Menace

Satoru Gojo + Suguru Geto

You smelled them the second you stepped inside. two thick, sweet-musk scents tangled together in the air. Satoru’s bright and almost sugary, Sugurus deeper, warmer, like rain on warm wood. It hit you low in the gut and made your cock twitch in your pants before you even saw them.

Satoru was on the couch, shirt hiked above his stomach, one hand loosely around his leaking cock like he’d been trying not to touch too much. His white ears were flat, tail lashing hard against the cushions. The second he saw you he made this broken little sound and tried to get up, but his legs wobbled.

Suguru was in the kitchen doorway, robe hanging open, long black hair messy. His ears were low, cheeks flushed dark, and there was a visible trail of slick running down the inside of one thigh. He looked like he’d been trying to hold it together with sheer will. The second your eyes met, his tail curled tight around his own leg and he exhaled shakily.

“Both of you?” you said, voice low. “At the same time?”

Satoru whined and nodded fast. “It’s bad. Really bad. I tried waiting but Suguru came out of his room and he smelled so good and then I got worse and—” He cut himself off with a soft moan when his own hand twitched on his cock.

Suguru swallowed. “I… didn’t want to bother you. But it’s not stopping. The ache. I can’t think.” His voice was quiet, rough at the edges. “If you’re tired we can—”

“I’m not tired,” you cut in gently, stepping closer. “Come here. Both of you.”

They moved at the same time. Satoru basically launched himself into your chest, tail immediately wrapping around your thigh, face buried in your neck while he rubbed his leaking cock against your hip. Suguru came slower, more hesitant, but when you reached out and cupped the back of his neck he leaned into it like he’d been waiting for permission. His purr was low and shaky.

You walked them toward the bedroom, one arm around each. “Tell me what you need,” you said. “Use your words.”

Satoru answered first, voice muffled against your throat. “Your cock. Please. I need it inside, I need to be full, it hurts so much—”

Suguru’s ears flicked. He didn’t speak right away, but when you glanced at him he met your eyes and whispered, “I need you too. I tried touching myself but it’s not enough. I keep thinking about how you feel.”

You got them on the big bed, side by side on their backs. You took your time stripping them the rest of the way—slow pulls of fabric, hands sliding over their warm skin. Satoru squirmed and whined the whole time, tail trying to drag your hand between his legs. Suguru stayed quieter but his breathing got heavier every time your fingers brushed the base of his tail or the soft skin behind his ears.

You started with your hands. Two fingers in Satoru first because he was already dripping down his thighs and begging. He arched hard, a high sound ripping out of him, ears flattening all the way back.

“Fuck—yes, yes, right there—” His tail thrashed, then wrapped around Suguru’s wrist like he needed something to hold onto. You crooked your fingers and he sobbed, cock jumping against his stomach.

You looked at Suguru while you fingered Satoru. “You okay?”

Suguru’s eyes were glassy. He nodded once, then shook his head. “I—I need it too. Please.”

You pulled your fingers out of Satoru (who whined in protest) and slid them into Suguru instead. He was just as wet, maybe more, and the second you pushed in he let out this long, shaky exhale and his whole body relaxed.

“There you go,” you murmured. “Breathe for me.”

You worked them both open like that. alternating, sometimes two fingers in each at the same time, watching the way their tails curled around each other for comfort. Satoru kept up a running commentary of needy little noises and half-begged sentences. Suguru was quieter but every time you hit the right spot inside him his ears would twitch hard and he’d let out this soft, broken purr that vibrated through the bed.

When they were both loose and dripping and begging, you finally pushed your pants down. Your cock was hard and leaking, and both of them stared like they were starving.

Satoru reached for it first. “Me first? Please? I’ll be good after, I swear, just—let me feel it first—”

You lined up with Suguru instead, slow and deliberate. “You can wait a minute,” you told Satoru, voice calm but firm. “Let me take care of him. Then you get your turn.”

Suguru’s eyes fluttered when you pushed in. He was so hot and wet around you it took effort not to just slam in. You went slow, watching his face, one hand stroking his tail base the way you knew he liked. He made this soft, relieved sound when you bottomed out.

“God—yes. Just like that. Don’t pull out yet, please…”

You rocked into him in long, deep strokes while Satoru watched, whining and touching himself, tail lashing. Every few thrusts you reached over and wrapped your hand around Satoru’s cock or slid two fingers back into him to keep him open and desperate.

“Look at you both,” you said, voice a little rough. “So fucking needy. Dripping all over the sheets. You feel so good, Suguru. So tight around me.”

Suguru moaned softly, one hand reaching out blindly until Satoru caught it and laced their fingers together. The sight of them holding onto each other while you fucked Suguru made heat curl low in your stomach.

You didn’t let Suguru come yet. You pulled out when he was close, ignoring his soft protest, and turned to Satoru.

“Your turn.”

Satoru practically threw himself onto his hands and knees, tail high and quivering, presenting so fast it would’ve been funny if he wasn’t shaking. You pushed into him in one smooth thrust and he screamed—high and broken and so loud Suguru actually laughed breathlessly beside him.

“Fuck—fuck, yes, finally—your cock, it’s so good, please don’t stop, pleasepleaseplease—”

You fucked him harder than you had Suguru, one hand reaching over to stroke his cock. Satoru babbled the whole time, ears flat, pushing back into every thrust like he couldn’t get enough. Suguru watched, one hand slowly stroking his own cock, eyes dark and hungry.

When Satoru got too close you slowed down, pulled almost all the way out, and said, “Not yet.”

He whined but obeyed, trembling. You turned your head to Suguru. “Come here.”

Suguru moved without hesitation. You had him position in front of Satoru while you stayed buried in him. Then you reached and guided Suguru’s cock to Satoru’s mouth. Satoru took it greedily, moaning around it.

You started moving again—slow, deep thrusts into Satoru while he sucked Suguru. The sounds were filthy. You kept talking, low and steady.

“That’s it. Both of you. So good for me. Suguru, you can fuck his mouth a little if you want. He can take it.”

and suguru did.

careful at first, then deeper when Satoru moaned encouragement around him. You fucked Satoru through it until his whole body was shaking, then pulled out and switched to Suguru instead, repositioning him on his back. Suguru’s head fell forward with a broken moan.

You went back and forth like that for a while—fucking one while the other got attention with your hands or mouth or just watching. Every time one of them got too close you backed off, made them breathe, made them wait. The begging got louder. Satoru stopped making sense. Suguru started saying your name like a prayer every time you pushed back into him.

When you finally let them cum it was almost at the same time. You had Suguru on his back, legs wrapped around you, fucking him deep and steady while Satoru knelt beside you and jerked himself off, tail wrapped around your thigh. Suguru came first, whole body locking up, a long shaky purr ripping out of him as he clenched around your cock. You followed right after, buried deep, filling him while he held onto you and shook.

Satoru came two seconds later with a loud, broken cry, painting Suguru’s stomach and his own hand.

You stayed inside Suguru for a long minute, catching your breath, one hand petting Satoru’s ears, the other stroking Suguru’s flank. Both of them were purring now. Satoru loud and ragged, Suguru low and content.

You pulled out slow. Suguru made a soft unhappy noise at the loss. You kissed his forehead, then Satoru’s.

“Stay right there,” you murmured. “I’ll clean you both up.”

Satoru, already half-asleep and clingy, mumbled, “Don’t go far…”

Suguru just reached out and caught your wrist, eyes soft. “Thank you.”

You cleaned them gently with a warm cloth, then got water and made them drink. When you finally lay down between them they both curled in immediately—Satoru half on top of you, Suguru tucked against your side, tails draped over your legs like they were making sure you couldn’t leave.

The heat would come back later. But for now they were full and warm and purring against you, and the only sounds in the room were soft breathing and the occasional sleepy, satisfied little mewl.

You closed your eyes, one hand in white hair, the other resting on a warm striped tail, and let yourself rest.

Toji Fushiguro

Toji was on the bed, back against the headboard, one arm thrown over his eyes like he could block out the heat if he just ignored it hard enough. His tail was curled tight under him, tip twitching every few seconds. He was naked already—had probably stripped the second his heat hit. his cock was flushed dark and leaking steadily onto his stomach. Slick had soaked the sheets beneath him. every breath came out rough.

The second the door clicked he growled without moving his arm. “Out.”

You didn’t leave. You just leaned against the doorframe for a second, watching him. “Wow. Look at you.”

Toji’s arm dropped. His eyes were glassy, cheeks flushed dark under the scar. “I said—”

“Trying to tough it out all by yourself again?” you cut in, voice soft but teasing. You pushed off the door and crossed the room slow. “Such a big, tough guy… until the heat hits and you’re leaking all over your own sheets.”

He bared his teeth, but it didn’t have much bite. His tail uncurled a little when you sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t fuckin’ baby me.”

“Too late.” You reached out and scratched behind one of his ears. Toji’s whole body jerked, then he leaned into it before he could stop himself. A low, reluctant rumble started in his chest. “Aww, there it is. You’re burning up, huh? Poor thing.”

“Shut up,” he muttered, but his eyes were already half-lidded and his tail had started curling around your wrist.

You kept petting his ear with one hand while the other slid down his chest, over the hard lines of muscle, down to where his cock was twitching against his stomach. You didn’t touch it yet—just let your fingers trail through the mess of precum and slick on his skin.

“Bet you were touching yourself before I got here,” you said, casually, like you were talking about the weather. “Trying to make it go away. Did it help?”

Toji’s ears flicked back. “No.”

“Didn’t think so.” You finally wrapped your hand around his cock, slow and loose. He hissed and his hips jerked up. “Look how wet you are already. All this slick and you’re still trying to pretend you don’t need help.”

“I don’t—” His voice cracked when you gave him one slow stroke. “Fuck—don’t tease.”

“But you’re cute when you’re all worked up and stubborn.” You leaned in and kissed the corner of his mouth. “Lie back for me.”

He grumbled the whole time but let you push him down flat on the bed. You settled between his spread thighs, running your hands up and down them, thumbs pressing into the tense muscle.

You took your time opening him up.

Two fingers first, sliding in easy with how wet he was. Toji’s head tipped back against the pillows and he let out this rough, bitten-off sound. You crooked them just right and watched his stomach jump.

“There we go,” you murmured, voice warm and a little teasing. “Feels better when you stop fighting it, doesn’t it?”

“ shut up,” he growled, but it came out breathless and his hips were already rocking down onto your fingers.

You added a third, slow and careful, and he moaned—low and rough, trying to swallow it. You stroked his cock with your other hand at the same time, just slow enough to keep him on edge.

“Look at you,” you said softly. “All that growling and now you’re pushing back on my fingers like you can’t get enough. Such a good boy when you let me take care of you.”

Toji’s ears flattened harder. “I’m not—fuck—a good boy—”

“Sure you are.” You leaned down and licked a slow stripe up his cock, then took the head into your mouth for a second, sucking lightly. He made a choked sound. You pulled off with a wet pop and smiled up at him. “See? Taking it so well for me.”

You worked him open until he was loose and dripping, four fingers easy, his hole fluttering every time you pulled back. Only then did you slick your cock and line up.

Toji’s eyes were dark and hazy when they met yours. He didn’t look away.

You pushed in slow, watching every flicker across his face. The stretch made his mouth drop open on a silent moan, ears twitching wildly. When you bottomed out he let out this long, shaky breath.

“Fuck… yeah,” he rasped. “Just like that.”

You stayed still for a second, one hand stroking his hip, the other petting slow behind his ear again. “There it is. All full now. Feels good, doesn’t it?”

He nodded once, jerky. You started moving—long, deep strokes that made his whole body rock with every thrust. Toji met you halfway at first, pushing back, but the teasing and the soft coaxing seemed to have changed something in him. After a minute his growls turned into rough, needy moans and his hands came up to grip your shoulders like he needed something to hold onto.

You kept talking, voice low and warm between thrusts.

“Look at you taking it so well. So desperate for me.” You reached down and stroked his cock in time with your hips. “You can growl and curse all you want, but your body’s honest. Dripping everywhere. Clenching around me like you never want me to pull out.”

Toji’s head tipped back, a broken sound ripping out of him. “Shut—ah—shut up—”

You didn’t. You leaned down, chest to chest, and kissed the corner of his mouth again while you fucked him a little harder. “It’s okay to need it. I’ve got you. Not going anywhere until you’re full and satisfied.”

His ears flicked at the word “ full,” You kept the pace steady and deep, hitting that spot inside him on every thrust, stroking his cock, petting his ears, murmuring soft teasing things against his skin.

When he got close you slowed down just enough to drag it out.

“Not yet,” you said gently when he whined. “Let me enjoy you a little longer. You’re so pretty like this—all flushed and shaking and trying so hard not to beg.”

Toji cursed you out, but it was weak and his hips kept trying to chase your hand. You gave him what he needed eventually—fucked him harder, stroked him faster, whispered “That’s it, cum for me, good boy” right against his ear.

He came with a deep, guttural groan, cock pulsing between you, hole clenching tight around your cock. You fucked him through it, then pushed in deep and came too, filling him while he shook and panted and finally let that low, rumbling purr out.

You stayed inside him after, both of you catching your breath. Toji’s arms were still around your shoulders. You stroked slow fingers through his hair and behind his ears, soft and soothing now.

“There you are,” you murmured. “ Knew you had it in you.”

Toji made a gruff, embarrassed sound but didn’t shove you off. If anything he pulled you closer, face tucked against your neck.

“Don’t get used to it,” he muttered, voice hoarse.

You smiled and kissed his temple. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Ryomen Sukuna

His door was closed, but you could hear him pacing. Heavy steps. The occasional sharp thump of his tail hitting the wall. Low, frustrated growls left him.

You knocked once. “Sukuna.”

“Go away.”

“You’re in heat.”

“I’m aware.” Another thump. “I don’t need your help. I can handle it.”

You opened the door anyway.

He was a wreck. Pink hair wild, markings standing out stark against flushed skin, ears pinned flat, tail lashing so hard it kept knocking things off his desk. His cock was hard and angry-red, leaking down his thigh, and there was slick running in shiny trails down both legs. The sheets on his bed were already in shreds from his claws.

His eyes snapped to you. (all four of them) narrowed. “I told you—”

“You’re hurting,” you said, calm, stepping inside and closing the door. “And I’m not leaving you like this.”

He bared his teeth, sharp fangs flashing, but he didn’t move when you crossed the room. Didn’t move when you reached out and touched his jaw. He leaned into it before he could stop himself, then jerked back like he’d been burned.

“Brat,” he snarled. “Touch me I’ll kill you.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” you said. You backed him toward the bed until the backs of his knees hit the mattress. You knew it was a loose threat. He sat down hard, legs spreading without meaning to. More slick dripped onto the floor.

You got on your knees between his thighs and ran your hands up them. He watched you with narrowed eyes, chest heaving. When you wrapped your fingers around his cock he hissed and his hips jerked up.

“Don’t—shit—”

You stroked him slow, thumb swiping over the head, while your other hand slid between his legs and pressed two fingers against his hole. He was soaked. The second you pushed in he made this choked sound and his head fell back, ears flat, claws digging into the ruined sheets.

“You can growl all you want,” you said, voice low, “but your body’s telling me exactly what it needs.”

He didn’t answer with words. Just pushed down onto your fingers with a snarl that turned into a moan halfway through. he clawed the bed and cursed and tried to pretend he wasn’t shaking.

When you finally pulled your fingers out and lined your cock up he was panting, eyes glassy, tail wrapped tight around your waist without him seeming to notice.

“Do it,” he ordered, voice cracking. “Fill me. Now. And don’t you dare be gentle.”

You pushed in slow anyway. He took it. his hole clenched around you—but the second you bottomed out he let out this long, shaky breath and his whole body went limp for a second.

“Fuck… yes.”

You fucked him hard, just like he asked. Deep, rough strokes that made the bed creak and his claws tear new holes in the sheets. He met every thrust, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, growling and moaning and cursing your name like it was an insult and a prayer at the same time.

“Bite if you need to,” you told him when his teeth started worrying at his own lip. “I can take it.”

He did—latched onto your shoulder and bit down hard when you changed the angle and started hitting that spot inside him over and over. The pain mixed with the heat in your gut and made you fuck him even harder. He came like that—sudden, violent, cock pulsing untouched between you, hole clenching so tight it dragged you right over the edge with him. You buried yourself deep and filled him while he shook and growled and bit down harder on your shoulder.

After, you stayed inside him. One hand stroking slow through his hair, the other resting on his hip. He didn’t shove you off. Just kept you there, still buried in him, tail heavy and warm around your waist, one clawed hand resting on the back of your neck.

“…Stay,” he muttered against your throat, so quiet you almost missed it. “Until it comes back. Then we’re doing that again. And you’re not pulling out until I say so.”

You smiled and kissed the bite mark you’d left on his skin. “Whatever you need.”

TENDERNESS toward the object of his desire becomes, in ben’s mind, a kind of heresy that accidentally reads as love—not because he’s ever been a man built for softness, but because softness contradicts the native grammar of wanting. wanting, as he understands it, is not a hymn; it is a wound with teeth. it is a hand closing, not to hold, but to encircle and claim. it is pressure, bruising and insistent, the crude physics of conquest performed again and again until it feels less like a choice and more like gravity. when he thinks about what people call intimacy, his mind doesn’t go to soft mouths or shared breath; it goes to fingers digging into the hinge of a jaw, a palm flattening the curve of a spine until there’s nowhere left to go but down, teeth at the fragile seam where decorum is supposed to live and die. his appetite has always been more gnash than kiss, more eat than embrace, the old animal impulse to take something into himself until the boundary between “mine” and “not mine” dissolves.

for most of his life, the act of wanting has been a kind of vandalism. he takes things, uses them, chews the sweetness out until all that’s left is pulp and compliance and the faint aftertaste of regret that never lasts more than a day. he is good at that. he knows how to leave marks that cameras can’t see. he knows how to make people feel small enough that it looks like gratitude when they cling to him afterward. he can explain that kind of wanting to himself, because he can file it under power: a transaction sealed with sweat and a smile and maybe a threat. it doesn’t soften him; it confirms him. it tells him he is exactly what the posters say he is, what the flag wants from him, what vought pays him to perform: a man whose desire is just another form of force.

and yet the very fact that he doesn’t do that to you—doesn’t crush, doesn’t consume, doesn’t make you pay for the unbearable fact of being wanted—becomes its own confession. he can be gentle with you, sometimes. that’s the part that terrifies him. because gentleness is not his instinct; it’s his exception. it’s the one behavior his body can’t explain away as power.

mostly, his object of desire is a man.

that is the simple, obscene sentence that sits behind his teeth like a hot coin. he cannot say it out loud—not in the mirror, not in the locker room, not even alone in the private, upholstered silence vought builds for its “assets.” he cannot show it, either, not with the cameras always hungry and the handlers always watching for weakness the way wolves watch for blood in snow. he has grown up on words like fairy and faggot and fruit, spit like bullets, and every time the thought of you even brushes against that territory, his body floods with an instinctive recoil, a churn of stomach and static behind his eyes that feels like he swallowed a lit cigarette.

so he learns to translate. he learns to smuggle the truth out in disguises: a hand on your shoulder that lingers one breath too long, then squeezes, just hard enough to make it look like a warning if anyone is watching. a look across a conference table that arrives late and stays there, drilling into the hinge of your jaw instead of whatever idiot is giving a presentation about payback’s Q4 engagement metrics. a sudden flare of wrath at any other man who stands too close to you, whose laugh makes you laugh, whose hand brushes yours when you both reach for the same folder. ben has broken noses for less than that, and when people ask why, he lets them believe it’s about respect, about rank, about any stupid little fiction that does not involve the fact that the sight of another man’s fingers grazing your wrist makes something low and violent snap inside him.

he plays the straight hero on television, he plays the straight hero with the muscle memory of prayer. he can drape an arm around a blond co-star’s waist and make it look easy, natural, inevitable. he can talk about the american dream with a grin that has sold more cereal and beer than he will ever be comfortable acknowledging. the country rewards him for it, showering him with applause, with medals, with girls holding up signs that say things like “MARRY ME, SOLDIER BOY!” in bold paint. all of that is performance. the real thing, the unprofitable truth, stays locked behind his ribs, beating like contraband. every time you walk into a room, he can feel it thrash, like a smuggled animal waking up in its crate.

you have been the object of his desire since the mid-1970s, when ben became the leader of payback and the world decided he was a patriot instead of a problem. you weren’t a supe. you were just an assistant in vought’s orbit—clipboard, schedules, coffee, the unglamorous administrative ligaments that kept a monster-shaped celebrity standing upright. you were supposed to be invisible. that’s what vought trains its “support staff” to be: furniture that breathes, hands that hand things over, a convenient human absence. but you weren’t absent. not to him.

the first time he really noticed you, it wasn’t during one of the glossy press events, not under the hot buzz of stage lights, but in the dreary fluorescent afterhours of some vought building where the walls all smelled like old carpet and newer secrets. the applause had shut off like a switch, leaving a silence that hummed in his ears. he had peeled off parts of his costume: the gloves, the mask, the carefully calibrated smile. what was left behind had felt scraped-out, hollowed. he needed something to push against, something to hit, someone to sneer at, just to reassure himself that the world would still bend around his temper the way it always did.

instead he found you standing alone at a table, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, sorting through a stack of paperwork like it mattered. the overhead lighting was unflattering and the room was too cold and your coffee had clearly gone lukewarm hours ago. and still, there was something about the line of your wrist as you flipped a page, the set of your jaw as you frowned, that hooked under his skin with the rude efficiency of a fishhook.

he stalked over, ready to bark about call times or transport or whatever else would make you fumble and shrink, because that was what people did around him, that was how the universe affirmed itself. you didn’t. you just looked up, eyes tired but steady, and said his name like it was a title and a chore, and then you told him he was late for a debrief and asked if he’d eaten. no awe, no flirting, no flinching, no coy little giggle to stroke his ego. just this flat, almost bored professionalism, this quiet concern for his blood sugar like he was a volatile machine someone had to keep fed or it would malfunction.

you should have been safe. he should have written you off as part of the wallpaper. instead, you became important, and importance around ben is always dangerous.

by the time the 1980s roll in, it has curdled into something sharper, something more unlivable. the decade hits like a chemical spill: neon bleeds across everything, hair is sprayed into rigid architectures, shoulder pads and cocaine and patriotism all collapse into the same shrill aesthetic. reagan grins from every television screen, selling trickle-down mercy, while vought polishes its propaganda until you can see your own reflection in it, distorted but flattering if you don’t look too hard.

ben was built in a lab for this era, even if the lab was just america itself. the jawline, the smirk, the flag-draped arrogance; he is all biceps and bullets and jokes about commies delivered with the timing of a man who knows that no one will ever challenge him. the public wants him to be simple. they want his desire to be loud and heterosexual in a way that can be packaged onto lunchboxes and tied to fragrance campaigns. they want him photographed with actresses on his arm, hand on some perfect waist, giving the impression of heterosexual virility that reassures fathers and excites daughters and sells the idea that strength looks like him and only him.

then there is you, and the fact that his wanting refuses to take the state-approved shape.

he does what he has been taught to do his whole life when a feeling threatens to slip outside the narrow categories he understands: he smashes it into a different mold. he finds a woman whose face echoes yours in cruel, approximate ways. she has your mouth shape, though hers is always painted in glossy reds that have never stained your lips. she has your haircut one year, because the stylist tells him it’s “on trend,” and he agrees too quickly and then spends the next three weeks unable to look directly at either of you without his palms itching. her neck is slim in the same way, the same clean line from ear to collarbone that his hand has memorized from staring at you in briefing rooms while pretending to check his watch.

he dates her with the diligence of a man attempting a cure. it is an exorcism done with champagne and magazine spreads. he lets himself be photographed with her on his arm, her laugh thrown back, his hand splayed possessively over the small of her back, the two of them framed by flags and flashes. he takes her to bed with a grim kind of focus, determined to overwrite whatever obscene circuitry is misfiring inside him. he kisses her like he’s trying to scrub a stain off the inside of his skull, tongue hard and insistent, teeth a little too sharp, as if aggression can bleach out the part of him that keeps imagining those same motions aimed at you instead.

it doesn’t work. it never does. the lie only makes him meaner, turns his sensuality into something sour. every time she arches against him, every time she gasps into his mouth, something inside him misaligns. her skin is too soft in the wrong ways, her voice the wrong pitch when she says his name, her laugh too light when he snarls some filthy compliment meant to reassure himself that he still knows how to play this role. he closes his eyes and the worst thing happens: he doesn’t see her at all. he sees you in flickers, like a damaged reel of film. your hand adjusting your tie in his peripheral vision during a press junket. your profile lit by the blue wash of a television screen in a war room at two a.m. the way your throat moves when you swallow after he’s barked at you, that tiny betrayed tremor you think you hid.

he hates himself for every one of those images. he hates you for being the axis they spin around. and because he cannot confess the real hunger, he turns it into a kind of private cannibalism of the soul: he tries to consume your presence by eating its resemblance.

in bed, with the almost-you woman, he becomes a kind of private executioner of his own fantasies. he doesn’t want her, not really; he wants proximity to the shape of you without the terror of your actuality. he grips her too hard, kisses her too harshly, bites the tender places as if he’s trying to tear the resemblance off her piece by piece. there are moments when his hand closes around her throat in that familiar way and he tells himself this is proof that everything is normal, that he is still the same man he has always been: a man who takes what he wants from women, not a man who lies awake staring at the ceiling thinking about another man’s wrists.

he wouldn’t admit any of it, not even under hypotheticals. if you asked him, point blank, when simple awareness of you started to ossify into something as obscene as desire, ben would lie reflexively, the way most people blink. he’d scoff, shove his hands in his pockets, say something about how he doesn’t “catch feelings” for pencil-pushers, maybe spice it with a slur sharpened from the eighties air, thick with talk-show punchlines and locker-room venom. he’d tell it like a joke, like the very premise was insulting. soldier boy doesn’t pine. soldier boy doesn’t obsess. soldier boy doesn’t want men.

the real answer started small, in ways he could pretend were nothing.

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HE wouldn’t say he stalked you. he’d call it “keeping an eye on his handler,” like you were just another part of the equipment, like he was checking his shield for cracks. but he knew your schedule with a precision he never afforded anyone else’s. he knew which coffee cart you favored when the internal machines were “undrinkable dog piss,” knew that you always tapped your mug twice against the counter before taking a sip. he knew the way your shoulders tightened right before you put on your professional voice for a call, how you pushed your tongue against your teeth when you were angry but couldn’t show it. in the maze of vought hallways and mirrored elevators, in offices that all smelled like paper, anxiety, and air conditioning, his attention found you like a compass finds north, over and over, as if you were the only real thing in a building made of sets.

he learned your cologne by accident at first. passing you in a corridor, shoulder brushing yours, he caught it: something clean, not the heavy, choking musk they hawked in his commercials. it was subtle, almost demure by the decade’s standards, threaded with citrus and something warmer, something skin-adjacent that made his brain file it under you and only you. after that, he could pick it out anywhere. you’d walk into a meeting late, and before he even looked up, his spine would stiffen, some old soldier reflex snapping to attention at the ghost of that scent. when you leaned over his chair to shove a contract in front of him, the faint aura of it turned the air thick around his head, as if the whole room narrowed to the space between your wrist and his jaw.

he knew the brand, though he would never admit how he found out. one late night, you’d left your briefcase open on a chair in the war room, files splayed like a crime scene. ben had been pacing, coming down off adrenaline and cocaine and the sterile adrenaline of a televised “operation,” not ready to go back to the hotel, to the lonely echo of his own fame. the room was empty except for the ghost of mission chatter. he told himself he was just making sure nothing classified was left out. that was the story he built over the memory later.

his hand went rifling through papers it had no business touching, but what he was really hunting was the shape of you. dates, signatures, margin notes in your handwriting, little angry question marks stabbed into the paper where vought’s demands got too impossible. and then, buried under a sheaf of memos, the small, rectangular bottle: glass, understated, with a label that made his mouth go dry when he realized what it was. not just any cologne. the cologne.

he stood there too long, fingers braced around it, pulse roaring in his ears. the act of lifting the bottle had the furtive shame of stealing money from a church plate. he unstoppered it before he could talk himself out of it and held it close, drawing in a slow breath that felt like a confession. the scent hit him and everything else in the room dropped a few decibels. it was you, distilled, atomized, made portable. his knuckles whitened around the glass.

he put it back. he didn’t pocket it—that would have crossed some line he still believed existed. but the name on the label burned itself into his memory with the clarity of a mission objective.

he bought it a week later.

he did it in person, which was the worst part. no assistant, no errand runner. just him, hat pulled down low, sunglasses on despite the fluorescent store lighting, a walking caricature trying to pass for anonymous. the girl at the counter almost fainted when she realized who he was. he leaned on the display, threw a joke over his shoulder, let her giggle and stammer, played the part he always played. soldier boy buying cologne made sense; of course it did. it was normal. masculine. a man who smells like victory needs a signature scent, right? that’s what the ads said.

he pointed at your brand when she started her sales pitch, voice casual. he didn’t sample anything else. didn’t let her spritz it on a paper strip. he already knew how it smelled; it was under his skin by then. when she asked if it was for him, he said yes too fast, then covered it with a wink and a raunchy aside about “making the ladies lose their minds.” she blushed, rang him up, slipped her number into the bag, because of course she did.

back in his penthouse, he stood in his bathroom under unforgiving lights, the bottle in his hand, his reflection staring back at him like an accusation. tile, glass, chrome; everything crisp, expensive, impersonal, the way vought liked their investments to look. he shrugged off his shirt, baring a chest they’d photographed a thousand times, every line of muscle a promise the public thought they were owed. none of that made him feel as naked as the small, unremarkable bottle sitting on the counter.

he sprayed it on his throat first, a quick, nervous press of the nozzle, like ripping off a bandage. mist kissed his skin, cold and then not, and the smell bloomed around him. wrong. it sat on him wrong—not unpleasant, just misaligned, like a suit tailored for another man’s shoulders. on you, it was seamless, the scent and the skin and the voice all arriving as a unit. on him, it felt like wearing someone else’s clothes still warm from their body.

he caught himself in the mirror, jaw clenched, eyes flat as gunmetal, shoulders squared like he was facing an enemy. the cologne curled around his head and he stared himself down, daring his reflection to say the word he wouldn’t. queer. faggot. whatever ugly syllable came easiest. he waited for the accusation, for some visible marker of deviance to appear on his face, something he could punch or shave off or drown in whiskey. nothing changed. same jaw, same pretty-boy ruin of a face, same national mascot staring back at him.

he sprayed more. his wrists, the hollow of his chest, the inside of one forearm. each burst felt like driving a nail deeper into some invisible structure he wasn’t ready to name. the bathroom filled up with you, with the idea of you, with the phantom sense of you standing just over his shoulder. it tunneled his awareness until the only thing he could smell, the only thing he could think about, was that note he associated with your pulse, with the space just behind your ear, with the brief, torturous inches between your neck and his knuckles whenever you leaned past him to point something out on a document.

he told himself he was stress-testing the product, that he was figuring out if it “fit his brand,” the same way he test-fired guns for movies he never watched. in reality, he was marinating in you, soaking himself in your absence until the boundary between his body and the memory of yours blurred. the more he pretended it was about control, the more it curdled into something else entirely. this wasn’t conquest. this was contraband. this was him trying to carry you on his skin, to stain himself with you in a way no one could see but he could never escape.

the worst part was how quickly it worked.

for days afterward, every time he shifted, every time he brought his hand up near his face, there you were, phantom-close. he’d be in a briefing with suits yammering about demographics, and a bead of sweat would slide down his throat under the costume collar, carrying the scent up with it, and suddenly the air in his lungs would feel too thick. he’d be on set, lights brutal, stunt coordinator shouting, and he’d catch a whiff of himself and think of the way you smelled when you brushed past him in some cramped hallway, your tie tickling his arm, your apology mumbled, your eyes not quite meeting his. the cologne turned his whole life into a haunted house where every room contained some version of you lurking just behind his shoulder.

he started putting it on before he saw you, like armor made from your absence. some poisonous logic told him it would desensitize him. exposure therapy. you walk into a room reeking of the man you’re trying not to think about, maybe the real thing will hit less hard. instead, it rewired him. now, when you appeared, clean and sharp in your suit, your own cologne layered over your usual soap and coffee and paper scent, it hit him twice as hard. the room doubled: you across the table, and echoes of you lifting from his own skin. it felt like standing between two mirrors and watching the reflection stretch into infinity—your face, his, yours, his—until he couldn’t tell which direction was forward anymore.

he turned it on his bed next. that was where it slipped from eccentric to something sicker, something he wouldn’t even name in his own head without flinching.

it started with an accident, or so he told himself. he tossed the bottle onto the mattress one night after a long, sour evening of press and schmoozing, and it hit the comforter at a bad angle, the cap popping off. a fine mist sprayed the sheets. he swore, grabbed it, checked for cracks. none. just a small dark patch on the fabric, glistening for a second before it began to evaporate. he bent down, intending to check if it would stain.

the smell punched him in the face. concentrated, raw, uncut you, soaked into the cotton where he slept, where he woke in the middle of the night sweating and confused. his hand flattened over the damp patch without thinking, fingers pressing in, and for a moment he saw you instead, saw your back against that mattress, your shirt rucked up, your tie askew, the way your throat would look bent back to meet his eyes—

he jerked away, as if he’d touched a live wire. the back of his neck burned. he stood over the bed, breathing hard, nostrils flaring, the hot little spill of scent climbing up around him like smoke. he could have stripped the bed, could’ve yanked the sheets off, thrown them in a laundry bag, called housekeeping with some gruff complaint.

he didn’t.

the next time, it wasn’t an accident. he stood at the foot of the bed, bottle in hand, jaw clenched, feeling every one of his thirty(sixty)-plus years and all the rules they’d wired into him: men don’t do this, real men don’t linger, don’t fixate, don’t ache. he flicked the safety on guns without thinking; now he was flicking the nozzle of a cologne bottle with the same grim, deliberate motion. one spray. then another. pillows, the dip where his body usually lay, a careful mist at the center of the mattress like some obscene altar.

by the time he was done, the room was thick with the smell. not feminine, not floral; that would’ve been easier to write off as generic decadence. this was your scent, your choice, the thing he’d ruined by making it his. it seeped into the cotton, into the air, into the breathing space above the bed until it felt like he was wading through you just to cross the room.

he lay down in the middle of it, eyes fixed on the ceiling, muscles locked. every inhale dragged you into him, into his chest, down into the dark, hungry places that didn’t care what year it was or what words he’d learned to fear. his mind clawed for excuses—stress relief, curiosity, boredom—but they fell apart under the weight of how specific the hunger was. this wasn’t about bodies in general, about anonymous touch or faceless warmth. this was about the slope of your shoulders under your shirt, the way your tie hung slightly crooked by the end of the day, the exhausted set of your mouth when you thought no one was looking.

he took that scent with him over the edge—dragged it down into the bottomless place inside himself where shame curdled into need. It was no longer just a smell by then; it was you, encoded molecule by molecule. and it wasn’t just that he imagined you where his hand was—he replaced himself, rewrote the script of his body to accommodate yours, made a blasphemous cathedral out of his own sheets. every touch became yours, not his—every stroke mapped onto the landscape of your hands, the precise tension in your forearm, the way your fingers might grip him like a man torn between sin and duty. he imagined the scrape of your stubble against his neck, imagined you above him, close enough to spit scripture in his ear and call it mercy. his hips moved like he was trying to meet you, not his own hand, chasing your weight like a man seeking penance.

your voice, in his head, was always steady. always low, clipped, too calm for what he was doing—like you were trying to stay professional even while he writhed under you, your breath threading into the curve of his throat. you didn’t beg in his fantasy. you didn’t plead. you ordered. called him “good,” sometimes, in a voice sharp enough to cut glass. other times you mocked him, took him apart with quiet, surgical cruelty. “that what you like?” you’d mutter, breath hot against his jaw. “getting off smelling like me, you sick fuck?” and the worst part, the part that made his spine arc off the mattress like a live wire, was that even in the fantasy, he agreed.

there were moments—short, white-hot bursts—where his own name dropped out of the equation entirely. he’d squeeze his eyes shut and forget whose body he was in, lose the boundary between skin and thought and fall into something that felt more like possession than pleasure. the wet sound of his fist moving over his cock blurred into the imagined weight of your hand—rougher than his, intentional, purposeful—and he’d bite down on the corner of the pillow, chest trembling, teeth aching, like if he made a noise it might make it real.

and when it hit, it wasn’t soft. it ripped through him like a mortar round, all pressure and no grace. he came hard—so hard it made his vision blur—his thighs twitching, breath caught in his throat like a confession he didn’t want to give up. his cum spilled across his stomach, hot and ugly, streaking the scent-stained sheets beneath him. it soaked into the cotton, his sweat mixing with the slick, manufactured you he’d sprayed all over the bed. there was no poetry in it. it wasn’t romantic. it was desecration. a private defilement he couldn’t stop returning to.

afterward, the shame didn’t creep in—it slammed down like a body hitting concrete. cold and clinical. the kind of silence he’d only heard after raids gone wrong, when the blood on the floor was the wrong color, when the enemy was just a kid with a gun and a bad translator. he’d stare at the ceiling, ribs still shuddering with the aftershocks, and feel hollowed. not empty. not clean. scooped out. like something essential had been stripped from him and replaced with a crawling awareness of how wrong it all was.

the sheets beneath him smelled like you. not in a sweet, sentimental way—but in a filthy way. the scent didn’t sit on the fabric so much as cling to it—oil on water, the ghost of a body that had never been there and yet left fingerprints everywhere. his cock lay soft and wet against his thigh, still twitching occasionally like it hadn’t figured out the moment was over. he didn’t wipe the mess off right away. part of him thought he deserved to lie in it.

it felt like he’d committed a crime. worse—it felt like he’d committed a sacrament in reverse. if touching you would have been the sin, this was the mockery. the profane parody. he’d turned your scent into a medium, turned his bed into a reliquary for a want he couldn’t bear to name aloud. you weren’t there. hadn’t consented. hadn’t asked for any of this. but he had used you anyway, repackaged you into something portable and passive and pliant, let your ghost fuck him six different ways without so much as a word exchanged. there was something vile in that. something beneath even the standards he held himself to—and those standards weren’t high to begin with.

he told himself—swore to himself—it would be the last time. a moment of weakness. a slip. coke and exhaustion and the ancient american curse of fame hollowing him out from the inside. a bad dream in physical form. he stripped the bed. opened the windows. drank a fifth of whiskey and punched the mirror for good measure. slept on the couch like the room itself had turned toxic.

but the next night, the sheets still smelled faintly of you, and his fingers drifted to the bottle again like a homing beacon. the logic broke down fast after that. it wasn’t just a slip; it was a habit. a ritual. the spraying became a prelude, an invocation. he stopped pretending it was accidental. he’d apply it to his pillowcase like a man laying out a welcome mat for a demon he couldn’t stop inviting in. sometimes he came fast and angry, barely thinking. sometimes he took his time—stroked himself slow while whispering your name into the dark, breath shaky, eyes closed, trying to sync his heartbeat to the imagined weight of yours.

he talked to you sometimes, under his breath, filthy and cruel. called you names, slurs. asked you if this was what you wanted. told you to keep looking at him, even when his own eyes were clenched shut. It wasn’t love. not in the way he understood the word. love was for people with softness still intact. this was hunger. need. old, ugly want with no logic and no exit strategy. and because he couldn’t admit it, he punished himself for it—fucked his own hand raw, denied himself for days only to cave in harder, ruined shirts with the mess, turned the whole act into a cycle of arousal and violence and regret.

sometimes, the guilt was a comfort. it felt masculine, at least. shame he understood. regret could be weaponized. but the softness—the sweetness—terrified him more than any of it. because sometimes, when he was just on the edge, the thing that made him tip over wasn’t the image of your hand or your mouth or your cock—it was the sound of your voice, not mocking, not ordering, but gentle. saying his name like it meant something. like you saw him. like you wanted him.

that was the part he could never forgive himself for.

he swears the mirror cracks a little more every time he looks at it. not a cinematic shatter, just hairline fractures spidering out from the center, like the glass is tired of lying for him. the face looking back isn’t his, not really. it’s a corrupted overlay of yours, a bad VHS tape where your features keep ghosting over his, frame skipping, jawline flickering, mouth reshaping into your mouth before snapping back. some nights it’s so vivid he has to lean in, breath fogging the glass, watching his own eyes rewrite themselves into your tired, steady gaze. you don’t even have to be there for it to happen. you’ve colonized his reflection so completely that the idea of “ben” as a separate entity starts to feel like a cheap marketing fiction, some vought-approved mascot costume he puts on over the real infection. he isn’t a man; he’s an outline you keep seeping into, a concept wearing your residue.

you follow him like a shadow that’s learned to move independently of light, creeping in under the doors, pooling in the corners of his thoughts. it’s not romantic; it’s pathological. you get into his mind the way mold takes a damp wall, slowly at first, then all at once, a quiet, furry bloom of you across every internal surface. the more he tries to scrape it off, the deeper it sinks in, threads of you knitting through his impulses, your voice grafted onto his instincts. it doesn’t get better with repetition. there’s no desensitization curve here. if anything, it escalates.

every glimpse of himself becomes a misprint. he wants to claw at his face, dig his nails into his own cheekbones, ruin the flesh everyone insists on calling “his.” he fantasizes—just for a heartbeat—about raking his nails down to the bone, tearing off this counterfeit mask until whatever is underneath finally looks as monstrous as it feels. if he could peel his own skin away and leave it on your desk like a grotesque resignation letter, he might actually sleep.

so he doesn’t sleep. or when he does, it’s shallow, twitchy, full of you in wrong places. when he’s awake, he lies there in the dark of his room, the blackout curtains pulled tight, the city neon leaking in around the edges in sickly blues and reds, making the ceiling look like the inside of a police siren. the almost-you woman is laying in his bed and she’s breathing softly, one arm flung over his stomach like a claim. her perfume is thick, sugary, expensive, but underneath it he can still smell the cologne he sprayed on the sheets hours ago, that thin arrested chord he’s come to associate with your orbit. she shifts, murmurs his name, presses closer, and his brain writes over her outline in real time.

you. you, you, you.

that’s all he sees, all the flickering, stuttering projector in his skull is capable of throwing on the wall. every curve of her body becomes a misaligned stand-in for you, a silhouette his mind keeps editing. her hair falls across his shoulder, and it’s the wrong weight, the wrong scent, wrong everything, and yet his body doesn’t seem to care about the distinction as much as his pride insists it should.

the first time he realized he was desiring you instead of just orbiting you, tulips were blooming in some manicured vought courtyard, thick red cups of flesh opening themselves to the sun like they didn’t know better. you were outside on a break, tie loosened, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, sitting on the edge of a concrete planter with a folder in your lap. he should have been thinking about whatever mission brief you’d just gone over. instead, his attention snagged on the smear of pollen on your wrist where you’d brushed one of the flowers without paying attention. stupid, small, nothing detail.

but the image lodged in him like shrapnel: your hand, dusted in that obscene, reproductive yellow, poised above paper, above ink, above everything he thought of as clean. the tulips looked like mouths. he couldn’t unsee it. something shifted in his chest then, a hot, low slide, and he decided tulips were disgusting. he decided you were worse.

he breathes you in the way he used to drag on cigarettes in the barracks—sharp, needy, punitive. the eighties have turned smoke into a lifestyle, everyone exhaling cool in music videos, but for him it’s always been more like penance. he wants you in his lungs like that, a slow blackening from the inside out, tar of you layering his airways until every exhale tastes faintly of your name. he wants you burning in his bloodstream like cheap bourbon on an empty stomach, running hot and toxic through every vein, making his hands shake and his judgment slide sideways. he’s lived his whole life on chemical shortcuts—coke, booze, adrenaline—but none of them hit as hard as the way his body reacts when you walk into a room and say his name in that work voice, clipped and professional and completely unaware of how it lands.

the very air is haunted with you. it’s not metaphor; it’s sensory warfare. elevator doors slide open and he smells your soap before he sees you. conference rooms reek of your coffee, paper, the faint metallic tang of your pen ink when you scribble notes fast enough to dent the page. even when you’re not there, his brain supplies you like a phantom limb. a stray whiff of your cologne in a hallway three floors away, and suddenly his knees want to buckle, his gut tightens, his jaw locks down around a slur he spits reflexively just to prove—to himself more than anyone—that he still knows what side he’s supposed to be on.

faggot. fairy. soft.

the words taste like ash and copper on his tongue. he throws them around in dressing rooms, on set, into any available conversation, building a wall of noise so no one can hear how quiet it gets inside his skull whenever you pass close enough that he could reach out and touch your sleeve.

he thinks about killing you far more often than he would ever admit, and it has almost nothing to do with justice. “he wanted to murder you on your back” is the kind of phrase that crawls through his mind at three in the morning and makes him sit bolt upright in sweat-soaked sheets, heart jackhammering. he wants you down, laid out, the way a man lays someone out when he’s finished a fight and needs proof he won. wants you pinned to the mattress, the floor, the hood of a car—any horizontal surface where gravity will help keep you there.

in his worst, most unspeakable thoughts, the line between fucking and killing gets dangerously smudged, and he hates that. hates how easy it is for his body to blur threat and desire into the same instinct to drive you flat and hold you there until the squirming stops. it’s not that he genuinely wants you dead; the idea of you gone leaves his throat weirdly tight. it’s that he doesn’t know how to imagine possession without violence. control and intimacy share the same vocabulary in his nervous system. he wants to own the sight of you on your back so thoroughly that there’s nothing left of you that isn’t marked as his, and the only language he’s ever been taught for that is annihilation.

he would be sorry for thinking this way if he’d ever been raised to believe thoughts counted as anything more than background noise. but he’s never been responsible for his thoughts. only his optics. only his outcomes. what goes on in his head is supposed to be irrelevant, so long as the cameras catch the right angle. so he lets his mind rot in private, lets the fantasies run their sick little loops as long as his hands stay off you in daylight.

he can’t stop thinking about it—your arms hooked around him, not in some soft-focus lover’s embrace, but like restraints. your legs locking around his hips, not delicate, not yielding, but braced. The idea of you choosing to hold him close makes him half-hard and half-hysterical with panic. your mouth open, not just for his mouth but for breath that tastes like his cigarettes, for words he certainly shouldn’t be imagining you saying, for sounds that belong in a different decade, a different life, somewhere men like him don’t get executed in public opinion for wanting other men at all.

he needs too much of you, and there’s nowhere for that hungering to go that doesn’t make him feel diseased. it’s not a crush, not a simple lust he can jerk out of himself and then ignore. it’s an infestation. a blight. you’ve rooted in the soft loam of the few human parts he has left and started blooming things he doesn’t have names for, tulips and tumors and nerve endings all tangled together. so he does what he’s always done when confronted with terror that doesn’t have an enemy face attached: he doubles down on being the man the world says he is. makes dirtier jokes. grabs more asses. let’s the public think his depravity starts and ends with groupies and blow. and then, when the doors are locked and the woman beside him is breathing slow in counterfeit sleep and the mirror on the closet door is reflecting a face that looks more like yours than his own, he lies very, very still in that haunted air and tries not to admit how badly he wants to turn toward your ghost and beg.

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SEASONS change, but those ugly tulips he fucking hates keep blooming. they do it just to spite him, he’s sure. they push up through manicured vought soil in the spring, brazen and obscene, fat red cups splitting themselves open under the sun like they’re proud to be reproductive organs on stalks. they explode in parks, in corporate courtyards, in hotel lobby arrangements he knocks over with his shoulder just to hear the stems snap. and somehow, without him agreeing to it, they start blooming inside him too. root systems of want. bruised petals of thought. something soft and unasked-for unfurling where he’s only ever grown bone and gristle.

he sees them on you.

that’s the worst part, the way his treacherous brain keeps overlaying them onto you like some fucked-up visual effect. you stand outside a studio, cigarette between two fingers, the wind catching your tie, and his mind paints tulips in the background, red and white and blood-colored, nodding their heads like they know something about you he doesn’t. you lean over a table in a meeting and the pen behind your ear looks, for a moment, like a green stem. there was that day you walked through the vought plaza with a paper cup of coffee, the tulips on either side of the path clipped into perfect corporate rows, and the sun hit your face just right and every flower behind you blurred into a smear of color that made his chest ache.

he’s turned an ordinary flower into a hazard symbol because his body decided it would mark the moment his desire grew teeth.

seasons change, and the enormity of that desire disgusts him. it doesn’t ebb with the weather; it mutates. summer cooks it, makes it humid, sticky, a clinging film under his skin that he can’t sweat off even under studio lights and kevlar. your image presses against him like a decal half-peeled, edges lifting but center fused irrevocably to flesh. autumn tears leaves off trees and strips the city to bone, but you remain intact, crisp and sharply outlined against a background of things dying back, which feels like a threat. winter should kill it, he thinks, winter is supposed to freeze things, to put them in hibernation, to make all this sentimental rot go quiet; instead, he sees your breath puff white in the cold outside the vought doors, ephemeral and intimate, and feels an insane urge to lean in close enough to catch that brief ghost of warmth in his mouth, to swallow it, to prove that he can hold even the air you’ve exhaled.

on television he hears the word AIDS said with that particular blend of panic and disdain, hears late-night hosts wrap their mouths around slurs while the audience howls, hears “they” used like a curse, and it’s like the culture is holding up a funhouse mirror saying, look, this is what you’re terrified of being, this is the shape of the monster under your bed. he sits in studio green rooms with makeup powder on his cheekbones, watching news anchors talk about “lifestyles” and “high-risk groups,” and there’s that strange rancid bloom under his sternum, something like fear but more sour, because he knows damn well he doesn’t belong to whatever club they’re talking about—he’s a patriot, a war hero, a supe, a man’s man whose posters are tacked up in teenage girls’ bedrooms across the country—but the proximity, the adjacency, makes his skin crawl, and every time your shoulder brushes his in some cramped control room he feels like someone’s drawn a target there in invisible ink.

he keeps counting reasons this can’t be real. talk-show punch-lines deride men like the one he’s becoming; locker-room banter loads the words queer and faggot with enough shrapnel to blow a man’s career to powder. yet here he is, pinned beneath the inertia of want, telling reporters he sleeps like a baby while you and your clipboard burn phosphor-bright behind his eyelids every night.

in the middle of all that cultural static he starts doing something that looks harmless in a report, something logistics can justify: he starts staying overnight with you.

that’s the part he can’t rationalize with a straight face, even to himself. proximity has always been a weapon he uses on other people, not a threat aimed back at him; stick him in a room with anyone long enough and he’ll either seduce them or scare them into the shape he wants. but with you, the math starts throwing up errors. it begins on a mission gone long—some out-of-state op with weather rolling in, flights grounded, hotels overbooked, handlers and assets put wherever there is space. you are space. he gets stuck with you in a beige, overlit business hotel where the bedspread looks like something that came free with bulk carpeting.

“you take the bed,” you say, setting your folders down on the small desk in the corner, already unpacking, already claiming your perimeter. “i’ll be in the adjoining room. if vought calls with changes, i’ll wake you.”

he should argue. make some comment about how he doesn’t need a babysitter down the hall, about how if there’s a problem they’ll call him. instead he just grunts, shrugs off his jacket, and watches you roll your shirtsleeves up, the inside of your wrists pale in the yellow light. the television hums nothing in the background—MTV, some glossy synth track and dancers oiled to within an inch of their lives, neon streaking across the screen—but none of it holds his focus as effectively as the small domestic sounds you make: the soft thud of your bag hitting the floor, the scratch of pen on paper as you correct some idiotic error in the itinerary, the tiny sigh that escapes you when you realize they’ve triple-booked him for promo after a mission.

“get some sleep,” you say without looking up, flipping a page with your thumb. “you’re up at five.”

he lies on the bed fully dressed, boots still on, staring at the ceiling tiles while your pen taps a steady, maddening rhythm. every creak of your chair is a reminder: you are there, on the other side of a door that isn’t locked, and he is here, pretending that his heart hasn’t reprogrammed itself to keep tempo with your page-turns.

it happens again—a different city, a different mission, the same thin walls and thinner excuses. “it’ll be easier if we’re both on-site,” you say, and he nods, pretending it’s operational efficiency, not a fix. it becomes a pattern, and he lets it, half on purpose. shared corridors. shared late-night room service. shared silences where the air is thick with everything that isn’t being said.

whenever there’s only one bed, you always take the couch or the floor without comment, like it’s muscle memory. the first time he finds you that way, half-curled under a cheap hotel blanket, tie still hanging open around your neck because you were too tired to take it off before crashing, something in his chest does a weird, painful little misfire.

“jesus, you planning to die of a backache?” he mutters, leaning over you, one hand on the doorframe.

you blink awake, squinting, hair rumpled, voice rough with sleep. “you snore,” you say simply. “couch seemed safer.”

he snorts, but his gaze snags on the imprint the pillow has left on your cheek, the pink crescent where the seam dug in. the sight warms him in a way that feels more dangerous than any weapon. he goes back to bed and does not sleep, listening to your breathing even out in the dark, each exhale a small, treacherous comfort.

you start showing up in his head when he’s alone, too, the way water finds all the cracks in a structure. his daydreams, which used to be about applause and explosions and the satisfaction of hitting someone hard enough that bones give way, begin to deform. he’ll be in makeup, eyes closed, while someone fusses with his hair, and he’ll catch himself imagining your hand on his arm at a press conference, fingers closing just above his elbow, not to pull him back but to steady him when a reporter asks a question that jabs where it hurts. he imagines you in his kitchen—he barely uses the thing, but suddenly there you are, sleeves rolled, tie hooked over a chair, reading the paper with a frown while toast smokes in the toaster and the morning news lies about both of you in the background. the domesticity of it makes him sick. he pictures reaching over, plucking the cigarette out of your mouth and taking the drag himself, and his stomach flips like he’s done a stunt jump without a harness.

he gets high on you in ways he doesn’t have language for. coke jacks him up, whiskey smooths him out, adrenaline gives him purpose; you do all three and then twist. you stand too close in elevators, shoulder grazing his, and static jumps between you like a spark from a faulty wire. his hands curl into fists not because he wants to hit something, but because if he doesn’t anchor them somewhere they might do something stupid like reach out. he closes his eyes for half a second and the sensation hits—a dizzy, off-axis rush dangerously similar to the first cigarette drag after a long enforced abstinence. it feels chemical. addictive. it feels like weakness, and he recognizes it instantly because it’s the only thing he’s ever been taught to fear.

no other handler has ever gotten under his skin this way. they’ve come and gone in a revolving door of credentials and clearance levels, all of them thinking they’ll be the one to get a leash on soldier boy. ex-spooks, corporate climbers with manicured nails and dead shark eyes—they all bring charts and contracts and little folders full of phrased threats. he has broken every one of them like cheap toys, bent them around his ego until they either quit, get reassigned, or start shaking when he walks into a room. none of them have tamed him. you don’t even seem interested in trying.

that’s what works.

you don’t chase him when he storms out. you don’t plead for cooperation. you don’t pull rank or weaponize vought’s muscle. you just look at him when he’s halfway through a tantrum, this flat, unimpressed look over the top of your paperwork, a look that says i see you, and also you’re not special, and somehow that does more to calm him than sedatives. it infuriates him. it makes him want to slam his fist into a wall just to make you flinch. It makes him want to lean over the table, get in your face, and ask, “who the fuck do you think you are?”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

⎯⎯⎯  𖣂 ⎯⎯⎯

HE tells himself he’s just coming to see you for… something. paperwork. clarification. scheduling. some bureaucratic fig leaf he can drape over the fact that he’s already left the other room, the other bed, the other body. the woman-who-is-you has her nails in his shoulders when he peels her off, lipstick smeared, perfume too sweet, a whole carefully constructed approximation of heterosexual satisfaction. he mutters something about an early call time, about needing to “check with his handler,” and she pouts, loops an arm around his neck, tries to drag him back down into the indentation his body left in the mattress.

“come on, soldier boy,” she laughs, teeth bright. “you can check in with the nerd later.”

he bares his teeth in what passes for a grin, like it’s funny, like it doesn’t land right in the center of that secret sore spot he doesn’t want to admit exists. nerd. that’s the word you get assigned in this story. quiet, efficient, sexless. safe.

“yeah, yeah.” he drawls, patting her hip, already half out of the bed. “don’t wait up, sweetheart.”

he walks out smelling like her perfume and your cologne, a nauseating palimpsest of lies, and every step down the corridor feels like rehearsal for a crime.

he wants you. not her. that’s the ugly, inoperable fact. wants you in ways that don’t fit any of the scripts they’ve handed him since he was fifteen and someone realized he could take a punch from a truck and keep walking. wants your mouth, sure, and your hands, and your voice saying his name in that curt way like you’re already late for the next problem, but more terrifyingly he wants the exact particularity of you, all your tired little habits and your coffee breath and the lines at the corners of your eyes. not the generic stand-in he just left tangled in sheets that suddenly feel fraudulent. the realization sits behind his sternum like a swallowed shard of glass—too sharp to force down, too large to cough up.

he doesn’t have to look for you. of course he doesn’t. by now, he could graph your habits on a chart. you’re as predictable as gravity, as nicotine cravings, as the way his hands start itching for a fight around hour ten of any publicity tour. you’re exactly where you always are at this hour when they’re on location: same office, same shitty overhead light buzzing like a fly, same ashtray perched indecently close to a stack of reports vought will pretend someone more photogenic wrote.

you’re in your chair, fluorescent halo making your hair look tired rather than holy, cigarette burning low between two fingers. smoke curls up in fragile blue ribbons as your eyes track a briefing like it’s holy writ you’re too smart to fully believe. your shoulders slouch, just enough to betray how late it is and how long you’ve been holding this whole machine together. your tie is loosened, your collar open, and there’s a faint red crease at your throat where the knot has been strangling you all day. he wants to put his thumb there. he doesn’t dare think about why.

you don’t look up when he enters. you never scramble just because he’s walked into a room. that alone makes him a little feral. no one else in his life has learned that trick: treating him like weather, not like god. your eyes track the lines of text, your mouth moving around the same syllables you always use when you talk about him in this context. not “soldier boy.” not “america’s son.” just:

“ben,” you mutter under your breath, pencil scratching a note in the margin. “ben needs to sign this or the whole thing falls apart.”

he shouldn’t like that. he does. the casual assumption of his failure, the way his name slots into your sentence as just another variable in a logistical nightmare—it makes something low in his stomach twist.

he closes the door behind him. the soft thud of wood on frame barely registers. the click of the lock does.

that’s what makes you look up.

your attention hits him like a spotlight—sharp, assessing. there’s a flicker—an almost flinch—across your features when you hear the lock: a quick flash of irritation or maybe calculation that slides back behind your professional mask. your gaze moves in a precise triangle: his face, his hand on the knob, the small squared shape of the lock, then back to his eyes.

“is there a reason we’re making this a hostage situation?” you ask, arching a brow. your voice is tired, dry, threaded through with smoke. you stub the cigarette out without breaking eye contact, the filter crushing into old ash.

the tulips blooming behind his eyelids don’t bother waiting for permission anymore. they just erupt, like they’ve been pacing in the wings for this exact cue: red, obscene, fleshy petals, opening and opening until they’re not flowers anymore but the shape of your mouth when you say his name, the particular way your lips part on the consonant, the slight drag on the vowel. it’s grotesque, the way his imagination cannibalizes you into botany and then back into anatomy, like he’s turned you into a whole taxonomy of want just so he doesn’t have to say: i am staring at your mouth.

“needed to talk,” he says, and the sound comes out wrong in his own ears—thick, gravelly, like he’s been shouting for hours or chain-smoking or both. “’bout… stuff.”

“stuff,” you repeat, unimpressed. “that narrows it down. we talking missions, PR, or the existential nightmare of the american project?” you tilt your head, pencil tapping the margin of the report. “clock’s ticking, ben. i’d like to go home before reagan’s next term, assuming we survive this one.”

he takes two steps toward you. they feel enormous. his boots are quiet on the carpet, but the movement feels seismic. the room is objectively small, four walls and a window staring at a neon sign, but with each step the distance between you compresses, and your presence expands to fill everything else. the buzzing light, the hum of the air conditioner, the muted sound of a television somewhere down the hall—all of it dulls. what’s left in focus: your throat, the hollow at its base, the line of your jaw. his hands.

“not missions,” he says. “not PR.”

you go still in a way most people wouldn’t notice. there’s a flicker of something in your eyes—wariness, yes, but also that sharper recognition, the one that comes from knowing him too well. this isn’t his usual swaggering entrance, the “hey kid, you got smokes and a new line of bullshit for me?” routine. this is quieter, stripped down, and he hates it because he doesn’t know how to weaponize quiet.

“you high?” you ask eventually. the question isn’t cruel; it’s almost practical. “because if you’re about to redecorate my office with your feelings, i’d like to know what we’re blaming.”

he huffs out what wants desperately to be a laugh, but it snags, comes out as a rough cough. “you always think it’s drugs with me?”

you give him a look over the top of your papers, the kind that catalogues three decades of empirical data in half a second. “historically? good odds.”

he’s close enough now that he can see the fine chalky ash on your fingers, the faint indentation your ring used to leave on your hand before you stopped wearing it, the slight sheen of fatigue at your temples. close enough that your cologne isn’t just some ambient ghost in the room; it’s lifting warm off your skin in tiny currents whenever you shift. it hits the back of his throat, thick as incense in a church built for a god he doesn’t believe in anymore. underneath it: coffee, gone lukewarm hours ago. stale smoke. the neutral, clean undernote he’s come to file mentally as simply you.

something bright and feral flares in his chest. it’s not fireworks; it’s a signal flare fired inside a confined space.

“i broke up with her,” he blurts, like a man pulling a pin and tossing it on the floor between you.

your brows climb slowly, skepticism shading into something more like resignation. “congratulations?” you flick your gaze toward the stack of unsigned forms. “you want me to send flowers?”

tulips, his mind supplies, violent and instant, and the force of the association is so strong it almost turns his stomach. tulips on the bedside table, tulips at the funeral, tulips on your desk, tulips blooming in his chest cavity. he swallows hard.

“she wasn’t…” he starts, and then his jaw locks, muscle jumping. she wasn’t you is right there, a round in the chamber, and he cannot make himself pull the trigger. the words feel too big, like trying to pass a stone. “wasn’t workin’ out.”

“shocking,” you deadpan. “a relationship built entirely on publicity and cologne. who could have predicted.” you lean back in your chair, cigarette forgotten in the ashtray, giving him your full attention now whether he wants it or not. “is that why you’re in my office at—” you check the clock again “—one fifteen in the goddamn morning? fishing for a gold star? because i left my sticker chart at home.”

he should snap back. that’s the groove he knows: banter as armor, mockery as shield. call you a smartass, call you “kid” even though you’re not, throw in something about how any girl in america would kill to be in any godforsaken hotel room, so you should be honored he’s even pretending your opinion matters. Instead he just…stands there. too large for the room, too awake, feeling ridiculous and cornered in a space where he’s supposed to be the one who corners others.

“she smelled wrong,” he hears himself say, and wants to put his own hand over his mouth.

you blink once. twice. “i’m… not sure what you want me to do with that information.”

he takes another step, hands on the edge of your desk, leaning in, shoulders filling his side of the room, wrists braced near your paperwork, boxing you in without actually touching you. it’s a posture he knows intimately; he’s used it in interrogation rooms, in locker rooms, in bars. but something about this angle, this tilt, makes all the familiar menace curdle into something more vertical—like gravity’s flipped and you’re the one holding him down without moving.

“you smell like you,” he says, like that explains anything, everything. he hates how that sounds. childish. demented.

a small muscle in your throat jumps. he sees it because he’s close enough now to count your eyelashes, close enough to track the path of your swallow. tou’re not immune, not carved from marble; he’s observed the micro-tells over months. the way your pupils dilate when he strides in after a mission, uniform torn, still humming with adrenaline. the way your fingers go perfectly, deliberately still when he crowds too close. the way your eyes flick, involuntarily, to his mouth when he licks his bottom lip out of habit, and then snap away like you’re annoyed with yourself.

“ben,” you say, equal parts warning and question. “what are we doing here?”

“don’t know,” he lies, because he does, because the answer is pulsing in his fingertips, scrabbling at his teeth. “just—”

he inhales, and it’s all you. smoke and paper and that precise cologne he bought like a thief and sprayed on himself like a penitent. it hits his bloodstream like contraband, like something he shouldn’t have access to in this pure, undiluted form.

“you,” he says, and hears how wrecked it sounds. “needed… you.”

your eyes flick to the locked door and back, meaning written in the angle of your jaw.

“this isn’t funny,” you say quietly. no sarcasm now, no cynical polish. just that low, bone-tired honesty he’s only ever heard when the two of you are alone. “you don’t get to come in here at one in the morning, smelling like somebody else’s perfume, lock the door, and say shit like that because you’re bored.”

he bristles, reflexive. “i ain’t bored.” it comes out rougher than he means it to.

“then what are you?” you shoot back. “drunk? high? lonely? all-american confused?”

it hits him like a slap—all-american confused—because that’s exactly what he isn’t allowed to be. men like him don’t get confusion; they get clear directives and acceptable targets. the room feels smaller, suddenly, the distance between your mouth and his own an exact, measurable threat.

before you can say anything else—before he can even decide whether he’s really going to cross this line or just circle it, like he always does, like a dog worrying the perimeter of an electric fence—ben’s body makes the choice for him.

it feels almost mechanical, the way muscle overrules mind. one second he’s braced on the desk, staring down at you like you’re the last sane man left in the building, jaw working, something ugly and half-formed lodging behind his teeth. the next, there’s a spasm of intent he doesn’t remember authorizing, and his weight surges forward.

his mouth finds yours in the same way he’s hit a hundred men in a hundred bars: sudden, graceless, like an impact, like a collision. there’s no lead-in. no slow lean. no tentative search. one second he’s braced on the desk, staring down at you like you’re the last sane man left in the building. the next, he’s surging forward, chair wheels squealing under your weight as he crowds you back, his hands landing on either side of the blotter, palms slamming down hard enough to rattle the pen cup, and his lips crash into yours with the blunt-force logic of a weapon fired point-blank.

it’s not soft. it’s not sweet. it’s a hit that doesn’t quite know how to be anything else.

you go still under him. not limp, not reciprocating—just shocked-still, that primitive freeze response humans have when they realize a predator has its teeth somewhere they shouldn’t. he feels that stillness in the tiny stutter of your breath against his cheek, in the way your hands lift and hover in the air for a heartbeat, fingers spread, suspended in that ambiguous space between shoving him off and grabbing hold of something solid. that hesitation is gasoline on every bad impulse he’s ever had. his brain, already half-feral, reads it as both permission and warning and, of course, lunges for the interpretation that hurts the worst.

the tulips blooming behind his eyelids don’t bother with metaphor anymore; they erupt, full-bore, grotesque and vivid. red, obscene, fleshy petals unfurling and unfurling, piling over one another, until they stop being flowers altogether and turn into the shape of your mouth—this exact shape, right now, under his. the heat of you. the give of your lower lip when he bites it, harder than he means to, tasting tobacco and stale coffee and something clean underneath that is just you, unadorned.

his first stunned thought is: this is wrong. not morally, not spiritually, those registers are vague abstractions to a man whose ethics have always been written in collateral damage and ratings. the way a weapon sits wrong in the hand when it isn’t yours. your mouth isn’t supposed to fit against his; that isn’t how the world he was built for is structured. men like him are supposed to take women apart, not lean over their own handler in a fluorescent coffin of an office, not lock the door and shove their tongue past another man’s lips like they’re drowning and this is the only air left in the room.

the second thought, quick and vicious and absolutely unforgivable, is: jesus fucking christ, you taste good.

you taste like his worst-case scenario. nicotine and cynicism and after-midnight exhaustion. there’s a trace of whiskey ghosting over your tongue, faint and warm, and underneath it all, blooming up between your teeth and his like some obscene little miracle, is that specific cologne he’s been trying to counterfeit for months. he’s bought the same bottle. sprayed it on his throat, on his sheets, on the pillows he ruins alone, desperate to turn his own life into a knockoff of being this close to you. now he’s got the real thing, and it’s so much worse. this is undiluted, poured straight from the source down his throat. the contrast makes everything he’s done up to now feel pathetic, like a teenager humping the mattress and calling it sex.

his left hand moves before the thought fully forms, peeling off the desk to catch your jaw. his fingers bracket your face, rough and sure, thumb pressing into the hinge as if he’s checking armor for weaknesses, mapping bone and tendon and the twitch of muscle into terrain he can understand. your stubble scrapes his palm, an unfamiliar rasp, nothing like the polished smoothness of the women vought lines up for him like party favors and bribes. it should repulse him. it doesn’t. it grounds him in the worst possible way, pins the experience to reality, makes the kiss feel real and anchored and therefore undeniable.

“ben,” you manage, the syllable mangled, half-swallowed against his mouth. it comes out more like mmph–ben, consonants vibrating through both of you, caught between your teeth and his. it’s not a moan—not yet. it’s a warning. a question. a ragged plea for sense.

he hears it as provocation.

a sound claws its way up from his chest, something low and primitive that never quite makes it out past his teeth. he chases the noise down into you, mouth moving over yours with clumsy, brutal intent that has very little to do with affection and everything to do with a need to erase distance. he does not know how to kiss you; he only knows how to take. so he does. he drags your lower lip between his teeth again until he tastes that faint metallic spike of blood, and the tiny involuntary flinch you give sends heat lancing through him like an amphetamine shot straight into the spine.

in the back of his skull, the static never entirely goes away. the word AIDS hisses there, a grainy TV broadcast, footage of hospital beds and moral panic. talk-show hosts curling their wrists and their mouths around the word “pervert” to roar afterlaughter. men like him—men who want men—held up as punchlines, as pathology, as contagion. those voices should be deafening. they’ve been the loudest thing in the room his entire adult life.

right now they sound like a weak radio station half a state away. beneath the roar of his pulse in his ears, they’re a thin line of static he refuses to tune fully in.

fag, something snarls from the past—his father’s voice, a coach’s, some nameless old man with cigarette breath and god in his mouth—thrown like a bottle at his younger self for looking too long at the wrong magazine or letting his eyes linger too long in the locker room. he shoves that, too, down where he’s buried the rest of his inconvenient truths: guilt, bodies, friendly fire, collateral.

if he lets himself really hear it, he’ll have to stop.

he really doesn’t want to stop.

“i shouldn’t—” you start again, trying to turn your head away, the words skidding across the corner of his mouth, brushing his cheek.

“then don’t think,” he says brusquely, into the edge of your lips, the phrase slurring together, half drunk on you, on the sheer audacity of this. it’s an indecent thing for him to say; it makes him sound needy, and he hates that. hates how true it feels in the marrow.

his other hand leaves the desk, fingers finding your loosened tie like it’s a handle only he is entitled to grip. he curls his fist in the knot, not yanking, not yet—just holding, anchoring himself in the borrowed silk. if he pulls, he knows he can haul you up into him, drag you half out of that chair, make your body collide with his the way his mouth did. that knowledge crackles between you like a live wire.

he doesn’t even remember deciding to do it when the decision is already made.

he yanks.

the motion is sharp, possessive, the kind of movement he’s used in bars to drag men into fights or drag women onto his lap. you’re not built for that kind of rough handling; you stumble, feet skidding on the cheap carpet, knees banging the underside of the desk. the chair scoots closer to him with a protesting screech, your chest coming up hard against his. for half a second your balance is entirely his problem. the instinct to catch you wars with the instinct to keep you off-kilter, to watch you flail. the instinct that wins is uglier than both: keep him close.

his knuckles press into the hollow at the base of your throat, the skin there hot and thin, the frantic jump of your pulse beating directly into his hand through the slack knot of your tie. your breath gusts against his face, sharper now, tinged with something like anger or panic or both.

“ben,” you say again, clearer this time, your lips breaking away from his just enough to form the word. the sound is hoarse, scraped raw by contact. “what the—what are you doing?”

he doesn’t answer. his jaw slots against yours, chasing your mouth, refusing the question in the only language he’s ever really mastered. his tongue licks into the smear of your breath, into the last trace of your protest, trying to turn it into something he can use. the corruption begins with the mouth, some half-remembered sermon mutters in the back of his brain—the old catholic idea that sin enters through language, through taste, through what you take into yourself.

he’s inclined to agree.

the first poem in the world, if you strip all the metaphors off, is i want to eat. survival masquerading as art. consumption dressed up as devotion. ben has never been hungrier than he is in this moment for a mouth this unremarkable and this exquisitely, excruciatingly specific. not generic softness, not magazine sex, not whatever vought thinks goes on in the back of limousines. you. the exact shape of your lips. the way your jaw tightens when he presses in, as if you’re trying to hang on to a line that already snapped.

he wants to eat the distance between what he’s allowed to be and what his body is currently confessing. he wants to swallow the sound of his own name on your tongue and make it stay there. he wants, god help him, to devour that small gasp you make when his teeth catch on your upper lip again and hold it in his mouth like a sacrament.

it should fill him up. by all the old rules he’s lived by, it should be enough: impact delivered, target hit, appetite sated. instead, it just makes him greedier. gluttonous.

every drag of your breath, every minute tremor in the muscles under his fingers, every micro-flinch of resistance feeds something ravenous in him. the more he gets, the more he needs. there’s no equilibrium point here, no neat graph where desire spikes and falls; this line just keeps going up.

“ben. stop.” your voice is rough, torn up from the contact. too close. too intimate. it sounds like the aftermath of shouting orders in a storm. it sounds like every post-mission debrief where you’ve had to talk him down, except now your lips are swollen and there’s a smear of your own blood at the corner.

he should listen. that’s the line. the word stop is one even he recognizes as a wall. but he’s never met a wall he didn’t want to blow straight through.

“can’t,” he says, and hates that it comes out as a confession instead of an excuse.

he dips back in, slower this time, or what passes for slow with him. the second kiss lands differently—not the frantic crash of first impact, but a grinding, sustained pressure, like a bruise being pressed. he angles his head, chasing the taste of you deeper, tongue pushing against the seam of your mouth, trying to force it open. when your lips part on a surprised inhale, he takes it as invitation and plunders. it’s crude. it’s messy. it’s not the practiced kiss he gives actresses on red carpets, all show and no depth. this is all depth, no show.

he feels filthy. he feels exultant. the two emotions knot together in his gut until he can’t tell which is which. every catechism he ever swallowed about what makes a man has turned to acid in his stomach, and here he is anyway, breaking the first and only rule that ever felt carved into his bones: don’t be this. don’t be like them. don’t be the punchline. don’t be a goddamn statistic on the evening news.

your hands finally stop hovering and commit: they seize fistfuls of his shirt, knuckles punching into his chest like you’re trying to anchor yourself to something that isn’t moving nearly as steadily as it pretends to. cotton bunches under your grip, buttons biting into your palms. you haul yourself upright because if you don’t, you’re going to go over backward with the chair, and humiliation is the one luxury neither of you can afford right now.

the chair skids and then jolts to a stop, the metal lip at the back smacking into the wall with a hollow thud. for a second you’re just…stacked. there is no other word for it. him braced over you, caging you in between his arms and the desk; you wedged between cheap laminate and an all-american monument to weaponized masculinity. your bodies line up in a way no HR training packet has ever had the guts to diagram: sternum to sternum, ribs to ribs, weight slotted against weight through too many layers of fabric that suddenly feel obscenely thin.

he doesn’t mean to move.

that’s the story he’ll tell himself later, anyway. he’ll swear he was just trying to steady you, that the way his fingers cinched in your loosened tie was pure reflex, not hunger. that the arm that banded around your back was about balance—center of gravity, physics—nothing more. that there was no intention in the way his shoulders rolled, in the way his torso adjusted to accommodate you.

but his hips betray him.

they hitch, subtle at first, a small, traitorous rock forward as your weight comes fully up against him. some old buried instinct—older than patriotism, older than PR, older than whatever man he’s been paid to pretend to be—kicks in. his pelvis slots into a mindless, automatic rhythm his body remembers all too well from bathrooms, from alleys, from the shadowed corners of clubs where no cameras were rolling. It’s the crass, thoughtless motion that’s carried him through a thousand anonymous encounters where nothing was at stake but release.

except this isn’t anonymous. it’s you.

the first drag is rough, uncalibrated, more collision than motion, and yet the jolt of your cock grinding against his through layers of denim and wool and heat sends a brutal, electric seizure up his spine, the kind of sensation that makes him suck breath through his teeth and flex every muscle in his abdomen in an instinctive attempt to deepen the pressure, to repeat it, to anchor it in his body as if fear alone might erase it if he doesn’t chase it immediately.

“ben,” you rasp, fingers spasming in his shirt, each syllable caught on the snag of your own disbelief. and the sound vibrates straight through his ribs into his cock, provoking a slow, deliberate thrust of his hips that forces your lower backs against the desk edge, pinning you in place while he drags the thick, aching weight of his cock along the contour of yours, the friction precise and devastating in a way that makes his breath falter and his vision tunnel.

he should stop. every part of him that still recognizes risk knows that. there’s a split second in which the entire scene hangs in the balance—the lock on the door, the dead of night, the fact that if anyone opens it now there is no version of this that can be spun into a joke—and he could still, technically, pull back, laugh, blame it on substances, on stress, on anything but the naked, unmedicated truth of wanting another man.

he doesn’t.

his body has already held a vote and decided that this is happening, that whatever gravity he used to orbit has flipped and now everything falls toward you whether he consents or not. the desk digs into your spine in a long, unforgiving line; his chest presses flush to yours, flattening the front of your shirt, crushing the papers you were reading between you like collateral. the world shrinks down to a series of contact points. his hands on you. your fists in his shirt. the unforgiving press where your bodies are pinned together.

every tiny adjustment—your attempt to find leverage, the twitch of your knee, the half inch you gain by trying to straighten in the chair—drags the front of him along the front of you. the cloth-on-cloth friction is indirect, buffered by seams and belts and all the supposed protection of tailored clothing, but it might as well be bare skin from the way his spine registers it. the sensation spikes up his back, white-hot and abhorrent and horribly good, a flash of heat that feels both obscene and inevitable.

he grinds again, this time with the kind of controlled pressure born from decades of fucking in alleys and back rooms and backstage couches, his hips rolling forward in a long, deliberate stroke that scrapes his cock against yours from base to tip through the unforgiving press of your clothes, the heat blooming upward in him so fast it feels like fever, and he gasps into your mouth, voice cracking into a hoarse, blasphemous “don’t—fuck, don’t do that—” he grits against your mouth, the word torn out of him, half curse and half confession. his breath fogs against your lips, the syllables almost a groan.

your head jerks back a fraction, enough to unseal your mouths, enough to get air. your eyes are too close, pupils blown wide, disbelief written in the tight line of your brow.

“I’m not doing anything,” you snap, breathless. and it’s true in the most damning way possible because you’re not the one rutting like an animal, you’re not the one grinding your cock against another man’s like you’re starving for it, you’re not the one who dropped the lock on the door and crossed the moral event horizon like this was destiny instead of a mistake—he is, he always is, he always has been.

he answers your denial by grinding harder, dragging the heavy ridge of his cock along yours with a slow, brutal thoroughness that makes your heads knock together and forces a sound out of him that’s half groan, half snarl, something torn from deep in the chest like a confession extracted under duress, his hands tightening in your tie and the back of your neck as if he can fuse the two of you together through sheer force of friction.

your belt buckle gouges his abdomen with each thrust, biting a crescent into his skin through his shirt, and the sting only goads him, makes him fuck into the pressure more greedily, more relentlessly, rolling his hips in thick, obscene arcs that drag the full length of his cock over the rigid line of yours in a rhythm that obliterates thought, shame, fear, all of it crushed beneath the animal roar of need.

he can feel you getting harder against him, feel the way your cock thickens and surges as your hips betray you with a tiny upward grind that you try and fail to stifle, and when he feels that—feels your cock pushing back into his, answering the rhythm even against your will—his whole body jerks and he bites down on a curse, forehead crashing into yours as he gasps, “fuck—fuck, don’t stop—don’t fucking stop—jesus, you feel—”

your hands, trembling and furious and desperate, fist harder in his shirt, pulling him closer even as you try to shove him back, caught between disgust and need, anger and shock, and the fractured sound you make when he pushes your thigh wider and drags his cock directly along yours again through the hard press of your slacks is the filthiest thing he’s ever pulled out of another human being.

somewhere behind the animal roar of blood in his ears, the culture plays on a loop: daytime talk shows, studio audiences laughing at limp wrist jokes; men in suits using words like deviant and unnatural with patient disdain; headlines whispering about “confirmed bachelors” and “mysterious illnesses” in the same breath. It’s the entire national vocabulary telling him what this makes him. What this makes you. What this makes both of you together.

he should hear it like sirens. he should feel it slam the brakes on his nerves. instead it’s just more background noise, another grainy channel barely coming in. as if the entire american moral apparatus has been reduced to a faint, staticky signal fading in from somewhere just outside reception range, another grainy channel barely coming in. the only thing his body seems capable of prioritizing is the hard, wet sound of your breathing just below the threshold of a groan.

and fuck, he feels your cock—feels the heat of it, the rigid, involuntary pulse of it, the thick line of it pressed almost perfectly against his own in a way that feels engineered by some malicious deity. every thrust of his hips aligning both of you so obscenely well that the friction becomes a language all its own, one that neither of you should be fluent in and yet both of you speak with the fluency of desperation.

the tip of his cock is getting slicker inside his underwear, a humid, slippery pressure that spreads with each grind until he can feel the damp patch blooming through the fabric like a secret he has no chance of concealing, the kind of slickness that used to terrify him in adolescence and now terrifies him for entirely different reasons. you make a sound—ragged, involuntary, caught between protest and surrender—and that sound detonates something deep and vile and ecstatic in him, something that takes the last barricade between thought and action and sweeps it aside like rubble.

his mouth leaves yours in a stumble of breath and instinct, dropping to your neck with the graceless hunger of a man who has stopped pretending he has any upper brain function left, his lips catching on the tendon as you turn your head to say his name again, but the name melts against his tongue as he drags his mouth along the line of your throat, sucking at the warm, pulsing skin like he’s trying to bruise truth into it. your pulse is frantic under his lips, and the taste of you—salt, smoke, stress, a day’s exhaustion—slides into his blood with the same velocity as the cocaine he snorts in bathroom stalls.

he doesn’t plan to use his hand.

his body uses it for him.

it leaves your tie, slides down your shirtfront, drags over your ribs, and then it’s cupping your cock through your slacks with a grip that’s both too much and not nearly enough, the heel of his palm pressing into the thickest part of you while his fingers curl around the shaft with a precision that makes you choke on your next breath. the feel of you—hot through the fabric, solid, twitching against his palm—hits him like a blow to the solar plexus, knocking the air out of him in a ragged gasp that he pours directly into the curve of your throat.

he grips harder, thumb grinding along the underside of your cock through your clothes, feeling the slick heat seeping through the fabric, feeling every twitch, every pulse, every stutter of your hips as your body betrays you with its honesty. his hand moves in slow, dragging strokes that sync with the brutal rhythm of his hips, his cock grinding against yours in thick, obscene arcs that turn the front of both your pants into a slick, fevered mess.

when he feels you jerk in his grip—your cock surging hot and swollen into his palm—his own hips buck in a way that’s almost incoherent, a helpless, shattered thrust that drags his cock along yours in a grinding stroke so precise it turns his knees to liquid. the contact is so devastating, so shockingly good, that his breath breaks into a ragged groan against your neck, a sound he didn’t know he was capable of making anymore.

he presses his forehead to your jaw, panting against your skin, his hand still pumping you through your slacks in slow, ruthless strokes, his cock grinding against your thigh as if friction alone might absolve him or damn him or save him or finish him. every drag of your cock against his palm feeds something gluttonous in him, some ravenous, bottomless hunger that has been waiting for years for a single crack in his armor.

you buck your hips against his hand, a sharp upward grind that forces the thick length of your cock directly into the cradle of his palm. the sound that tears out of you is hoarse, scraped raw, ruined by need and disbelief, your hand flying to the back of his head and sinking into his hair with enough force to drag a gasp out of him, the roots tightening between your fingers as you yank him closer the way a man might yank someone back from a cliff—or push them off it.

“ben,” you say, but it’s not a reprimand this time, it’s not even a warning, it’s a cracked, breathless invocation that hits him with the force of a command. and the second it leaves your mouth he stiffens, shudders, his grip on your cock tightening in a reflexive spasm that makes you groan, your hips pushing up into his fist again as if you can’t help it, as if your body is answering a question he hasn’t yet dared to ask.

he hears himself make a sound—low, wounded, hungry—and it isn’t a word, it isn’t anything human, it’s the noise of a man whose spine just folded under the weight of being wanted.

his grip on your cock tightens automatically, obscene in its desperation, the heel of his palm pressing up against the swollen head through your slacks while his fingers close around the shaft in a way that forces a rough, bitten-off groan out of you. and the sound of it goes straight to his cock, makes it throb painfully against the inside of his pants, the leaking tip wetting the fabric so thoroughly he can feel the slick heat blooming through every grind.

you drag his hair again—harder this time—and he makes a strangled noise into your throat, hips jerking forward in a helpless rut that presses the entire length of his cock against your thigh. he’s lost any semblance of control now, running entirely on the raw animal circuitry of cause and effect, you touching him equals him breaking, you pulling his hair equals him trying to climb inside your body with his clothes still on, you saying his name equals him falling apart.

the command hits him so precisely that his whole body seizes, not with disobedience but with a catastrophic, involuntary obedience. a submission he doesn’t consciously choose, his hand freezing on your cock for a split second before he adjusts, recalibrates, slows, the strokes becoming long, deliberate pulls of pressure that drag your cock through his fist in a rhythm that is unmistakably careful, attentive, pleading, the kind of slowness that says i heard you and i need you to know that i listened.

and the worst part—the part that finishes undoing something old and rigid inside him—is how his hips slow to match the pace of his hand, how he grinds his cock against your thigh in those same slow, devastating arcs, his movements syncing to your breathing. as if the command rewrote him from the inside out, as if your word became law and his body bent itself around it without thought, without hesitation, without defense.

you feel the change; you feel the way he gives into the motion, into the order, into you. and when you tighten your fingers in his hair again, dragging his head back just enough to force his mouth open, his lips part without fight, and you slide two fingers between them—no ceremony, no permission—and he takes them instantly, hungrily, the heat of his mouth closing around your fingers with a desperation that borders on reverence, his tongue tracing the pads like he’s tasting confession itself.

he groans around your fingers, the sound muffled and filthy, vibrating against your skin. the humiliation of it—the degradation of being fed your fingers while grinding his cock against your thigh like a dog starving for friction—hits him so hard his legs nearly buckle, his whole body pressing into you, against you, needing you in a way that terrifies him.

“look at you,” you murmur against the corner of his mouth, voice low, dangerous, intimate in a way that feels surgical. “you like being told what to do, huh?”

his whole body jerks—hips, chest, throat—every part of him reacting at once, a violent, involuntary spasm of desire and terror.

“you like being my good boy?”

he chokes so hard he almost pulls off your fingers, a gag of shock and shame and want fused together, shaking his head even as his hips betray him by grinding down harder against your thigh, dragging his cock along the heat of your body in a slow, wrecked thrust that leaves a hot smear of slick against you through his pants.

“don’t—” he gasps around your thumb, words distorted, wet, helpless, “don’t—don’t call me—”

your cock twitches in his fist, and he slows even more, stroking you with obscene precision. his palm dragging over the sensitive head through your clothes, his thumb pressing along the underside in a rhythm so careful it borders on worship, and he can’t stop himself from grinding down harder against your thigh, the slow friction turning unbearable as his slick tip smears another streak of wet heat into his underwear, his cock throbbing, pulsing, begging.

your fingers stay in his mouth, hooked against his tongue, controlling his breath, his jaw, his sound, and he is so far gone he doesn’t even try to hide how hard he’s shaking, how wrecked he is by the simple fact that you told him to slow down and he obeyed, how his cock is right on the edge of coming just from the combination of your voice, your hand in his hair, your fingers in his mouth, and the unbearable drag of your thigh pushing back into him.

he tries to swallow around your fingers, tries to breathe, tries to speak, but the only thing that escapes him is a broken, guttural whine pressed into your skin. his hips—once wild, uncontrolled—now move with this agonizing, obedient deliberation. each slow grind dragging his cock along your thigh in a perfect, devastating arc that smears more and more slick heat through the fabric, his breath turning ragged and high and humiliating around your fingers.

your hand slips from his cheek to the back of his head, tightening your grip until he gasps, the sound vibrating helplessly around your fingers in his mouth. “you gonna be good for me?” you murmur, your voice soft and wrecked and merciless. “gonna cum nice and slow like i told you?”

his whole body lurches like you’ve hit a nerve directly wired to his cock. tears prick the corners of his eyes from the intensity, from the shame. he shakes his head again, frantic, but his hips contradict him, grinding down in a slow, trembling circle that drags the leaking head of his cock precisely across your thigh. “don’t—fuck—don’t make me—” he whines, cheeks flushed dark red, thighs shaking, “don’t make me do it like that, please—”

“oh?” you whisper, smiling against his ear, your fingers dragging against his tongue until he chokes on his own breath. “you wanna cum fast like a filthy little teenager? hump my leg until you ruin your pants?”

he whimpers, a raw little broken sound he tries to swallow back.

“that it?” you breathe. “you want to get off like that, ben?”

“i—no—don’t—fuck, don’t say—” he groans, hips stuttering, his cock pulsing against your thigh in frantic contradiction, needing friction so badly he’s shaking.

you pull his hair again, sharp at the roots, and the motion makes him gasp your name, makes his knees buckle so hard he nearly sinks to the floor. you hold him up by his hair and your cock in his hand, and he’s so far gone he doesn’t know where to put the humiliation, doesn’t know what to do with the fact that he’s obeying you even now.

“that’s what i thought,” you murmur, letting your thumb slide deeper over his tongue, forcing him to taste the salt of your skin, forcing him to breathe around your fingers. “you like being talked to like that. you like being handled. you like being told exactly how to get yourself off.”

he makes a desperate, wrecked sound that isn’t a word.

“say it,” you breathe, stroking him slow enough to make his whole spine bow. “say you want it slow.”

he shakes his head, green eyes squeezed shut, humiliation bright across his face. but his hips answer for him—pushing down into the slow friction, dragging himself along your thigh in a long, shuddering grind that smears another thick streak of heat into his pants, his breath collapsing into a sob around your fingers.

you tighten your grip on his hair until he gasps. “ben.”

his body convulses.

“say it.”

his jaw quivers around your fingers. his hips grind again, slower—obedient, ruined, helpless.

“...slow,” he chokes into your hand, the word soaked in shame and need. “fuck—slow—please—”

and the moment he says it, the second the admission leaves his mouth, he’s gone.

he tries—god, he tries—to clamp down on the instinct, to brace his thighs, to hold the tremor in his belly like something containable, but the first involuntary thrust of his hips betrays him in a way that feels biblical, the kind of betrayal you read about in stories where men lose their names to desire, because the moment his cock jerks against your thigh, wet and slick and throbbing through the soaked fabric of his underwear.

he’s gone, he’s helpless, he’s reduced to nothing but a sound, that choked, guttural moan that rips out of him around your fingers like the truth he’s spent decades beating out of himself. his spine arching in a violent bow as the orgasm crashes through him with the destructive force of a bomb going off at close range, every nerve firing at once as the hot bloom spreads messily through his pants in pulses so heavy and uncontrollable it feels like he’s being emptied from the inside out.

he keeps grinding while he comes—slow, unbearably slow, exactly the way you told him to—his hips dragging the length of his cock through the wet heat between your bodies in long, shuddering arcs that smear slick against your thigh with every trembling pass. each movement sending another shockwave through his spine, prolonging the orgasm past the point of sanity, past the point where pleasure and pain separate into different sensations, his breath unraveling in gasping fragments against your throat as he rides out every humiliating pulse of release, his body shuddering violently as if your command is the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground.

your fingers remain in his mouth the whole time, and he sucks around them like he can’t remember how to breathe without the taste of your skin. the humiliation coursing through him so intensely it only worsens the pleasure, his eyes squeezed shut, lips stretched around your knuckles, saliva slicking your fingers as he moans helplessly into your hand, every sound vibrating up your wrist and into your bones, every shudder of his hips confessing how completely you’ve undone him.

even when the sharp crest of his orgasm finally begins to ebb, when the violent pulses soften into tremors, when the hot spill in his underwear stops blooming and begins to cool, he’s still shaking in your grip. panting against your throat like he’s just survived something catastrophic, his skin flushed, his hair stuck damp to his forehead, his thighs trembling uncontrollably as if his body hasn’t received the message that it’s allowed to stop.

you ease your fingers from his mouth slowly, deliberately, dragging them across his tongue and out past his lips, and he gasps at the loss, mouth closing around nothing like he’s trying to catch the ghost of the touch, his eyes glazed and wet, pupils blown wide, shame and need smeared across his expression in equal measure.

and the most devastating part—the detail that will haunt him long after this night ends—is that even after the orgasm drains from him, even after his cock begins to soften in the sticky heat of his ruined underwear, even after he collapses against you in a limp, shaking sprawl of exhausted muscle, he doesn’t stop.

his hand on your cock never falters. if anything, the trembling intensifies, his strokes becoming sloppy but still achingly careful, his palm dragging over the shape of you through your slacks with reverent desperation. his thumb circling the head in small, precise motions that betray the fact that he’s memorizing the way you feel, learning the weight and length of you by touch alone, his breath hitching every time you twitch in his grip like it’s something sacred.

and his hips—fuck, his hips—keep moving, keep grinding that soaked, softening cock against your thigh, still performing the slow, ruinous rhythm you forced into him, his forehead pressed to your jaw as he rubs himself through the mess in his pants, each drag a sticky, aftershock tremor.

for a few heartbeats, there’s nothing in the room but that rhythm, then something shifts.

it’s tiny at first, just a flicker in the angle of his shoulders, a minute stiffening under your palm, the way his eyes open not all the way but enough for the fluorescent light to catch, enough for the world at large to come leaking back in around the edges of what you’ve just done.

his gaze drops.

it doesn’t fall like a cinematic crash; it slides, grudging, down the line of your bodies to where you’re still pressed together, to the obscene sight of his own fist moving over the shape of your cock, to the darkened stripe on his slacks where he’s soaked himself through, fabric clinging wetly to the outline of what he refuses to name. and you can almost feel the second the realization lands, sharp and surgical, as if someone has just cut a hole in his chest and poured ice water inside.

the noise in his head, which you’d managed to drown under the roar of blood and breath and friction, comes screaming back like a station snapping into perfect reception.

talk shows. laughter. that word hissed on couches in ohio and texas and everywhere else the TV reaches. men like him becoming warnings. men like this becoming jokes. AIDS headlines like tombstones. “risk groups.” “predatory behavior.” all the static he managed to tune out while his cock was doing all the thinking suddenly slams back to full volume, and you’re not just you anymore; you’re a category, you’re a diagnosis, you’re a mirror held up to every slur he’s ever spat at someone else to make sure no one looked too closely at him.

his hand on you falters.

not stops—faltering is worse. the stroke stutters, loses its smooth, obscene confidence, fingers clenching, then loosening, then clenching again like they don’t quite know what they’re holding. his hips give one more traitorous twitch against your thigh, one last slow grind his body can’t help but chase, and then they lock, muscles going iron-hard, freezing him in place.

“ben,” you say quietly, your own hand loosening in his hair, your fingers easing more from instinct than strategy, giving him space in case he wants to pull back.

he does. violently.

he tears himself out of your grip like your touch has razored edges, head jerking to the side, his mouth dragging off your skin in a smear of spit, heat, and noise. for a second he just stands there too close, still within your radius, chest heaving, eyes wide and unfocused, like a man who’s just walked out of a blast radius and hasn’t yet realized his eardrums are blown. then he takes a step back. then another. the smell of him—sex and sweat and that cologne you’ve both turned into contraband—lingers in the air between you like evidence.

his hand drops away from you like you’re radioactive, like contact is a contamination he can’t afford. it hangs stupidly at his side, fingers still curved in the ghost-shape of your cock, tendons twitching with unused momentum, as if his body didn’t get the new orders yet.

he looks down at himself.

sees the dark, damp ruin at the front of his pants, the way the wet patch spreads over the zipper and down his thigh, the faint, obscene shine where fabric still clings to the mess cooling beneath, and his face does something ugly around the realization, a contortion that isn’t just embarrassment, isn’t just fear. it’s something more deformed: revulsion and grief and a flash of mourning for the man he thought he was, all crammed into one expression he can’t smooth out in time.

“don’t,” he says, and his voice is wrong—hoarse, cracked through the middle, pitched younger, like you’ve peeled him back to some version of himself from before the costume, before the PR, before he learned how to lie with every muscle. “don’t… don’t look at me like that.”

you hadn’t been looking at him like anything yet, just cataloguing how badly he’s spinning out, but now you are looking, because the crack in him has widened into a faultline, and it’s impossible not to. you watch him scrub a hand over his mouth, fingers digging into his own skin as if he could erase the shape of your fingers there by sheer pressure. his fingertips come away wet—from his own saliva, from the shine your fingers left in him—and that’s worse, somehow, that shared slick on his skin; you see the way his eyes flick to his hand and flinch, like he’s holding proof that he has no idea where he ends and you begin.

“ben. hey.” you keep your tone low, even, the way you do when he comes back from a mission with blood on his shield and that glassy, haunted stare that says the cameras got the wrong story. “you’re alright. breathe.”

he laughs. it’s a bright, high, brittle sound, nothing like humor. it sounds like a glass breaking in another room.

“no,” he snaps, too fast, like he’s cutting you off before you can finish diagnosing him. “no, we—we’re not doing the whole… whatever—” he waves a hand in the air between you, an incoherent gesture that takes in your open collar, his ruined zipper, the locked door, every indicting detail “—headshrinker bullshit. this was—this was nothing.”

you’re still half-hard, body buzzing with the frustrated voltage of what he started and then violently aborted. your own cock achingly aware of the absence of his hand, of the distance he’s now put between you, but you don’t move toward him. you don’t reach out. you recognize the posture he’s taken: shoulders squared, jaw locked, eyes refusing to land on you for more than a flicker. fight, flight, freeze all jammed together, that horrible overflow state where the nervous system just chooses chaos.

“‘m not—” he starts, and the words wedge in his throat like something too jagged to swallow or spit out. his jaw grinds. the tendons in his neck stand out like cords. the unsaid word is still there between you, thick as the smoke that clings to your clothes. he doesn’t say it, but the whole room does. fag. queer. sick. all the vocabulary the decade has kindly provided.

the tulips behind his eyes—the ones that had the audacity to bloom the first time he saw you in that goddamned courtyard, those stupid blood-red cups opening in vought’s manicured beds, the ones that kept unfurling every time he caught your scent in a hallway, every time you said his name in that tired, professional tone—rot all at once. not into something sterile, not into clean emptiness, but into a glistening, collapsing mess. petals blacken at the edges, curl inward, soften into mulch. stems bend under their own corrupted weight. roots drown in the chemical runoff of his self-disgust. whatever soft, unarmed thing had grown there—for you, for this—dissolves under the acid wash of every sermon, every slur, every laugh track he’s ever used as a shield.

“this didn’t happen,” he says finally, and he’s not talking to you; he’s talking to the overhead light, to the walls, to the future, trying to carve a revision into the reality of this room. his eyes are unfocused, glassy, fixed somewhere a few inches above your shoulder, like he can’t bear to look directly at the person who helped him detonate his own denial. “we had a talk. you—you gave me some… handler crap, stress relief, whatever.” he swallows, adam’s apple bobbing hard. “i went back to my room.”

you open your mouth, not even sure yet whether you’re going to argue or reassure or simply repeat his name until he comes apart more honestly.

he flings a hand up, palm out like he’s stopping a blast, fingers splayed, and the sudden, sharp motion is pure battlefield muscle memory. “you wanna keep your job,” he says, voice jagged, “you didn’t jerk me off in a locked office while i…” the sentence fractures on impact. his throat works. he forces the end out like it hurts. “while i did that. you didn’t. i didn’t. that’s not what this was.”

the directive hangs there in the humming air: your safety stapled to his denial.

the thing he can’t stand, the thing this whole performance is built to bury, is simpler and filthier and much harder to kill:

the object of his desire is a man.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

your friend called you up last minute, asking if you could dog-sit for the weekend. you agreed without hesitation—after all, how hard could it be?

when you arrived, the house was strangely quiet. following the instructions she’d texted you seemed straightforward:

- "make sure puppy stays hydrated. his water bowl is by the cage."

- "he only eats from the floor—use the dish labeled ‘good boy’ in the kitchen."

- "daily walks are a must. leash is hanging by the door."

- "if he’s restless or needy, give him belly rubs and scratch behind his ears. he loves that."

- "use the command ‘sit’ if he gets too rowdy. he’ll listen."

- "bedtime is at 10 pm sharp. puppy sleeps in the cage with his blanket."

easy enough. you made your way to the living room, only to stop short at the sight of a large, covered cage. oddly, you didn’t hear at shuffling or pacing from the inside. you hesitated, curiosity (and maybe a bit of dread) gnawing at you as you lifted the sheet.

and much to your surprise inside, curled up with a collar tight around his neck, a false set of fluffy ears, and a tail plug nestled firmly in place, was her puppyboy—her belonging. his eyes were wide and eager, cheeks flushed, cock already half-hard between his thighs, waiting for you to discover just what kind of "dog-sitting" she actually had in mind for you. he whimpered the moment you met his gaze, shifting so the tail plug wagged, desperate for your attention before you even said a word.

okay. um. what the fuck.

with a sigh, you slipped your phone back into your pocket, glancing down at her puppy—for the weekend, he was yours to take care of either way, you guessed. ugh. is this some sick joke? was she getting off thinking of this?

whatever. you’re getting paid. might as well play into it for a job well-done.

“come,” you motioned. he did. he shifted to sit back on his haunches, palms flat on the floor, thighs splayed wide so his cock jutted out, flushed and leaking, the head leaving a wet mark on his skin. the tail plug twitched with every little movement, the faux fur brushing against his lower back, and his knees bore fresh red marks from the roughness of the bottom of his cage. his tongue lolled out, panting in earnest, chest rising and falling with every eager, shallow breath.

why is his tongue out like that—no, don’t think about it, too late, thinking about it.

you tried to go about your day normally. but the sight of him—hips rocking, ass pressing up, shoulders hunched in a perfect, submissive arch at your side—made your mouth dry. the urge to grab his hips, to squeeze his trembling thighs, to press your palm between his shoulder blades and force him lower, was almost overwhelming. your cock throbbed in your jeans, straining at the zipper, as you watched him pant and whine, precum beading at his tip and trailing down to smear across his thigh and the hardwood beneath him.

god, he was such a tease—so needy, so eager to show off while you were scrolling on your phone or bushing yourself with something else. sometimes, with a shameless flourish, he would even drag his tongue over his own forearm, leaving a glistening wet trail, or roll onto his back, knees bent and legs spread wide, cock twitching as he wiggled for your attention.

once, when your patience was nearly gone and he deemed you weren’t paying much attention to him, he crawled forward and began rutting against your leg, desperate and mindless, his cock grinding against your calf, leaving a hot, sticky mess as he whined and panted, eyes wild with need. the humiliation and sheer animal desperation in his movements made your breath catch, restraint hanging by a thread as you watched his body tremble with every scrap of praise, every touch. you could see the muscles flex and quiver beneath his skin, the way he arched into every caress, begged for your grip, for your weight pressing him down in any way he could. it took everything in you not to snap right then, not to bend him over the nearest surface and rut into him until he was boneless and spent, so perfectly vulnerable and shamelessly inviting—every inch of him a living, breathing temptation. it was surreal, but you’d agreed to this, and the instructions were clear.

you set the thought to the side.

if he wanted to be treated like a dog, you would. a dog is just a dog; it can't think like a human, and communication doesn't work, so it's just an animal. you decided to think of it at that level. your tolerance was quite broad.

later, you poured water into his bowl and set it down, watching him scramble forward on all fours, knees scraping against the floor. he ducked his head, collar chain rattling, and lapped greedily at the water—his jaw moving clumsily, tongue flicking out, droplets splashing onto his chin and trailing down his bare chest. drool soaked his skin, trickling along the hollow of his throat, and the mess pooled beneath him.

“you’re drooling more than drinking, you know that?” all he did was rigorously nod his head in response.

when you set out his food next, he crawled to the dish, lowering his face until his nose bumped the rim, then shoved his mouth into the food, eating hands-free—shoulders and back flexing, ass high in the air once more, tail plug twitching visibly with each eager movement. his cock hung and swayed, hard and dripping, smearing more precum onto the floor with every shift. that was going to be a real pain to clean up.

you could see the heat staining his cheeks, his eyes flicking up for approval even as he stuffed his mouth, lips shiny and flecked with crumbs. every part of him—his trembling thighs, his flexed back, his parted lips and wet chin—was on display, a needy, pitiful thing desperate for your approval and utterly unconcerned with his own dignity. you ignore him again for your own.

leashing him for the daily walk, you clipped the collar and tugged, the leather digging into his skin as you guided him forward. he trudged after you on all fours, elbows and knees taking the brunt of the movement, his thighs trembling, knees red and sore from the hard floor. his cock bobbed with each shuffle, the shaft brushing against the cold hardwood, leaving slick trails as he moved, his hips swaying, the tail plug bouncing in time with your steps.

every time you paused, you let your hand tangle in his hair or scratched behind his ears, dragging your nails slowly down his spine—he whimpered, body arching into your touch, desperate for any scrap of attention. his ass wiggled, tail plug twitching as he tried to catch your eye, every inch of him on display for your enjoyment, shameless and obedient.

following the instructions to the letter, you couldn’t help but feel a strange satisfaction at how easily he fell into his role—and how naturally you fell into yours.

you watched him, crawling at your feet. the collar was a constant reminder of his status and your new authority, the metal tag jingling softly whenever you tugged it to steer him where you wanted. his whines were constant—high, pleading noises every time you pulled on the thing. it wasn’t helping.

really, you tried to contain yourself—you did. but a man can only handle so much.

sometimes, when you denied him a command or left him waiting, the whining would grow sharper, needier, until you couldn’t help but smirk and call him a needy mutt.

with every command you gave, “sit, roll over, stay,” he seemed to slip deeper into his role—submissive, needy, and desperate for your praise or discipline. his cock was already leaking, desperate and untouched. still, you made sure he earned every stroke, only rewarding him with a firm scratch behind the ears or a sweet word when he was being good for you. when you cupped his chin and made him look up, the helpless, wanton expression on his face made you want to see how much further you could push him.

you pressed your thumb to his lips, smirking. "tell me, puppy," you murmured, voice low, "your real owner is a woman, right? you belong to her, her collared little pet—she keeps you caged and marked, teases you with her hands and voice, but she can’t fuck you right, can she? i’m the only one who can split you open, fuck you so deep you forget your own name, make you drool all over the sheets just from getting filled. has she ever make you tremble and cry, leave you dripping and used, begging to be owned? or is it better with me—am i a better owner because i could actually fuck you, make you scream, bruise your hips, ruin you for anyone else? do you like how i treat you, even when i make you beg and whimper like this, would you like it if i stuff you full and make you take every inch?"

his response was immediate—a whine, choked and desperate, eyes shining as he nodded frantically, unable to form words but eager to please, shame burning in his cheeks at how easily he caved. "say it," you demanded, tightening your grip on his collar. "tell me whose you are, and how much you need to be my pathetic little pet—the only one who can fuck you right, stuff you so full you can’t even think."

he whimpered, voice shaky but eager to obey. "yours, sir. i’m yours. you’re the best owner—better than anyone. please, let me be good for you… i want to be your good boy. please fill me up.”

you made him crawl to you, guiding him by the collar, and forced him to kneel with his face buried in the bedding, ass high and waiting.

you pulled open and spat on his hole, your hands gripping his hips tightly as you forced him to arch his back, tail plug swaying with every movement. the sight of the plug already stretching him, the faux fur brushing his lower back, made your cock throb. you lined yourself up, pressing the swollen head of your cock right against the plug, letting him feel the blunt pressure of both at his entrance. slowly, you pushed in, not bothering to remove the plug—forcing him to open up, your cock stretching him impossibly wide around the thick toy, the tight ring of muscle swallowing it all up helplessly as you breached him. inch by inch, you fed your cock into him, the toy held firmly in place, the sensation of being pried open by both making him shudder violently. he gasped, body jolting as you bottomed out, the fullness so overwhelming his thighs trembled, his voice breaking into helpless, high-pitched moans. you paused, buried all the way inside, feeling the plug pressed hard against the underside of your shaft, the inner walls squeezed impossibly tight around both intrusions. he was stuffed, stretched to the limit, unable to close even a bit, his hole forced wide and gaping around your cock and the thick plug. you kept him like that, not letting him adjust, grinding your hips so he could feel every vein, every inch of you, the toy pushed deeper with every slow, deliberate movement. the strain of accommodating so much made him twitch, whole body convulsing from the strain, sweat slicking his skin as he babbled wordless pleas. only when you felt him relax—his hole spasming around the impossible stretch—did you start to thrust, shallow at first, your cock and the toy rubbing together inside him, making his insides churn, and his moans turn wild in no time. saliva dribbled down his chin onto the sheets, and the deep, relentless probing hit his solar plexus, the ache twisting into sharp, dizzying pleasure, his brows furrowing and eyes rolling as you used him.

the room echoed with the wet slap of skin against skin each time your hips met his ass, your cock splitting him open and making him gasp, hole stretched wide and twitching around both your length and the toy. you could feel the heat radiating off his flushed skin, sweat beading along the line of his spine as your palms slid over the tense muscles of his back, leaving streaks as you raked your nails down. each thrust was deliberate, meant to remind him exactly who owned him—your cock and the plug grinding together, making him cry out as you leaned over his trembling body, breath hot against his ear. you tugged his collar, forcing his head up, so you could see his tongue lolling, drool smeared across his cheek, eyes rolling back with every rough thrust.

his moans and needy whines filled the room—high, desperate, and punctuated by the jingle of his collar with every sharp movement. his knuckles turned white where he gripped the bedding, arms trembling from the force of your rutting, whole body shuddering at the praise you growled in his ear for being your filthy, obedient dog. he shivered and pushed back harder, chasing every scrap of attention you gave, his tail plug twitching in time with your rhythm, the inner lining of his hole, clinging to both of the intrusions, nearly protruding before retracting all over again.

you wanted to see how much the puppy could take.

you slapped his thigh, relishing the way he yelped, and ordered him to bark for you—his voice breaking as he obeyed, utterly debased and eager to please.

you grabbed the base of the furry tail plug and twisted it, making him sob as his muscles clenched around both your cock and the thick toy. the sensation forced more precum from his leaking cock, dribbling onto the sheets as he writhed and whimpered, hips jerking uncontrollably.

your free hand roamed his body, tracing every ridge of his spine, squeezing his ass, then spreading his cheeks just to watch your cock disappear into his hole and the plug stretch him wider with every thrust. you pressed a thumb down on the plug, grinding it in, he howled like an animal. when you pressed even hard, as if prying open the deepest part, he convulsed, unable to close his mouth. you reveled in the way his entire body convulsed beneath you, helpless and desperate.

you reached under him to wrap around his throat again, pulling him up so his back was flush against your chest. his breathing turned ragged, chest heaving, his pulse fluttering beneath your grip. you bit down on his shoulder, hard enough to leave marks, and felt him shudder, his breath stuttering as tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. with every brutal thrust, you could feel him clenching, desperate for more, his cock untouched and bobbing between his shaking legs, the tip smearing precum over the bedding. you reached forward and pinched his nipple, twisting it until he choked on a moan, then slapped his thigh again lightly in that red spot—just enough to make him gasp and rut into your touch, precum splattering with each frantic jerk of his hips. you spat into your palm and smeared it over his cock, stroking him slowly, teasingly, just to watch him sob in frustration when you stopped again. "beg for it," you growled, voice hot against his ear. "tell me you want to be fucked like this—tell me you love being my filthy little mutt."

you gripped his hips so tightly your fingerprints bloomed red on his skin, rutting into him until the bedding bunched beneath his knees and his arms buckled from exhaustion. his cries turned to broken sobs of bliss, drool pooling under his cheek, cock leaking in a puddle on the sheets. you bent low to kiss the side of his face—wet, flushed, and stained with tears—you could feel him trembling all over, thighs quaking, muscles taut as a bowstring as you denied him again and again, making him plead and babble for release.

you alternated between praising his obedience and degrading him, nails dragging down his sides, fingers digging into his skin, leaving raw red marks as a reminder of your ownership. you slapped his ass and watched the flesh jiggle, then pinched his nipples until he whimpered, rewarding his good behavior with a tug on his collar and a harsh thrust that made him yelp. you rutted into him hard, your cock driving deep with every thrust, the blunt force making him cry out, his voice raw and high-pitched. with every grind of your hips, you pressed the plug deeper into him, making him clench around you, his hole stretched and dripping. when you wrapped your hand around his throat, collar tight beneath your fingers, he whimpered your name, voice muffled and eager to be used, drooling onto the bedding as you kept him pinned. you leaned over, biting at his ear, then spat on his cheek and watched him shudder in desperate gratitude. every time your hips slammed into him, you felt the quiver of his thighs, the slick slide of sweat and skin, and the way his hole clenched desperately around you. he arched his back, pushing back to meet you, rutting against the sheets, desperate for friction to his own aching cock—which you cruelly denied. “bad puppy.”

he was a mess—spit smeared across his cheek, tears pricking his lashes, eyes unfocused, prattling broken pleas and praises as you used his body. his cock jerked and spasmed, untouched, as he came hard for you, painting the sheets in messy, desperate spurts. even as you kept fucking him, the overstimulation quickly built again—his hips shaking, whines growing higher with each thrust until he tensed and came a second time, cum leaking in thick, sticky ropes down his thighs. the raw need between you grew, the rhythm turning relentless, both of you lost in the sensory haze—muscles straining, bodies pressed together, the sharp scent of sweat, precum, and arousal thick in the air as you claimed him over and over, not stopping until you were both gasping and spent, his cum leaking messily beneath him, the bedding soaked with filthy puppy cum.

"you’re such a mess, aren’t you?" you murmured into his ear, voice rough with arousal as you ground into him from behind. "tell me who you belong to."

“you..."

you chuckled, smacking his ass hard enough to make him jolt. "that’s right. i want to hear you say it every time i fuck you. loud enough for the neighbors to know who’s making you bark."

"p-please— please, use me, m-make me bark, make me yours!" he begged, voice breaking as you pulled him up by the collar, forcing him to look at you.

"such a needy little thing," you taunted, leaning over to bite down on his shoulder. "is this what you wanted when you begged me to dog-sit? to be fucked stupid, to be nothing but a leaking, drooling mutt?"

he sobbed, pushing back against you, "yes, sir, please—want to be ruined, want to be your bad dog—please, please, use me."

every so often, you’d make him thank you, forcing him to repeat how much he loved being used, loved being nothing but a filthy mutt for your pleasure. "th-thank you, sir— thank you, f-for using me, f-for making me yours— f-for making me— feel like— like a real dog," he babbled, voice hoarse with desperation and bliss.

when you finally let him ride you, straddling your hips with the leash wrapped tightly around your fist, he bounced helplessly, whining and panting, cock swinging and dripping while you thrust up into him, making him clamp down and grind desperately for friction.

"look at you, riding my cock like you were made for it," you said, yanking on the leash so he gasped and arched, eyes rolling back. "whose filthy mutt are you?"

"y-yours! yours, sir, just for you—p-please, please, d-don’t stop! c-can’t stop—gonna—gonna cum again!" as you picked up the pace, he came with a loud, broken cry—hot, sticky ropes painting your skin and his own belly. even as he was still pulsing and leaking, you didn’t let up, you weren’t done yet, fucking him through the aftershocks, making him sob and beg as his cock jerked again, spilling another, weaker load with nothing left in his balls. you felt him clamp down around you, milking your cock until you finally gave in, groaning as you pumped your own load deep inside him, thick and hot, flooding him with your release. as you kept thrusting through the aftershocks, your cum and his mixed inside him, and when you finally pulled out, a thick string of cum stretched between your cock and his gaping hole before snapping, the rest oozing out in sloppy, glistening streams, dripping down his thighs to pool with the rest of his spent desire, your cum and spit, and everything else.

before you marked him, you pulled him back against you, spooning him close with his back pressed to your chest, one arm wrapped around his waist to keep him in place. you let him feel your breath against his neck, your hand splayed possessively over his belly as you ground your hips against his ass, holding him still and savoring the way he trembled in your grasp. that's when you started to leave your marks— everywhere you could reach, biting along the slope of his shoulder and the nape of his neck, your teeth sinking in deep enough to bruise, your nails raking down his sides and across his thighs. you wanted everyone to see exactly who had owned him that night—how his body was smeared with your lust, his skin painted in the colors you’d made. as you raked your nails down his back, you watched thin red lines bloom and fade, your fingerprints blooming purple on his hips where you’d gripped him the hardest, branding him as your filthy, fucked-out slut. some marks you left boldly, wanting them to be seen, while others you pressed into places only he—or his owner—would find later. not that you cared. she must have known this would happen. and if not, she was sorely mistaken about your character.

you bit down again, savoring the way he gasped and arched under you, the helpless way his cock twitched and leaked at every fresh display of ownership. the knowledge that she might discover them made you bite down harder, leaving a perfect ring of marks on his shoulder, your claim written in flesh—proof that he’d let another use him, that he’d let someone else make him this wanton and ruined.

leaning in, you pressed your lips to each bitten spot, whispering, “no amount of scrubbing will hide who you belong to now. you’ll remember me every time you see these marks—every time she touches you, she’ll know you’re nothing but a filthy, cheating mutt.”

as you dressed him after, your fingers lingered on each bruise, each swollen bite. “these marks are for her,” you said, voice low, “but these—” you pressed your thumb into a fresh bite on his hip, making him gasp, “—these are for me. she might see, and maybe she’ll guess, but only you and i will ever know how you begged for each one.”

he whimpered at your words, clinging to you with trembling arms, desperate for your praise and your warmth. you stroked his hair, wiped away the tears with your thumb, and whispered, "you’re perfect. my filthy, obedient, broken puppy."

he smiled through the haze, eyes glazed with satisfaction and exhaustion, "th-thank you, sir. thank you for— for everything."

exhausted and utterly spent, you gathered the puppyboy up in your arms and carried him to the bathroom. he whimpered softly, still trembling from your treatment of him, as you gently set him in the tub. you ran the water warm, lathered up a soft washcloth, and began to clean him—meticulously washing away the culmination of bodily fluids from his skin, the sticky streaks on his thighs, and the traces of sweat and cum from every inch of his body. you made sure to be gentle, running your fingers through his hair, washing behind his ears, and letting the water rinse away the evidence of what you'd done. at least at the surface level.

he leaned into your touch, eyes fluttering shut, letting out small, contented whines as you cared for him, your touch a stark contrast to the roughness from before. when he was clean and relaxed, you dried him off with a towel, wrapped him snugly in his blanket, and carried him back to his cage. only then did you lock him in, watching him curl up, limp and satisfied, ready for sleep.

you should feel guilty putting him back like this. you don’t.

"there we go. sleep tight, mutt. tomorrow we see just how much more stupid i can fuck you."

You’d only been to yuji’s apartment once, but that single evening had carved itself into choso’s mind.

It was a random tuesday night, the kind where the air outside still carried the chill of early spring and the streetlights buzzed faintly overhead. yuji had texted you after a brutal study session at the campus library: “Dude come over, my place is like 10 mins away and my older brother always stocks snacks. You’ll like choso, he’s super chill even if he looks kinda scary lol.” You’d laughed at the message, shoulders aching from hours hunched over notes, and replied with a quick “bet” before shoving your laptop into your bag.

Choso had been in the kitchen when the two of you walked through the door. He was rinsing a mug, black hair loose and messy around his shoulders, wearing an oversized gray hoodie that swallowed his frame. The moment he heard your voice—low, easy, laced with that tired laugh—he froze. water ran over his hands, forgotten.

yuji kicked off his shoes. “Yo, bro! This is my friend I was telling you about. We’ve got that group project together.”

You stepped into the light of the living room, offering a casual wave and a smile that reached your eyes. “Hey, man. Nice to meet you. yuji talks about you like you’re some kind of plug or something.”

Choso’s throat tightened. He managed a nod, awkward and stiff, the way he always did around people who weren’t yuji. “…Hello.” His voice came out quieter than intended, almost hoarse. He couldn’t stop staring. The way your jacket hung open over a plain black t-shirt. The faint scent of rain and cheap cologne that clung to you. The easy slope of your shoulders, the way your hair fell when you ran a hand through it. Everything about you was too much for him right now.

You didn’t notice. Why would you? You were just yuji’s friend. Good friends. the kind who made snack runs at 2 a.m. and bitched about professors over cheap ramen. You dropped onto the couch like you belonged there, legs spread comfortably, and started arguing with yuji about which horror movie to put on while choso retreated to the kitchen to “grab snacks.”

He didn’t grab snacks right away. He stood behind the counter, gripping the edge until his knuckles went white, listening to your laugh echo through the thin walls. His heart hammered in a rhythm that felt foreign and addictive. When he finally brought over the bowl of chips and a couple of sodas, his fingers brushed yours as he handed you one. The contact lasted half a second. It burned.

That night was the spark. The obsession didn’t bloom slowly. it ignited in choso.

he’d always been the quiet older brother. The one who faded into the background, calm and reserved, content to watch over yuji with a fierce, protective loyalty that ran deeper than blood. Family was everything to him. But you… you weren’t family. Not yet.

He started with watching. It was easy enough. Your apartment was only three blocks away in that rundown off-campus complex with the flickering hallway bulb that never got fixed. yuji mentioned your schedule in passing once or twice—“My buddy’s got library nights on tuesdays and thursdays, dude always crashes hard after.” choso memorized it.

The first time he followed you home, he told himself it was nothing. Just making sure yuji’s friend got back safe. He kept his hood up, hands shoved deep in his pockets, blending into the shadows between the dumpsters and the chain-link fence across the street. Your window glowed on the second floor. He stood there for hours, unmoving, eyes fixed on the silhouette behind the cheap blinds. When your light finally clicked off around 1 a.m., he didn’t leave right away. He stayed until the sky started to pale, breathing in the cold air that still somehow carried traces of you.

Night after night, it became ritual. He learned the creak of the stairs in your building by listening from the alley. He learned the exact time you usually killed the lights. Sometimes he’d see your shadow pass the window—pacing while on a call, or slumped over your desk. Each glimpse fed the static in his veins until it felt like his whole body was vibrating with it.

He told himself it was protective. yuji cared about you. That made you important. Family-adjacent. The lie tasted sweet on his tongue.

But lies only hold for so long.

The stealing started a week later, on your second visit to their shared apartment.

You’d slung your backpack onto the couch without a second thought while you and yuji raided the fridge, arguing loudly over whether pineapple belonged on pizza. Choso lingered in the doorway, pretending to scroll on his phone. His eyes flicked to the bag. The front pocket was half-open. Careless. Trusting.

His fingers moved before his brain caught up. He slipped them inside and closed around cool metal—a spare key on a plain ring. Not your main one, just the backup you kept for emergencies. He palmed it smoothly and retreated to his room before either of you noticed.

You blamed yourself later when you couldn’t find it. “Shit, I must’ve dropped it somewhere. Whatever, I’ll get a new one.”

Choso used it the very next afternoon while you were in class.

The key turned silently in the lock. His pulse thundered in his ears as he stepped inside your apartment for the first time. It smelled like you—faint sweat from gym clothes, that same cheap cologne, leftover takeout in the trash. The air felt thicker, warmer, alive with your absence.

He didn’t touch anything obvious at first. He wandered like a ghost through the small space. the tiny kitchen with dishes still in the sink, the living room with your gaming controller tossed on the couch, the bathroom where your towel hung damp from the morning shower.

Then he reached the bedroom.

Your bed was unmade, sheets rumpled from where you’d rolled out of them. Choso stood in the doorway for a long minute, just breathing it in. He crossed to the laundry basket in the corner. A black hoodie lay on top, the one you’d been wearing the night you first met. He picked it up with trembling hands and pressed the collar to his face. Your scent flooded his lungs. salt, fabric softener, something uniquely you. His cock twitched hard in his sweats, almost instantly.

He didn’t fight it.

Choso sat on the edge of your bed, knees weak, and shoved the hoodie against his nose with one hand while the other palmed himself through his clothes. The fantasy hit him full force for the first time, vivid and merciless.

In his head, you didn’t come home to an empty apartment. You came home early. You caught him there, standing guilty in your bedroom with your stolen hoodie in his hands. But instead of yelling or calling the cops, your expression shifted. Your eyes darkened with something raw and dangerous. You said his name—“Choso”—low and rough, the way you said it when you were tired but still smiling at yuji’s dumb jokes.

Then you stepped closer. No hesitation. You pushed him back onto the bed with one firm hand on his chest. Your body was heavier than his, solid muscle from whatever sports or training you did. You pinned his wrists above his head with one of your warm hands, leaning down until your breath ghosted his ear.

“You’re sick,” you’d growl, voice thick with mock disgust and real hunger. “Breaking into my place like a desperate little freak. You think I haven’t noticed you watching my window every night? You think I don’t know you took my key?”

Choso whimpered into the hoodie, hips jerking up into his own palm as the fantasy sharpened. In his mind, you didn’t stop at words. You shoved his sweats down roughly, freeing his aching cock. You stroked him once, twice—mean and dry at first—before spitting into your hand and doing it again, faster. “Look at you. Already leaking for me. Pathetic.”

He’d bite back a moan, but you’d force his mouth open with your thumb. “No hiding. Not anymore. You’re mine now. Every time yuji drags me over to your place, you’re gonna sit there acting normal while my cum is still dripping out of your ass from the night before.”

The fantasy crested hard. Choso came with a choked gasp, biting down on the sleeve of your hoodie to muffle the sound. Thick ropes of cum spilled over his fist and onto your sheets. He kept the fabric pressed to his face through the aftershocks, inhaling you like oxygen while his body trembled.

Afterward, shame flickered—but only faintly. He cleaned up meticulously, folding the hoodie exactly as he’d found it and tucking it back into the basket. He even smoothed your sheets, though the wet spot he’d left made his stomach twist with dark satisfaction. He took one more thing before leaving: a single black sock from the basket. The left one. You’d notice the pair being incomplete less than if both vanished.

He went back every few days after that.

The key became his lifeline. He’d slip in during your afternoon classes, heart racing every time the lock clicked. He learned the layout intimately. which floorboard creaked near the bed, how the shower curtain rings sounded when he tested them, the exact drawer where you kept your boxers. He started taking more. A half-used bottle of your body wash from the shower shelf—he’d pour a little into a small container he kept at home so he could smell like you when he showered. The sticky note you’d left on yujis fridge once that said “thanks for the answere, dude” in your messy handwriting. He kept that in a small box under his bed, running his thumb over the ink until the edges frayed.

Some days he’d crawl fully into your bed. He’d lie on his stomach, face buried in your pillow, and hump the mattress slowly while whispering your name like a broken prayer. “Please… just once… let me feel you…” His hips would grind down harder, imagining your weight pinning him, your cock stretching him open while you called him every filthy name he deserved. He’d come untouched sometimes, just from the scent and the fantasy, then lick the mess off your sheets with trembling shame and arousal twisting together.

The fantasies evolved, growing darker and more detailed with each visit.

Sometimes in his head you were angry—furious at the invasion. You’d slam him against the wall the second the door closed behind you, hand around his throat just tight enough to make stars burst behind his eyes. “You’ve been stalking me, haven’t you? Jerking off in my bed like a fucking animal.” You’d force him to his knees and make him suck you off right there in the entryway, tears streaming down his face while you fucked his throat and told him how disgusting he was. How he didn’t deserve it but you’d give it to him anyway because he was too pathetic to stop.

Other times the fantasy was slower, crueler in its tenderness. You’d catch him, but instead of rage you’d smirk like you’d known all along and had been waiting for him to slip up. You’d pull him into your lap on the couch, hands roaming under his hoodie while you whispered, “Been waiting for you to break, choso. always so quiet and proper. But you’re just a desperate slut for me, aren’t you?” You’d edge him for hours, stroking him slow and stopping every time he got close, until he was crying and begging. Only then would you finally fuck him deep, relentless thrusts that had him clawing at your back, moaning your name like it was the only word he knew.

He always came hardest to the versions where you claimed him completely. Where you bit his neck hard enough to bruise while pounding into him from behind, growling that he belonged to you now. That he couldn’t hide anymore. That every family dinner at his apartment would be torture because he’d be sitting there across from you, hole still sore and leaking, trying to act normal while you smiled innocently and asked him to pass the salt.

Back in reality, Choso remained the awkward older brother.

yuji still brought you over every couple of weeks. You’d show up with that same easy smile, bumping knees with Choso on the couch during movie nights, completely oblivious. “You good, man? You seem kinda zoned out tonight.” Your voice was casual, concerned in that friendly way that made Choso’s stomach flip.

He’d nod, forcing a small, tight smile. “Yeah. Just tired.” Under the table, his nails dug crescents into his own thigh to keep from shaking. The fantasy played on loop behind his eyes the entire time, you dragging him into the bathroom the second yuji stepped out for more drinks, bending him over the sink and covering his mouth while you fucked him quick and dirty. “Shut up. Don’t want your little brother hearing what a whore his big bro is for me.”

After you left, Choso would excuse himself to his room and jerk off again, sometimes twice, biting his own forearm so yuji wouldn’t hear the broken whimpers. He’d stare at the collection hidden in his drawer: your spare key, the sock, the empty body wash bottle now refilled with his own cum mixed with traces of yours, the sticky note. He’d press the fabric or paper to his lips and whisper, “Soon.”

He still hadn’t touched you. Not really. Not skin to skin beyond that accidental brush of fingers weeks ago.

But the obsession had gotten worse.

He knew your class schedule better than his own. He knew the friends you texted late at night from the glimpses he caught when you left your phone on the table at yuji’s . He even started following you on rare nights when you went out with the group. still keeping distance, always in the shadows, making sure no one got too close to what was his.

yuji remained cheerfully unaware. “Choso’s been acting weirder than usual lately,” he’d joke to you once while Choso pretended not to listen from the kitchen. “But he’s harmless. Just a little.. uhrm.. protective, y’know?”

Protective. The word made Choso smile faintly to himself, small and fractured. If only yuji knew how deep that protection had twisted.

Choso waited in the dark now, more patient than ever. He had the key. He had the fantasies. He had pieces of you scattered through his life like talismans.

One day soon, the waiting would end. You’d come home to find him there. not hiding, not running. Maybe you’d finally see the hunger in his eyes that he’d buried under awkward silences and quiet nods. Maybe you’d push him down. Maybe you’d hate him for it. Maybe you’d want him just as badly.

Either way, Choso was ready.

He’d drop to his knees on your shitty apartment carpet without hesitation. He’d let you do whatever you wanted—use him, break him, claim him. Because in the quiet, obsessive corners of his mind, you already owned every piece of him.

You just didn’t know it yet.

you kneel in the dark hush of the confessional, the carved lattice barely obscuring the priest’s silhouette.

this booth is meant for repentance, but you’ve transformed it into a sanctuary of unrepentant filth. what was once a place for absolution has become your personal stage, and the ritual is as precise as a liturgy. week after week—sometimes more than once—you return, each visit a brazen challenge to the sanctity of the space. your confessions grow more elaborate, more explicit, as if you’re determined to see how far you can drag the priest into your depravity. you imagine him on the other side, hands clenched, jaw tight, tormented by the images you paint with your words. he must wonder how you find the time or the stamina for so many encounters, but you never let him ask—never give him the satisfaction of breaking the script.

you murmur your sins—detailed, shameless, the words spilling from your lips like a challenge, each syllable a weapon meant to corrupt. you recount, in graphic detail, how you choose your prey: the lingering glances across crowded rooms, the predatory confidence in your stride as you lure men into shadowed corners. you tell him of the strangers you’ve ruined in public places—the alley behind the church, the restroom at the train station, the backseat of parked cars—describing the way your cock stretches and fills, how men are left wrecked and sobbing from the roughness of your hands and the sheer size of you. you describe the desperate sounds they make, the way their bodies feel, the marks you leave behind as proof of your conquest.

you describe hands wandering under tight jeans in a club’s shadowy corner, mouths choking and drooling around you in backseat trysts, men whimpering as you pin them against filthy restroom tiles and take your pleasure with no care for who might hear.

you recount how you press them down, how they beg and cry for your cum, how you finish inside and leave them dripping and ruined.

you go out of your way to tell him it’s all consensual to assuage any misconceptions he may have. to not scare him away. it hadn’t been the first time you’d be turned away because of your debauchery. but you like this one.

though, he says nothing. even as each confession is explicit, your tone taunting, as if daring the priest to react, and the knowledge that you’re soiling this sacred place.

on the other side, the priest’s breath catches. you can’t see his face, but you sense the tension, hear the faint tremor in his responses.

at first, he tried to keep his voice steady, his words formal and detached, clinging to the rituals of his office as a shield. but as the weeks pass and your visits become routine, the facade cracks. his silences stretch, his sentences falter, and sometimes he stumbles over the prayers—his voice rough, breath hitching in a way that sounds almost like a groan. once, you think you hear the faintest thump—the sound of his knee knocking the confessional wall as he shifts, restless and undone.

the penances he assigns grow lighter, his admonishments less convincing. it’s as if your confessions have begun to unravel something inside him, drawing out desires he can’t suppress.

more than once, you’ve heard the faint click of his rosary beads—less prayer, more a desperate anchor as he listens to you describe how you ruin men. the shame in his voice thickens with every session, a growing awareness that he is being dragged into the filth with you, helpless to stop the rot spreading through his soul. sometimes, the beads slip and clatter softly, betraying the tremor in his hands. you imagine his fingers working over the smooth stones, not in supplication but to steady himself—to keep from reaching beneath his robes and succumbing to the temptation you weave with every filthy word.

sometimes, you imagine him shifting in his seat, struggling not to touch himself as you speak, the boundaries of sacred and profane blurring with every confession, the booth itself becoming a gutter for your mutual degradation.

sometimes, on the other side of that screen, the priest’s thoughts grow wild and irreverent. he pictures the flush on your face, the sin on your lips, and wonders what it would feel like to fall from grace for you.

he finds himself longing for your visits, desperate to hear every sordid detail, every taunt. he knows he shouldn’t, but he clutches his rosary so hard his knuckles pale, silently begging forgiveness even as his mind wanders to images sacrilegious and hungry—your mouth, your hands, your body, the way you sound when you confess.

he imagines you forcing him to his knees, using him for your pleasure right there in the booth, the sacred space corrupted by your sin and his surrender. each prayer feels emptier, each longing more blasphemous.

his temptation grows unbearable. one evening, as you confess with that same brazen voice, he can no longer resist the pull of your stories.

hidden by the screen, the priest succumbs to his own desire, seeking release with a trembling hand as you speak. he bites his lip hard enough to taste blood, desperate to keep his breathing measured and not betray himself.

the rhythmic sound of your voice, the filth of your confessions—he strokes himself beneath his robes, slick and aching, stifling any moan that threatens to escape. his fingers curl tighter, hips jerking in tiny, desperate motions as shame and lust war inside his chest. the scent of incense clings to him, failing to mask the musk of his arousal.

his free hand clutches the rosary, knuckles white, the beads digging into his palm as he comes, silent and shaking, warmth spreading beneath his robes, shame flooding him before the heat has even faded.

disgust and guilt roil in his gut, the enormity of his sin crashing over him in the stillness that follows.

he is a man of god, undone by the very confessions he is meant to absolve. he tells himself it must end, that he will resist next time, but the memory of your voice—low, mocking, vivid with sin—never leaves him.

the urge to weep rises in his throat, but he swallows it down, terrified that even a stray sound might give him away. he tries to pray, tries to beg forgiveness, but every whispered ave feels like another lash on his soul.

the words of the our father catch in his throat, each syllable a reminder that he has betrayed both his flock and his faith. he pictures the crucifix above the altar, eyes closed in agony, and knows he is unworthy to meet that gaze.

each prayer, each sign of the cross, feels more sacrilegious than the last, a desecration of the rituals he once held sacred.

he remembers the words of scripture—"you shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is abomination"—and cannot fathom how he, once so devoted, has become so hopelessly lost. he imagines the saints turning their faces away, the virgin’s eyes brimming with tears for the shepherd who has lost his way.

he feels as if every candle flickering before the tabernacle burns for his condemnation. he realizes he is defiling the very name he invokes for mercy, compounding blasphemy with each hollow plea. the more he seeks penance, the more poisoned his prayers feel—his mouth shaping words of contrition even as the taste of sin lingers, convinced that the heavens themselves recoil from him.

yet for all his shame, he finds himself craving your next confession, plagued by the certainty that he will fall again.

no matter how much he despises himself, no matter how earnestly he begs for strength or forgiveness, he knows he cannot help himself.

something inside him is broken, corrupted, and every time you kneel on the other side of the screen, he is helpless—powerless to resist, desperate for the ruin only you can bring.

all the while, he forces his tone to remain steady, giving you penance in words that barely tremble, maintaining the illusion of composure even as his body betrays his vows.

you never realize what happens on the other side, but he is left breathless and spent, the confessional now tainted with the evidence of his sacrilege.

he wonders what it would feel like to be ruined by you, to feel the burn and stretch of your cock, to sob and beg as you make him yours—his faith, his vows, his shame all meaningless in the face of your command.

tonight, as you finish, you let your fingers slowly trace the edge of the wooden lattice, lingering deliberately. you know he’s listening, transfixed, and you savor the power. the air thickens with something dangerous—something that has nothing to do with forgiveness.

it happens one night, when your confessions reach their filthiest crescendo and the priest’s responses grow strangled and breathless.

you pause, listening beyond the lattice, your senses sharpened by the charged silence. there—a muffled sound, a trembling exhale, the rustle of fabric not quite masked by the hush of the booth. the realization hits: you are not the only one confessing tonight.

without warning, you rise and push open the door to the priest’s side of the confessional.

he’s caught mid-motion, robes tangled, cheeks flushed with guilt and shame. his eyes widen, panic and humiliation warring with the desperate longing etched across his face.

you step closer, your presence filling the cramped space.

“you don’t have to hide anymore, father,” you murmur, your voice edged with a teasing cruelty. you let your gaze roam over him—caught, exposed, trembling with need—and your mouth curls in a smirk.

“is this what you wanted all along? to be caught with your hand where only god should see?”

the priest’s protests spill out in desperate, trembling pleas—“please, wait, i—i shouldn’t—” but you ignore them, catching his wrists in your large hand and pinning them above his head.

your grip is unyielding, almost bruising, as you press him hard against the wooden wall. with a sneer, you snatch the rosary from where it dangles at his waist, winding the beads tightly around his wrists until they’re bound together, the cross pressing into his skin.

he tries to squirm free, panic flickering in his wide eyes, but you only tighten the rosary’s hold, enjoying the helpless arch of his body and the frantic flutter of his breath.

“be still, father,” you sneer, applying just enough pressure to remind him of your strength.

his struggles weaken as you shove his knees apart with your own, forcing his legs open despite his attempts to close them. you drag your hand down, rough and possessive, cupping him through his robes, feeling him shudder and sob as he realizes resistance is futile.

you manhandle him with deliberate, mean efficiency—yanking the fabric aside, the heavy robes rasping against your knuckles as you expose him to the chill air and your merciless gaze.

his cock springs free, flushed and leaking, the tip wet with precome as it bobs helplessly in the space between you. the cold air raises goosebumps along his thighs, and you watch his legs tremble, muscles quivering in anticipation and fear.

his pleas dissolve into ragged whimpers as you handle him, your hands not gentle but claiming, making it clear he has no say in what happens next. your palm is rough and hot against his skin, the contrast making him shudder as you grip his cock at the base, squeezing until he whimpers, then let your fingertips ghost up the shaft, smearing the slickness across sensitive skin.

you can feel the frantic thud of his pulse under your hand. he tries to twist away, but you pin him harder, forcing his legs wider, your thumb brushing over the head just to watch him shudder.

you relish every flinch and gasp, every time his hips jerk against your control, every desperate “please, no—” that melts into a helpless, broken moan.

when you guide him, it’s with a mocking patience, every instruction tinged with a hint of derision.

“relax, father. you’re not going to break—unless i want you to.” you make him hold eye contact as you press against him, and when he hesitates, you only smirk, letting your words cut through his shame.

“first time? don’t worry—i’ll make sure you feel every inch.”

with each touch, the priest yields, unable to resist the force of want he’s tried so long to deny.

the confessional becomes a stage for blasphemy—your hands bruising his hips, your voice sharp with mockery as you taunt him for how easily he’s corrupted.

"on your knees, father," you snarl, forcing him down until he’s trembling before you, the rosary beads tangled in his fingers as he clings to the last vestige of faith.

you work him open with rough, relentless patience, the sound of your spit wet and obscene as you slick your fingers, ignoring his sobs and pleas, making sure he feels the stretch and burn as you press into him for the first time.

his body resists at first—tight, unyielding—but you force him to take you, delighting in the way his muscles clench desperately around your fingers. the priest’s back arches, his breath hitching between pained cries as you add another finger, stretching him mercilessly.

sweat beads along his hairline, his skin sticky and hot beneath your touch. his face is a portrait of devastation—eyes squeezed shut, lips bitten bloody in an effort to stifle his sobs.

tears drip from his chin, his cheeks streaked with wetness as shame and agony twist his features, each sob ragged and raw. he chokes on his own snot and spit as he cries, the sounds of his misery echoing in the cramped booth.

each time you force him wider, the filth of your act settles over everything—an invisible grime that no amount of prayer will ever wash away.

when you thrust deeper, his whimpers turn into hoarse, broken pleas, his whole body wracked with shudders as he tries to press back against the wall, desperate for escape. his cries climb in pitch, voice cracking from the strain, eyes red and swollen as new tears replace the old.

you savor the way his bound hands strain uselessly above his head, the rosary biting into his wrists, his body arching in helpless surrender, his thighs trembling with the effort to hold himself together, both of you irredeemably dirty, lost to the depravity you’ve forced upon him.

when his cries grow too loud, you clamp a hand firmly over his mouth, your palm covering his lips and muffling his desperate moans. his eyes go wide with panic—then squeeze shut as you push in deeper, your grip making it clear there’s no escape. you lean in until your lips brush his ear, your breath hot and cruel. "god is watching you," you whisper, voice venomous with mockery. "he sees you taking me—he knows how badly you want this. there’s no forgiveness coming for you, father. only sin. only me."

suddenly, footsteps echo in the nave beyond the confessional—a parishioner, perhaps, or another priest, pausing just outside, close enough that their voice drifts through the thin wooden slats. the priest goes rigid beneath you, panic stark in his eyes, his body frozen in terror at the thought of discovery. you keep him pinned, your hand still tight over his mouth, forcing him to choke on his own muffled sobs, naked and exposed, your cock buried deep inside him as the threat of witnesses lingers just beyond the thin wooden veil.

the confessional becomes a filthy altar, the air thick with the stench of sex and shame as you rut into him—each thrust a fresh blasphemy, each slap of flesh on flesh a perverse liturgy echoing through the sacred hush.

the priest’s humiliation is no longer private; every ragged, stifled gasp, every wet squelch and desperate whimper could betray him to the world outside. he can hear the faint, oblivious murmur of voices, the shuffle of feet, someone perhaps kneeling just yards away—unaware that their shepherd is being desecrated inches from where they pray for salvation.

you force his head back, letting his terrified eyes meet yours, your mouth curling into a cruel, knowing smirk.

“let them hear,” you whisper, voice a venomous caress.

he shakes his head vehemently.

the initial push is brutal—your cock forcing him open, a slow, punishing stretch that leaves him gasping and whimpering. you feel the tight ring of muscle straining to keep you out, the resistance sweet and fierce, until you finally bottom out and grind your hips against his ass, making sure he feels every last inch.

the shame is total, seeping into the wood, the air, the very marrow of his bones. he is left trembling, split open by your cock and by the knowledge that the line between holy and profane is gone forever his sin will be laid bare before his flock, that the confessional itself will become a shrine to his utter ruin.

you savor the way his helpless sobs vibrate against your hand. his muffled cries only spur you on, and you relish the way his body betrays him, arching into your touch despite his shame.

you whisper, “you don’t get to hide, father. every part of you belongs to me right now.” the weight of your dominance settles on him, heavy and inescapable, leaving him trembling and exposed—body and soul.

his body tenses, muscles clenching involuntarily around you as you thrust deeper, his rim fluttering with every thick inch that breaches him.

he is torn between pain and a humiliating, forbidden pleasure, his body shuddering as you hold him open and rock slowly, letting him feel the obscene fullness. he feels each violation as a fresh blasphemy, his body defiling all that he’s sworn to keep pure.

worse still, his traitorous flesh betrays him utterly—his cock hardens between his belly and the linen of his robes, leaking slick shame onto the sacred fabric.

each time you thrust, his body clings to you, the tight heat milking your cock with desperate, helpless contractions, as if trying to keep you inside. with every withdrawal, his hole grips you, stretched wide and glistening, only to be filled again with another hard, relentless thrust.

each thrust forces a ragged tremor through his frame, his back arching in a futile attempt to lessen the pressure, but his body only betrays him further—hips jerking, ass pushing back despite his pleas, his hole slick and raw from the unrelenting use.

his mind screams denial, but his body, flushed and trembling with involuntary arousal, welcomes every violation, every filthy touch, unable to refuse the pleasure blooming within the pain.

shame and self-disgust burn in him as acutely as the pain.

every nerve seems to scream that this is wrong, that he is desecrating the vows he took at the altar with every gasp and quiver.

"for the wages of sin is death" (romans 6:23), the verse reverberates in his mind with every humiliating moan. he tries to pray, words jumbling soundlessly on his tongue, but "if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" (1 john 1:8) stings him with every breath.

each thrust leaves him feeling filthier, more lost—his faith slipping away as he remembers, "let the wicked forsake his way" (isaiah 55:7), but he cannot let go. he is drowning in sin, every part of him slick with guilt, the thought of god’s eyes upon him making him shudder with a sick mix of horror and perverse excitement.

"be sure your sin will find you out" (numbers 32:23) echoes through his soul, sealing his sense of corruption.

the priest’s bound hands twist uselessly, rosary beads digging into his skin, the cross pressed hard against his wrists, leaving angry indentations.

his legs tremble violently, thighs slick with sweat and slicker fluids as he tries and fails to pull away, the sensation of your thick cock stretching him leaving him gasping for air, his chest heaving with every shallow, panicked breath.

his abdomen tightens, muscles fluttering with each desperate, involuntary gasp. you feel the heat radiating off his skin, the way his body clenches and quivers around you.

his cock, hard despite his shame, leaks against his belly, smearing the linen of his robes as you drive him closer to the edge of surrender, the fabric now damp and clinging to every twitch and shudder.

you feel every shudder, every tremor of resistance ebbing into reluctant surrender.

his hips jerk weakly, torn between the urge to escape and the shameful pleasure that’s beginning to override his terror.

your hands are unrelenting—one bruising his hip, the other splayed across his lower back, holding him in place as you grind in slow, punishing circles, forcing him to feel every inch as you fill him. the slick heat of his body clings to you, muscles fluttering helplessly around your cock, his skin fever-hot beneath your touch.

when you loosen your grip just enough for him to gasp a breath, he chokes on a sob, tears streaming down his cheeks as he pleads with his eyes for mercy that will never come, his lips trembling, lashes wet with embarrassment.

you continue. really, too good an opportunity to pass up.

you relish the tremors running through his body as you thrust harder, every sound from him smothered beneath your hand, every plea dying in his throat.

his body jolts with each impact, the sting of your hips meeting his ass echoing like a taboo drumbeat in the stifling booth.

your cock plunges in deep, relentless strokes—an act of desecration, battering past the last defenses of his body, splitting him open again and again, until his hole is stretched wide and quivering, a pulsing ring of shame around your length. the tight muscle that once resisted you now spasms and flutters, greedily swallowing every ruthless drive, slick with sweat and the proof of his own betrayal.

the confessional is thick with sacrilege: the air humid with the rank heat of rut, the scent of musk and penitence mingling in a fog of blasphemy.

each thrust is its own sermon—a sermon of ruin, of flesh pounding flesh, obscene and unholy. the wet squelch as you bottom out, the lewd percussion of your balls slapping against him, the ragged chorus of his muffled sobs and strangled whimpers: together, they compose a prayer of degradation.

his cock, trapped and throbbing between his belly and the battered wood, drools silvery streaks of shame, sticky and hot as it paints the sacred surface.

with every brutal thrust, you grind him harder into the confessional’s scarred edge, branding him with the memory of this night. his ass blooms red and violet beneath your hips, each bruise a flower of sin, blossoming where only grace should dwell.

each movement wrings another broken moan from his lips—a hymn to filth, sung in the key of agony and helpless want.

tears streak his cheeks as you use him, his shame and pleasure indistinguishable. every thrust echoing blasphemy, every whimper a profanation of the sacred.

when you finally spill inside, you don’t bother to pull out—just let the evidence of your subjugation seep out of him, staining the confessional floor. he ought to clean it up after you leave. you’ve turned this booth into a place of ruin, a monument to everything that should never happen here.

you leave him there—wrecked, sobbing, and marked by sin—his body and soul both thoroughly, irreversibly claimed.

the words "depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire" (matthew 25:41) ring in his ears, and "there is no peace, saith the lord, unto the wicked" (isaiah 48:22) settles like a curse over his trembling form.

he is left haunted by the knowledge that his corruption is complete, wondering if he will ever be clean again.

More paperwork. More filing. Fewer deployments. You’re sent out less yet still expected to document everything when others return.

You don’t hate it.

If anything, you’ve settled into it. There’s a system now, a routine. Predictable. Efficient. Quiet. And apparently, useful.

Your CO, still impressed and clearly wanting to make use of you more, starts giving you more access. Logistics, intel, even occasional clearance into operational meetings. At first, you’re only there to deliver reports.

Then you start noticing things.

Some small gaps in plans. Overlooked details on maps. Timing that doesn’t quite add up.

The first time, you keep it to yourself. The second you saw it again, you lean in just enough to murmur your concern to your CO before stepping out. Then one time, he voices it for you once you’re gone.

The feedback he received was good.

After that, he starts keeping you around.

More invites to meetings. More asking for your input.

And now… Another one.

You enter the room with a report in hand, the low hum of the officers’ conversation already filling the space. A few heads turn briefly at your arrival before returning to the map spread across the center table.

You walk straight to your CO and hand over the logistics and intel report on the enemy base.

He takes it, skimming through the file, then a smile appears on his face after a pause.

“This is the one I mentioned,” he says while wrapping his arm around your shoulder, loud enough so everyone in the room can hear.

Your presence is acknowledged properly this time, eyes lingering a second than before. Curious eyes. Assessing you.

Then your CO looks back at you. “Well?” he prompts. “Anything to add?”

The room falls still as you glance at the map, eyes scanning over the layout again and again. Entry points, elevation, marked patrol routes.

“The front team…” you say. “They’re a bit too out in the open.”

There’s a brief pause. You take this chance to step closer to the table, pointing at the marked position.

“If they go in from here, they’re going to be seen almost immediately. There’re too many angles looking down on that spot.” Your finger then shifts slightly across the map. “From here, here… and even this path. If anyone’s watching, they won’t miss them.”

Someone leans in, following where you point.

“It’s the fastest way in, sure,” you admit. “But it also makes them the easiest target.”

You tap slightly off to the original marker this time. “If they move a little off to the side instead, there’s more cover. Less chance of being spotted right away.” Another small pause. “Or… don’t send them in first at all. Let a smaller group go ahead quietly. If things go bad, then they move in.”

You take a breath. “And based on the report I just handed in… The enemy’s base is heavily guarded. If we want to get every criminal within the place, we need to be stealthy. Any compromise in our position will surely lead to their higher ups escaping.”

And with that, you take your leave. At this point, it’s not your business whether they’ll take your suggestion into account or not.

-

Taskforce 141 doesn’t just accept team-ups from anyone. They don’t need to.

Reputation alone is not enough to carry most operations, but when they do work with others, it’s never blind trust. It’s a result of an observation… an evaluation. A quiet process of deciding who’s worth relying on… and who isn’t.

You and your unit have passed that much already. Already having a couple of joint operations under your team’s belt with the 141. Enough to prove you and your team are not a liability to them.

Still, that doesn’t mean much to Ghost.

When they return to your base for another possible joint operation, its now familiar ground for him. Already knowing the layout, the quickest routes between buildings, the quieter corridors, the places people tend to gather and the ones they avoid. If he has a destination in mind, he already has a mapped route that is easy to move through without being noticed.

He keeps to himself, as always. Stays close to his team when needed. Drifts and returns to his quarters when he doesn’t.

Sometimes he just walks with no destination in mind. Just the need for some movement. A habit more than anything else. It keeps his head clear. Keeps his thoughts from settling too long in one place.

It was during those times he started to notice you.

Not because you stood out. But because you chose not to.

Your CO spoke highly of you. That alone enough is to put you on his radar. Praise like those are rarely given without reason, and just as often misplaced.

He’s seen it a couple of times already.

Soldiers trying too hard. Talking too much, always hovering where they can be seen, where they can be acknowledged. Mistaking attention for competence.

So, he watched. From a distance at first.

You were on a treadmill one morning, pacing pushed just past what most would comfortably hold. Yet he sees the determination printed on your face. No complaints. Pushing yourself past your limits, not too much, but enough to test yourself.

You don’t slow down early. Not even looking around to see who’s watching. That detail made him think of you as someone who genuinely wants to push themselves more, to improve yourself.

Another time, at the weight rack, he watches you. You load the plates, complete a single set, and pause. Your brow furrows, deep in thought, as you add two more plates to each side. You try again, strain evident, but give up halfway, exhaling sharply. Disappointment flickers across your face as you remove a plate from each side and continue your lifting, steady again.

Just yesterday morning, after the morning PT, when most are still cooling down or lingering around, you’re already indoors. Seated on your desk. Papers stacked neatly in front of you. Reports being filled out with steady, consistent movements. No rushing, no dragging it out.

Just efficient and precise.

Logging inventory like it matters, because to you it actually does. Every number means something.

Most treat it like a chore. But you don’t.

You do your job. And damn you do it well. That much is clear.

But it’s not just that. It’s the pattern, the consistency.

The way you move through the day. The way you don’t insert into conversation unless necessary. Not lingering. Not trying to be part of something you’re not needed in.

No wasted motion. No wasted words. Not looking for approval.

You just... exist.

And somehow, that’s what makes you stand out to him. he finds it unusual really. Enough for him to keep watching.

Competent. That’s the word he settles on. A conclusion he files inside his mind away.

So, when the next briefing comes around, he’s already aware of you before you even step into the room.

He takes his usual position, slightly removed but just enough to observe and hear the briefing without directly being involved. Map already laid out across the table. Voices overlapping, a mix of low and focused mumbles, bits of planning being pieced together.

Then you enter.

Report in hand. Posture steady with no hesitation in your steps.

A few glances your way. Most don’t linger. But his does.

Your CO takes the report from you, then pauses. “This is the one I mentioned.”

That shifts the room, attention redirects back to you. He watches… waiting to see how you’ll react. Or rather… how you didn’t.

No visible change. No awkwardness under the sudden attention. You don’t straighten up more than necessary.

You just stand there. Waiting… and then-

“Well? Anything to add?”

There it is. The moment most soldiers fumble.

He expected hesitation. A pause too long. Maybe an over-explanation dressed up to sound useful. Or maybe you not even entertaining the question and deciding to walk away from the challenge. Instead-

“The front team… they’re a bit too out in the open.” That made his focus sharpens. Not outwardly that would give him away. But internally…

You step closer to the table, pointing things out. Angles. Sightlines. Exposure. You don’t dress it up. Don’t even try to sound smarter than you are.

Just… stating it.

Clear. Direct. Easy to follow. With no room of miscommunication.

He tracks your hand as it moves across the map, mentally running through the plan again.

You’re not bullshitting your way out of the question. It is clear you’ve thought about what to say.

“If they go in from here, they’re going to be seen almost immediately.”

Correct.

“Too many angles looking down that spot.”

Also correct.

He’s already marking the same points in his head as you speak them aloud.

 “It’s the fastest way in, sure… but it also makes them the easiest target.”

You’re not pushing for agreement. Not even glancing around to check if anyone’s convinced.

You just say it. Then offering an alternative.

A simple adjustment for a better cover, less exposure. Or delay the movement entirely, sending a smaller team in first and keep the larger force back until it matters.

A practical and measured alternative plan.

You finish speaking. No trailing words. No attempt to reinforce your point. You let your words hold.

If only you weren’t already assigned-

The thought comes, uninvited. And just as quickly, he sets it aside. He didn’t dismiss it, just noted.

Then you walk away, not as just some face, not as just a name attached to your CO’s praise. But as someone worth remembering.

-

Rumors always started small. Usually among the lowest ranks.

In the mess hall one afternoon, Ghost scrapes his plate clean while his team yaps about something he’s not interested in. He isn’t really listening to anyone, just existing in his own world as he eats

Then, he overhears two privates whispering behind him.

“…swear to God, mate… saw him in the showers after PT this morning…” one says, voice low. “Can’t believe it.”

“Shut up,” the other hisses. “I’m eating here and you’re making it worse.”

“Making what worse? I’m telling you… twelve inches, at least. That’s why he got his callsign ‘Tripod’, the man is packing a third leg.”

His eyes narrow, but he doesn’t react much. He doesn’t need to. This kind of talks is nothing new to him, just another form of idle noise that fills the gaps between operations.

He files it away within his head as just some irrelevant gossip.

At first.

But as the days pass, the callsign keeps surfacing. In passing conversations. In quiet jokes. In half-suppressed laughter when certain names are mentioned.

“Tripod.”

It lingers.

Eventually, the pieces fall into place. A name. A face. A pattern he’s already familiar with.

You.

The realization settles without much reaction. No surprise worth noting. No shift in how he sees you.

The information is simply added. Filed neatly alongside everything else he’s observed about you.

Another detail. Nothing more…

The night has already fallen, and Ghost prefers it that way.

The showers are quieter, less occupied, less crowded, less noise, fewer eyes. It makes things easier.

He steps in a shower stall, the air thick with stream, the sound of running water echoing faintly off the tiled walls.

He keeps to himself, as always. Others might describe him as quick and efficient, just get in and get out, with no wasted time. But here, it’s different.

Here, he slows down.

There’s no rush. No pressure for him to be fast. Just the steady rhythm of the water and his breath.

He takes his time, still methodical in every movement. Washing, rinsing, repeating, each step deliberate.

A routine. An intricate ritual he’s built for himself over time.

One of the few moments where everything is quiet.

Safe.

Because here, at this hour, no one’s looking. No one’s supposed to be looking. At him.

He doesn’t mind his scars. He doesn’t hate nor regret them, much. They’re a part of his life of being a soldier. Proof of what he’s endured. What he’s survived.

But that doesn’t mean he wants the stares. The way people try not to look… and fail.

So, he rather avoids it.

Late nights, empty spaces, minimal risks.

Control.

That’s what this is. That’s what this always is.

Which is why the sound of footsteps cuts through the quiet like a blade.

Close. Too close. Stopping right beside him.

His shoulder tense instantly, every muscle tightening under instinct alone. His jaw sets, a frown already forming as irritation sparks.

Out of all the free stalls, this fucker chose the one beside me.

This was supposed to be empty. His space. His me-time. Now ruined.

He turns, already bracing for the usual. Another pair of eyes, another moment of having to endure being seen.

He debates in his mind whether to call the fucker off and ask them to move.

Only to find… it’s you.

-

Sure, you were always on the move. Reports from one desk to another, one office to the next, never really stopping until everything was done.

But today… today wasn’t one of those days you could handle easily.

You’re exhausted. Completely knackered.

Your body aches in that dull, persistent way that comes from being on your feet too long, your mind just as drained from hours of sorting, organizing, thinking. You can feel it clinging to you. The fatigue, grime, the weight of the day sitting heavy on your skin.

So, the moment you’re finally dismissed, you don’t linger.

You head straight for the showers.

Head down as you undress yourself in the locker room. Only focused on one thing, that is, to clean up, clear your head, just standing under the water longer than you should.

You think there’s nobody in the shower room this late in the night. Not registering who’s already there. Because you’re too tired and too used to your routine.

You pick the nearest stall available without a second thought.

Turning on the shower as you step in. That’s when you felt some presence beside you. You turn to only realize you’re not alone.

You freeze.

Right beside you stand a towering figure, broad, and unmoving. And already looking at you.

At first, you don’t realize who he is, but you see his piercing gaze and instantly your head recognized it.

The mask is gone. But the man beneath it isn’t. Your breath catches, for just a second.

Because this was the rumored lieutenant, Ghost. The one who prefers to be alone.

During your runs, you always hear recruits complain when he gets assigned as the designated trainer. You noticed him sometimes during meetings, and the rumors checks out, he always stays a little far off where the crowd settles, and you always try your best not to look at his eyes. Since, a single stare felt like a dagger caressing your skin.

And right now, that dagger feels very much real as he’s glaring at you.

You feel the spike of tension crawling up your spine. Your body locks up, instinct telling you to look away, to apologize, to leave.

But you don’t.

Since something else catches your attention…

The scars. They’re… everywhere.

To you, it wasn’t messy nor random.

Your fear falters as your mind focuses, scanning his body. Taking the details of his scars, the location, where it starts and ends. You’re mesmerized by the man before you, that you didn’t notice how the lieutenant’s shoulders tensed further, at you returning the staring.

He tries his best to continue his own ritual but he’s far too uncomfortable to move. Usually, around this time, people were quick to apologize and leave him alone, maybe even steal some lingering gazes. But you, you’re intently staring. Like you forgot he’s even here.

Then he hears.

“…knife wound,” you murmur under your breath, eyes tracing a jagged line across his forearms. “Upward motion… definitely a result of blocking.” Your head tilts, studying the angle. “Attacker was aiming higher,” your eyes landed on his chest. “The heart, maybe.” A pause. “Good deflection, since the blade didn’t go too deep.”

Your gaze shifts without hesitation, unto a circular-ish scar. “This one… a gunshot. Seems to be close range base on the abrasions around the entrance…” you lean in sightly. “Angle is off… so, he was moving when it hit.”

Another scar catches your eye. Something rougher and older. “…field-treated,” you add quietly. “No proper stitching, so it didn’t heal cleanly like the rest…”

Then it hits you. You’ve been talking, out loud, about him. Invading his personal space and inspecting his injuries without an inch of his permission.

Eyes widening, snapping back into the moment. You straighten immediately, stepping back before bowing your head.

“Sir, I’m deeply sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to…” words fall out of your mouth, quick and genuine.

It also made his eyes widen from the sudden bowing. Sure, he got apologizes when people realized, but not to this degree, they usually say it and leave.

When you dip your head lower in your apology, that’s when you see more. More older, older than the field-treated one you saw seconds ago. Something more uglier.

Your gaze catches on his ankles first, and you pause. “…restrain marks,” you breathe, eyes flicking back up to see his wrists. Same wear. Proving that both set of scars came at the same time. Worn into his skin and not cut clean. You can only imagine it was left to be open and infected the way the scar healed.

You straighten yourself again, as you stare at his eyes. Now seeing his uncomfortableness of showing his skin. You feel ashamed. Minutes ago, you were eyeing his scars, like some sort of data. Forgetting that each of it was a story, a reminder of what the bearer has gone through.

“You didn’t deserve those, sir.” His eyes avoid yours. “But I’m glad you’re still here… with us.”

The words hang in the steam-thick air. Almost enough to make his eyes water.

So, he blinks, once, then again. Chest tightening in a way it hasn’t in years, a mixture of disbelief and something raw he isn’t used to naming.

Glad I’m still here.

The same words echo in his mind again. It wasn’t pity. Just… acknowledgement. Recognition.

Recognition that he, Simon “Ghost” Riley, survived, endured, and still matters. That someone didn’t recoil, judge, nor look at the scars and see brokenness.

For a moment, he feels it… that tight knot in his chest loosening, just a fraction. His lips press together, trying to swallow the sudden lump in his throat. He can feel moisture pricking the corners of his eyes, threatening to betray him.

Not here. Not now. Not like this.

He’s thankful that the droplets from the shower may be helping him hide his current predicament.

A warmth spreads from his chest, spreading tentatively outward, like sunlight through a thick storm he’s been stuck in for far too long. The usual walls he wears, the mask, the deliberate silence, the control, they feel thinner somehow, fragile in the face of this simple, honest recognition.

He swallows again, quietly. Gaze drops just slightly, locked somewhere between your chest and eyes, not fully meeting, but he knows you’re still staring at him, in a way that terrifies and comforts him all at once.

Someone… finally.

Thoughts he hasn’t let himself have in a long time, buried under years of fear, self-reliance, and the weight of being untouchable.

And he feels it… hope.

A little spark that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have to carry everything alone anymore. His shoulders dip slightly under the tension, a subtle release he doesn’t fully notice.

Just as the thought rises, it quickly dissipates as he realized he may have been quiet for far too long, the awkwardness hanging heavy in the air.

He coughs, tilting his head slightly toward the wall, trying to look busy while the tightness in his chest slowly eases. “Finish your shower, soldier,” he mutters, voice low but steady.

You do, though your own heart feels oddly fluttery. For a fleeting second, you catch the faintest crinkle at the corner of his mouth, and something inside you warms.

And then… the thought hits him. That nickname. “Tripod.”

Now that we’re here, might as well confirm right?

So, he does. Stealing a quick glance at your equipment to see whether he’ll believe the rumor or not.

Bloody hell…

-

It’s been a hell of a week for the lieutenant.

And not because of mission. Not because of paperwork. No, not any of his duties as a soldier.

Because of you.

You keep showing up, physically and mentally. Uninvited.

Whether its in the middle of drills, during briefings, or especially when he’s along, just trying to clear his head. Your voice, your words that night. It stuck to him, and worse than that it lingers.

He exhales sharply, dragging a hand down his face as if that would somehow clear the thought, when he fully knows it doesn’t.

Because then his mind betrays him further. Back in the moment at the showers. For some reason, he can’t get rid of the imagery of your equipment out his head. His mind began to wonder as he recalls the memory.

The length… he was sure it’ll take both his hands to cover it. The girth… and he was more sure his hand would struggle to fully wrap around it. He imagines the heat of your cock, warming up his hands as he slowly strokes you. Imagining the little twitches it’ll make the moment he’ll get you mouth on you.

Then… your words. He begins to imagine all the possible sweet nothings you’ll whisper to him the moment he’ll sink his hole into you. He wants it, to hear your voice again, words directed at him. He wants to feel his chest flutter, not just because of your massive dick rearranging his guts, but because your words makes him feel good.

It’s distracting, annoyingly so. Enough that he misses a beat during a briefing. Enough that his responses come a second to late. Enough that it doesn’t go unnoticed.

Price notices everything. “Something on your mind, lieutenant?”

The question comes naturally, but there’s weight behind it.

He doesn’t answer immediately. Doesn’t look back at him either. He just keeps his gaze forward, shoulders squared, like nothing’s wrong.

His silence made Price’s brows furrow. “Your focus is slipping, that’s not like you.”

A pause.

And then another.

Ghost exhales through his nose, nice and slow. “…it’s nothing, sir.”

Price just hums, clearly unconvinced. “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

The silence stretches between them. The captain waits. He always does.

Eventually, Ghost speaks. Not about everything, just enough to give the captain context. He’d rather die than confess to his captain about him fantasizing about another soldier’s dick piercing his insides.

Price listens, not interrupting a single second or thought from the lieutenant. Then, he smiles wide. Not mocking the poor man, just… knowing.

“Well,” Price says, folding his arms. “About time.”

Ghost’s head tilts slightly, a faint frown forming. “…sir?”

“I was starting to think you’d buried that part of yourself for good.”

He doesn’t answer back, he doesn’t need to.

This made Price’s gaze soften. “You’re distracted,” he admits. “And I don’t like that.” Another beat. “But I’ll take it over you forgetting that you’re still human after all, not just a ghost off the field as well.” A small smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Just make sure it doesn’t get you killed, yeah?”

Ghost exhales quietly, something unreadable crossing his expression as he takes his captain’s words. “…yes, sir.”

After that talk he decides he’ll face the root of his problem.

You.

-

You keep your presence down, same as always as you do your job. Filing logistics report with meticulous care, suggesting route tweaks during briefings that shaved off unnecessary risks, hauling gear without complaint. You prefer your work to speak for itself, because that way, no one needed to hover over you, and you like it that way.

But recently, it’s not the same anymore. Whenever you’re on the move during office hours, you feel it. A constant gaze behind you hiding somewhere. At first, you shrug it off. But the lingering presence stays. And that’s when you notice.

It’s Ghost.

You have no idea why the lieutenant is overseeing most of your movements now.

During morning PT, you hit the obstacle course with your usual steady rhythm. Vaulting walls, low-crawling under wires, breath even despite the burn in your quads. Sweat and mud soak your shirt as you crest the final rope climb. Reaching the top is when you notice him again.

Stationed at the edge of the field, arms crossed over his tactical vest, mask impassive under the brim of his cap. Not participating, just… watching. His gaze locks on you through the slits, unblinking, as if cataloging every flex of your arms, every heave of your chest.

You try to shake it off, lieutenants oversee drills sometimes, but the weight of his stare lingers like humidity after rain.

By midday briefing in the ops tent, being called by your CO again, the unease you felt roots deeper. You sit at the back, notebook open as you jot notes on every information being shared over the table.

You answer when your CO asks for your input. You see the captain of the other team your joining ops with, nodding as he approves of your input at the head of the table.

But as the discussion drags, you feel it again… that prickling awareness at your nape.

Ghost is across the room, leaning against a post, but his focus isn’t on the projected slides on the television. It drifts to you, subtle tilts of his head tracking your pen scratches, the way you shift in your seat.

When you glance up, his eyes snaps away, but not before you caught the intensity, like a sniper sighting a target.

Why is he constantly watching me?

You think as your pulse kicks up, fingers tightening on the edge of your notebook.

Afternoon training ramps it up. Live-fire range, you zero in on the targets with precise bursts, constant headshots and seamless reloads. The recoil jars your shoulder, but you stay locked in, ignoring the chatter of your squad behind you.

Halfway through the second mag, you notice a movement in your periphery. It’s Ghost again, prowling the perimeter fence, gloved hands loose at his sides. He paused near the observation bunker, his body angled towards the lanes, and you swear his stare bored into your back.

A round jams mid-drill, you cleared it quick, but your hands feel clumsy under the imagined weight of his attention.

Focus. You mutter to yourself, slamming the mag home and squeezing the trigger. But the nervousness coils tighter, heart thudding not from exertion, but from the sudden spotlight.

No one else clocks it, too busy with their own drills. It’s just you, hyperaware, wondering if you fucked up somewhere, resulting of this uncharacteristic orbit.

Evening rolls around and you’re in the mess hall. Tray already filled with food, you claim a corner table, taking out a manual to unwind as you take spoonful of bites. The fluorescent buzz of the lights above you mixed with low conversations and forks scraping plates.

That’s when Ghost slides in without a word in front of you. His own tray clattering down, his presence swallowing the space like smoke.

You freeze again the moment you register him.

“Soldier,” he rumbles, his voice sends a shiver down your spine. No preamble, no talking after that. Just his loaded stare as he eats his portion.

You swallow hard, fork pausing mid-air. “Lieutenant.” The word comes out steadier than you felt, but your gut twists.

The mess hall is supposed to be your reprieve, a place to wind down. And now, he’s here as well. The squad near you shoots curious glances your way, but Ghost’s aura kept them at bay.

“Everything alright, sir?” you ask, keeping your tone neutral.

He doesn’t answer right away, just chewing slowly, gaze dropping to your hands before flicking back up. “Just checking in.”

His words hang vague, like there's something raw and unspoken.

You just nod, forcing another bite, but the food tastes bitter now. Every shift of his frame, every subtle stolen glance, it amplifies the knot in your chest.

You finish quick, excusing yourself with a crisp ‘Good night, sir,’ and bolting for the barracks with your pulse racing.

The night falls heavy, but sleep seems to evade you. In your bunk, staring at the ceiling, you replayed the day. What even is there to replay but Ghost. Ghost. GHOST.

What does he want from me?

This feels like a pursuit, and in the dim glow of the barracks lights, it left you wired, body humming with half anxious energy, and the other half, you can’t explain as forbidden thoughts creeps in despite the dread.

-

His presence has been constant that sometimes you expect him now. What you didn’t expect, was due to this, is you forming some sort of sick fantasies in your head.

You kept replaying your memories that contains him, trying to find the cause of him watching your every single move. And that’s when you recalled.

The showers.

You weren’t lying when you were mesmerized with his body. It was clear he trains really hard to keep himself in shape. His bulging muscles, from his biceps to his thighs, it made you want to see him like that again.

But, you also recalled, the scars. You didn’t mind it really, in fact, it made you more proud to see him still standing this day. You weren’t lying when you said those words to him.

These mixed feelings continued to plague you. But one thing was clear, his smile near the end of your interaction. It was something real and genuine, you feel it within you. And you want to see him like that again.

Thoughts of him smiling, the way you want to give him the love (platonically, you want to think) he deserves. That he still deserves to live his life outside of being a soldier.

What the fuck am I thinking, he’s a lieutenant. Maybe I don’t belong to his team but what if-

You stop the thoughts as your cheeks reddens.

And so, you started to avoid him.

It starts out small.

During PT, you angle your path to the far side of the course, vaulting obstacles with your eyes fixed ahead, refusing to scan the sidelines. Briefings became a game of selective seating, slipping in last to claim a spot farthest from his usual lean against the wall. On the range, you scheduled your slots for off-hours.

It works, mostly. No one questions the sudden shift, since your outputs stayed flawless.

But the base feels smaller, the air thicker with an unspoken evasion. And deep down, you know it can’t hold.

That pull you continue to get as you get reminded of that shower scene. Better to ghost the Ghost, keeps the lines clean.

The lieutenant notice, of course he did. His presence sharpens into something more, like a predator scenting evasion.

A flicker of his silhouette during mealtime, where you bolt early to avoid sitting with him again. During briefings, the way you hide yourself behind some officers.

By mid-week, the irritation coils in him like a spring. Jaw clenching under the mask during drills he oversees from afar, responses to Price’s queries coming sharper, laced with mild venom. He started to snap at rookies, because his eyes hunt you, the one slipping from his grasp.

It pissed him off, this deliberate distance after the raw vulnerability, you’d cracked open in him. You’d seen his scars, filled him in ways that haunted his nights. And now? Dodging like he was the enemy. It gnaws at him, fueling a restless burn that demanded confrontation.

He tried to play nice… but he won’t play your game.

It’s another night for you. Wrapping up a solo gear inventory check in the warehouse, crates stacked neat, logs updated. Your shoulders knot from the day’s haul, you step out into the cooling air, boot soles crunching the gravel beneath you as you slowly made your way back to the barracks.

For a moment, everything is quiet, you, the night sky, and the wind flowing quietly as you take a deep breath. Then it shattered.

A gloved hand clamps your bicep, yanking you sideways into the narrow alley between supply sheds. Your back slams against the wall, breath punching out as Ghost loomed, pinging you there with his bulk.

His free hand braces beside your head, forearm caging you in, the heat of him radiating through your layers and his. Up close, his eyes burn, dark, stormy, laced with that pissed off look you sensed brewing for the past few days.

I’m screwed.

“L-Lieutenant,” you stammer, heart slamming your ribs, body tensing to bolt. But his grip tightens, thumb digging into muscle, holding you fast, cutting any chance of exit down to nada.

“Enough,” he growls, voice low and rough. “You think I didn’t notice what you were doing? Dodging me like I’m the fucking opposing force.” His breath ghosted hot through the fabric of his mask, inches from your face, and you catching the faint scent of gun oil and sweat clinging to him.

And it slowly made your dick wake up.

FUCK.

You swallow, throat dry, eyes darting for escape but finding none. “Sir, I-”

“No.” he leans in closer, knee nudging between your thighs to pin your legs, the pressure firm and unyielding.

FUCK.

Panic stirs within you as his thighs starts to send shivers all over you body as your slowly raging boner announces his presence. You thank whoever is above as Ghost seems to have not realize it yet.

“You made me feel… human.”

What?

You stare back at him now. Confusion spread across your face.

“Invading my thoughts and dreams. And now you hide? Like it meant nothing?” his words hang heavy... vulnerability cracking through his tough facade.

Your pulse thunders, as your cock now stirring traitorously against your zipper at the proximity and his voice. Your eyes continue to look for a way out before he finds out what this situation is doing to you.

His hand slides up, fingers curling around your jaw, tiling your head to force your eye contact back. He presses closer, hips grinding once, deliberate, and he feels it, and so does you.

He is also sporting a hard on underneath his pants, letting you feel the hard line of his arousal against your thigh. Suddenly, grabbing your groin, his turn to feel you.

Feeling your own hardness against his grip, he grins. “This is mine now. You’re mine.” Admission now out in the open, possessive and fierce. The closeness of his face against yours makes you notice the scars underneath, itching under the balaclava. “No more avoiding or I’ll make you regret it.”

Heat flushes your skin, submission coiling tight in your core, but you nod, breath hitching. “Yes, sir.”

A low hum rumbles from him, satisfaction now clear within. Without warning, he drags you from the wall, iron grip on your wrist, hauling you through the shadows towards the quarters.

The door to his clicks shut behind you, lock snicking reminding you of the finality. There’s no turning back now.

He shoves you against the door, teeth nipping your lip hard enough to sting.

“Clothes off,” he orders, stepping back, stripping his own vest and shirt in efficient yanks. His scars bared again, jagged knife lines crisscrossing his chest, puckered bullet crates dotting ribs, burn welts twisting over his shoulder. Pale skin stretched taut over muscle, cock already straining his pants, now leaking a wet spot.

You obey, fumbling as you remove the belt and zipper, shoving your pants down. Your cock sprang free, heavy and thick. Veins throbbing, head flushed dark. Ghost’s gaze locks on it, hunger flashing raw.

“Fucking missed this thing.” He mutters. Before you can ask what he meant, he’s already dropping to his knees with predatory grace.

One hand wrap around your base, fingers barely circling the girth, the other steadying your hip. He leans in, tugging his mask up just enough to free his mouth, tongue swirling the slit to lap the pre-cum.

Then, he sinks deeper, throat relaxing to take half of your length. He gags as he tries to push more inches, but struggles. Disappointed, he pumps what he couldn’t swallow, thumb pressing a vein that made your knees buckle.

Moans spills from you. “Fuck, sir… ahh yes.” Each assault of his lips drawing whimpers, body arching in the wet heat. He growls around your cock, the vibrations shooting sparks up your spine, free hand digging bruises into your thigh as he stables you.

Spit-slick sounds fill the room as his sucks turns sloppy, hungry, aiming to claim every inch. Your balls tighten, pleasure coiling within, but he pulled off with a pop, strings of saliva connecting his swollen lips to your glistening head.

“No, not yet,” he rasps, standing, shoving his pants down. His cock bobs free, curving up with a bead of pre at the tip, but he ignores it. Instead, pushing you toward the cot. “On your back. Now.”

You scramble, heart pounding, cock throbbing untouched as you stretch out. He straddles your hips, knees near your sides. Rubbing his ass against your shaft, and that’s when you feel it.

He’s wet?

You look around to see the bottle of lube on his bedside table. Turning back to him confirms your suspicions.

He raises up, as he grabs the lube and slicks his fingers. He works his hole quick, two breaching deep, scissoring with grunts that betrayed his impatience.

As you just stare, it was obvious he’s done this before. And the idea of you being the reason for it made you the more harder.

“Want you inside, now,” he demands, voice thick, positioning your cock at his entrance.

He sinks down slow at first, ring clenching tight around your head, then dropping with a hiss as inches stretches him wide, only halfway in.

“Fucking…. Big,” he groans, hands splaying on your chest, fingers gripping hard.

You can only moan loudly, the vice of his ass gripping you like a fist, hot and unyielding. “Tight-” your hips bucking up instinctively, but he pins you down. One hand now on your shoulder, while the other on your stomach. Rolling his pelvis to take you deeper.

“Quiet,” he snaps, but his own breath hitched, face contorting in pleasure-pain as he bottoms out, your balls finally snug against the back of his ass.

After a few seconds of adjusting, he rode you, hard and commanding. Ass slamming down, inner walls milking your length with each grind.

“That’s it, fill me up.”

You can’t think well anymore, the way he’s just using you makes you throb inside him harder. His words not even registering.

Due to his amazing blowjob earlier, your release hit like a grenade, cock jerking deep in Ghost’s ass as thick ropes of cum paints his insides. Gripping his hips hard, your fingers bruising the scarred skin there, slamming him down one last time to burry every pulse.

He groans low, settling his full weight on you, but he didn’t stop. Hips circling low, grinding to squeeze out more, his walls clenching rhythmically around your now sensitive shaft.

The overstimulation rips through you, nerves firing sharp, making your body spasm under him. Legs trembling, abs clenching as you buck weakly, a whine escaping your lips.

“Fuck- sir, too much,” you gasp, but he just hums, pressing his forehead to your chest, mask rough against your skin.

Something mumbled vibrates through you, words lost in the haze. Your mind slowly claws back from the edge of your high, breath steadying.  “I’m sorry, could you repeat that, sir?”

He lifts his head slightly, eyes dark and vulnerable through the mask’s slits, voice a rough whisper. “Please, don’t stop yet. I-Its your turn to control.”

The shift hits you like a green light, his submission laid bare, yielding the reins. Heat surges in your chest, cock already twitching again inside him despite the sensitivity.

You nod, hands sliding up his back, tracing the ridges of old wounds. “Don’t worry sir, I got you. Gonna make you feel good.”

“Simon…” he breathes. “Please, call me Simon.”

With a grunt, you roll him off you, careful but grip firm, his ass lifting with a wet schlick, cum leaking from his stretched hole onto the cot. He lands on his back, legs splaying wide, cock still hard and leaking against his abs, scars on full display under the dim light.

You kneel between his thighs, grabbing the back of his knees to hook them over your shoulders, folding him open. His breath hitches, hands fisting the sheets, but he doesn’t resist, eyes locked on yours, trust clear in his gaze, needy.

“Look at you,” you murmur, lining your cock up again, the head nudging his cum-slick rim. “All these strengths, these marks… they’re fucking beautiful, Simon.”

You push in slow, watching his face twist, lips parting on a silent moan as your thickness invades him again, cum easing the slide. Inch by inch, you sink deep, balls pressing to his ass, the heat of him pulling you under.

“Every scar tells how you survived. Such a good goddamn warrior.”

He whimpers, back arching off the cot, his cock jumping at the praise. Voice cracking as he calls for your name, hands reaching for your arms, gripping to anchor himself.

You start to thrust, steady at first, pulling out to the tip before driving back in, the slap of your hips against his ass filling the room once more. Each plunge hits deep, his prostate being grinded deep as your shaft passes through, making his thighs quake over your shoulders.

“I love these burns here.” You pant, leaning down to kiss one puckered spot on his chest, tongue flicking the rough texture. “Shows you fought fire and won. So hot, so tough.”

His moans grow louder, now unrestrained. “Ahh, fuck yes.” Head trashing, mask slipping slightly from sweat. His ass clenching around you, sucking you deeper with every withdraw, cum squelching out around your base.

You pick up the pace, pounding harder, one hand bracing beside his head, the other stroking his cock in firm pulls, thumb swiping the slit to spread his pre-cum.

“Your body’s perfect like this,” you growl, hips snapping forward, balls smacking skin. “Scars and all… fucking makes me want you more. You’re mine, Simon, just as I’m yours. Taking my cock so well.” The words pour out, raw and honest, targeting the shame he hides under all the layers and masks.

Tears prick his eyes, visible even in shadow, but pleasure overrides it. Body shuddering, moans turning to sobs of release. “Don’t- fuck, keep talking…” he bucks up to meet your thrusts, ass rippling around you, chasing the edge.

You oblige, voice low between grunts. “Love running my hands over them, feeling your heat.” Your free hand tracing a knife scare across his abs. “You’re fucking gorgeous, Simon. Every fucking inch.” Pressing firm as you fuck him relentless, your cock dragging his walls hitting his spot over and over.

It breaks him, his back arched, ass clamping as he cums hard, cock erupting in your fist. Ropes of his cum shot across his chest, splattering the scars, his mouth open in a silent scream that turned vocal. Moaning your name before a “Fuck, yes!” released from his mouth. Body convulsing, walls milking you in ways that nearly pulls your own orgasm back.

You let him ride through it, thrusts slowing to deep rolls, drawing out every spasm until he slumps, panting and spent.

You remove your cock inside him as you lay on his cum-covered chest, jerking your cock, head aiming for his face. You remove his mask fully first before painting his face white.

Emotions crashes in his gaze, raw vulnerability, his shame melting under the affirmation.

You lay down beside him, panting hard as the physical labor catches up to you.

After a few minutes, he coughs to clear his throat, turning to you. “Not a word to anyone.” His voice back to his lieutenant tone.

You chuckle for a second, before realizing he’s serious. “Of course, sir.”

He smiles, as he nuzzles to you, resting his head against your chest.

For a moment, neither of you speak. Just the sound of breathing.

Yours are still heavy and uneven. His are slower, gradually settling as the tension leaves his body in quiet waves. You feel it in the way he presses closer.

Present.

Your hands moves almost instinctively, coming up to rest against his shoulder. Then higher. Careful and slow. Tracing along one of the scars on his face. Just… feeling.

He tenses for a second before easing in. A quiet exhale leaves him, softer than anything you’ve heard from him before.

“…you’re staring again,” he mutters, voice low, but there’s no bite to it.

You pause before responding. “…just making sure you’re still here.”

That earns you a silence. Not an uncomfortable one, but the opposite.

His fingers curl slightly against your side, grip tightening just a fraction, like he’s grounding himself, or maybe grounding you.

“…I am,” he finally says after a moment.

No rank being thrown, nor edge. Just the truth between two men.

Your thumb brushes lightly over his skin again, slower this time. “Good,” you murmur.

He shifts slightly, adjusting so he’s more comfortable against you, head tucked in under your chin. You can feel the steady rhythm of his breathing against your chest now. Your hand rustling his head softly.

“…don’t make this a habit,” he says after a while, his voice still lacking any real warning.

You smile faintly, eyes already half-lidded from exhaustion. “What? Taking care of you?”

A small scoff leaves him, barely audible. “…thinking you can.”

“Too late for that, sir.”

He doesn’t respond. You take his silence as him getting his sleep until…

“Before we sleep, can you grab me a towel or any cloth and wipe your spunk off my face?”

Shit. Right.

-

a/n: just needed to get this one out of my head after a very tiring midterms week LMAO

Mahito always knew he was special. The ability to reshape the soul and body – turning people into sorcerers, making servants out of crumpled little souls, being nigh immortal? It sounded overpowered on paper, and he liked that he was considered a threat to sorcerers. It was like a pat on the back every time one of them struggled against him or had to call for backup. Getting ganged up on was annoying, but it did make his ego swell.

Upon meandering through Geto's library and rifling through personal notes on curses, however, he found something that he did not like at all.

The scroll contained a story about an ancient curse. And not just any curse – a curse that instilled terror through controlling and altering the soul.

His mood soured immediately. That was his thing! The thing that made him special! Sure, techniques could be similar – any shikigami user would agree – but Mahito hated feeling second to anything. This would mean he wasn't even original.

The curse couldn't have been very good with it, anyway, getting sealed up like a mouse in a Tupperware container. He tosses the scroll back onto the shelf with a roll of his eyes, flouncing away and fully intending to forget it all in a few days.

But he can't. The report, written in the style of a mythical tale with the same purposeful vagueness over details, stuck in the back of his mind like a tack. Just thinking about it made him edgy, and that pissed him off like nothing else.

He began to spend a lot of time in Geto's library – to the point that the others took notice, commenting on how much self-imposed homework he was doing regarding a mostly-forgotten Heian-period curse. It was annoying, of course, but not as annoying as the itch in the back of his mind that occurred whenever he remembered that he wasn't the first to have such a distinctive technique.

Most of the related scrolls in the library are written like cautionary tales or children's bedtime stories. It details the sorcerer clans that fought the curse and how they eventually restrained him, trapping him deep in the earth to become the roar of Mt Fuji's eruptions and the crashing rumbles of tsunamis. But not one explains why they didn't just exorcise the thing. It makes him suspicious, and he delves deeper.

After several days and nights of research, warehouse burglaries, and one impromptu sorcerer kidnapping, he finally has something to show for his obsession: a location.

He travels alone in the dead of night to Nara. The Kasugataisha shrine, housing over three thousand lanterns, also houses the curse he seeks. It's supposed to be a relic on display. Between all the chaos of shrine reconstructions and the fact that it's a thousand years old and has never been carefully monitored in a temperature-controlled museum box, Mahito attributes the fact that it hasn't been lost or destroyed to sorcery. Jujutsu sorcery, that is.

Mahito finds it sequestered away in an auxiliary shrine, displayed along the path in the shade of the forest. It is the only remaining emakimono from the Heian period and is almost perfectly preserved; during his research, he found that most humans attributed its miraculous survival to its presence at the shrine. Divinity did such wondrous things, Mahito thought drily.

Staring at it in person, it doesn't seem like much. It's an old paper scroll, twelve metres long, rolled up at one metre to make it less intrusive, and it rests inside a glass box. A little white panel with a description in both Japanese and English sits off to the side, but that's all it gets. This is not, after all, a museum. At the bottom, there's a website listed for the full twelve metres of art, as well as the name of a nearby museum with a reproduction so the scroll can be enjoyed in person at its full size, as intended.

Funny how the reproduction is the one in the light- and temperature-regulated building, he muses. The locals had been afraid to have it removed from the shrine – superstition goes a long way.

Mahito flicks his wrist. The glass shatters all at once, bursting with an exploding tinkling noise. He brushes the glass off his arms and reaches inside, picking the emakimono off the display hooks. Nothing stops him – there are no seals, no markings, not even a whiff of cursed energy.

He purses his lips and unrolls it to the span of his arms. It doesn't feel important. Was his information wrong?

He turns it the other way, letting it hang from his hand, and dumps the rest of the scroll unceremoniously. It smacks the stone path, tumbles away from him, and unrolls.

It takes a good few seconds to unfurl all twelve metres of paper. Mahito scrutinises the artefact as it does, brow furrowing as he brushes his fingers over the paint and ink.

It's just old paper.

Mahito whines to himself and stomps his foot in a tantrum. All this work for absolutely nothing? He wants to kill something. Slaughter it. Pull it apart and watch it spill. He hurls the end of the scroll down in a huff, and the wooden rod clatters roughly on the path.

Then the wood starts to bleed.

He doesn't notice, hands over his eyes and head tilted back. He's fine! Everything's fine! Back to square fucking one, but that's fine. He is fine.

Truthfully, he's still not quite sure why he's so... interested in this curse. None of the texts he came across mentioned anything about why it decided to become an enemy of the sorcerers, so it isn't a case of matching life purpose. Part of him wants to fight him, best him in combat and prove that he's not just a shadow of something greater. Another part of him wonders if this curse could... teach him a few things. He's not above learning some tricks.

A presence looms behind him, suffocating and nauseous. His pale eyes snap open behind his hands.

"Another weaver?" a voice whispers in the back of his mind, soft and dangerous as lead. Cold fingers curl around his jaw, sharp nails digging into the stitches across his skin. It forces his face to tilt to the sky and he gasps as he staggers backward. Deep pools of amusement stare down at him, curiosity low and languid in half-lidded feline eyes.

"No," the ancient curse decides, a disdainful smile pulling at its lips as Mahito grabs its arm with triumphant glee. Delight flashes in its eyes as Mahito's grin slips off his face. A raw terror fills his gut as his technique grasps at nothing, clawing at an emptiness where a soul should be. "My mistake... You are nothing so extraordinary."

Mahito begins to struggle, clawing at meat and bone, and his flesh bubbles and twists as it morphs rapidly between shapes. The curse watches him inquisitively, barely twitching as Mahito elbows a long, lance-like protrusion into its stomach.

"What a pity," the curse murmurs, letting go of his face as if it can't bear the sight of him.

Mahito trips in his eagerness to get away, scrabbling over the rocky path. His chest heaves as he stares up at the curse, haloed by misty moonlight. His instincts blare red. "Y-You're—! You're not..."

The curse tilts its head, gaze eerie and unblinking, and Mahito feels like he's drowning.

He picks himself off the ground and runs.

—

"Gojo Satoru?"

"That's my name! Don't wear it out."

"This is for you." The sorcerer offers a hand scroll, looking nervous. She's got the same white hair as he does, and if he squints, she sort of looks like a cousin he used to torment with worms as a child. Maybe that's why she looks like she's swallowing glass with every word. "It was found at the gates of the estate with a seal – nobody can open it. It's addressed to the clan head."

"Huh?" He accepts it, turning it over in his hands. He touches the red seal. "Weird... I don't recognise the cursed energy signature. No one saw anything?"

She shakes her head. "The elders think it's from, er, Geto Suguru's group of curse users. They advised caution when opening it—"

Satoru shatters the seal with an excessive blast of cursed energy, which ruffles his hair.

He unrolls it, squints, raises his eyebrows, then barks a laugh. "Nah. No way it's his. Who uses kanbun like this these days?" He flips it around and shows her. "Literary Chinese? This person is old-old. I'll go out on a limb and say it's a man, so you can go ahead and tell the old geezers to focus their efforts. Well – that's if they wanna do anything at all."

"A man? Why do you say that?"

He lifts a finger. "This scroll mentions Sukuna through an old contemporary title that no one uses anymore, so our buddy's probably from the Heian period. So many of those these days, right? During that time, men were taught written Chinese, as it was the language of government. Noblewomen used kana, which was less formal. In conclusion, it's likely a man – one who had links to the imperial court." Satoru's lower lip juts out and he taps his chin, scrutinising the careful, inky strokes. "An immortal sorcerer...? But then why wouldn't they use modern language? Is it an obstacle in case someone else managed to open it? Or is it meant as a clue to their identity?"

"Do they sound like an ally?" she asks hesitantly. Immortality is always a threat.

"Eh..." Satoru scans the paper, tilting it off-kilter as if it'll help him read it better. "No idea!" he chirps. "My Chinese isn't very good."

He shrugs, rolling it back up again. He steps past the young woman, playfully bopping her on the head with the end of the scroll. "Thanks anyway for the message. I'll be in the city for the rest of my day off, so if the elders want me, tell 'em to pound sand, 'kay? Catch ya later, alligator!"

She grumbles, glaring at his back. Thirty years old and he's still the same kid who put worms in her glass of milk.

—

Satoru leans back in his booth, idly adding two sugars to his tea. The café is a bright little place, popular with young people, and Satoru's unique appearance has garnered more than a few curious glances.

"My. You Gojo clan children all look the same."

Satoru glances up as a body slips into the seat across from him. His brow furrows, and his teaspoon pauses against the rim of his cup.

His Six Eyes scream curse. Common sense screams human.

"What are you?" he says sharply.

You place a teacup and plated muffin on the table. You have a receipt that says you paid in cash. Dressed in a textured white hakamashita kimono and black-and-gold hakama, you have the grace of a dancer and the steadiness of a tailor, every movement precise and purposeful. You lift your eyes and smile politely.

"Not something you must fear," you say, pushing the plate closer to Satoru. "My name is—"

"I know who you are."

"Really?" You tilt your head. "Not many do."

"Yeah, really-really," Satoru replies. He peers at the muffin. Triple choc-chip. You even collected a fork for him. "You've got a hard-on for souls, rules, and order. You had significant influence over the imperial court from the Asuka to Heian periods. You like art."

Your smile grows wider, almost genuine – if a little condescending. "Clever little thing, aren't you? Perhaps you know why I searched for you, then. I'd save my breath."

He begins to stir his tea again. Behind you, the young cashier stares, clearly enamoured by your outfit. She's a non-sorcerer. "I dunno. Lessons on modern life? What a crosswalk is, how to use a phone? Honestly, I'm surprised you aren't walking around in full formal sokutai."

He is also curious about your apparent knowledge of currency. Barter and trade were the main economy in your time.

"You do not come to be my age without understanding how to fit in, Gojo-san," you hum, taking a sip of your tea. It is strangely sweet, but not unappetising. "I come with a request. I hoped my history with your clan would allow me a sliver of your time."

"Depends on what it is," Satoru says, fiddling absently with his blindfold. You know part of him itches to unleash devastation upon you, right here and now. It's a sorcerer's instinct. "You've been polite so far, so fire away."

"A name," you say truthfully, setting down your teacup. Your countenance becomes grave. "I was released not long ago by a curse with a technique that afflicts the soul. He did not linger. I want to find him."

Satoru rolls his neck with a sigh, stretching his arms over his head. He settles back in his seat, folding his ankle over his knee, and jiggles his foot. "Uh-huh. Okay. You gonna tell me why you want this curse?"

"To thank him, perhaps. Or, more likely, to kill him. He seems cowardly, unfit for the power he wields – a mistake I must rebalance."

Satoru laughs, resting an arm on the back of the booth seats. "Ooh, man, you old curses are all so... intense! You know, there aren't a whole lot of records about you – I dunno if I wanna help you. Nothing personal, just a lack of insight. You get me?"

"I can appreciate a pursuit for knowledge. Very well," you concede. "What do you want to know?"

"I know you had history with my clan, but the records seemed purposefully wishy-washy. Why did they collude with you?"

"There was no collusion," you chuckle, interlacing your fingers on the table. "They sought me out. By nature, I am more than a simple curse born of fear. Some call me the Weaver, or perhaps the Allotter. I can not only touch but also alter a soul, and can suggest certain proclivities or dispositions. In some cases, I can completely revise a person's fate with just a warp and weft. Inclinations and temperaments go far in paving the path of one's life."

"You can change people's futures? Through the soul?"

"In a word: yes. That is why your ancestors sought me out and why I spent so long toying with imperial politics. Existence is a careful balancing act. I am its scales."

There is a glitter in your eye. So, Satoru deduces, you are proud. You may be sitting in this café with him and looking him in the eye, but you do not stand on equal ground. You are better. More.

"Sounds fun. Bet they liked it for saving face when someone got rebellious. Is there anything else you can do?" he asks as he sits forward, spinning his cup by the handle in slow circles.

"Why, Gojo-san? Planning on fighting me?" you say, voice lilting with amusement. You pull your sleeves up slightly as you reach for your tea and take a sip. "I see souls differently to your Six Eyes. Let me show you."

You extend a hand but he snatches your wrist out of mid-air, grip tightening in warning. With a soft, airy chuckle, you open your palm placatingly, brushing his chin.

"I won't do anything to you, Gojo Satoru – you have my word. I need you for what you know, and I may need your alliance in the future. While I could make you more trusting and subservient, I cannot force you to trust and obey me in particular. Puppetry is below me. Gods create the flood – they do not drag the dogs to drown."

"Oh, goodie, making friends with megalomaniac curses," he mumbles to himself. "Yaga's going to be so disappointed."

"You can't care about that," you say, a touch patronising. "You are stronger than them all, existing naturally in a place beyond their most desperate capacities. Why does someone like you submit to the weak?"

"I do care about that. Yaga's cool. Unlike you, I'm not about to be a tyrant and force everything to bend to my will."

"Oh, why not?" you drawl, leaning in with a dangerous grin. "Power is fun. Showing off is fun. Having servants pick up your brush just to place in your hand is fun. That's all I'll do today – show off what I see. It is far superior to your Six Eyes. After all, if we are to be allies, it is good to know what tricks we have up our sleeves."

Satoru stares you down. His grip loosens, and he folds his arms over the edge of the table. "Fine. But no funny business, or I'll put a hole in your skull – and it'll be a really big one."

Your smile widens as you reach out towards his chest, gently twisting your fingers in the air with a delicate ripple. You make a gesture as if pushing something aside, and you close your eyes and focus.

His breath catches in his throat and the world goes quiet, as if his head was dunked under water. Shimmering, translucent golden threads extend from the pinch of your thumb and the bend of your little finger, taut over the first joint of your fingers. They fade into nothing as they travel towards his chest – it's your touch that brings them forth into tangibility.

You tap the bundle of threads, humming softly as you gaze at them. "I can join, weave, and sever these threads. I could paralyse you or sever your soul's connection to your body – and to this earth."

"Ooh. Scary."

"Isn't it?" You chuckle and release his soul, leaning back. Air rushes back into his lungs and the café noise returns. "Are you pleased with what you know? Will you help me?"

"For a curse with a god complex, you're surprisingly deferential."

"I thrived in court politics for several hundred years, Gojo-san. I know how allies are made."

"Hm." He sits forward, pulling the chocolate muffin towards him. He picks up the fork and breaks off a piece of the top, sliding the prongs against his teeth. "What drew you to it? Court, I mean. With your technique, you could've been like Sukuna, taking power by easy brute strength. Aristocrats are always back-stabby. So annoying."

You tilt your head thoughtfully, a wistful little smile on your face. You lift a contemplative finger to your lips. "I like luxury. I didn't want to live in a forest, lying in muck and bathing in cold river water. I was also quite popular with women."

Satoru can't help but snort. He stabs the muffin. "Real ladies' man, were you?"

"Unfortunately not. I unsettled people the longer they spent around me. I did, however, make up for it through my excellent calligraphy and poetry. I once wrote a wonderful piece about Lake Biwa that the emperor himself enjoyed – I wonder if it has survived."

"I doubt it. A thousand years is a long time." Satoru peels the paper liner from the muffin, cutting it into bite-sized pieces. He pops one into his mouth with a pleased hum. "Well, colour me intrigued! You want Patchface, right? Crazy eyes, long hair, looks like he got stitched back together after a Final Destination death?"

"That would be the one."

"Then you're in luck. We've got sightings we're supposed to check out, and if I can save my guys the trouble, all the better. Meet me here tomorrow, same time, and I'll get you the file."

"Perfect." Your smile widens, almost unnaturally so, and you press your fingers to your lips to hide your sick glee. "You don't know what this means to me, Gojo-san. Such meaningless chaos is a blight on this earth and must be purged. I will be the hammer that falls."

—

"Hello. You must be this Geto Suguru I've heard so much about."

Suguru turns, tilting his head. His long dark hair cascades over his shoulders. He scans your figure – your hands are clasped behind your back, and you are clothed in traditional dress.

"You're no miko," he says, a teasing lilt to his soft voice. "I'm afraid you can't be back here. My visiting hours are over for today – we open tomorrow at eight o'clock sharp, if you would like to return then."

You smile, sharp and a little cruel, and Suguru's smile fades into a frown. You observe the picturesque temple from the engawa, the wood beneath your feet barely creaking as you step forward.

"It is unfortunate that sorcerers have fallen so far as to be unable to recognise their foe standing before them," you hum, gaze flickering towards him from the corner of your eye. "Back in my day, being a sorcerer meant something. It seems they take just about anyone these days."

"I beg your pardon?" Suguru's voice is like a knife.

"I am not looking for salvation. If I were, I doubt I would find it with you, sorcerer," you chuckle, watching the burnt orange leaves swirl gently across the pebbled paths. The golden sunset casts a soft glow over the temple grounds. Tall bamboo canes edge the gardens, making it feel intimate. You have missed such sights. "'Curse user', I should say, though I was never fond of that name. Morality is not so binary; not every sorcerer who rejects jujutsu society necessarily allies themselves with curses."

Suguru's folded hands drop to his sides, fingers inching towards a slender knife hidden in his belt. You're too close to risk the time it takes to summon his inventory curse. "Who are you and what do you want?"

You click your tongue. "So rude. I spoke with the Gojo clan head this morning – he had the foresight to stay his blade. You appear to have no such restraint."

"You know Satoru?"

The words come quick, sudden, punched out of him. His eyes widen; he knows his mistake.

You smile – not kindly. "The boy was generous enough to offer me your name. I take it you are the leader of your little establishment? I am looking for someone. One, I am told, who is under your command. It calls itself Mahito."

"I'm not telling you a thing before I know what you are."

"Ooph," you huff, waving a hand in the air as if dispelling smoke, "always the 'what', never the 'who'! Tell me – what is it that makes it obvious? I was so certain I had it mastered."

"You don't breathe," Suguru points out. "Nor do you blink."

"Ah..." You sigh, pressing your fingertips to your temple. "Such simple faults. I've grown careless. I didn't have to blink when I was trapped in that shrine. Now that you know what I am, will you tell me where I can find this 'Mahito'? I understand that you have appointments to keep. My time is equally precious."

Suguru's eyes flick over your figure. His gaze darkens. "Alright. Stay here. I'll find Mahito and send him to you."

"Thank you, Geto-san. I promise I won't wander off," you say playfully, smoothing down your hakama and taking a seat on the wooden steps. You brush leaves off the engawa. "You're doing me a wonderful favour."

"Don't mention it," he replies, expression unreadable. "He'll be here soon."

When Suguru finds Mahito – obsessing over old folktales and Heian-era courtesan diaries, as usual – he doesn't grace him with a greeting. He yanks him away from the long library table and stares him down.

"This is all because of you, isn't it?" he demands.

Mahito blinks, big grey eyes the picture of innocence. "Eh – what's 'cause of me?"

"There is a curse on my steps asking for you, Mahito," he says sharply. "You wouldn't have anything to do with that, would you?"

"Um, no. I've barely gotten out the last few weeks," he complains. "I'm not making you any enemies. Swear it. Cross my heart."

"Well, it's a curse that's spoken to Gojo Satoru, lived, and received his help. I believe you've been learning about an ancient curse with favourable relations to the ancestral Gojo clan. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this." His dark eyes narrow.

"You're accusing me of releasing him?" He sneers. "I haven't done anything! You think I'd shake Sukuna two-point-oh out of a box for fun? I'm not stupid."

"What would be stupid is releasing a powerful curse with no binding vows to keep us out of reach," Suguru hisses. "If this truly is the curse I think it is, then heavens above, you may as well have packaged us up, tied off a bow, and presented it to him. He deals in souls, Mahito, and not like you. He is judge, jury, and executioner of every living being, and you brought him right to our doorstep!" He inhales sharply, smoothing his hair out of his eyes with a snap of his sleeve. "Meet him by the east gardens. Speak to him. Kill him, if you can. Just don't keep him waiting."

In the gardens, Mahito recognises the broad back and perfect hair with a stone in his throat. There is a soft breeze, and your hair flutters slightly as leaves swirl around you, grazing the mossy paths and floating atop the pond's dark surface.

You stand, and Mahito is once again reminded of how imposing you are, dangerous and beautiful like a snake.

"Mahito. That is a title given to the descendants of the Imperial Family. You think so highly of yourself that you would invoke their memory, call yourself a child of the divine? How arrogant."

Your voice is as smooth as silk. You flick a hand out, fingers splayed, and the glittering golden nail guards gracing your fingers are like needles.

You make a pinching gesture, like gently grasping the stem of a brush – airy golden threads weave around your fingers. You glance over your shoulder with a growing smile, eyes crinkling at the corners like a lover looking at their darling. "Kneel."

Mahito gasps as the earth meets his knees painfully – painfully? – and his palms press into the stony path, sharp pebbles cutting into his skin. His forehead brushes the ground, and no matter how hard he strains, he can't move – he can't even lift his head.

"You," he wheezes, chest constricted, as he stares down at the mottled stones. "It's really you."

"Did you miss me?" you ask with a feline smile, gliding towards him. The pale golden threads of his soul are still wrapped around your fingers, bundled together like wilting flower stems. "Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but having fun with someone, then running away when the deed is done, really hurts. I didn't even catch your name."

You sigh regretfully, crouching down before him and cupping his chin to tilt it up. His eyes flicker around him like a prey animal, and his fingers twitch as he attempts to use his technique. It's amateurish, easily subdued.

"Now, I am obligated to thank you for releasing me, however sloppily," you declare, turning his face this way and that, "but I must also punish you for treading so woefully far out of your league. What if I were a terrible, savage thing, one who would sooner slaughter you than speak with you? From one curse to another, I will teach you a lesson in control."

You draw away from him and he fears the way he yearns for your touch, body straining to return to the palm of your hand. Picking a single thread from the wispy bundle, you cut it clean in two with a razor-sharp flick of your nail guards.

A devouring hollowness seeps into his chest, black and hungry. He stares, trembling slightly, as you carefully select another, and another, and cut those as well. His head spins, his stomach lurches, and his veins run cold.

Then, taking the two ends of cut threads, you tie them together, and with a sway of your open palm, the knot vanishes, smoothing out into a single unbroken strand. You hum softly as you work, slow and meticulous. For you, this is not a battle. Only work. He is no threat to you – not even a thorn in your side.

You show him your artistry, delighting in your own design. The thread shimmers white-gold, brighter than the rest. "Isn't it lovely?" you ask, weaving the thread into his soul. It twists amongst the golden tapestry, its pale length entwined with the rest. "Your soul is a mess, tied and untied too many times during your transfigurations, but it holds strong. Its one redeeming quality, I suppose. Most do not take well to such drastic alterations."

A compliment? His heart skips a beat. You are undeniably beautiful, like a snow of cherry blossoms.

"Hm... here is the difference between you and I. You damage your opponents' souls and use your own as your last line of defence, yes?" You pause, waiting. "Speak, dear."

His heavy tongue flicks against the roof of his mouth. "Y-Yes..."

"Good. Now, if you knew better, you'd know how to keep your soul out of reach – to be effectively immortal. It isn't enough to simply push it to where your opponent's blade is not. We must be proactive, not reactive. Do you understand?" You push two of your fingers through the weave of his soul, parting the threads with ease. Mahito gasps, pleasure and pain searing him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

"Your weakness is that you require physical touch. While you can attempt to compensate with unpredictability, your opponent still knows they can't let you get close. I have no such limitation. I may teach you how – if I find you worthy of it." You press another finger into the weft, slipping and curling your fingers into the silky twisted threads. Mahito's eyes roll back as his body throbs with liquid fire, deeper than he thought possible.

You tilt your head, eyes trained on his soul in your palm. Your lips purse. "Oh, poor thing. It's all kinked and knotted. But as someone famed for their gentle touch?" You lean in and a grin spreads across your face from ear to ear. "I could help you relax."

Mahito makes a sound like a gurgle as you stroke the soft golden threads with your thumb, smoothing out the split fibres and sharp corners.

"Wait," he manages to choke out, still prostrate before you. "W-Wait."

"Look at me when you address me." Abruptly, you seize his chin and force his face up, fingers digging into his jaw. Saliva drips down his chin from the corner of his lips, trailing over your fingers, and his face is a deep crimson red, eyelids fluttering and pupils blown wide. He whimpers, shuddering at your touch.

You observe him for a while, grip tightening and forcing his lips into a pathetic fishy pout. It'd be almost cute if he weren't so piteous.

"Yes?" you prompt. "What is it?"

He swallows uselessly, his length dripping and smearing the inside of his dark trousers. "Hurts."

"Yes, well, that is the point. How will you learn if there is no incentive?" You push two fingers into his mouth and he yelps, moaning wretchedly as you stroke the back of his wet throat. You tap his tongue, ignoring how he quivers. "Suffering builds character."

He drools on your fingers, lips closing around them. He tries to say something else, but you press down on his tongue and all he can get out is a pathetic little 'aah'.

You glance down, and a mocking smile spreads across your face at the sight of the obvious bulge in his dark trousers, a patch where the tip is even darker with pre. He squirms under your attention, his eyes flickering madly between you and his surroundings for an escape. He hasn't ever been so clearly outclassed before.

"Pitiful," you murmur, pulling your fingers out and wiping his saliva on his shirt. You grab his jaw and tug him up onto his knees to better inspect his shame. "Can I let go of you, or will you try to run?"

"Please..." His chest heaves. He's never begged for anything.

You release your hold on his soul. His body sags, his own once more, and the first thing he does?

He starts to scramble away.

You sigh, clicking your tongue derisively. You grab his pale ankle and yank him back – he cries out, nails raking lines into the pebbled paths.

"That was my fault. You never promised me anything." You push him to the ground, one hand firm between his shoulder blades. You shift your hips over his, pinning him in place, and play with his waistband, letting it snap back against his thin hip. He flinches at the sound. "But I won't lie – you've gotten me curious. What exactly were you begging for?"

Mahito glances over his shoulder at you, heart pounding behind his ribs. Instead of answering, he asks a question of his own. "What – what do you want?"

"An answer, if you could believe it."

"No – what do you want with me? Why did you come here? You coulda run, done whatever you pleased to anyone you wanted!"

You tilt your head, your weight not quite oppressive on top of him. You consider his words. "Your technique was what intrigued me. Never in all my years had I seen something even tangentially similar to my own." The threads of his soul dance between your fingers. "I have something embarrassing to admit: I long for companionship. Even Ryomen Sukuna had his little sorcerer servant. I wondered if you might be that companion – a successor, of sorts. If you agree, I am willing to forgive your earlier blunders."

Mahito's voice quivers. "And if I say no?"

"I will eliminate you."

It's not like he has much of a choice, does he?

You feel him slump below you. You hum, pleased, and begin to stand – but he grabs your wrist, keeping you on top of him.

"You're leaving me? Just like that?" he whispers, eyes huge.

"What else would I do? I've gotten what I asked for."

"You're—" He swallows, his head spinning. "You're gonna leave me like this...?"

"Why would I—" You halt. Oh. Amusement flits its way across your lips. You lean down, breath hot against the shell of his ear. He suppresses a shudder. "Oh, dear... you like what I do to you, don't you? Do I make you feel empty, helpless, starved? Would you like me to fix that for you, Mahito?"

He shivers at the way you purr his name, syllables soft and round. Would he? Would he like that? Part of him still wants to shred you to pieces for even touching him, for flaunting your superiority so brazenly.

But, as your touch shifts from pinning to playful, your fingers threading through his blue-grey hair the same way you caress his soul, Mahito's hostility melts into hot, heady desire.

"You long for me, don't you, Mahito?" you taunt, entwining your fingers with his like lovers do. "Like a little puppy waiting for its owner. Hah! How embarrassing."

"I'm not—!"

The back of your hand cuts sharply across his cheek. His head snaps to the side. It hurts.

"If I call you a puppy, you'll bark. If I call you a whore, you'll open your legs." You press your thumb into the dip of his hip, nails grazing his stitches. "If you want me to stay, to fix your broken little body, you are what I say you are. Am I clear?"

A wrecked noise escapes his throat. He nods as best he can with your fist in his hair.

"Good dog." You ruffle his hair – almost nurturing – and tug his hair ties out, leaving it all to pour over his shoulders, pale blue like an evening fog. He's as pliant as anything, and though he shrinks away when you tug his trousers down around his knees, he rocks his hips back meekly, searching for your own. "Stay still."

He stills. You bare your teeth in a sharp smile.

Carefully undoing your robes, you unwind them just enough to bare your chest and free your cock. Mahito watches it all, uncharacteristically silent – though his breathing quickens when he spies the size of your dick.

You grasp your shaft and guide Mahito's hips up. You tap it against his tight puckered hole and his breath hitches as the weight of the situation finally renders.

It takes some effort to fill his rippling walls with every inch of you. He gasps, elbows buckling under his weight, and he immediately slicks up like a cunt. The stretch is tight – suffocating, even – and you let out a low purr, eyes half-lidded and dark with sadistic delight.

"You fit me well," you murmur. "Like a practiced bitch."

He clenches his eyes shut, his hole fluttering around you as you languidly pump your hips back and forth – nice and deep. When you shove in the last few inches, burying your whole length in him until your base presses firmly against his ass, his body tenses and his cock throbs with a spurt of precome. He wants to widen his legs but his stupid pants lock his knees at waist-width.

He makes a noise high and whiny at the back of his throat. You trail your fingers down the stitches over his joints. Looks something like a puppet – or a doll, you think idly, gradually pressing down on him between his shoulders. He shudders and gasps, nails digging into the fine gravel path, and his hips jolt towards you, his hole clenching deliciously.

"Hnn..."

"What? Nothing to say anymore?"

He scrabbles at the ground, his head dropping onto his forearm below him. His pale hair cascades over his shaking shoulders.

"Shame," you murmur. "But I won't say I don't like a challenge. You'll have learnt obedience by the time I'm done with you."

You pin him to the ground, throwing your weight onto his upper half while you pound his slick little hole, tight and quivering. He squeals like a piglet, his legs kicking and toes curling as he moans desperately. His spine arches dramatically.

"I – ugh—!" His nails dig into the loose fabric gathered by your waist. "Ahh! Ah, ah, n-not like this! Y-You can't treat me like this...!"

"Who'll stop me? You? Don't make me laugh." You lean down, burying your cock deep into his asshole, and his dick spurts weakly as your length forms a sizeable bump in his stomach. He heaves and gasps, a hand flying down to cradle it, and his eyes roll back as you grab the back of his head and slam him into the dirt. His mouth falls permanently open, an unending stream of cries and moans falling from his lips.

You grind your cock into him, his firm ass clapping against your thighs, and you hike his sagging hips higher with a click of your tongue, fingers brushing his throbbing cock and making him keen. The bulge of your dick through his stomach makes him giddy, even as you yank roughly at his hair to manhandle his body the way you like it.

He comes without warning, ass clenching like a vice, and your cock scrapes roughly against his gummy walls as he quivers and screams. Your cock twitches in his flat stomach as he jets streams of come onto the fine stone paths, his spend seeping between the pale gravel. He can barely breathe, filled up to the throat with thick cock, and he moans wantonly as he weakly thrusts his ass back against you in a pitiful attempt to drag out the ecstasy of being used.

Fingers tangling in his hair, you yank his head up, looming above and narrowing your eyes at his flushed, teary expression, completely blissed out. "Did I say you could finish?"

His eyes roll back at the low, warning growl of your voice. He cradles his belly, rubbing your tip through himself, and obsessively runs his trembling fingers down his stomach as if stroking your shaft. "No...! No, hngh, ah – jus' feels good, feels so good—"

Not even an apology. You click your tongue. You reach down, trailing your fingers up the curve of his ribs, and press your palm to the centre of his back. Your fingers curl and pull.

You fist the white-gold threads of his soul: they're paler than humans', wiry. Unassuming. How pathetic.

You tug and he cries, babbling and slurring as his body seizes and more come spurts from his leaky tip. He's not worth very much – not for his soul, and not for his morality or sense of identity. The only thing he has going for him is his tight, wet hole.

Staring down at him, you almost regret promising him his life. Despite your grip on his hair, he still tries weakly to wiggle his hips back against yours. Not only is he a coward, but a greedy one, too.

You feel... cheated. He seemed so promising the first time you saw him – what happened to all that potential? You don't like admitting to being wrong, but you may have no choice. Unfortunate. At least there's a lesson to be learnt here about caution and setting oneself up for disappointment.

Twisting his hair around your hand, you tug to make sure your grip is secure before yanking him up, forcing his back to arch as you drag him towards you for inspection. You scan him impassively, still fucking him hard enough to create small hollows in the gravel path beneath his knees.

His appearance is fascinating. The stitches across his pale skin... You wonder if they keep him together. What happens if you take them out? Would he fall apart?

You brush your fingers over the stitches on his hip, ignoring the way he shudders. It would be so easy to remove them. His eyes, too – they're mismatched. He'd be prettier with a matching set. Perfection is attainable through symmetry and order; while he's flawed, you can improve him, and anything is better than nothing.

But you probably shouldn't linger here too long. That Geto Suguru didn't seem to appreciate your presence, which is a shame because you are an absolute delight to behold. You look human enough to pass as one of them, with the exception of a few facial markings that can be explained away as make-up in this modern era. You'd called them birth marks back in the day for being born under an auspicious moon, and you must be divinely beautiful to humans because they never questioned it and simply asked if you were busy that evening.

Hm. That Gojo child you met earlier was rather charming, fair and confident as he was...

Mahito cries out, clawing at your hand as you shift it from his hair to around his throat. You squeeze his jaw and he moans as your grip forces his lips open. He pants, chest heaving, his wide eyes tracking your face as you stare down at him impassively. You tilt your head.

You spit into his mouth and force his jaw shut.

His eyes flutter as he whimpers, body jerking and jolting as he flails and swallows. He hiccups quietly against your palm as come splatters his stomach, his dick throbbing and heavy as you grab it and aim it up. You fuck him harder, deeper, every technique-imbued thrust twanging at the fibres of his soul. You're feeling a little playful, after all, and Mahito looks adorably pitiful when you bury yourself in to the hilt – pain and pleasure like this must be so new to him.

He comes hard. With your help, he manages to spurt all the way up his chest and neck. You hum softly, a low rumble in your chest, and your approval feels like nirvana to Mahito. He rocks backwards on your cock, urging his body to draw out his high. Surely you'd approve of him even more.

He hangs from your grasp, his arms limp below him. His fingertips brush the gravel with every thrust, strangled moans spilling uncontrollably from his lips. Every sound is new to him, torn from him the way screams are.

"Greedy mutt," you murmur, tucking his hair behind his ear almost sweetly. "Over and over, you take what you want, chasing pleasure selfishly. I gave you ample chance to try again, but it seems I have to take things into my own hands. How disappointing."

The shame that squeezes his lungs is disorienting and unfamiliar. Why does he care so much about what you think of him? He doesn't get much time to ponder it before something deep within tangles and snaps, reverberating through his very being.

His soul gleams between your perfect fingers. He can't move.

"Cursed spirits are fascinating. They aren't tethered to the world like humans are, yet I can interact with their souls the same way," you hum, weaving your fingers through his soul. The pleasure splits and cracks his thoughts apart, destroying any potential to plan or even think logically. Your fingers flutter. "Geto Suguru ordered you to kill me. Ah-ah... Don't deny it. One glance at you and I know you could never even draw my blood."

Twisting your fist in the threads of Mahito's soul, you slam him down into the gravel, making him wail as his body jostles back and forth with the force of your thrusts. The tiny pebbles dig into his skin, leaving cuts and little abrasions that hurt, and his heart has never hammered so hard before – he's basically a human in your hands, disgustingly mortal and fragile. Drool trickles down the corner of his mouth as his eyes roll back, your thick cock impossibly hot and heavy inside him. His ass slaps against your hips, tight and firm.

He can't come. He can't. It's not that he doesn't want to, but that his body won't allow it – it no longer obeys him. It obeys you, and you are a cruel master.

"No," he wheezes, nerves burning, smouldering, with heat. "No – don't—"

"You wanted this, Mahito. Begged for it, even," you interrupt, your hand heavy as you press his face further into the ground. He lets out a strangled whimper, gnawing the inside of his lip. "You weren't wrong, were you? You're not stupid enough to forget what you wanted, are you, Mahito?"

The scorn in your voice stings like poison, every word dripping with disdain. His lungs burn as he inhales, your name slipping through his teeth somewhere between a sob and a moan. His nails dig into the gravel; the pain gives him something else to focus on as he desperately tries to ignore the gnashing maw hollowing out his insides.

"I'm sorry!" he shouts, his wet hole swallowing you like a throat. He whimpers pathetically, voice pitching high and warbling. "Th-That's what – nngh – what you want to h-hear, right? I'm sorry for coming! For being greedy – hnnh, please," he sobs, hips bucking madly against your grasp. "Please let me come, I'll listen, I will – I'm sorry, I'm sorry for everything—!"

He cuts himself off, eyes showing their whites as you carve a hot path through him, settling deep inside him and coating his tender walls with your seed. You groan softly, jaw working as you fuck your come into his tender asshole. He gawps, breathless moans needy and high-pitched on every heavy exhale. His teeth sink into his lips, breaking through skin. The iron taste of blood fills his mouth.

"What a pretty apology," you breathe, amused. You fuck him roughly, carelessly, his skin red and tender from impact. "Say thank you, mutt."

You release your iron grip on his soul – body? He can't tell them apart – and his body slumps to the ground as he wails and hiccups, tears streaming down his cheeks as he comes a gushing waterfall. Arousal burns white-hot in his gut as his toes curl, legs kicking pathetically as he jolts and shudders.

Before his high even peters off, you pull out and let go of him. He drops to the ground with a pained whimper. His hips tremble and jerk, his swollen hole fluttering around the thick white seed dripping from it. White teardrops trickle down the inside of his thigh.

Mahito shivers, drooling into the garden path with a hot, dazed expression. His hair is a mess, there's blood under his nails, and his cock still spurts with every twitch of his hips. You're not even touching him anymore.

"Th-Thank you," he moans, quiet and humiliated. "Gnggh..."

The sound that burbles out of him is wet and pitiful, as if he's choking on his own tongue. You wipe your hands on his clothes before tucking yourself back into your kimono. You reset your kanzashi with a soft hum as you stand and turn away.

"I gave you what you wanted, Mahito," you say, stepping over his limp body. "I hope that, the next time I see you, you'll have honed your technique further. I gave you quite a few demonstrations with your soul – remember them well."

Shakily, he drags himself up, chest heaving. He wipes the tears off his cheek and glances uncertainly up at you through his messy fog-grey bangs.

"N-Next time?" he parrots, voice cracking and ruined. "You're... not staying?"

You click your tongue chidingly. "Asking another favour of me, mutt? You'll run out of them quickly if you continue like this." You pause on the engawa, glancing over your shoulder at his naked form, barely covered by his own ruined clothing. You tilt your head. "On second thought... let's call it a trade rather than a favour. I want something from you."

Mahito straightens despite his achy, stinging soul, buzzing with the red-hot remnants of your cursed technique. "Anything," he rasps, practically pleading. "I'll give you anything you want."

You smile, too-sharp canines catching the pale light. "What do you know of Gojo Satoru?"