mouth gnarls to the side in grief, uncertainty. 

He says your name. You know this because you know the shape it makes of his mouth, but don't you hear it. All it sounds like is a nail scraping over waterlogged, mossy wood. 

Price leaves.

A part of you goes with him.

You rest your forehead against his pillow, the one that smells of him still—warm milk, honeysuckle—and you wish so hard on broken promises, unfilled dreams, to see him again, to hold his face in the plinth of your palms, that your heart feels like it might burst—

—break. 

But it's already broken. There's nothing left to shatter. The pulpy mess he left behind beats not because you want it to, but because it has to. A biological failsafe that does not care about your human emotions even as it quivers and shakes at the loss that tipped your world upside down. A gaping hole sits in the middle in the shape of his smile, and your stubborn heart pulses around the wound. 

Sometimes you think it would be easier to feel nothing at all. To shed the agony like a rotting limb, cutting it as close to the bone as you can, and watching it fall, blackened with decay, and postulating with infectious spores that bud, devouring unblemished, unhurt, flesh until you're a pristine corpse. 

Grief twists you into the living dead. Breaks your head in two, cloved clean down the middle of unrelenting panic and anger—anguish so severe, you can easily convince yourself nothing at all is real. 

But it is. 

And then there is only denial and abject horror at that unimaginable nothingness that looms, blooming in your insides until they turn into a gaping, festering maw. One that makes you feel like you could swallow the whole world and still feel empty. 

No longer a human on the inside but a chasm. The person you were before died the moment his heart stopped beating. Irrevocably changed with three, stark knocks against the door he painted yellow because it reminded him of the way you looked standing in a field of sunflowers. Gone. Gone—

A barren void with its insides scraped out. Hollow. Wind rattles through your chilled bones. It sounds like his voice when it ghosts over your ribcage. 

You chase the sound. 

Running, running, running. Going so fast, it barely feels like your feet touch the ground. A wingless bird soaring across the valleys that gleaned in his hazel eyes. 

Running, running—

Your feet slide against marshy peat. A hidden bog gurgles beneath your soles. 

You don't scream when you sink. 

(The bubbles sound just like him—)

You smile.

—NOW

Eldritch machinations, some fanciful god playing a chaotic game of matchmaker, a dizzying sense of folie a deux—you haven't quite determined what the reason for this is, who or what might be behind it, but one thing you do know is this:

Something might be aligning your paths until all trails lead to him, but when you wander down those Wonderland roads, your heart beats for him. 

A second heart pulses under your skin. One slipped inside when you cupped his cheeks in your palm, and told him when you looked, you saw only him.

It might not be a choice you've made in this lifetime, but it's certainly one you can't bring yourself to regret. 

You run, but this time, it isn't away from him, but to him. 

He tastes of coumarin when you press your lips to his, a kiss met in the middle. 

You're lost, now, in the swell that gusts across the boscage. A breeze dances over your ears. A thousand starlings coo in the clear blue aether above. You feel the tickle of barley against your knees. Rasping tussock sedge curls over your ankle, weaving together until you're tied to the ground. Anchored against the stalks of wheat that shiver in the wind. 

His hands are warm, solid, on your skin. One hand braced on the small of your back, keeping you pressed firmly against him. The other cups your chin like you're made of fine china, polished crystal full of precious gems and rare metals. He holds tight as if he's afraid you'll drift away when he lets go. 

Your head is blooming full of sunflowers. They germinate in your thoughts until the petals burst through, lifting high to the heavens where the sun burns half as hot as his body angling against yours. 

His atoms sing, calling to yours. A buzz, a hum. You feel them stretch, shifting from the prison of you until equilibrium is reached when they merge, tangling together. A new being, a new entity is born from the collision—a person made of two with lungs and hearts that breathe and beat in the same cadence as it's ghosts. Woven together with marionette strings. 

It feels like coming home and getting lost all at once. 

Etched in the delicate flesh of your heart sits a kairos moment. A brief period of nothing that runs as deadly and tumultuous as the Swillies. An upheaval. 

Time is tenuous. Broken. Fragmented. 

An arm stretches out, anchoring across your waist. His mouth presses a kiss to your bare shoulder, eyes glossy in the mid-morning sun. 

"Wha' time's it?" He slurs out, words thick with sleep. 

Your eyes cut to the alarm clock on the end table. A slow, languid smile curls across your kiss-bruised mouth. 

"Eleven-fifteen," you breathe, eyes fixed on the red lines. Your heart stutters when it flickers. "Eleven-sixteen."

"S'too early," he moans, lips rubbing over your flesh. "Stay in bed with me." 

You peel your gaze away from the clock ticking down the seconds (minutes, hours, days, months, years), and turn to him. Hazel in bloom. A boscage in spring. Your eyes mist a little from the morning dew. 

"I love you, Johnny." 

His breath ghosts over your skin. You hear the hitch in his voice when he speaks. 

"Been waitin' a long time t'hear you say that, bonnie."

"Sorry to keep you waiting." 

—don't wait for me, Bonnie. i'll come find you—

—THEN

"Excuse me? You dropped this."

It's raining. Pouring, really. The droplets are the size of pennies and pelt the top of your umbrella with an unforgiving force. It sounds like the clatter of a mourning bell, and drowns everything else out. 

But it catches. Clear. Low. 

You turn, blinking through the thick fog that congeals around High Street in a dense, white blanket. 

"Sorry?" 

A man. He's towering above you, cut off at the chest by the fine points of your umbrella. You lift it, and—

Your wallet is the first thing you see. Wet, covered in grit from the cobblestone. It's clenched between a thick thumb and forefinger, held delicately together. You baulk. 

"Oh, shit—," it's snatched out of his hand, and pulled into the sanctuary of cover. You can feel it already. The mess inside. Still. You hope—

The leather peels back. Mush. 

You groan. The meagre bills you'd pulled from the machine are now wet, sticking together in a papier-mache square. Useless. No one is going to accept sopping wet bills. 

"Alright?" 

"No, I—," you glance up at him, irritation cutting across your brow. No, you're not alright. You're shit out of luck, and stranded here, now. And—

And—

Hazel. It's the first thing you see. Mountains of brown slope into a lush green valley. A cool blue lake cuts through, splitting off into a ravine. 

Your breath catches. 

"Sorry, umm. Yes. I'm—"

Attractive is the first word that springs to your mind when you stare at him—dark eyes, furrowed brow, long nose, a dusting of charcoal stubble along his cheeks and jaw, and full pink lips. Kissable is the second one. 

And then—

Oh, God. 

"Sorry," you murmur again, cheeks heating despite the chill. "I'm fine. Thank you, I'm—"

"You're not," he says, and it's uttered so assuredly that you can't find it in yourself to lie. As if he is somehow able to chisel into your head, and rifle through your problems with ease. "It's all wet, isn't it? Were you heading home, or—?"

It's cliche. Stupid. Your belly rumbles.

Mortifying. Absolutely—

His lips quirk up. A soft, almost secretive smile. Reserved. "Well, I know this place around the back. I could use the company, if you wouldn't mind."

You should say no. No, thank you—because you were raised proper. But all you can think about is the deep, brassy tone that tickles your ears when he speaks. The distant, almost careful way he regards you, as if he's putting himself at arm's length so you aren't scared off by his brawn. 

Hazel is dusted in gold. You want to bask in his warmth for just a moment longer—

"I'll pay you back, I promise."

His brows raise. Hazel framed in white. A soft huff leaves his full mouth before his lips pull up in a slow, genuine smile. 

"Y'alright, bonnie. I'll hold you to it."