“nightwing?” the cigarette falls from your fingers as he startles you.

he chuckles, grinning, “sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” he steps closer, “just wondering why a lovely lady like you was doing out in the cold.”

you feel warmth crawl up your face, “oh, i’m… i’m just thinking.” you bend down to pick up the cigarette, wet from the cold.

“about?” you wait for him to continue, confused on why he was still here, “sorry, it’s been a pretty calm night, so i thought i could be a listening ear for you.”

his mask hides his eyes, but you almost certainly knew that they were shining in interest. you sigh, nodding. he sits on the ledge of the roof and you hop up, sitting next to him. “a… friend of mine… we had a pretty big fight.” you pull out another cigarette, trying to light it. the wind blows out the lighter twice before you let out another heavy sigh. he gives you a disapproving look before blocking the wind with his hand. “thanks,” you take a drag before continuing, “he crossed a lot of my boundaries, you know? he was so… overprotective, i guess.”

“why? whywhywhywhy- why are you choosing him over me? i can’t fucking believe you!”

“i’m not choosing him over you. it was just a date and you beat his face in! you just kept punching and punching and punching and punching! you-”

“he terrified me…” a shiver goes down your spine at the memory.

“maybe he was just worried about you?” he tilts his head, contemplating.

you shake your head, “no, it was just weird.” you let out a breath, the smoke of your cigarette mixing with the cold. “he was literally stalking me, nightwing. he tracked where i was going, who i was talking to, he attacked some guy i was talking to, everything!” you let out an irritated laugh, “we were just friends too! i don’t know what he was thinking…” you snuff out the cigarette against the concrete, flicking it over the roof. you watch it land on the hood of someone’s car, letting out a chuckle. you turn to see the hero watching you.

“have you considered that maybe he was just worried about you?” nightwing turns away from you to look out towards the city, “the city is pretty dangerous.”

you roll your eyes, “yeah, he said that too, but-” you look back towards him, “-i’ve lived here my entire life. i know how to take care of myself.”

he smiles, “really?”

you give him a small smile, mocking his tone, “yeah, really.”

“let’s test that then.” before you could question him, his hand rests against your back, pushing you off the roof.

a scream rips from your throat as you dangle off the roof. he keeps a grip on your hand, squatting on the ledge. he gives you a wild grin, stretching his legs leisurely as you scream, “OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD.”

“see? this is why i was so protective, (y/n).” he loosens his grip and you quickly latch back onto him.

“PLEASE- please, please don’t drop me.” you sob, clutching his arm. nightwing pulls you up, holding you by the waist.

“you’re okay,” he coos, “you’re safe.” you keep your arms around his neck, making sure to hold on tight as he starts his way back to your apartment. you keep your head buries in his neck, afraid to let go. your heart pounds in your ears as everything catches up to you.

he continues to speak, trying to comfort you as he presses the code to your apartment. “i’m here, i’m here,” he continues to try to soothe you as he lays you down in your bed. “do you see now? why i- he did what he did?”

“fuck you.” nightwing blinks, looking down to your arms around his neck. you try to shove him, but he catches your hand. “did dick send you to scare me? did he ask you t- to kill me?” you could feel a lump in your throat as you try to talk. tears start to well in your ears, blurring your vision.

he laughs, “what? no,” he keeps a tight grip on your hand as he sits down next to you. “i can’t believe you haven’t figured it out.” he snorts as he pulls off his mask. “honestly, i don’t think i was hiding it that well.” your mouth goes dry as dick smiles back at you, an innocent grin on his face. you stay silent, words escaping you. his grin falters and you see his eye twitch.

alarm bells ring in your head as you watch a shadow pass over his face, “w- wow! dick! wow…” you swallow your fears, “i- i can’t believe-”

“stop it.” dick sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. you shut your mouth, trying to slowly move away from the man. “stop. it.” he grabs your face. “i hate when you act like this, (y/n).” you could feel the anger radiating off him, “like- like you’re scared of me.” his nails dig into your face and you wince. “you did this at the restaurant during that stupid date, at your apartment, when i met you at work… all i want to do is keep you safe.”

you don’t respond, panic keeping your voice stuck in your throat. fear overwhelms you, clouding your brain. you touch his arm lightly, trying to placate your friend. “y-you’re right, dick. i’m sorry.” his grip loosens, “i- i didn’t consider everything. you were just trying to keep me safe.”

he lets go, an empty smile back on his face. “i’m… so glad you understand now, (y/n).” dick’s hand falls to your thigh, squeezing. “but-” his eyes stare into your soul, “-just in case you’re lying, i’ll have to make sure you actually understand, right?”

“what?” he doesn’t dignify you with a response as he pulls tape out of his utility belt.

“you know, (y/n),” you try to beg dick, backing up as he grabs your ankle, yanking you back to him. “you should be glad i’m a lot nicer than my dad.” the sound of the tape ripping; the feel of his spandex-covered skin against your own. the tears wouldn’t stop flowing as he pressed the tape against your mouth. “if bruce was here? he would’ve told me to knock you out and drag you back home.” dick laughs as you scream against the tape. “but, i’m not like him… so just relax, okay?” he uses more of the duct-tape to stick you against your bedframe, keeping you stuck. he presses a kiss against your forehead as you kick and scream, but he locks the door as he leaves nonetheless.

you weren’t sure how much more of this you could take. dick would come in once a day with food, and at first you would scream as many expletives at him as you could before he leaves, refusing to eat. after a week of this, you folded, letting him feed you. the hunger and thirst made you light-headed, but your irritation grew as he cooed and pet your head. between a spoonful of take-out, you clear your throat. “c-could you let me go now, dick?”

he frowns, the spoon pausing in the air, “let you go?”

“i-i’ve learned my lesson, dick. i know now, i was overreacting about everything.” you nod your head, forcing a shaky smile on your face.

dick hums, shoving the spoon into your mouth, “i don’t know… i really like taking care of you like this.” he pets your hair, “i know exactly where you are, what you’re doing… i can go out at night without worrying.” his eyes filled with love as he talks.

you swallow, “w- what about a shower? i just need to shower, that’s all. just- just 15 minutes.” dick purses his lips.

he thinks for a minute before he lights up, “only if you let me help you.” he gives you a wink and you hold back a sigh. you nod, tired. he undoes your binds, “can you get up, babe?” dick looked pleased as you shake your head. he could barely hide his glee, “aw, my poor girl needs my help?” you nod, biting your lip to stop yourself from crying. “say it.”

you feel warmth spread to your face, “p-please help me up, dick.” he grins, wide and toothy. he picks you up like a bride, letting you rest your head on his chest. he takes his time undressing you, hands wandering to caress your skin. you ignore his touches to stretch your muscles.

“beautiful…” dick presses a kiss to your hand before helping you into your tub. you let him wash you, too relieved to finally bathe. “we’ll do this every day,” he massages shampoo into your scalp. “i’ll take care of you for the rest of our lives, (y/n).” you stay silent and he continues, “once we move to my place in bludhaven, we’ll be doing normal couple things like this every day.” you could hear his happiness in every word.

before long, you were back in the bedroom, “dick.” you grab his hand before he could pull you back on the bed. “please, don’t tie me up. i’ll be good, i promise.” his eyebrows furrow.

dick bites his lip, thinking for a moment. dick swallows before speaking, “prove to me you’ll be good.” his voice is light as he sits down on the edge of the bed. you tilt your head in confusion and dick gestures for you to come closer. “kneel down.” realization dawned on you as you kneeled down in between his legs. he grabs your chin, gentle. your eyes meet his, full of love and want.

you slowly pull down his bottoms, holding his cock in your hands. dick moans as you touch it lightly. you swallow, thighs squeezing together. you couldn’t speak, unsure if you would protest or moan along with him. you could feel the warmth pulse in your hands as it got harder by your touch. dick whines, “come on, babe, i know you know what to do.” you ignore his words, rubbing your thumb on his tip. he bucks his hips into your hands and you let him, using his pre-cum to jerk him off. “m-mouth, use your mouth.” dick moans, grabbing your head.

“no-” you couldn’t finish your sentence as dick had shoved your mouth down onto him.

you choke and he moans, “fuck…” you try to hit his thighs, but he keeps his grip strong. dick uses you, his cock hitting the back of your throat over and over. you could feel drool dripping down your neck and you gargle.

your body submits to the abuse, warmth spreading down to your toes. you could feel yourself getting slick with wanton pleasure. tears well in your eyes as you stop fighting, letting your friend use you as his toy. “that’s my girl- fuck-” before long, dick pushes your head down, nose buried in his pubes, to release himself down your throat.  “swallow it.”

you hold back a gag as you taste the salty, metallic cum. you stick your tongue out to show him and his eyes widen in gleeful surprise. you clear your throat, “i-i told you i’ll be good.” your voice was rough and you watch as dick gets hard again.

Gojo

asphyxiation, being a rope bunny, praise,

gojo is a deeply affectionate person, yes?

well... deep down he longs for that connection with someone (again)

and for all of the teasing, the loving touches and all be turned back at him, instead of always being the giver

for you to quietly admire him, no need for big words or anything

....

......

well actually he wants to hear those words more than anything

shower him in praise and never stop

his little fantasy got catapulted once you gently intertwined your hand with his and sort of pushed them down into the mattress by his head

he was never the same

he loved the feeling of being securely held somewhere

not worried in the slightest about being hurt... just full of trust

same thing when you once (jokingly) wrapped your hands around his throat and pretended to squeeze it

suddenly wants to lean towards you, mouth open as he tries to kiss you

to seek the comfort of your soft kiss as your hand would squeeze around his neck

he quickly shakes his head, trying to get rid of those thoughts while you giggle about it

he had to excuse himself after giggling with you

(he freaked it on his own in the bathroom lol)

Geto

somnophilia, distension,

tired depressed man

he does need to rest more than anything

however comma that means that he often dreams about you

and this one particular dream left him very conflicted by his own mind the next day

the dream went something like this

he was woken up by you in the middle of the night (talk abt dream in a dream huh)

you woke him up by squeezing his thighs gently, running your hands up and down slowly, making them part automatically

to his surprise the head of his dick was already in the warm and wet embrace of your mouth, making him hiss

somehow once he was awake he was folded in half with ease, amazed at your strength

then the only thing he can remember is watching in awe as you insert your strap in his hole with no prep at all

how did you- it's still a dream dummy

the the thing that had his tummy up in butterflies was watching the way his lower tummy slowly started protruding, with every thrust you gave from above

the pleasure had his eyes roll back into his head and straight out of the dream

much to his dismay,,,

Shoko

sex toys, inspection kink (kinda?), overstimulation, pain play, slight mindbreak,

SHOKOOOOOOOO

okay get ready for a rant bitch

shoko is a FREAK, argue w a wall

THAT'S MY WOIFE

loves loves loves using sex toys in general and always uses them on herself whenever she's alone and too tired to try and freak it acoustic styleZ

so to get herself ready to mastrubate she often fantasizes on her own before getting home

and lately you've been on her mind too much

and in her mind you're sitting nearby while she's on all fours, a fucking machine slowly thrusting inside of her

you'd tape two bullet vibrators to her nipples, buzzing at a low frequency on purpose

working herself up more she wonders if you'd even go so far as to somehow attach a magic wand to her thigh, so it'd buzz away against her slightly swollen clit

well loved and taken care of so you can just lean back and watch

see the way the pleasure slowly works itself from her skin all the way down into her bones

the overstimulation still hurting and making her writhe around

but you just... stare...

unreadable expression making her wonder what's in your mind

she wants to be pushed past her limits, to slowly forget all her worries and submit to the pleasure taking over her entire body

she nearly breaks a pencil at work thinking about it a little too much

Yuki

gross? sex, piss kink/urophilia, "the forever place"

okay hear me out for a second

idk how to describe but please listen

I feel like yuki would like gross or like... sort of disgusting sex?

LIKE-

if your skin is glistening with sweat from the exertion, panting heavily while staring down at her

bc obvs you'd be tribbing/scissoring

BC ITS YUKI

but she can't deny the way her tummy flutter with butterflies when you spit on her pussy before fingering her or eating her out like a crazed animal or something

her pussy would also flutter lesbi real

also there is a fine line between liking squirting and a piss kink

and yuki would have both

she wants to know what techniques you got, to make her legs shake wildly before the clear fluid trickles down between her thighs

she's gnawing at her own pillow in frustration, wanting to see you soon already

also wants her body and pussy be pushed so far that she can't help but let everything flow freely, even if that ends up being something between squirt and piss

needs to know that "let go without meaning to" feeling

also for those of you familiar with "the forever place" from the bottoming/topping book

she'd defo have that fantasy

wants to reach a point of ecstasy and delight and pleasure and joy of closeness and intimacy to the point where she'd want it go on forever and ever

and that's why me and yuki are soulmates

Choso

breeding kink.

now.

excuse the rant I just love heeem

so choso is a family man through and through yes yes we all know

and since he is a 150 yr old VIRGIN he doesn't have any sexual experience

he knows the basics its ok choso ily <3

but ever since being with you it seems like his thoughts became preoccupied with you

he daydreams like he has a schoolboy crush on you

dreams about love and even family

but.........

suddenly he's picturing himself being put in a mating press, having you plow into his ass from above

the silicone digging itself into his the only opening he has over and over again

and you'd ask him things like "do you want to start a family, baby?" and he'd give a shuddery "yes"

trying to concentrate on answering you, while his brain and his insides are being mushed together

"then you'll get pregnant for me, right?"

and he answers immediately

"yes. anything for you."

once he realizes what direction his daydreams are taking he has to quickly stand up from wherever he was sitting, leaning against

and just walk around a little

maybe even bang his head against the wall

sliding down that same wall he suddenly wonders if that's a possible way for you two to make a big happy family

shh no one tell him about the fake cum in that ejaculating dildo lolol

Nanami

nylons, lingerie, crossdressing,

sexc business man crowd claps politely

sexc business man (wearing lingerie under his fancy suit) CHEERS AND HOLLERS AND CLAPS LOUDLY IN AGREEANCE

sorry

so anywayZ

Nanami admires the women around him hashtag feminist

but he has a strange fascination with womens clothes especially

he's always complimenting you when he nuzzles into your neck during a hug

he'd be guided into your bedroom where you make him sit on the bed while you do a little runway modeling show for him

to get him gushing about you

and he'd do it so genuinely too

now I'm just fantasizing about him my bad

but while he watches you twirl in giddy excitement he wonders...

could he feel the same way? perhaps in the same clothes?

would you make him wear your clothes on purpose? to see the way they don't fit his body type and giggle with him about it?

would you order custom made things, tailored to his exact size, fitting him perfectly?

would you buy matching clothes for him?

he might just have to cross his legs to hide the growing erection in his pants

he wonders how arousing it would be to roll around the sheets underneath him with you, wearing nothin but nylon stockings, held up by the elastic inside the lace top

to feel the material against his ears as he-

his ears are growing hotter by the second

Sukuna

passing out, dubcon, humiliation, aphrodisiac use

this is all mellos fault and I adore her to bits for it /gen

SUKUNA ON THE BRAIN

his freak ass

probably already voiced one out of the three fantasies mentioned above

you guessed right (maybe) it was aphrodisiac use

challenged you to it even... his dramatic ass

wants the two of you to take the same aphrodisiac and spend an entire day together

to see who can keep it in their pants longer, who has the strength... the willpower... the-

he'd lose

the other things he didn't mention... he's taking those to the grave unless you find out by accident

might just consider killing you both to save face

he won't..... (probably)

but he secretly wants to have sex with you in such intense ways or lengths that even he wouldn't be able to keep up

or be forced to pass out due to you cutting of the air to his lungs, making him grasp desperately at the hips bouncing on his dick faster on purpose

all the blood rushing away from his brain down to his dick

wants to know his own grip is slowly fading while you keep going, uncaring for him

even better/worse if you take pictures of his passed out self, knocked out cold on your bed while you pose with his unconscious body

feels offended at his own fantasy afterwards (loser)

Thinking bout that one rp where Era gets himself caught bc he overestimated his abilities and then gets his pride and dignity broken bit by bit... the man is stubborn and ungodly determined, but not entirely invincible.

I do love me a broken arrogant bastard whose insecurities get dragged to the surface against his will and who is forced to beg to keep some semblance of sanity <3

Goes from an arrogant demigod to a mess that just barely holding back from whimpering... Begging for comfort and love and would lick your fingers like a puppy to apologize for nipping at you. He stops lashing out, stops breaking things, just sits there waiting on a leash and lights up when you call him good- before promptly being crushed by immense amounts of shame and disgust for stooping so low.

Ohhh he uses his ability to smell emotions to gauge your mood... tip toe around eggshells and is careful not to bark too loudly- but if you push he still has that snark and bite in him that never truly disappears...

Above him, you sigh, breathy and high pitched, Your hips roll into his, and Yuji bites back a hiss. His hands lay limp at his sides.

“Why aren't you saying anything? I thought you would like this.” Your voice is wrong, you’re talking with his voice and Yuji feels the bile rise in his throat.

You switch rhythm, and Yuji chokes on his spit as you bounce up and down his cock. His hands spasm into claws, but no, he doesn't touch you. He won't, he won't.

You laugh. It's so fucked up but he sounds like you.

“You like this better, right?“

“Fuck you–” It was a bad idea to talk. Your– Mahito's hand shoots out and he sticks three fingers into his open mouth to gag him. Two on his tongue, the other on the roof of his mouth, keeping his mouth open. He chokes, but Mahito presses down on his tongue.

He’s going to come again. What number was this? He lost count around the fourth. All he could focus on was the hot coil in his belly, the tightening of his balls and that horrible fucking sound of your warped laughter when he spills, again.

It shouldn’t feel this good. He wants to tear his fucking skin off. He wants to bite down on the fingers in his mouth, he wants to curl into a ball and never wake up.

He's not going to admit to himself he's enjoying this, that he's missed this. It's not you. You're dead. You died, and it's Yuji's fault. All of it is. He got to you, and now he's wearing your likeness like it's a new coat, the bitch.

But damn, it really looks like you.

“I memorized everything about her, you know.” Your fingers leave his mouth, punched out gasps leave his chest while hands drag down his skin, drawing red lines. 

“She was fun to play with. Stubborn too. Kept fighting even when I made her unable to,” he giggles.

“But she made the prettiest sounds when she finally broke. Prettier when we slept together too. She was just like you–Human. Always trying to deny yourselves at your most desperate, out of some half formed sense of dignity. See?” He presses down with your body, chest to chest while your walls flutter around him. Yuji’s eyes roll back, his hands leave bloody gorges  in the ground.

“But human dignity is just the same as human depravity; you can't hide your baser instincts even in the worst circumstances, huh?”

Yuji would fight back, but his head is swimming, and his bones feel like they’re replaced with jello. There is a rage that simmers as he talks though, and Yuji bites his tongue until he tastes iron. It drips through the hole in his cheek. Mahito sees this and sighs.

"Your base instinct is to kill me. My base instinct is to murder your soul. That's what this is." He gestures between the two of them, not breaking pace. His hand drifts down, and he wipes away at the blood on his face, though he only succeeds in smudging it more.

“I did the same thing to her. Took your face and made her tell me how to do it right.”

“You’re sick–”

“I consider myself considerate. It's why you’re here and not dead.” He stops moving, tilts his head and meets Yuji's eyes in an eerie stare you've never given him. “Did you know that was my first time? I liked it.” You, fuck, he tilts your head, eyes pointed up in thought.

“Well, I'm a ‘human curse’ so I guess of course I would.”

“You fucking–” This time Yuji tries to buck him off, get some room in between them to get a hit in, but all he accomplishes is Mahito pushing him down and pinning his hands, going back to his earlier motions. Yuji's weaker now. Maybe its because its your face. He could never fight against you, even while sparring.

“That's how–I was able to memorize it too. All her faces, her sounds, what she likes. I wanted to understand you, through her. And now," a sound, high pitched and miserable leaves Yuji's throat.

"You like it too, right? A perfect replica, right? Wanna keep going?” Yuji just shakes his head, and tries to fight off his grip. But Mahito has more hands, and he remains pinned. He can't help the slight bucking of his hips, and when he notices, Mahito grins, a ruddy flush spreading across your face in a bald faced insult.

He can't breathe. He needs to vomit.

You had gone missing weeks ago, called on a mission to deal with a second grade level curse. Nothing too hard for you, it was a quick job and everyone had thought that you’d be in and out.

But cursed spirits have been acting strange lately, and everyone simply thought that it was due to the encroaching Halloween date. Due to various thoughts and practices towards the day, this was normal. But you had gone missing and the only sign of your whereabouts came from another encounter with the patchwork curse.

He went down to the sewers with Mr.Nanami, following the smallest clues they had towards your disappearance, where they met Patchwork. He had been vague and leering and lewd, and it was the first time Yuji saw Mr. Nanami’s face twist into such visceral rage. He mirrored the feeling, but Mahito had escaped, along with any other clues to where you were.

He had tossed a lump of...something to Yuji with a mocking grin, spongy and pale. They took it back to Miss Shoko, and it was confirmed to be a piece of your brain matter. Your death was confirmed.

Hope had dragged him along, weary and spitting blood, but losing you…was too much. Shibuya. Nanami, Kugisaki, Todo, you… His mind broke. He could feel the cracks. They fought, Mahito had knocked him unconscious, and dragged him to god knows where, and now he’s here.

And now he was faced with this horrible caricature of you, with too wide eyes and a leering grin that reminded him exactly of who was wearing your face.

Mahito didn't even seem that interested in the sex, too busy staring at the way Yuji reacted. His muscle spasms, the way he would jerk away from his touch or forward when he couldn't help it, the blank look on his face that sometimes twisted into an expression of such utter loathing– Or lust, and then his face would twist with such despair, a broken sob dragged from behind his clenched teeth, wrangled and bloody. Mahito felt the dark glee drip honey sweet through his soul, like the slick that ran down his thighs.

You really were a fun experiment. He knew how much you meant to Yuji, and initially just wanted to use you to damage his soul further. But where was the fun with that? You were something special. Yuji Itadori had plenty of friends and mentors, and killing any random person in front of him would always garner the same effect. But there was only one you. He wanted to understand you, and the exact place you held in Itadori’s life.

What made you special? What made you stand out to the one person, his natural enemy? Humans and their romantic relationships always seemed like a Greek tragedy to Mahito; Of course the person you let know all your weaknesses would be the one to destroy you in the end. Love always gave rise to hatred. It gave rise to a particular brand of hatred that made up Mahito, and if he was anything, he was always curious to know the full substance of his soul. That's where you came in.

“We would talk, and I'd have her tell me all about you–” Mahito drawled. “I had to pry out all the other stuff but she eventually spilled. I wanted to know everything you see,” he punctuates his words by slowly pulling himself off of Yuji's cock, before dropping down with a slap of flesh. He watches in fascination as Yuji’s lower belly flutters.

“We made deals the other half of the time. A few less experiments if she talked, or let me touch her.”

“I’m going to fucking kill you–”

“I got bored eventually, after she told me everything, and I took everything I could... I don't even remember what I did to her in the end."

Mahito wondered, if love gave rise to hatred, would you hate your lover for not rescuing you? Or for being the true target of Mahito's morbid intrigue? He never got his answer, you never voiced any thoughts like that, and strangely, he sensed no hatred at all when you died. Not for Yuji, or even for himself. You were probably too broken.

Mahito shrugged. “Oh well. She’s dead now anyways.” An ugly, violent sound tears through Yuji’s throat, and finally his hands reach out to grab at his–your waist with a bruising grip. He shoots up and doesn't let Mahito move, and Mahito is curious about this reaction, so he waits while Yuji catches his breath.

“You…how can you…just do that to people? She never did–she never did anything wrong–” His head comes to rest on your collarbone, and Mahito watches this all play out with an intense curiosity, and a growing glee.

Yuji continues to break down, tears slipping from his eyes down to the soft flesh of your breast.

“What the fuck did you do to her…why the fuck did you take her…" Mahito sighs, lets the familiar timber of your voice take over, and drags a hand through Yuji’s hair. Not as gentle a touch as he made you demonstrate on him, but Yuji shudders, and burrows further into the mimicry.

“Yuji.” At the sound of our voice, your true voice, Yuji's shoulders shake horribly.

So this is grief? Or despair? Mahito remarks. What's the difference? He watches Yuji as he shatters. Yuji sobs, ugly and loud off the sewer walls when Mahito starts moving again, but his hips thrust shallowly into your slick cunt.

Mahito wondered, had wondered, if love gave rise to hatred, then you just needed to love him, right? If he wanted to understand your place in his enemy's life, your place as his 'lover', than you just had to love him, right?  And lovers do things together, they talk about their vulnerabilities, they watch and learn their tics and preferences and dislikes and habits. They stick through the good and bad. And Mahito was….bad.

Yuji continues to sob, but he tilts his head back and starts fucking him back, soft whimpers slipping past his bitten lips.

“I’m sorry, I’m so damn sorry, ah–! Fuck, I'm sorry, I wasn't there, I let him get to you, fuck I’m sorry I let him hurt you–”

This isn’t even about the sex. But Mahito is a disaster curse–he was born from hate. And hate has flavors. Rage, vindictiveness, envy, glee; he’s all of them. And the hatred rising from Yuji Itadori is so potent and despair riddled that Mahito sighs, and in an act unbidden comes with a choked out gasp.

Its sudden. Mahito hasn't orgasmed once this entire ordeal before, but as soon as he does, Yuji groans, deep and guttural. His head flops back to the hard ground, and immediately his gasps turn shallow and fast before he pulls your hips down and comes in thick, hot ropes.

Is it because Mahito is wearing your face, or did he always hold on this tightly to you? Mahito is sure he’ll see dark purple bruises on your skin when he lets go, and Mahito decides he’ll keep them. He’s never fixed you, after all, so bruises were a common sight. He just wonders how it’ll look as it ‘heals’. Maybe Yuji could give him some pointers on the visual front.

Yuji lays there, and cries. The tears cut clean streaks through the blood and dirt and grime, and Mahito stares, and he stares. His pink hair is flat, and stringy with dried blood.

"Why are you pretending you don't like this?"

"What...?"

he tilts your head. "Its sex. Even if you're not one for carnal pleasure I still look like her. I still feel like her. Don't you love her?"

"No...I--"

"You dont?"

"I do, you're just--! Fuck, get off of me--" Mahito swats his hands away, almost halfheartedly, clicks his tongue.

"If you did 'love her' than wouldn't you stop me already? I read a plot like this in a book once... Shouldn't you kill me for 'defiling her memory' or something? You're enjoying this."

"I'm not--"

"You are."

"I'm--"

"You are. Stop denying it. I'm not going to stop if that's what you're scared of." Mahito chuckles.

“What the fuck…is your problem, what do you want?” Yuji gasps out. His breaths are shallow and his voice is high patched, chest rising up and down, up and down, too fast. He runs his thumb over his collarbone if only to feel the rabbit-fast pulse.

“What do I want...?” 

“Why me? Why do you want to break me? ‘Natural enemy?' I don't even know what that means...” Mahito is silent for a moment longer, enjoying the moment, before he leans over. With the use of Idle transfiguration, your mangled face takes up Yuji’s vision, and he feels the breath die in his throat.

“You are my natural enemy Yuji Itadori. But I can't kill you. Physically, that is. So this is the next best thing.”

“You, I–”

“Don't take my words too seriously, I am a curse after all,” Mahito brushes your hair out his face and leers.

“But you seem to think that this is a punishment. This is a reward, Itadori.”

“‘Reward’?” He hiccups.

Mahito nods.

“Without you, I would have never gotten to understand my soul on such an intimate level. I know the essence of my soul because of you.” He leans closer, breath full of mirth and rot.

“And I thought, surely you missed your little girlfriend. And isn't intercourse the most sacred act between two lovers?” Mahito shrugs.

“An experiment for me on whether this would fully break you or not. You can consider it a gift though.”

“You think…you think I want to see her like this?”

“Yes?”

“No!”

“Then would you like to see what's left of her?” Mahito points back to the mouth of the sewer. Tortured, anguish moans rise from there, and Yuji can already guess what was there. Despair grips his heart and rips it out.

“Don't worry, I didn't tranfigure her, actually. I bet I can find the parts of her around somewhere …but only if you ask nicely.” Again, he thrashes, but from battle, or loss, he’s weak.

No, Yuji knows why. He could never raise a hand against that face. Even now, seeing dark purple bruises on a body that even resembles yours makes guilt curl in his chest.

“Get off of me."

“What was that? You're talking so low I can't hear you.”

“Get off of me!” Mahito drawls out a low note, but surprisingly, he does as he’s told. Yuji hisses as he slides off his dick, letting him feel the drag of your walls and how they flutter. It's familiar, and Yuji wants to kill something when he thinks of how this curse must have learnt that from you.

He wants to kill himself when his breath hitches at the feeling.

Mahito gets off, but does not release his hands. The image of an extra pair of hands holding him down creates enough clarity for him to differentiate between the two of you, and Itadori growls under his breath.

Your face smiles down at him, and Itadori tries not to stare back. Just like that, the anger is gone. He’s missed you, after all.

“...You know I'm getting out of here, right?”

“And you’ll try killing me. I know. That's if you don't come back for this, though.” He gestures with a stitched hand the bare curves of your body.

“You’ve killed my puppets, transfigured humans, even the kid ones! Shibuya didn't break you, killing Mister 7:3 didn't break you, or that Gorilla, that hammer woman’s death almost did… but something tells me…”

He slithers up and slots himself against Yuji’s side, and it's an ingrained habit to hold you. He jolts back quickly enough in horror, but Mahito grabs his arms, and keeps them on him.

“Killing me while wearing this face would really shatter you, hm? it's why you didn't stop me when I dragged you here and did what I did. You let me. You let this happen." He shakes his head even before you, fuck, it's done. He denies it, because what else could he do?

Mahito moves to hiss in his ear. 

"Is it because of guilt? You're so human, Itadori Yuji.” And his eyes switch to that familiar silver and blue.

“Even if it's self loathing, I can still sense it. That hatred. You’ll come back, and I'll break your soul down some more each time. Little by little…until eventually, one of us kills the other. That's how this is going to go.” He rests your head on his shoulder, listening to the dull drag of his heart. The movement is so familiar that Yuji could cry again, but he holds it back.

“....So that's how it is.”

“Yup. Oh, and I'm still waiting for my thank you.”

“....” 

He sits up, and laughs at the way Yuji’s eyes go pinprick small, copying your laughter down to a terrifying degree. Yuji doesn't know how, he’s sure you never laughed in a place like this.

“Hate me all you want, it only makes me stronger. But, even if it's unconventional, I still let you see her, feel her. I want a thank you for that.”

And Yuji must truly be broken because what if I really never see her again? What if I never hear her voice or touch her? This here, horrible as it was, was both knife and balm, like peroxide on an open wound. Cleansing and burning.

“....”

“Well?”

If…he just pretends it was you, if he just watches your mouth and imagines….

He used to thank you after sex in the beginning, before you told him to stop thanking you like you were being paid to sleep with him. Of course, this led to the private joke, where you would demand your payment–anytime, anywhere, and he would smother you in kisses. Fushiguro, Kugisaki and even Gojo-san would roll their eyes or tease or gag, but he loved it. He knew you did too, with how often you used the joke.

“...Thank you.”

Fuck, he misses you.

“Nuh uh uh! Not like that!” Mahito shoots up, hovering your face over his again, noses touching. He switches his eyes back for yours, extra arms gone.

“Thank her. Like you used to. Go on.” He's broken. Yuji is broken.

He reaches a hand and cups the side of your face like he used to. You cant into it like a cat, and a fondness rises in his chest, just to be awashed by despair. He has to clear his throat, and still his voice breaks.

“Th-Thank you...” And because he can't help the fact that it's you, it looks just like you, he pulls you down for a kiss. It's so familiar, down to the way you would tilt your head to the side, and your tongue would swipe over the bottom of his lip. But Mahito bites down, reopening a wound from when he bit his tongue earlier. Blood fills his mouth, but Mahito laps it up. His tongue pokes at the hole in his cheek.

He pulls away, and his eyes are still yours, warm and loving, red smeared at the corner of your mouth. He smiles your smile. He speaks in your voice. Soft, so soft it kills him.

“You’re welcome, Yuji.”

∗

Be good.

‘Be good’ — by which Mikey meant, you suppose, no speaking to others in the compound, no leaving the house, no stepping inside anywhere but the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen… all the places that you’ve been wandering in-between for years without ever going outside. Is there anything else?

Well, you can’t bother yourself to remember. It’s not like you can do anything in here that’ll piss him off anyway. The time you’ve had to spend alone has started to blur into an impalpable being — an amalgamation, of sorts — warping and slowing your perception of reality to a tenth of a millisecond whenever Mikey isn’t around to monopolise your attention.

…I’ll reward you like a good little bitch when I get back. Can you do that for me?

Don’t leave the penthouse. Don’t enter rooms you don’t know. Don’t speak to anyone other than Haruchiyo. It should be pretty simple. Yeah, you can definitely do that for him. You can be good. You can. You’ll show him.

(As long as Haruchiyo doesn’t kill you before you get a chance to.)

You close your eyes, an image of the man with roseate hair floating into your memory. His lilting voice, the rattling of his pills, the way he kissed your hand after introducing himself and the way he smirked when Mikey made his announcement. A prickling chill runs down your spine like cold water. 

You clench a bundle of the sheets into your face, burrowing into the lingering scent of Mikey, and decide that you hate the way Haruchiyo speaks. In a slow, condescending drawl, smirk bared, revealing the carious fangs of a seasoned predator, the narrowed slits of his eyes scrutinising (for what, you have no idea) as if he thinks of your life as even more insignificant and disposable as the dirt between his shoes. 

There’s another thing, too. Something that fills your little heart with enormous anxiety and forces you on simmering coals within his presence, even now when you’re all safe and sound in this room with its four white walls and thick, locked door.

You can read that grin like an open book.

He thinks that your relationship with his boss has an expiry date. That it’s only a matter of time before you’re disposed of, too. That, without question, you were only there as a form of stress relief, your sole purpose being to tend to his boss’ every need. An emotional outlet, of sorts.

(You hate it because you know he’s right.)

But you don’t tell him that, don’t want to offer him the satisfaction — instead you scamper from his gaze, always slipping out of a room just as he enters it, going as far as to strategically plan out your daily activities to ensure that you wouldn’t be catching any glint nor shadow of that vibrant pink.

And for the most part, it’s working. And even if it didn’t, he has a funny way of looking at everything and anything as if it were leagues beneath him, so much so that you find it easy to simply duck your head and deem yourself unworthy of staying in his presence any longer than you already have. It’s weird, how simple it is to evade him — how predictable, easy, like child’s play. When he has just about given you as much attention as one would to a stray twig obstructing a sidewalk.

So, just like every other nagging worry, you stuff Bonten’s-Number-Two-Sanzu-Haruchiyo away in a cabinet for safe-keeping.

Time without Mikey also means that you’ll at least get a bit more time to yourself (albeit a large portion of it would be spent calculating how to avoid the man he left in his place). 

You’re using it wisely, you think — alternating between counting the grooves in the ceiling to toying with the strands of velvet rug in the middle of the too-spacious bedroom, to daydreaming until sprawling scenery of the outside-world blooms behind your eyelids… okay. So you haven’t been able to get anything truly productive done. So what? The word ‘productive’ feels alien in your mind — almost as if there’s something fundamentally cursed about its three syllables, as if it belonged in a realm unattainable to someone like you. You haven’t had to worry about being pro-duc-tive in years. It was always Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.

At some point, you think dismally, I’ll have to get up. But now is not the time. So you count, and count, until you feel your consciousness slipping away, and your eyelids droop, and you sink into a deep, dreamless sleep. Sleep that blunts the ache of isolation and the burning of your bruises, tip-toeing featherlight over your skin like a reminder of the person who left them. 

(Mikey doesn’t leave sticky notes on the fridge telling you to remember to brush your teeth and comb your hair. Everything he gives you comes from himself: his flesh and bone, his pain, his heart, his bruises.)

When time meanders forward, and inevitably touches upon evening, and you stir from sleep feeling an unbearable feeling of emptiness in your stomach (almost as if a large cavity was drilled into your abdomen), you shake the drowsiness away starting to feel an oncoming panic that Haruchiyo somewhere somehow found a way to sneak something into your breakfa— oh. That’s right.

You didn’t even have breakfast.

Your gut howls in agony. Reluctantly, you unwrap the self-made cocoon of blankets, preparing the mental artillery required to slip out the bedroom. 

Haruchiyo seems to be missing from the kitchen, which is a good thing, a pleasant thing — though you aren’t stupid to assume that he is shirking his duties as your ‘guardian’. Living in a sprawling penthouse with just two people, minus the seclusion, leaves you enjoying an overwhelming sense of privacy most of the time. But now? Now it feels like there’s bear traps under every tile in the floor, shuriken blades concealing themselves behind every groove in the ceiling (there were about 200 that you counted before dozing off).

It takes a few furtive glances down the corridor and you (fruitlessly) keep a knife within arm’s reach (‘I don’t know why I’m doing this it’s not like I’m even capable of wielding a knife’), but you get to work quickly, preparing a decent meal the only way you know how. The purple blemishes lining the expanse of your neck and thighs still throb in protest when you move, although now it’s become a dull, persistent, guileless ache. You’re all alone, since it appears that your housekeeper is nowhere to be found — got scared away, maybe?

Come to think of it, staff don’t stay for very long around the Bonten building (either that or the numbers are endless; every day you see a new face), and you were always too busy to pay attention to anything but the hulking man demanding your attention.

Even so, something about that particular woman made the word ‘bold’ pop up in your mind in thick, underlined letters.

She’s been around for a few weeks now, looking to be about the same age as you (maybe a little older?), and always wore her black hair pinned back neatly, revealing youthful and bright eyes. She isn’t permitted to stay long — no longer than when she finishes up cleaning and cooking food that’ll last the next few days — and neither of you know each other’s names. Though she did offer you the most sympathetic of smiles when the smell of good food left you poking your head into the kitchen. You think of it sometimes, when you’re lying in bed sleepless.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this on my own, you frown, wiping sweat from your brow. Not that you haven’t cooked before, you have — you just can’t remember when. Your fingers curl feebly around the vegetable peeler, strips of potato skin falling onto the cutting board like ribbons. How long has it been, since you’ve put so much care into something other than Mikey? Again, you’re reminded of how much of your time that he eats up on the regular, like a blackhole both in his presence and absence; like a mechanical heart that your empty cavity of a ribcage can’t pump blood without. The thought alone should petrify you.

Don’t think about that.

There you go again, fretting over things that can’t be fretted about. You stubbornly follow the woman’s phantom movements from what little you gleaned from watching her from afar, guiding your hands over a boiling stove. The sizzles generating at the bottom of the metal pot reminds you of firecrackers. If your memory serves you well, there should be extra seasoning in the top cabinet. And you have to remember to work fast, too, just in case Haruchiyo decides to stick his head out in curiosity.

One by one, along with those forbidden thoughts, the various base ingredients are banished into the pot. Minutes later, you taste the thick broth with a spoon and damn, you realise, this actually tastes kind of good. This actually feels kind of good.

Yeah… yeah no, maybe you’re starting to get the hang of it. Maybe it’ll actually turn out okay after all — the next two days, your isolation, this makeshift stew. Not as good as the woman’s, but you reckon she’d give you a pass for trying. It’s only been a few days tops, but you cave and sigh; you kinda miss her presence. It gave you something to mull over amidst constant chao—

“What the hell are you doing?”

Your blood freezes.

At the doorway, Haruchiyo looks dishevelled, pissed, a single olive eye twitching. Your legs caramelise into a thick hardness, rooting you to the ground. The pot continues to sizzle above the flame. Since when did he…

“C-cooking?” you begin warily, glancing for the nearest exit, trying to keep an impervious look on your face even though every second that slips by a silent fear creeps up on you like a chokehold. You flinch as he stalks closer with the air of a forensic inspector, looking over the mess that is the kitchen, the wildly strewn pots and pans and utensils — all because you panicked and couldn’t find the ones you were looking for.

(Around the counter? No—that will take too much time. What if you shoved your way past him? No, god no—are you stupid? He’d catch you immediately—)

“You’re dumber than I thought,” he snarls, his mouth donning that prized scowl, leaning forward before you can react and jabbing a finger at the cutting board. “You don’t even know how to handle a fucking knife?”

“Wha—huh?”

You blink; the pellets of onion, potato and carrot lie limply on the scuffed wood. Misshapen little pieces, some thick and some way too thin. Your hands lie frozen in time, one grasping at a chunk of orange and the other gradually growing slick around the knife.

He clicks his tongue in disdain.

“At this rate, you’re going to kill yourself before I do.” Haruchiyo and the long tendons of his fingers pry the weighted blade out of the comfort of your hands. Insistently, in a way that tells you he’s mad—oh god he’s mad— but strikingly, without a touch of malice. Is he mad? Is he sober? He won’t turn it—the knife—on you—right? Your breath hitches.

“Mikey would maim me to a pulp if you succeeded in that little stunt,” he arches a brow, as if using Mikey’s name in such a manner left a bitter taste in his mouth. For some reason, blood rushes to your ears as you watch the man in an unbuttoned suit hunch over the cutting board. You give him space to examine the ingredients, biting your tongue in shame. “If you wanted food you could’ve just said so.”

You could’ve just said so.

Something doesn’t feel quite right about his words, but you’re too relieved to dwell on it. You are graced with a sliver of respite, a moment’s peace; at least you know Haruchiyo has no intentions of killing you. He can’t. Probably.

The silky-smooth incisions he makes on the vegetables and meat send a tremor down your spine, each chop bouncing around in your eardrums. He’s helping you and yet, you almost feel bad for wanting to run. You don’t want to know where he learnt to wield a blade like a razorlike extension of his fingers.

“You know a lot,” you whisper, biting your lip afterwards, minutes in when the aimless hovering becomes too much to bear. What the hell are you doing, trying to make small talk? 

“I know enough,” he shoots back, long lashes fluttering like large silver fans as he turns around to squint at you. He likes to look at you as if you were some ancient vase excavated from the earth, you realise. Or like a fossil. As if you originated from a completely different time from him.

Nothing much of a conversation passes between the two of you after that; you awkwardly go through the motions, trying your best to stay away. He mutters some weird cantation under his breath as he sections off the potatoes from the carrots, moves them over to a plate as he readies the meat.

It’s almost faelike, how systematic of a man he is. How quick he is to catch on, requiring minimal instructions from you, despite seeming like a person of inferior culinary calibre.

When he’s done, Haruchiyo pats his hands on his thighs, breathing a sigh. His gaze mulls over the piping stew still bubbling with the newly-added ingredients, before plucking itself away and landing on the door to the study just a distance from the kitchen (his hiding place; his deep cavernous den). Just before he saunters to the room, twisting a hand on the door knob, he says, “I don’t cook, so don’t expect me to.” 

(You didn’t.)

It was a brief encounter.

In the early dusk, long after your meal, you hear him crawl out of the study like an emerging creature of the night, and when you’re halfway through turning over a page in a novel (a dusty old one that you found hiding inside the drawers of the bedside table) you hear the sound of cutlery scraping against ceramic, echoing from where the kitchen must be.

It’s strange, the gladness that washes over you — you hadn’t really expected him to react, let alone try your cooking. Come to think of it, you weren’t even sure that he ate in the first place. (He said he doesn’t cook, but he knows the ‘correct’ way to use a knife? Odd.) You frown, none of the words on the page construing a decipherable meaning to you.

Maybe, just maybe, sharing the same space with Haruchiyo won’t be so bad after all (now that you know he eats and sleeps like a human being, is normal-functioning in most aspects of his physical body).

With this thought in mind, you carry on business as usual in your small corner of the house, lightly pondering which part of Japan Mikey has found himself embroiled in.

At nightfall, your ears unwillingly pick up loud thuds down the hallway, and you triple-check that the door is locked before climbing into the soft covers, stifling a shiver. Regardless of whether he’s been oddly tame or not, it’ll take a while to get used to this — the strange, unexplainable things that go bump in the night. 

The bed… feels emptier. Desolate. Something feels odd, like the calm before the storm. It’s just your imagination. You close your eyes, falling asleep imagining Mikey’s arm around your hip. Ironically, you can’t seem to sleep well without him.

∗

What is this?

He’s felt like this before, of that he’s certain. A longass time ago. Judging from the huge blip in his memory when Haruchiyo tries to recall, it must’ve been eons since then. Eons and eons and then some, back when inactive volcanoes still spat real, smouldering lava — he’s sure it’s been that long.

It’s curious, and it amazes him more than it disgusts him. He should be disgusted, the logical part of his brain adds; he should have just minded his business and carried on as usual. He should have let you cut yourself in that dangerous manner (what’s a tiny cut going to do, add another notch to the scar-ridden pole?) — let you experience what it’s like to live life with an impish brain. 

He wasn’t intending to interrupt. Ten, fifteen minutes must’ve ticked by, with him standing there in silence (you are quite the careless one). He couldn’t push down the onslaught of annoyance at the way you bent over backwards to reach the top shelf — are you trying to make his job difficult on purpose? Haruchiyo is a lawless beast, sure, but even beasts have their master’s orders to abide by, along with a special place in hell for those who don’t obey orders. Maybe that was your goal — maybe you wanted him gone. Maybe deep down you’re a spy sent to eliminate Bonten from the inside.

That is how he almost relished in pure excitement, at the promise of bloodshed regardless of how minor.

And yet, and yet, when he saw the flat silver falling just millimeters short of slicing into your soft digits, something compelled him to step in. (To help? Or to finish the job? No, he knows why. It was to chase this surreal, abstract feeling.)

Soft. Soft.

Haruchiyo parrots the word in his mind. Almost as if within it holds the secrets to the universe — and that if he keeps saying it, keeps feeling the weight of this single featherlight syllable on his tongue, that it’ll give him a revelation of sorts.

Your skin looked soft and your hand was soft and he can’t help but wonder if every inch of you down to your bones is soft.

He wonders how you had the time to teach yourself how to cook. Or if you’d already known before you were brought here (in any case you didn’t look very experienced). If the flavourful explosion in his mouth attests to his boss’ favourite dish. Comfort food, his brain supplies. What is that? He never understood the little nuances that people sprinkled in their vocabulary, though the terms lingered in his head like pesky flies. (If it’s shit, it’s just shit, right?)

He’d been so used to the staleness served at dilapidated bars that he’d forgotten almost completely what it means to have a proper meal. If it wasn’t stale or nasty it was too fancy for him to stuff down his throat — he has always been a picky eater, wanted things to be just right, but somehow the smell alone was enough to entice him out of the study.

And when he took the first bite, something strange happened. A feeling akin to warmth flooded his veins. (It’s amazing, isn’t it? It was like poison. His head started spinning and his mind morphed into a jumbled maze of thoughts; so deeply entrenched in its twists and turns he was, left palm slowly running across hedged walls, groping for an exit. Or trying to find whatever treasure, salvation, lied in the middle.) It never ever struck Haruchiyo that you might’ve snuck something extra into the food to incite this wild reaction in him. No— you’re too innocent for that. Kind. Warm. Trusting. Soft…

Not once did you knock on the door. Not that he expected you to. Not that he wanted you to. (You’re stupid but not that stupid.)

He must’ve been in there for hours, oscillating between the fabric of time and space, consciousness and unconsciousness blurring into one. 

Flashes — funny things, like trusting someone, like cutting his fingers by accident as a kid, sitting outside the doctor’s office (“What are they going to do to me?” a young boy with flaxen hair whispered. “They will put you in stitches. It will not hurt. Just a few pricks, nothing more,” someone whispered back… who?) — materialise before his consciousness often. Uninvited. Unwarranted.

When he is awake they come to him like blessings, like offerings to a long-forgotten deity. When he is asleep they take on the sparkle and sheen of a fairytale — so blurry and blinding that he could never hope to brush his fingertips across such an ethereal feeling in his mortal life.

Because a common thread was that these recollections (or fairytales, or glimpses into the ether, or as he personally likes to call them, fever dreams) never lasted long.

The feeling always, always chose to leave last — that silent poking and prodding going on without his consent, shady dealings happening at the edges of his conscience that scream at him to mourn for a past innocence, something that he has no chance of ever recovering. Memory, in this way, comes like slippery eels in the palm of his hand: if he’s lucky, he’ll catch one. If he isn’t, oh well.

“Fucking hell,” he grunts, plastering his spine to the back of chair in hopes of relieving the pain throbbing behind his eyelids. Defeat tastes acrid, bitter, on Haruchiyo’s tongue; it’s no use fighting the waves of agony strobing like a heat wave.

His arm adeptly loses feeling and the metal spoon crashes down onto the plate. It’s empty now, and his stomach is somewhat filled. Yet this shitty-ass migraine chooses to latch onto his brain like a leech. God. Can’t you just—I don’t know—let me off? This one, goddamn time, Haruchiyo curses. He’s pissed. He’s sure he left an extra stockpile of that good stuff somewhere…

Old habits die hard, but it’s difficult to dwell on it when all he can feel is gratefulness for his own foresight. Mikey finds ways to avoid him a lot when he doesn’t feel like entertaining his highs, kinda like throwing a bone to stave off a dog’s abundant energy. But for the most part, he lets Haruchiyo do his own thing — lets him chew on the proverbial bone to his heart’s desire. Thus, once again, Haruchiyo finds himself with a fistful of pills. (It’s the only way he knows to curb the pain.)

He’d really meant to pounce on you by now, he thinks, as he swallows another. Gulp. He meant to already sink his claws into your neck, the same way Mikey does. Gulp.

But he can’t. Right now he can’t even stand straight his head hurts so bad. As if something from within him wanted to turn his body inside out, displaying his innards.

And, fuck, when the itch resurfaces again like an old friend, there’s little he can do to stop it. (When has he ever been the type to argue with instinct, after all? If anything… he is a slave to it. It’s understandable. Mikey’ll forgive him. He’s too used to running free, veins pulsing at the first whiff of prey. It doesn’t do anyone good to cage a wild animal.)

Haruchiyo and his dimmed gemstone eyes, clouded over with a drug-filled haze — a comfortable, fitted collar around his neck and the leash held firmly within his grasp. A slave. A weapon to his own instinct. Nature proclaims that it’s law for predators to hunt prey. How many girls has he killed? How many that look like you and how many just to satisfy this instinct of purging prey.

Haruchiyo has lost count at this point. Everything blurs and twists into one: pill-shaped candy, the boy with pale hair, the warmth of the food that felt like a paperweight on his tongue… you clutching the tip of your finger, thick blood gushing out. (The ‘what-if’ that would’ve happened if he hadn’t interfered.)

Deeper and deeper, he starts to feel dizzy, as if he were plummeting down a rabbit hole. He stumbles from the kitchen and into the living room, heads towards the noise that made his ears prick up like a predator groping for blood. Thirst. He’s unbearably thirsty.

It’s not you— is that you? He goes rigid; blinks away hysteria. It’s you.

All he can think of is you— all he can think is, Mikey will forgive him.

∗

At an abandoned dock two cities away a figure sits patiently, embroiled in a decrepit darkness. Moonlight creeps across his hunched back like vines over a wall. Dark bangs fall messily across his face with some strands still matted in a sticky substance. Sweat, or blood. Mikey scrunches up his nose. If you were here, he wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning himself up.

But you aren’t. And the thought is enough to wind a bunch of thorns around his chest.

The cylindrical shape feels strange as heck against the insides of his mouth. He’s poked his tongue through the barrel a few times before, out of pure curiosity, like a cat toying with a ball of yarn trapped in its mitts. But the taste? Well, it’s just as he expected it to be — bland. Flavourless. Unappealing. Just as unappealing as life without you.

(The fuck? Takeomi called me all the way here just to deal with this?)

Then again, he did take a longer time than usual to exterminate the local pest populace. Mikey doesn’t know if this particular thorn in his side is exceptionally formidable, or if he is exceptionally off his game today. (Huh — no, that can’t be it. It’s not as if he saw hostile figures blurring into two then three then four like a cheap ninja trick, even as he struck them down unfazed; not as if, after the tenth one the blood got too heavy for him to focus, and everywhere he turned, intrusive images of your skin plagued his psyche like a disease… no, that can’t be it.)

(…Right? Right. No way.)

He’s miserable. He wants to go home. He wants to hold you and he wants to make you taste the barrel of the gun as he is now — make you run your tongue along its concave shape and ask if you can taste the gunmetal on your teeth and call you pathetic when you start trembling like you always do. Would you let him? (Of course you would. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him.) You are obedient, Mikey likes that about you, and you’re always willing to go along with his whims — though, he frowns, it’s mostly because you’re scared. Probably.

Somewhere in the dark a rat squeaks, scuttles into a crack, leaving the timid cry resonating within jagged walls. It reminds him of yo— he throws his head back and gives a long, hard groan, one that spirals in the stillness. 

Okay that’s it. He clutches his head. I’m getting out of here.

“Oi. Come, Senju,” he calls monotonously, not waiting up before hopping down, setting his course deeper towards the direction of darkness. A barely audible pair of footsteps follow close behind. But Mikey’s thoughts are occupied; he thinks about the flat surface of the gun and what colour it’d make your skin turn, and he thinks about Haruchiyo sitting faithfully in the penthouse, doing his job. (He’s a little worried, and that’s an understatement.)

Mikey sighs, nose breathing in the musty, oppressive smell of the sea.

One more day and he’ll be back where he was with you; one more day and he’ll be home. But at the very least, he thinks, this little business venture has turned out to be the tiniest bit amusing. His first time exploring Japan in months and he’s already got himself a souvenir to take home.

∗

It’s… raining.

A fine, feathery, bountiful rain that’s only noticeable from ripples of water cascading soundlessly on the full-length window, and floating umbrellas shielding commuters from the downpour hundreds and hundreds of floors below.

From your bird’s-eye view, they all but resemble dewdrops of microscopic colour, so far away that you can barely tell they’re alive. You press your palm flat against the glass, feeling the heat of your own skin absorb the cool surface, feeling the tiny vibration brought forth by the morning raindrops on the other side.

How long has it been? Since you’ve been on that other side?

A backdrop of grey paints the city. A familiar view, but one that you’ve never quite gotten used to. It’s quiet. Way too quiet, at that.

Where is Haruchiyo?

The chill spreads to the tip of your toes when they meet the marbled flooring. You slip off the couch, contemplating the merit in searching for a man you would otherwise do triple somersaults to avoid. Is this a good idea? You chew on your lip. It’s not. But where is he?

You’ve been feeling uneasy for the whole morning. Earlier there’d been a crash (multiple) coming from the hallway, and besides making you drop your book it also brought with it a nauseating wave of anxiety. Not that you expected Haruchiyo to be quiet at all times, goodness no (last night was a test of your patience), but there was a certain instinct imbued into you that made the hairs on your forearms stand on end whenever things were a hint out of the ordinary.

A certain intuition that came part and parcel with living with dangerous, scheming people.

Why is he grunting like that?

(That was a grunt, right? No… no, it definitely was.)

There was the sound of something sharp, like metal, grating against the floor — what was that? You scurry over to press your ear to the door, listening hard for anomalies, trying to conjure up hypotheses in your brain that don’t equal to Haruchiyo throwing a messy fit or getting ready to jump you or — well, kill you.

A clunk. Several thumps. A knife, maybe? Or he could be moving furniture, or, or—he could be practicing with his rumoured katana (you’ve never seen it but heard people talk about it in hushed whispers) — there’s no way to know for sure. All these unidentified sounds send seismic fear rippling through you.

With Mikey there was no need to question anything, because it was only a matter of time until you found out. But now that you’re alone — alone and defenceless and the most vulnerable you’ve ever been since you were fresh out the womb — it strikes a waning courage in your steps as you venture into the unknown, sweaty palms encircling the cool metal door knob, trying your hardest to stifle the click it makes when it unlocks.

Slowly, you tiptoe over to the source of the sound. Because it couldn’t hurt to just take a peek. Right? Just to check in. Just to be safe. Just to make sure he isn’t putting funny stuff inside your cupboards.

And. Well. If you were being honest, being Mikey’s little pet must’ve changed you a lot.

Complacency that thickened your skin, artificial layers of cosmetics over baby-smooth doll fabric. The false sense of protection under Mikey’s invisible iron fist comes with its own, hefty price. It must have gotten to you somehow. It must have done something to build up that liquid courage in your veins, in its own twisted way, surely, because—because no sooner than when you poke your head through the doorway into the living room do you see it.

See them.

You stare at the pile of grisly red organs splattering the cold hard floor; stare at death itself.

And, on top of it, as if crowned the victor, no one but Haruchiyo hunches leisurely over the grisly mound of flesh. Cleaning the mess behind his fingertips with his tongue. Eyeing his handiwork. The glinting edge of the tiny scalpel in his hand still dripping with scarlet, sharp edge pointed towards god knows what’s left of that person ohgod—

Your gut drops to the floor in horror. That uniform. That’s her. That’s the woman. Shit—fuck. What was once a sweet young woman is now a mangled corpse by the hands of Haruchiyo. Something… something is terribly wrong. She doesn’t look like she’s been dead for minutes. No, her eyes are far too cold. Like gaping holes. There is blood from her mouth, no, there is blood everywhere —

Haruchiyo hums, his rosier-than-cotton-candy hair dip-dyed in scarlet. Drip, drip. “Looks like… ah, I’ve roused the attention of our reclusive little rabbit.”

It’s the same man who’d grasped your hand in a courteous gesture just the day before, who’d saved you from slicing your fingers, the same goddamn murderer who’s just got his hands on the only person in years to address you like a regular human being. Idiot. You’ve done it this time. You’re a fucking dumbass. He’s a murderer, murderer — he’s going to kill you.

You’re next.

“What’s wrong, little bunny?” His grin only widens at your stupor, your slow, petrified jaw hanging agape. “You look scared. Do I make you feel scared?”

Your legs won’t budge; you whimper.

Run. Runrunrun — your body is screaming at you, imploring you to hurry the fuck up and run for your goddamn life, but you don’t. Pleas fall on deaf ears. Your body is caught in a bear trap, forcing you to take in the gruesome scene before you. There is so, so much blood. More than you’ve ever seen in your life. And all of it, all of it, is hers. 

Just the other day she greeted you with her usual warm smile. Just the other day she was a living, breathing human, who ate and slept and radiated heat.

“Your face tells me you want to run,” he trills, eyes narrowing into slits. “Gonna run away?”

His tone is shrill as a sharpened blade, deranged, with every word mounting into maniacal glee. “Run with your little tail tucked between your cute thighs, back to your big, strong Mikey?”

Bloodshot and unfocused eyes zero in on your face and his body convulses like a zombie erecting from the dead, joints creaking like bars of scaffold. Slowly, assuredly, he rises to one knee, he points the scalpel at his own collarbone, and wait, wait, why is he— 

“Look here, little bunny,” he coos, a big wide smile twisting the scars on his mouth; his wrist twitches, yanks, the blade following suit, dipping obediently into his own flesh. His own skin. His own blood that leaks pure sparkling scarlet from a thin crevice. 

A scream tears through the room, one you can only feel is yours from the vibrations ringing in your hollow throat — he doesn’t wince. Sheer horror sends your body flying back, hands clasped tight in front of your face to shield you from the deep dark red. This is a nightmare. This can’t be real. Red is matted to pink strands of hair, red is glittering across his mouth like the snout of a beast, red is slowly advancing across the carpet. Wake up. You tremble, whimper. This is bad this is bad this is bad.

A cackle rips into the air, one with a chilling, blood-curdling echo bouncing off the walls, and no sooner than when he takes a step forward does the impenetrable cement in your veins crack. 

Fight or flight.

You turn and bolt, feeling the weight of your numb appendages carrying you as far as possible, away from that—that sickening blood, that red crawling ever so closely towards you like hot, molten lava—

You race, stumble, dive into Mikey’s room (Idiot! Mikey isn’t even here! The exit — you have to get to the exit!), managing to grab a spare key off the counter before fleeing like a bat out of hell towards the front door, salvation, the only way out.

“Where do you think you’re going? I’m not done with you yet.”

But then your back’s hitting the wall as you scramble to flee, jolts of the impact swelling up your spine as you hurtle into a dodge when Haruchiyo lunges, bloodied fingertips snatching your wrist and pulling pulling yanking, until the keys crash to the ground with a deafening clatter, until you’ve been sucked into the floor with a scream clawing at your throat, until you’re submerged limb by limb into that deep deep red that you hate.

“NO no no no no, letmego, letmeg—”

“Shh, shh!”

The cool tip of the blade drags along your cheek, thinly scraping against the surface, slicing into half the wet tracks that tears have left on your face so that slivered carmine wells up through the broken skin. His body has no right being this warm, pressed up against you, your knees and arms already going slick with blood. It’s over. He’s caught you.

Your eyes stay screwed shut amidst the barrage of hot tears bursting behind your eyelids. He has you pinned down for good, you realise, a strained whimper fighting its way in the back of your throat. There is no escape. The pain is real. You can feel the slim thread of blood rolling down your cheek, mixing with the tears — only for him to lean closer, lapping up the traces of it with a satisfied chuckle.

His saliva leaves a slimy, wet sensation on your skin. It’s the worst feeling you’ve ever felt in your life.

“Please… I won’t tell anyone… I won’t tell Mikey— please, just let me go…”

“Ah ah ah.” The man — Sanzu Haruchiyo — hushes you again, a finger on your lip, his shuddering breath fanning erratically on your face, his voice fading into yet another hysterical chuckle. But it’s deep, breathy, and taunting, thrumming loudly in his chest, and sending a tremor through your very soul. “I think you’re forgetting a teensy, tiny fact, little bunny— Mikey’s not here.”

Your nose fills with iron when he is this close. Haruchiyo’s eyes — those bulging, green masses of insanity — shift and convulse as if you were faced with the mouth of an abyss. His grip on your wrists tightens to an agonising degree the more you plead and squirm, leaving you with no choice but to hold your breath, hoping desperately that someone will come to your rescue.

Where is Mikey? 

You’re going to die here. You’re going to die here… and there’s nothing you can do about it. Pushed up against this psycho killer, who’s just murdered a person innocent of all crime, an outsider who shouldn’t even have been here. Is this how you find closure? From someone other than Mikey? 

Manjiro… the thought is enough to shoot a terrible pain in your heart, something unwarranted like denial, like indescribable terror, like—like regret. 

I never told him I love him.

Twin dilated pupils absorb the sight of your writhing, suffering form, shuddering in their sockets from unmatched euphoria.

“Why don’t we play a little?”

∗

Truth be told, Haruchiyo doesn’t know what time of day it is, what day it is, and all he remembers is feeling fatigued with an indescribable, insatiable hunger. He thinks he’s never felt so dissatisfied in his entire life.

But this… this is nothing short of a feast, isn’t it?

“You…” he begins, seething through his ultra-wide grin. “You’re a huge slut!”

His hands, not knowing where to touch, land greedily on every inch of your traitorous skin. Groping, taking, as if the gates to heaven inexplicably opened; a creature of hell, he is — a pitch-black entity descending upon a fine-feathered angel. He can’t stop himself, not when you’re so helpless to fend him off.

“If I had known… that you would be going around getting wet at every man touching your little pussy like this…” He bites back a laugh, the scarred edges of his mouth contorting. 

You look confused — terrified, but mainly confused. And scared as to why he hasn’t ripped apart your insides yet and god you’re fucking delicious. Your nightdress has long been torn to shreds. Blood — not yours — is splattered everywhere on the marble flooring. Haruchiyo’s obscene groans come like second nature at this point. It’s good, it’s too good — your cries, your shivering, your scent, the way that he can taste how salty your tears are and hear the wetness gathering at his fingers. 

“You’re a damned whore, aren’t you?”

You look stunned, stupefied, as if your little brain can’t comprehend what Haruchiyo wants to do to you, as if the squelching noises coming from between your thighs are a mechanism separate to your conscious body — as if they don’t tell him all he needs to know. 

“S-stop,” you snivel, wrists straining in his grip, though he thinks it couldn’t possibly hurt from the way you can’t help your half-moans, so delicate and frantic, flitting about in his ears like a pair of small butterfly wings. “Stop, please, a-ah, don’t touch me there—”

“Here? Oh, but what if I want to?”

Frankly, this is the most fun that he’s had in ages — your kitten-like mewls and crystalline tears, soft hips twisting fruitlessly and the friction only serving to make his blood rush south, adrenaline sizzling in his veins even more so than when he was in the midst of mutilating that dumb placeholder, that fake…

“You feel so nice and soft inside, little bunny.”

Haruchiyo shoves his fingers past the lips of your cute slit, prodding and poking like it’s his first time touching a virgin. Warm, tender, and suckling on him like a fawn to its mother’s breast… the gentle clasp of your pussy against his fingers feels like nothing short of heaven. God almighty, no wonder Mikey couldn’t keep his hands off of you. His cock becomes erect, the tip becoming sensitive as it strains against precum-soaked fabric.

He watches you squirm, watches as your tits heave with every breath you take. For the first time Haruchiyo is close to you, closer than ever before, to the point where if he brandished the scalpel now there’s no telling whether he’ll lose control and gouge your pretty eyeballs out in a fit of blind lust. Just like he did to so many others before you — just like those other porcelain, fragile, counterfeit dolls. (Except there’s really nothing that comes so close to perfection as the real thing.)

“What do you think is stopping me from killing you, hm?” 

He poses this question in the midst of circling your shining pearl, bringing you closer and closer to climax, coaxing panicked moans out of you as if the realisation just hit you that maybe he will rip apart your insides after all. 

Then, when you whine out instead of replying, Haruchiyo pauses, pressing his weight against your soft body for good measure, keening at your smell. He sighs—

“It’s because torturing you fucking turns me on.”

You used to smell like roses — like Mikey. But the you in this moment smells like sex, sweat, and potent iron, blood from his fresh killing and blood from his own flesh and bone; he has never felt such uncontrollable desire in his life. This is it, he thinks, this is the treasure waiting for him at the end of the maze. 

His lips latch on and suckle on your exposed nipple, tongue circling and biting and lapping hard until it draws cries of pain. His face returns to your neck, a slimy tongue sticking out and coating you with saliva, feeling himself quiver with desire when your entire body convulses. His hard length grinds against your inner thigh like a mad dog, eager to insert itself into your warm and inviting hole. 

But not yet. Just a little more.

He releases your wrists. Sharp nails latch themselves onto your scalp, straining against the roots of your hair to tug you eye-to-eye with his gaze. People like to say that Haruchiyo gets a spine-chilling, deranged gleam in his eyes when he’s in the middle of torturing someone — what do you see this time?

A monster? The devil himself? Or something more divine? Otherworldly? Something like a god?

His teeth sink into his bottom lip; not bad, he credits his brain, eyeing the tremble of your lip and the way tears cascade down your cheeks and jaw and drip onto your breasts, he might just crave to make you worship him. More than anyone else. More than his King; make you become his own private devotee.

“Does Mikey also do this?” Haruchiyo’s gravelly voice whispers filthy vice in your ear. “Does he? Tell me.”

Your back hits the floor. He sticks another finger, two, then three, inside your cunt, wriggling and feeling for the one spot that makes your toes curl and your back arch. Your non-stop whining, your incoherency, your lack of capacity for full sentences, all of it is starting to unravel his control — spilling out like a spool of thread underwater, dispersing never to be reeled in again.

“Tell. Me.” 

“N-no!” you rasp, hips quaking. 

“Liar,” he smiles. You’re a liar. You’re a filthy liar. He saw you. “What does he do to your little clit, huh? Rub, rub. Oh, you feel so soft and slippery here.”

“Stop, please, a-ah! It’s too much, it’s too much…”

“It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay,” he is quick to comfort, fingers speeding up, abusing your tiny nub, as if his ears were blotting out your frantic cries and tearful struggle. So, so sensitive. He almost feels like you’ll break. “Cum all you want. Again and again. We’ve got all day.”

He attaches his lips like a parasite to your cheek, licking at the small cut, sucking every drop of blood that leaks out, all while his fingertips never cease their momentum. You resist and jerk away from his face, only for him to wrench your jaw tightly in place.

“No, I don’t want to cum, I don’t—” You struggle like a rabbit with its hind legs bound, teeth sinking into your bottom lip in a feeble effort to mute your cries of pleasure. “I-I’m gonna—”

You cum without warning; a spray of liquid pools at your entrance, your thighs spasming under him as if charged with electricity. He coos as if to cheer you on. Fuuuck. He’s not done. There’s no way. Droplets of your juices taste like dews on his tongue; so much he wants to do, but he only has two hands. 

As you reel, incapacitated with the afterglow of your orgasm, his palm lets go of your face to wrap around the flushed tip of his cock, giving a few sharp pumps, imagining what it feels like to be buried in your warmth. Well, he won’t have to imagine much longer.

“So pretty, you’d put every other girl to shame,” he mutters, pressing a kiss to your forehead, and another to your lips, silencing your whimpers. “I hated you, god, but turns out you’re good for at least one thing.”

“Let me… let me go…”

“Nah. But did it feel good?” He wants to break you. He wants to see you drowning in so much pleasure that you collapse and black out and crave nothing but his cock.

Your face scrunches up. You’re looking at him, he thinks. Though your expression looks weird, and you’ve stopped struggling.

“Mikey… Mikey’s gonna… he’s gonna be so mad,” you start to hiccup, tears dripping silently onto the marble, bottom lip trembling. Haruchiyo goes still, watching you cry at a loss for words.

He’s confused.

Mikey? Really? At a time like this? And he sees it again. That blatant softness that filters over your eyes — that ickiness. You’re so in love with his King that it’s pathetic.

It hadn’t been obvious before, but it is now. It’s thickening the skin between your heart and the outside world: it’s still there, the veins permeating the layer of visibility just barely, but the pulsing is faint.

And he sneers. Who do you think you are?

“You came because you’re a disloyal whore and you know it. Looks like you didn’t really love him after all, huh?”

At his words, you let out a hurt-filled gasp, as if they made their way into your heart and deposited lashes of agony there. Your mouth hangs open with tears still streaking down your face. The sight makes him want to coo at you.

“Look — you’re all messy and slick down here.”

Before you can tell him to stop, his fingernail scratches your abused clit, hard and fast as if trying to coax another orgasm out of you. Just one more. You can endure it, right? He’s watched Mikey do worse to you. He’s watched Mikey splay your legs open at his mercy and threaten to let every man in the room have their way with you.

Your body thrashes in retaliation but it’s no match for Haruchiyo’s strength, helpless to fight back as he pushes you further and further until you splutter and give a keening cry.

“What would Mikey think if he saw you like this?” he laughs, tuning out your pleas to slow down. “He’d fucking kill you.”

Another spray of your juices — another sharp scream of pleasure. By the third, fourth, your body starts trembling in overstimulation.

“I’m going to make you cum, again and again. Until you regret ever coming here. Make you regret trying to tempt my King.”

Haruchiyo mindlessly nibbles at your ear, before brutish hands reach down to force your legs wider. It’s about time, isn’t it? His cock throbs painfully at the wait.

“No, no, no… you can’t—”

He ignores you, rearranging his hips so they align with yours, gripping your abdomen like a vice as if trying to bruise. More, more, more. All his filthy fantasies start to spill out of the crevices in his brain. All he can do is watch the lavish black rush out in an endless downpour, and he, wrought with an incurable thirst, helps himself to your body, spellbound by the adrenaline you incite in him and the softness and warmth that you—

Ouch. He feels a prick.

From his shoulder, a tiny cut. A warm drop of blood beads at the broken skin. Ah. you’ve got your puny, trembling fingers on the handle of the scalpel.

How clever. A laugh bubbles from his throat.

“Oh, little bunny. Are you sure you want to do that?”

His hand removes itself from your body, snatching the blade out of your grip. You panic and try to retrieve it, but in your moment of desperation he chuckles and slides his cock in, stuffing you with inches of his length at one go, stretching you out like a cushy sleeve. 

You yelp, foal legs kicking at air. Haruchiyo takes the time to tuck the blade away. 

“Stupid, stupid,” he clicks his tongue as you wail in defeat, tiny paws padding at his chest like you want him to pin you down harder — like you crave for him to abuse your little hole until you can’t walk for the rest of the year. “You’re just a little stupid, aren’t you? Gone all mush-brained from me teasing you?”

He wastes no time in bottoming out, leaving the tip brushing against your womb, beating on the squishy walls again and again. His pace is manic, uncaring, straight from the get-go. Nothing can compare to you. Your tight, slick walls accommodate him so lasciviously, so perfectly, that he swears you know what you’re doing. 

“You know what? I’m not even mad. Not when you’re the best fuck I’ve ever had.” His King has an eye for quality, he thinks, adjusting his grip so he can thrust deeper in you.

A mess of blood, cum, tears — a mess that he has made you, forced onto you like ink on a canvas, and he bled a bottomless black. You’re coming around slowly, letting the ink sink into your putty flesh and submitting yourself to the sensation, hips unknowingly rising to meet the timing of his thrusts. That’s more like it, he licks his lips. You’re cute. Obedient. He wouldn’t mind taking you home.

“Hey, hey. Here's—uh—an idea. Why don’t you become my own cocksleeve? I’ll tell Mikey that you—hah—fought real hard, but you just couldn’t resist putting a thick, hard cock inside you. I’ll tell him you couldn’t help it.” 

Haruchiyo chuckles mid-pant, having grown rather fond of you and your insides. He’s heaving like a beast, sweat gathering at his forehead, eyes squeezing shut to ride out this pure bliss. It’s a first for him. Has he been doing sex wrong his whole life?

“After my King disowns you… after he throws you out on the streets… I'll pick you up and give you a home. this little pussy… I’m going to make it my own.”

“Ah, ah— sto— ah…”

You’ve gone stupid for good, now. Your eyes are rolling to the back of your head, mindless babbling spilling from your lips (he can barely make out Mikey’s name in poor, broken syllables), your breasts bouncing and pussy twitching as it overflows with juices. All words are lost to you in this state. 

And yet you’re still hugging his thickness diligently, just like a custom-made cocksleeve. He really ought to reward you. Haruchiyo reaches down to stimulate your clit and shudders at the feeling of you clenching tighter.

That far-off look in your eyes, your thighs periodically convulsing with spurts of cum spraying out pathetically between your folds — it’s almost too good to be true. You’re spent, brainless, mouth agape and tongue lolling out with drool overflowing from the sides when Haruchiyo finishes in you. He can make out broken parts of your speech: feeble efforts of voicing his name.

Not Mikey’s. His.

“You’re mine to play with now,” he says, throwing his head back in laughter at your pitiful mewls. “What do you think? You don’t have any objections, do you?”

Without thinking, with a heightened lust that betrays all logical thought, he sheathes himself again, all the way to the brim with a heady groan. The cum still potent and thick inside your hole spills out and paints his cock in a hot mess of liquid.

Your mouth opens in a silent scream, eyes glazed over with so much pleasure that you look as if you were far, far above the clouds.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

‘Allow 1 tablet to dissolve under the tongue once per day or as directed by a physician. Recommended to reset circadian rhythm and for those with delayed sleep phase disorder’

You threw the bottle at the wall in frustration, ignoring the rain of pills that showered down after impact. You’d clean it up later.

It wasn’t enough. The “Extra Strength” claim on the label was nothing more than marketing bullshit since you had already taken three pills, and they had done fuck all. The tears of said frustration weren’t far behind, but you quickly wiped them away with the back of your hand. You were tired as hell, yeah, but nothing worth crying over just yet. It had only been about…

You counted the hours on your fingers.

...About a day and a half.

You frowned. That couldn’t be right.

You did it again, only to arrive at the same answer.

“God damnit!”

Your aggravation was emphasized with the slam of your bedroom door behind you. You were still in PJ’s, but fuck it. It was 3am and hardly anyone would be out anyways. You were going for a walk, since maybe that would actually do something for you.

You didn’t even bother to grab a jacket on your way out the front door.

The air was warm this time of year, despite it being so late… or early, depending on how you wanted to view it.

The city and all its concrete soaked up the heat from the sun during the daytime, and it would radiate it back out once the sun had set - allowing for a 24 hour rotation of heat that made you feel like a fucking rotisserie.

You smirked a little to yourself. Another thing to blame your sleep troubles on.

Like you suspected, there was hardly anyone out. The most activity you saw was at the back door at bars where the employees were locking up for the night,  or at restaurants, where the work day had only just begun

You had no destination in mind as you walked. Thinking about one required too much effort, and you didn’t have the energy to contemplate such a thing. Besides, what good would it do to have one anyways if the point was simply to wander? Having one would make no sense.

After what felt like an hour, the ache in your feet had begun to override the blissful nothingness previously occupying your mind, and you leaned to rest against a stone wall that had been on your left side for the past little while.

Only then you noticed the significant drop of temperature in the air, and you looked around.

You weren’t in the city anymore.

At least not obviously. You were surrounded by vast amounts of green - illuminated only by the dull yellow lights that lined the paved walkway you stood on. It made the foliage that wasn’t touched by said light feel that much darker.

But it wasn’t just the lighting that made the atmosphere shift in the way it did.

No, something felt off. Similar to the sensation of being in a government building you had absolutely no business being in - but far more sinister. Goosebumps peppered your skin once you realized what it was.

Silence. Complete and utter silence.

Even the small ravine next to you seemed to make no noise.

You turned on your heel and headed back the way you came.

“Leaving so soon?”

A shriek accompanied the startled jolt of terror that shot up your spine. You whipped around expecting to find someone, only to be met with the darkness of the path.

“Hello?”

Nothing. Not even crickets answered you.

You chuckled nervously, not sure of what to make of your situation. You knew sleep deprivation, if pushed long enough, could result in hallucinations, but you didn’t think you were that far gone just yet. That was only supposed to happen after two days without sleep.

A fact, you realized with growing horror, that could already be a reality.

You resumed walking - a few steps backwards at first before you turned and faced the proper way to accommodate the hurry in your steps.

You weren’t sure of exactly where you were, but if you followed the walkway it would undoubtedly lead you to a better lit area where you could get your bearings and figure out a way back home.

Your hands made a motion to enter a pocket that didn’t exist, and you were reminded of the fact you had neither brought your jacket with you, nor your phone.

God, you were an idiot.

“You’re going the wrong way.~”

Okay, what the fuck.

You stopped again and listened as hard as you could despite the roar of blood in your ears. The temptation to call out again to the voice was there, but you immediately thought the better of it.

Not wanting to stick around longer than necessary, you began to speed-walk..

The path felt endless. The foliage you passed felt the same, and the bridge you were about to go under felt way too familiar. A part of you hoped the familiarity was due to having seen it on your way in, and not because you were actually lost.

Eerie laughter from somewhere in the darkness did absolutely nothing to ease the palpable fear crawling in your skin, and a whimper slipped past your lips.

That was definitely not a hallucination.

The bridge felt akin to a checkpoint once you were under it. It was by no means safe, rather safer. You felt a lot less exposed to the trees - the iron supports acting as a comforting barrier to the outside world; even if logic dictated you were no less exposed than before.

Your slowed steps echoed quietly off the metal as you weighed the pros and cons of venturing further down the path. The unknown danger was by no means gone, but the promise of the coming dawn along with the temporary, albeit probably false, sense of security tempted you to stay put.

You cautiously poked your head out from the safety of the bridge and listened again - waiting for more laughter - or anything else, really.

“Where the fuck are you…”

“Here.”

You froze. Deer in the headlights as you slowly turned to face the owner of the voice no more than three feet behind you.

There was something so incredibly unsettling about the way he looked at you. He was smiling, yes, but there was something so Uncanny Valley about it that it had all instincts screaming at you to do one thing, and one thing only.

Run.

“Hey.” He said, far too casually.

Your eyes flicked over his appearance - lingering much longer than intended on the numerous stitches that ran across his face.

When you accidentally locked eyes with him, you gulped.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing.” You began, “But I want you to leave me alone.”

The stranger raised his eyebrows, his three sections of pale blue hair falling to the side as he tilted his head curiously.

“What, no ‘hello’ back? That’s quite rude of you.”

You laughed, but there was no humour in the sound whatsoever. “My apologies. Please leave me alone.”

“I heard you the first time.” His expression fell into one of boredom while he flicked a piece of lint from his shirt. He clicked his tongue when his eyes came back to yours. “You’re out late, aren’t you?”

Your smile was all nerves. “I suppose.”

He hummed in acknowledgement and continued to look at you. Eventually he bowed ever so slightly towards you, but you couldn’t help but feel it was completely ingenuine.

“My name is Mahito.”

You smiled thinly. “Pleasure.”

He grinned and resumed his full height with a hand on his hip. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“That’s because I didn’t give it.”

The lull of silence that fell between you was nothing short of awful, and you flinched when he finally laughed. It was sharp as it echoed across the underbelly of the bridge.

“Well, aren't you cute?”

“Not really.”

Mahito ignored your answer and leaned in closer, if that were even possible. “I think you are.”

You felt like you were going to be sick on the spot. “Thanks…” You cleared your throat awkwardly. “But if you’d pardon me, I’d like to go home now.”

You went to step around him, but his movements mirrored yours - keeping the path behind him blocked.

“Now? We only just started talking.”

His exaggerated pout made you feel a nauseating combination of pissed off and afraid. “Yes. Like you said, it’s very late.”

“So why are you out here?”

“That’s my business.”

“Trouble sleeping?”

Time stood still after he said that, and the anxiety must have shown clearly on your face because his smirk only widened. “I read humans have issues with that.”

Humans. Not ‘people’. Humans.

Your brow furrowed and you moistened your lips before you spoke.

“We do.” You said slowly, “But what makes you think I do?”

“You threw your sleeping pills against the wall, I’d say that’s a clear sign you’re still having issues.”

If the world didn’t stand still before, it certainly did now.

Unlike before, he wasn’t smirking. He said it as it was - a fact. Neutral expression and everything. It only served to make the drop of your heart into your stomach feel like freefall.

You opened your mouth to speak, but the words came out as a stutter.

Mahito watched your face the entire time you struggled with yourself and used the moment to nonchalantly walk closer to you - debris crunching quietly under the soles of his bare feet as he did.

“...Still?”

He grinned and reached out to push a strand of your hair out of your face with a single finger. “Bottle says to see a doc after you use it for more than four weeks, I’d say you’re pushing it.”

You flinched back from him before he could touch you, repulsed. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I told you, I’m Mahito.” He sighed and looked skyward for a moment, mumbling to himself. “Although I suppose sleep deprivation can result in problems with short-term memory…”

The tautness in your chest increased, and each breath became more difficult to suck in. It was all too much at once, and his complete dismissal of how goddamn creepy he was being only served to add to the fear.

He had been watching you, and clearly had been for a while. A fact only made worse by the knowledge that you hadn’t the faintest idea the entire time it had been happening - however long that had been.

“Did-” You cringed at the way your voice caught in your throat. The croak-like noise brought Mahito’s attention back to you immediately. “Did you follow me here?”

He cocked his head again to the side, “You shouldn’t ask questions you know the answer to, it’s not polite.”

You wanted to fucking cry.

You didn’t know what to do. Honest to god, you had absolutely no idea what to do or say anymore after a response like that because what was there to do?

You were alone. In the middle of a place you had never been with a person you had never met - one who was clearly out of their fucking mind.

Mahito giggled and he reached out to touch you again. “Your soul is trembling, am I making you nervous?”

Frankly you had never been more afraid in your life, and something in your brain snapped when his fingers made contact with your skin.

You ran.

Fight or flight was one hell of a bodily response. Gone was the tightness in your chest and back was the roar of blood in your ears as you sprinted down the path. The boost of adrenaline served its purpose - allowing your muscles to take on the inordinate amount of strain required to get you as far away from danger as possible.

A prospect that you didn’t expect to succeed as much as it did.

There was a large part of you that expected to get hit from behind - to go from hauling ass to eating shit in a matter of seconds, but it never happened.

No, what did occur was far, far worse.

There was an earth-shattering crash before the world disappeared. You had enough time to slap your palms over your ears before the scenery around you was literally pushed out by impossibly large, ink-like hands.

Whatever hands didn’t wall off your only chances of escape were used to pull you into a kingdom of darkness.

When you looked up, you didn’t see stars in this warped cosmos - only thousands of hands linked together in seemingly random patterns. There was no logic, only the horrific truth that solidified itself the more these hands clasped themselves together above your head.

You were trapped.

Even still, a part of you wondered if you were really here. If this was truly something happening to you of all people, and not some sick, horrendous nightmare conjured by several doses of melatonin at once.

That would make the most sense, wouldn’t it? That you were trapped in your mind rather than whatever horrors in front of your eyes - and it would only take a pinch of your skin along with  the will to wake up to set yourself free.

But any hope of that was shattered by the call of your name and the feeling of a hand on your shoulder.

He knew your name. Of course he did. It would be incredibly stupid to think he wouldn’t if he had really been following you for as long as he alluded to. He had only been playing dumb beforehand so you would offer up your name to him freely.

On top of everything else, he was a fucking hypocrite.

You let him turn you freely - offering little resistance as he had you face him once more, and he cupped your face in his hands. You closed your eyes, unable to deal with the intensity of the blue and gray staring into your soul.

“Normally I hate this, but I have to thank you.” He murmured, brushing a thumb across your cheek. “The pills were only meant to wear you down. Coming out here… you made this easy for me.”

The burn of hot tears behind your lids worked as an incentive to keep them shut, and you bit your cheek hard - hoping that the taste of your own blood would keep you grounded enough not to break in front of whatever creature that held you in its grasp.

But unlike Mahito, you were only human.

And you tasted salt when cold lips pressed to your own.

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