#stebxreader

Your touch, your breath, your laughter - your soft words. Each brush of your fingers, each unspoken glance, each careless word chips away at Steb's fragile barriers of patience. Ones he has so meticulously built over the years between his instinct and self control. Now you tether him to something he can barely understand, something he was not designed to endure.

Waiting.

Steb was not meant for this.

Your human kind courts through painfully slow rituals of language and dramatic hesitation, a series of tentative and convoluted steps towards tenuous connection. His kind does not. Bonds are forged in violent moments, immediate and irrevocable. Steb had observed that humans do sometimes bond like this too - but more often outside seedy nightclubs on the outskirts of Piltover when both parties are inebriated.

For you he would go slow.

But even now as he watched you knead dough, a smattering of flour across your cheeks dulling the freckles that made his blood boil and rush directly to his groin - vivid images of the rush of his teeth and light and blood leaving no room for ambiguity as to his instincts intentions. This slow unfurling you call dating is a torment he cannot escape.

And yet, for you... He endures.

--/--/----/--/----/--/----/--/--

In the beginning, time was meaningless to him. There was only you, and work of course, to steer the course of his days. Your rhythms erratic, your rituals incomprehensible to him. But now, he knows the cadence of your days by both hearts. He has memorised the way you move with slow lazy grace in the morning light, the tilt of your head as you shape dough, the soft sighs you release when you think no one is listening. The sharper ones when you think they are listening.

You touch the scale in your braid often.Brazen temptress that you are. You think it’s absentminded, but he notices every time.

He watches the way your fingers trace its green edge - his edge, your touch lingering as though drawn to it. The very sight fills him with a pride so sharp it borders on pain. That scale is a piece of him, embedded in you, a fragment of his flesh given freely with excrutiating pain, marking his claim on you. Marking that you were his, and soon your flesh would be his too.

You wear it with incomplete understanding.

To you, a keepsake. To him, a bond.

Steb's eyes narrow as he bites into a horrific concoction you've christened ” a vegan sausage roll“.

For you he endures.

--/--/----/--/--

There are nights late in the bakery when he finishes his often late shift, and you simply sit with him, your body curled against his as you read your books and wait for bread to bake, your breath warm against his neck. His uniform meticulous even after a long day of mending and breaking bones. You don’t speak much in those moments; the silence between you feels natural. He listens to the rhythm of your breathing - monitors you - watching observing cataloguing things had always relaxed him - and for a while, the tension within him eases.

But even then, his instincts stir.

He imagines what it would feel like to wrap you entirely in his arms and world, to pin you down and see your wrists dwarfed in the palm of his hand, to see you adorned not just with his scale but with the indelible marks of his teeth upon your neck staking the weight of his claim. He dreams of you swollen and ripe with his young, your body transformed by the life you would create together, your form bent irrevocably to the rhythm of his species.

The thought is as intoxicating as it is terrifying. Bright flashes of vivid daydreams that infect him every time he looks at you.

And for all your humanity and terrifying softness, you are resilient in ways he cannot fully grasp. You do not yield easy. There is a quiet strength in you that disarms him, that keeps him tethered to the human rituals he has come to tolerate as a necessity to bridge the gap of your bond. You test him without realising it, your small provocations igniting fires he struggles to extinguish in the wake of your careless hands and careless words.

You trust him. And it is that trust that holds him back from completion. A trust which forces him to remain in liminal limbo, waiting for you to bridge the distance between your worlds. At your own pace.

You are far too precious to rush.

--/--/----/--/--

As you sit one evening, your graceful human hand filling out orders for flour and yeast and those vegan sausages no one but Steb seems to eat...He studies you the way his kind studies prey.

No not with malice, never that,,but with precision.

Every movement you make, every shift in your expression, every tremble and huff of annoyance as you cross something out in your ledger is carefully catalogued and dissected. He notices the way you glance at him when you think he isn’t looking, the way your lips press together when you’re deep in thought. Soon his mind pulls him to the memories which haunt him - the way your breath hitches when he pulls you in with his forearm against the small of your back. So pliant for him. So trusting. So large eyed. Your hand so small when it chases his bioluminescence, not understanding that the vivid hues are screaming that he is ready to claim you.

He wonders if you notice the way his gaze lingers on you and the way his gills flare when you speak his name.

He wonders if you feel the crushing weight of his attention. Or are you blissfully unaware of the chaos you have unleashed within him?

Sometimes he thinks you do know.

And then you smile, and the thought vanishes.

--/--/----/--/--

Weeks had passed. As they often do.

You don’t know how much he dreams of you, how vividly he imagines your body entwined with his, your skin marked pink and red by his hands and teeth. His species is not supposed to wait this long. When a mate is found, they are fought for if needed, and promptly claimed.

You don’t know how often he fights the urge to pull you closer and claim you fully, to make you his in every way that matters. Hear his name screamed from your swollen bitten lips in the throes ecstasy. Feel your small human hands on his neck gills, holding on for dear life as he ruts into you. He would take you again and again. However many times it took for his seed to take root.

And yet, you trust him.

That trust is a tether. It binds him to you like a knotweed, forces him to confront the depths of his restraint. You have become the spinning central axis of his world, the pull that keeps him grounded even as his instincts spin out of control and scream for release.

For now, he waits.

He watches you now, his scale glinting a silent promise in your hair as you twirl your braid carelessly. The ledger forgotten as you pour tea. It's only a matter of time really. Mostly inevitable things are.

When the moment comes, when the rituals of your world finally give way to the primal currents of his, there will be no hesitation.

You will be his. Completely. Irrevocably.

And he will make sure you understand exactly what that entails.

--/--/----/--/--

The low lapping rumble of waves crashing against the shoreline brings a cool salty brine to Steb’s nostrils. His ears twitch as he tilts his head towards you. His dapper outfit consisting of a tailored vest, shirt and slacks betraying that he's off duty. This is another one of these human dates. Not that he minds. He quite enjoys your company and hopes to enjoy your quiet laughter and smile. Perhaps taste your lips.

You smile and lead him by the hand to a bench overlooking the pier. The vista is one of power - waves crashing down onto the shoreline threatening to swallow up Piltover itself each time, before slowly retreating.

The sound of your breath, shallow and uneven, cutting through the roar of water like a blade. The flicker of your pulse beneath the thin skin of your throat, hammering out a rhythm that matches the frantic drumbeat inside his chest. The scent of you, warm and human and maddening, filling his lungs like smoke. He is choking. Suffocating on you. His gills flutter as if that would help. It doesn't.

Suddenly you are sitting too close.

Your hand rests on his arm, your fingers tracing patterns he cannot understand - his ears twitching as if to steady himself , and the warmth of your touch is unbearable. The light from tthe dying sunset casts ripples across your skin, illuminating the soft curve of your jaw, the hollow of your collarbone and your plunging neckline offering a suggestion of soft breasts - so inviting, the soft lines of your body where it presses against his.

He has studied you long enough to know every detail by heart.

But tonight, knowing isn’t enough.

You tilt your head to look at him, your eyes catching the light in a way that makes his breah hitch. Constellations of freckles slot instinct into place like a finely tuned mechanism.

“Steb...” you say, your voice soft. “What are you thinking? You look so dour.”

He doesn’t answer. He can’t.

How could he explain that his thoughts are not words? That they are violent heartbeats?

You are a sharp living blade, cutting against his neurons blinding hot. You have made home in the cold antiseptic confines of his piscine mind. A fractured cut fault line filled with vivid hopes - you pliant and yielding and panting and moaning his name so beautifully under him. You. Your shallow gasps like gunfire against his chest. You. His against all odds. The war and the world and the myriad of complications he would overcome without hesitation if only he could have you as his mate.

But those are just fantasies.

Instead, he stares at you, his silence stretching taut. His gills flare, their golden lights pulsing erratically.

And then you smile.

Steb moves and stands, sudden and fluid, and before you can move back, his hand - strong grip and scaled, cold , it closes around your wrist. Not harsh, not painful, but unmovable, a force inevitable. You can feel the faint texture of his scaled fingers, the barely perceptible press of knuckles against your skin.

"Steb!" you start, your voice catching in your throat.

He doesn’t speak. Of course, he doesn’t. His eyes - too relaxed and too steady, fix on yours with sudden ferocity - and change that sends a cold spike of something sharp and unfamiliar through your chest. A primal fear. Something as old as time telling you to fucking run. Run now.

And then, without warning, he pulls.

You stumble forward, unbalanced, your breath hitching as you collide with him. His body is cool against yours, unnervingly solid. You can feel the faint shift of muscle beneath, the unearthly strength coiled within him. “Steb wha...” you say again, your voice sharper this time, tinged with a nervous laugh. “What...”

Before you can react, he lifts you effortlessly, his muscular arms locking around you. There’s no violence in his grip, no malice, only unyielding determination. He is simply a conduit of the inevitable in this moment.

“Put me down!!!!” Panic edges into your voice now, but he ignores it, doesn’t even glance at you as he strides toward the edge of the pier.

The sea stretches out before you, dark and vast and turbulent, its surface churning black restlessly beneath the storm heavy sky, groaning with dark clouds that kiss the tips of giant cresting waves.

“Steb, stop! The fuck!! ” Your voice rises, trembling with fear. “What are you...”

The words die in your throat as he steps off the pier, plunging you both into the water.

--EPILOGUE--

Dear reader.

To be truly loved is to be dissected.

One must endure a violence so intricate it borders on artless artifice- a kiss or a scalpel masquerading as your salvation. Steb's affection a vivisection performed under the cold blue fluorescent lights of his unblinking gaze. A cold metal table against your back - or perhaps his long trailing fingers. You are no longer sure.

It would be easy to frame his love as monstrous, but then is human love not a monstrous thing ? We only think it not because we live in a society where our instinct is celebrated in song and word, idealised and cherished.

Can you bring yourself to cherish and celebrate his instinct ? His rituals that are simply incompatible with human ideas of consent ?