Contempt

contempt

I do not have contempt! So please enjoy this brand new microfic, inspired by this definition of contempt: Open disrespect or willful disobedience of the authority of a court of law or legislative body. 

Draco doesn’t look up when the door to the courtroom bangs open. He doesn’t look up when the murmur of discord turns into shouts for order. He doesn’t even look up when the confident strides of the new arrival come to a halt beside his chair.

It’s the scuffed trainers that draw his eye. He’d know them anywhere. 

“Mr. Potter, if you do not stand down we will be forced to hold you in contempt of the Wizengamot.” 

Draco watches Harry’s eyes spark as he stares down the Chief Warlock. His lips pull back, and Draco would call it a smile if it didn’t chill him to the bone. 

“Please, your honor.”

It isn’t an appeal, Draco knows, Harry’s magic already hot against his skin as it works secretly at the heavy chains.

It’s a warning. 

Holy shit holy shit holy shit I love this AU! It's so fucking good I'm so excited for the next part please please tag me in the next part

Wings. Fire. Magic.

Dragon Trainer Joel x Female Reader

Summary: After stealing an egg you become the prisoner of a very handsome human male. CW: no smut (yet), massage, weaponry, mild nudity, blood Word Count: 3.3k, just a teaser Graphics by @saradika-graphics 💚🐉

You peel one eye open, the man who has you captive appears to be sound asleep, leaning up against a rock with an axe across his outstretched legs, one ankle crossed over the other. The large trees rustle around you in the breeze. Moonlight dancing around his face, the scar along the side of his head glistens.

Ok, captive is a strong word. You did try to steal from him. You had stolen from him. A fiery orange egg. Between your magic and your wings you should have been able to escape. He’s just a human and you are one of the few magic Fae left in this world.

Last night, he let you out of the tightly wound chains he had wrapped around you since catching you. For two days you were stuck in those chains that glow a sickly green, chains that silence your magic. Now a single thick cuff, in that same putrid green, is wrapped around your ankle, a short chain binding it to a nearby tree. Your iridescent wings ache as you roll off your back and onto your side to face Joel. 

Joel. Pfft. What a weird fucking name.

You try to stretch your wings quietly, but Joel’s eyes pop open at the little grunt you let out. 

“What’s wrong?” He grumbles. 

“Nothing,” you say defiantly as you roll onto your stomach and try to lift your wings out to stretch them. Your wings may look dainty and fragile, but they weigh more than you and without your magic it’s almost impossible to move them. You grunt again, if Joel hadn’t wrapped you in that fucking chain you wouldn’t be dealing with the uncomfortable tightness between your shoulder blades that can only be fixed by stretching and fluttering your wings. 

Joel sighs in annoyance as he stands and walks over to you. The gravel crunching under his boots wakes the thing that quite possibly intrigues you more than it scares you. It’s a death sentence to want to be around her. It was a death sentence to steal that egg. 

You try to slow your heart as you hear Remmer, Joel's indescribably large dragon move through the shadows behind you. Breathe, breathe, you say to yourself, sweat slicking your palms.

“What’s wrong?” He says again, more softly this time, feet stopping by your head.

“You fucking tied me up, Joel. With that enchanted chain for two fucking days. You squished my wings and now they’re sore.” You don’t mean for it to come out as a whine, but there’s a cold fire spreading across your upper back, slowly spreading up your neck and into your lower back.

He looks down at you, you stay on your stomach, eyes staring at his boots in front of you, resting your cheek on your hands.  “You stole from me,” he says flatly.

“Ya, I know Joel, you made that abundantly fucking clear. Just go back to sleep.” You try to stretch your wings out and then up, but the right one cramps and a sharp pain lances through your body. You cry out into the quiet dark night and it echoes back at you mockingly.

“What can I do?” Joel says bending down beside you, placing a large warm palm in between where your wings meet your back. 

“Rub there,” you say through the pain of the cramp. This isn’t like when you get a cramp in your calf, a wing cramp lights every nerve on fire. Tension builds in your neck and starts to blur your vision, your sciatic nerve shooting pain down both legs. 

Joel rubs the space between your wings in slow gentle circles, his rough hand scratching against the leather of your jacket. You gasp out in pain again as the right side twitches harder. Joel moves swiftly, undoing the zipper down the back of your fighting leathers, opening it fully, rubbing at your bare skin where your wings connect to your back, trying his hardest to work out the knots. He continues the same slow gentle circles and your left wing finally relaxes, curling itself back against your body.

“Is this ok?” Joel whispers. His voice sounds dry and timid. 

You moan slightly as the cramping begins to ease. “A little harder,” you say. 

He kneads the joint of the right one a little harder and it flops down weakly beside you, but he doesn’t stop massaging you. His other hand trails along the top edge of your wing to the first joint and he gently folds it back to your body. 

You close your eyes at the tingly sensation that spreads down your spinal cord at his touch, it feels like warm oil being drizzled down your back and the pain in your legs stops. No one has ever touched your wings before and humans are known to be vicious, yet there isn’t an ounce of fear in you as the man you’re currently a prisoner to cares for you. 

His hand on your wing continues to trace along the outer edge until it’s all tucked up right above your hip. His other hand kneads down your spine and you melt into the hard ground you were sleeping on. 

A little whimper passes your lips at how good his hands feel on your body. Both his hands trail lightly up your spine and massage at your neck. When they slip into your hair the pain in your head stops and your vision evens out. An almost pornographic moan passes your lips. He jerks his hands away and you bite your cheek to stop yourself from begging him to continue. 

He lets out a low whistle. You feel the air move around you and the massive dragon lands beside you with a tiny thump. Fear rises in your throat like a dry lump. A voice inside your head laughs at you. Little Fae warrior, steals an egg yet is petrified of what’s inside.

Joel grabs your ankle and unshackles the chain. Then says, “Don’t run. Go back to sleep, we have a long journey tomorrow.” 

The next morning Joel doesn’t wrap you in chains and make you sit side saddle on Remmer like he did the day before. Instead, he places a thin gold cuff that glows green around your wrist and then gives you a boost to sit normally before he hauls himself up behind you. He makes it look easy, his long powerful leg stretching, the lean muscles lining his back and arms pulling him up. The cuff silences your magic just enough that you won’t be able to fly.

The dragon rises from its crouched position when Joel takes the reins and you grab the edge of the saddle - even though you know that when you’re caged between Joel’s broad frame you won’t fall.

He lets out a whistle similar to last night and with one long swoop of her wings the dragon is up in the air. You tuck your wings in tight to your body, Joel's strong, leather wrapped chest close enough that you can feel the heat radiating off him. The warmth feels nice against the sore muscles lining your back, you have to fight the urge to lean against him completely. 

He doesn’t bring up what happened last night so you stay quiet as the dragon soars high above the fluffy white clouds. Morning dew sticking to your skin, you gaze around admiring the rising sun casting hues of pink and orange around you. It’s almost kind of romantic, minus the whole being held captive and being taken - well, you aren’t exactly sure where Joel is taking you. 

You sit in silence as the morning sun rises up and over you, until it becomes the evening sun. Joel pulls the reins and his dragon swoops down, skimming the surface of the large lake you didn’t even know you were flying over. The dragon drinks deeply, dragging her long obsidian claws of its back feet through the water. There’s a large mountain range on the other side of the lake and when you reach the shore the dragon gracefully veers upwards, landing in a grassy clearing between two peaks. Remmer lands so gently that you barely feel it, the only sign that you’re on the ground is that the wind around you has stopped. 

Joel doesn’t take the cuff off, but says “I’m trusting you not to run” before climbing down the leg of his dragon. He disappears into the tree line, assumingly to gather some firewood, and the dragon turns her head to look at you, almost side eyeing you as if to say “get the fuck off of me you freeloader”.

You mutter an apology to the dragon, flinging your leg over the saddle, trying to replicate all Joel’s steps while the burnt orange eyes of the dragon watch you.

Once you hit the ground the dragon nudges you with her snout and you stumble forward before she takes off into the air, darting into a cave above the right side of the meadow. 

Rude. 

You look around the meadow, light green clover and colorful wildflowers cover most of it. Tall trees lining the edge of it, a jagged rocky mountain cliff face that leads to the cave closes in the rest of it. You hear water trickling, spinning around you see a stream of bright blue water. The water is so clear that you can’t tell how deep it is. The bed of the stream is covered in rocks of purples, greens and blues. 

Joel is nowhere to be found and you’ve been up near the sun in these leathers all day. You glance around again before stripping off all your clothing and submerging yourself in the cool blue water. It flows over your skin like silk, you take a big breath and disappear under the water for a little bit, watching a few striped fish swim past. 

Suddenly, a hand has you by your hair, ripping you from the water as a yelp leaves your mouth. 

“Joel, what the fuck?” You yell, trying to cover your naked body with your arms. But it’s not Joel. No, it’s three large males dressed in greens to match the meadow. All of them have large full beards and are armed with curved blades.

When humans think of sprites they imagine small woodland creatures. But some sprites are anything but that. In this land, sprites have been after fairy wings for as long as you can remember. The brutal males need the wings to make the potion to keep their unbelievable strength. 

They speak to each other in a language that you don’t understand. Two of them grab onto you, one at your hands and the other at your feet. They spin you around and slam you face first into the ground. You scream out, hoping that Joel is close enough, or cares enough, to come help you. But maybe he brought you here for this reason. Maybe he only massaged your wings so tenderly last night because he’s expecting some sort of payment from these males. 

The third male crouches down beside you. “Shut the fuck up, there’s no one here who can help you.” 

His hand reaches around the top of your wing and he pulls it as hard as he can to try to pry it away from your naked body. If Joel had removed the small gold cuff around your wrist you may have been able to fight them off. At this point all you can do is squeeze your wings into yourself as hard as you can. They need the whole wing, joint and all to make their potion properly.

“No! Please!” You scream, seeing the long sharp dagger he pulls from his boot. 

His feral touch on the sensitive membranes of your wings is almost enough to make you wretch. His cronies pull your arms and legs tighter, almost as if they’re trying to rip you in half, the sharp rocks poke and scratch underneath you. 

“No! Help me! Someone!” You are practically sobbing. 

You know you aren’t a good fairy. You’ve spent years stealing and taking things that aren’t yours, but it was for your village. Fae in this area of the world have been pushed out of land that they once owned. Your ancestors were injected with that same sickly green that Joel has embedded in his chains and then stripped of their wings. Magic and wings were lost for centuries. Babies were born without either, and only recently did it start showing up in a new generation of Fae. You thought yourself lucky at one time, but here you are, about to be flayed open like a spatchcocked chicken.

A sharp poke hits just above your right shoulder blade and you scream out in agony. Before you can comprehend what’s happening you’re encased in a dark shadow. For a moment you think you’re dead, until glowing flecks of orange light cast a warm glow around you. A wing. You’re surrounded, tented in almost, by a wing. You hear the males pleading on the other side. 

“Easy there.” 

“We didn’t mean no harm. Eaaaasy.” 

You hear the sound of wood falling to the ground and as if he appeared from thin air, Joel is beside you, his axe gripped tightly in one hand. He’s crouching slightly and you wrap your arms around yourself to cover your naked flesh. 

“NO!” You scream, trying to scramble away from him.

He puts a finger to his lips to shush you and then steps out from the wing. 

The males go quiet. 

“If you touch her again,” Joel says darkly, “My dragon will be the least of your concerns.” 

“We have gold,” the voice of the one who was cutting you says, “give us the fairy and we’ll give you gold.” 

Joel is silent for too long, you’re sure he’s considering it, about to sell you off. You reach over your shoulder to where the dagger pierced you and feel a sticky warmth against the pads of your fingers, pulling your hand back you see your fingers coated in blood. 

“Stay. The fuck. Away from her,” Joel growls. Remmer huffing beside you.

You hear the footsteps of the men trail off. The dragon lifts her wing and then peaks at you with one eye. You stay seated on the ground, knees drawn to your chest, covering yourself up as best you can. A shiver runs down your body, the dragon's eye narrows slightly and then warm air blows from her nose, heating the space under her wing. 

You smile at the dragon. “Thank you.” 

“Lift up,” Joel says on the other side of the wing. The dragon growls quietly at him. “Ok weirdo. Can I at least hand her her clothes?” 

She lifts just enough for Joel to slide your boots, leathers, and white cotton shirt under. The moment his hand is clear she flaps it back down and huffs at him. More warm air fills the space before she turns her head away so you can get dressed. 

“How chivalrous,” you say to the dragon. The tented space under the wing is big enough for you to stand up in as you shimmy your clothes and boots on, leaving your jacket off since the joint of your wing is burning. You can already feel the soft cotton of your shirt sticking to you. “I’m dressed,” you call out when you’re done. 

The dragon peaks in again at you. “Am I allowed out?” 

Remmer stares at you for a little while before Joel speaks up from the other side of your cocoon, “Rem, she’s not your pet. You can’t hold her in there…”

The dragon eyes soften at you and you smile a little. “I’m ok, I promise. Thank you.” 

She lifts her wing up and nudges you towards Joel, using her nose to turn your body so that Joel can see the blood. 

“Shit,” he whispers. 

“I’m fine, Joel.” You say, trying to step away but you’re caged between the dragon's large head against your stomach and Joel at your back. 

“You’re not fine,” he says, moving your hair away from the deep gash. “Fuck, don’t move. We need to wrap this up.” 

The dragon must be able to understand him, because she immediately turns her body to where the bags hang off her saddle. He gets the medical supplies and then pulls you gently over to sit on a rock. He stands behind you, tugging the back of your shirt so he can see the full extent of the damage. 

“This might sting,” he says as he uncaps a bottle of antiseptic. 

He drizzles a little bit on you and it feels like liquid fire spreading across your body. You bite hard on your lip to not scream, hands curling into fists. The dragon pushes herself flat to the ground and almost slithers up to you, resting her massive head on your lap, looking up at you with sad eyes. 

“Why’d you take it?” He says, gentle hands beginning to wrap a bandage around the joint of your wing. You stretch it out as much as you can to make it easier for him, wincing at the sharp pinching sensation, Rem lets out a whine, similar to a little dog, at the sign of your pain.

You want to reach out to pet the dragon but fear stops you, “The egg?” you ask timidly.

“Mm-hmm,” he says behind you, looping the bandage around, the back of his hand grazes the underside of your wing. You hadn’t realized how sensitive that part of your body is and your nipples harden, eyes closing briefly at the sensation.

“We needed money,” you reply just above a whisper.

“Who’s we?”

“My family. I’m the only one with magic and wings, their survival falls on me. And there’s not a lot for us here.”

“Why don’t you all go somewhere else?” he asks, his hand brushing that sensitive spot again.

You snort a little, the dragon thinking it’s pain nuzzles into you more, you still don’t move to pet her. “Wingless Fae aren’t exactly welcome in many places, and as you just saw, those of us with wings are under attack.”

“Why?” he asks again as he ties the bandage in a knot.

“Our wings hold our magic.”

One of Joel's strong arms trails down yours, his chest pressed against your back. Sparks shoot across your body at his sudden and all consuming closeness. He smells like pine needles and fresh grass. His hand wraps around your wrist and he brings your hand to rest on the Remmer’s head, right between her glowing orange eyes.

“Just don’t stroke against her scales, she won’t like that.”

You take a shaky breath and stroke back towards the spiky crown of her head.  Her spikes lay flat and she closes her eyes, a purring sound fills her chest and you smile over your shoulder at Joel.

“Where are you taking me?” You ask.

“Where we take all thieves.” He says.

The King.

“No, please. You can’t! He’ll do worse than cut off my wings!” You plead, Rem shoots her head up towards Joel, eyes flaring.

“Remmer, down.” Joel says warningly at the dragon. She doesn’t lower her head back to your lap, but you notice the orange in her eyes softens. He turns now to address you, “This is the way of your world, you knew that long before you took my egg.”

Rem huffs smoke at him when he says ‘my egg’.

“Apologies. When she took your egg.”

Remmer blinks at him, then back at you before resting her head back on your lap. You use both hands now to stroke along her scales. It's hard to believe that just mere hours ago you were terrified of her, but something about those males that attacked you has changed her presence around you. 

Joel turns towards the wood he dropped earlier and starts building a fire. You swear you hear him say, “whose side are you on?” under his breath.

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I've been going through something lately where I feel full of life and energy and want to give all that I have and then when I do I find there's nothing there. I've felt panicked and trapped. Like I'm more beast than a person anymore and I would say woman but woman or man are too small of words anymore. I'm still filled with so much passion and want though a little to the left is a carnal desire to stay away from it all and disappear into obscurity. I feel empty but in the way that I just feel present in the muscle of my body and nothing deeper. I'm afraid.

I'm not super into Ghost but FUCK THIS WAS HOT and so incredibly human that I feel like I just drank from the most filling spring of water.

Austerlitz

Pairing: Simon (Ghost) Riley x F!Reader

Summary: The day he left for his hideous war, the dream changed. The house was still there, but now neither of us lived in it anymore. And when he finally came back, if that’s what you could even call it, he was nothing but a Ghost. 

-OR-

Ghost goes away, comes back in a maybe dream.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: I know very little about COD so AU I guess; Unreliable Narrator; Is Ghost a ghost or a Man? Who tf knows; More feelings than fucking sorry about that; PWP; Rough Sex; Creampie; Grief Study; Mean Ghost; Size Difference; Complicated Relationships; Dom/sub Undertones

A/N: Wanted to post and then got pissed off and didn't want to post and then got pissed off that I was pissed off.

So anyways, here's my Ghost.

Word Count: 4.2K

Read on AO3

[AUSTERLITZ]

The first time my mother had the dream, it was our engagement. 

They were always the same—the dreams—the house, our home. Sometimes I was there, sometimes it was only him, but the house remained. Always the image of him inside that place that belonged to us. Even if I wasn’t all the time there. 

They went on for years, this idea living inside my mothers mind; different variations of our togetherness or not, parties, children, him, him, always him there. Once, he was even there with another woman, and amidst her sleep she knew it was wrong, that I should have been there but was not. It didn’t birth mistrust, that already lived between us in different ways regardless. It didn’t send me running home to him demanding answers, but it birthed fear. Fear of what could be lost—of what there was to lose. 

A lot, it turned out. 

It was like this fear that lived so painfully sentient within me, the fear of losing him, the fear of how much I loved him was so strong and so powerful and so pulsating that I'd given the infection of it to my own mother. She worried for me and for us the way I worried for him. 

And there was guilt then—for me, from me. I felt guilty, I felt like I was doing this to her, making my own mother afraid. Sending her these dreams with my own worrying mind of a perfect life that could have been so easily lost, of all my happiness and wants and desires of him and how easily it could have all been destroyed. 

The last time she dreamt of the house, months after he’d gone in my real waking life, the house was alone. Abandoned. Falling down on its own bones. A bad omen. And there was something so– I couldn’t say… but that was my confirmation, really, more than the years or the silence or the reports of missing, unknown, no answers or responses or clues to what could have happened, it was that dream of hers that told me it was all over in a real way. 

She said she’d walked through the dream house, and all the ghost memories had been there: him and I, an engagement, a marriage, a happiness, losses and family and life. But everything was falling down around the past, and it was all alone, and she knew in her heart that he was gone and that I was alone now. 

My real fear had gone to her dream fear had come back to my real life, and there was no true abandoned house, but there was an abandoned I. 

-

You’d begged—before he’d gone the last time, on your knees, hands clasped, tears—wrought. You’d begged, please, Simon—don’t go, please. Please, don’t leave me. You said last time was the last time. Please, don’t go again—I have the worst feeling about this one. He’d not listened. Chasing a mission, a tour, the salvation of the world or the loss of himself, not me, which was the only distinction that mattered. But he’d gone, and the bad feeling had swelled and swelled swollen until it’d burst. Until there was some uniform on your doorstep speaking words of missing in action, comms gone dead, Simon—maybe dead, maybe not, just gone. Unfindable, but come along with a sick sort of satisfaction that you’d been listed as his next of kin when he’d never even been able to tell you that he loved you. But these were the words now, said with tongue and teeth not belonging to him, not my wife but the woman I love, the woman that’s important to me, my kin.

Simon Riley, code name Ghost: missing in action. 

It’s been such a long time now, and you don’t know if that man you loved, love, is still alive or dead or missing or gone or just nothing. 

All he is—is not— 

—Here. And the before—it’d been complicated. Real and not real, hard, good, never easy. The complicated nature of a thing born from a complicated man such as he was. Occlusive, reclusive, reticent. But so good. So much, that it never really mattered if it was all growing pains, or just pain. How could you know? But when you were in the thick of it, it didn’t actually matter, that answer. It felt good, that was the only focus. Even when it didn’t. You loved him, that’s what mattered. He loved– war, being a ghost, fucking you, having you, maybe you. 

You’d had certainty in some ways, that he wanted you, that he was closed off and silent and serious, and that he’d come back because he always said he would, and he always did the things he said. That he was a creature of habit. But everything else—uncertain. 

Your mother hadn’t had the dream in years. Memory had become hard to reach, murky, but the sound of his voice, that remained. The only one that did, only because you held onto it with vapor fingers. And it was so clear, the baritone of it, the way it sounded when he was calling you his sweet girl, the way it sounded when he was telling you he was going or telling a lie. That had stayed no matter how far out to sea you’d tried to toss it. 

Your last conversation: don’t be a stranger, you’d said. And it was in jest, or desperation, you can’t remember anymore. Something like please, please, don’t go away forever, please, don’t turn into someone I don’t know anymore. 

There are things you remember very clearly. Others you’d been granted the mercy of forgetting—the way it felt when he slid inside you, no mercy there. 

How do I know if these are growing pains or just pain?

The memory of him is distorted now, preserved under glass, entirely untouchable; just there, and the stopping point is invisible, but it’s still just there. 

And you still love him because it’s impossible to let go of a ghost. A thing like that haunts you. 

You’d left the home you’d become a woman in, left your country and your mother, after he’d gone missing; found somewhere far and cold and nothingful, and it all reminded you of him in a way that let you know you’d never outrace this feeling. But you’d needed to run and disappear the way you told yourself he’d had to. That excuse, blame, you placed on him, Ghost, leaving that last time, despite the way you’d begged him to stay, please, Simon, don’t go. As if the idea of him just not wanting to be with you at all was more comforting than the reality of, well, he did, but just not more than he needed to chase his duty to violence. 

[When they’d come to tell me he was gone—but not really gone for sure—no one has died, they’d said, and I’d thought, just me, and violently. It was the last slap in the face, punch to the gut, fist down my throat and all the oxygen gone through a vacuum—stolen.]

Years: you’d lived with the vertigo of heartbreak, your whole life muffled. And you’d wanted to be alone with the enormity of your devastation and the Ghost shaped hole that’d been left in your body, so you’d come here, to this place you were in now, and you’d learned to be cunning like a fox, a cold that burned. You were not yourself anymore, something else, but something that didn’t hurt as much. A new version that fit that final dream image of an abandoned, forgotten home. 

You walk all the time now, through the Ždánice and along the wet meadows and towards nothing. In lieu of doing something else, now you walk. 

You find it on one such—it’s just like the dream—walk. Circles and circles around the Slavkovský rybník, back into the trees you go, and then it’s just there falling in on itself, eaten dead by the green overgrowth; the dream house. Your mother’s voice within your ear, I had a dream about the two of you, he’s yours, he was your husband, he was your fiancé, he was the love of your life, I had a dream about it all. There is a house. 

He’d liked to smoke, when he was stressed or angry or happy or sad or just. Cloves because he could be a jackass sometimes, like when he was buying cigarettes. You smoke them now too—a griefful jackass, even still. Obviously you’re trying to hold on without saying it out loud, like being kin. Tongue slick, sucking on the stick until it’s all gone, just a stub, and standing there in the waning gray light—the sun doesn't come out much now, it’s wonderful—you watch the house. 

You wonder if your mother sent it to you with her own missing. You wonder if he’ll be in there if you go inside. You feel like if you do, you’ll die in there, find something real bad, real real. 

When you’re done with the lie of the cloves, you exchange the butt for a leaf, feel the smooth, dry edges of it. Folding it slow and careful between your fingers, thinking, trying to follow the path of veins, trying to decide if this is the dream house or not, trying to decide if you’ll really die in there or not. There are no more sounds, there haven’t been in a long time, and so you can't tell if it’ll really matter or not. 

Recently, or years ago, you’d watched a video of a trio of swans doing battle, a rarity, the fact of three. They’d mauled each other, first two overtaking the third, and then the co-conspirators, turning their violence on each other. This is how you feel, at battle within yourself; your past, present, future, all fighting to leave you dead and bloodied, floating bloated in the water. 

Horrible thoughts. 

[We’re fighting a war on three fronts: me, him, fact.]

But there’s only dream here now. No Ghost. 

You decide on the house—walk inside. 

It’s only bones within, guts on display, covering ripped away. And very sad, very familiar. 

You pass through it slow and floating, not looking where one foot goes in front of the other. You’re inside your mother’s dream just like she’d seen it so many times, returned to the womb, and like she’d said: there’s your engagement, a rarity of happiness, glorious intimacy, possibility, there’s your Ghost. 

You’re not paying attention when your foot goes through the floorboards, to the knee first, jarringly painful, then the rest of your body gone through the rot. The only thing fizzing through your stupidly shocked mind is that you knew this would happen before you’re hip smashing, skull bashing ten feet down onto the basement floor. Cement ground, laying on your side and gasping like an eviscerated fish. The fist down your throat pulling all the oxygen out is back. 

And all you can think, as you lay there, only a wink before pain that knocks you into sleep, is—and really, get a fucking grip, get your priorities straight—I tried to fuck so many other men to wedge the memory of you out, bring the sounds back. I’ve tried other people and other tastes and other lives, and I can't. I can't. I want you so much, I miss you so bad. I dream of you, of the way you felt inside of me, of how wet I get for you even still, wet for a maybe dead man, and how much my cunt hurts because it is so wanting. How much it hurts to love a thing that’s gone and how the physical pain is almost as bad as the one in the heart.

And then an ice blue, cold that burns. “Wake up, darling.” He’s always had the bluest eyes that’ve ever been. 

“Ghost?”

“Simon.”

The jut of his chin, it’s the same. The one you missed. You come awake or alive. “Simon, you’re not really here. How did you find me?” Your body doesn’t hurt the way it should. 

“Been lookin’ for you,” he says, runs his big thumb up the curve of your cheekbone, and you turn your face into his hand almost involuntarily. He even smells like a ghost, and you can’t remember if you actually ever even fell or not. 

“Ghost?” You ask again—confused, full of sleep and someone else's dream.

But he shakes his head slow, and you can’t see his mouth behind the mask, but you see the smile in his eyes, joy above the skull. “No, baby. Simon,” he says again. 

“You were looking for me?” His hand moves into your hair, cupping the small bowl of your skull in the big pool of his palm, the other coming to your neck, thumb at your pulse, just to feel, just to hum along to it. 

“I was.” His accent is different, and you can’t hear sounds anymore, but this sound is different—you can tell. 

“Where’ve you been?”

“Told ya—lookin’ for you.” Jut of your chin propped against the jut of his palm, pads of his fingers against the ledge of your orbital bone. He presses soft, probes gentle, lets himself be tickled by the fan of your lashes. 

You close your eyes and tell the truth, “I wish you wouldn’t. I might hate you now. I wish you’d let me go. It’s been such a long time.”

“I know, baby.” But he doesn’t know, not really, not how bad.

You’re laying on something soft, no more hard basement you can’t really remember, and you let yourself slump into it while he touches your face. “I can’t believe I’m still here,” basement or with him or someone else's dream, you can’t tell which you mean. “I can’t believe I'm still here all these years later. You’re like a ghost.”

He agrees, “I am a ghost,” and contradicts himself. 

You open your eyes again, swallow the blue. “I thought you said you weren’t.” No answer—but he hunches over you, large and brutish and falsely undiscerning, without any answers ever. “You’re not a ghost. You’re a real man, and you have to stop haunting me.”

“Not haunting, only looking.” He bends, reveals his mouth, kisses you for the first time since he’d gone, and it’s the same as before, but not. Always a beautiful, hidden mouth that he’d had. 

There is nothing that Simon Riley does that is gentle, even when he is being gentle. 

It’s always with a punch behind it, always with a scream behind it. Always with the certainty that he does not know how to be gentle, but that he’ll try to be so anyway. If only for you.

He tastes like cloves and ghosts. Lips warm, dry and smooth, tongue slick and demanding. He presses his big thumb bone between your molars, pries your jaw open so you’re mimicking the dying fish again and licks inside of you.

Ah—so this is how it’ll be, you think, mean.

The inside of your cheeks pinch hard enough between his grip and your teeth that you’re sure the mouthful of come he’ll be giving you soon’ll be seasoned with blood. You moan into him, take his breath on your tongue, the dream flips and switches in your mind. Rolodex of memories and unrealities. Where have you been? You ask again because the demand feels necessary, the answer, life-hinging. 

He shoves you belly back, tells you, “Sometimes you talk too fuckin’ much,” and swings one tree trunk thigh over your middle so he’s straddling you, caging you, crushing you. A fist twisted in your hair so he can pull and handle you as he pleases. “Open your mouth,” so that he can lick inside again, taste you again. “It’s all just the same,” he whispers, and you can’t tell what he means. Doesn’t he see you’re the fox in the marsh now, cold enough to burn? Nothing’s the same since he went away. 

You try and scratch at him, shove the behemoth away, mountain versus the moth, yank him closer—too. You bite his tongue, and then it isn’t only your own blood in your mouth, but his too. It only feeds him more. When he lets his weight fall heavier on your belly, ribs compressed, you feel the ridge of his hard cock. 

You couldn’t ever keep him, but you could always make him hard. 

“Ghost.”

“Not a ghost.” He tells lies now. 

“It’s not all the same,” you gasp when he comes up from the well, hand at your tit, hard and punishing. “Can’t you tell?” And you say it angry or affronted. “How can you look at me and not tell? How can you look at me and not care?” About what you’ve done to me, is what you don’t say. 

This makes him pause, even as he mauls you, and the blue is not ice but not warmth either. Jagged, perhaps, even though it always is a little bit so, but punctuated in a different way. Only discerning now, nothing un– about it. 

“How can you look at me and think I don’t?” His words have teeth, and you want him to chew you up and spit you out. Maybe then he’ll recognize you better. 

“You’re always going to choose something else over me,”—an accusation. “Because I wanted you to come back so badly,”—an explanation. You don’t remind him how he didn’t, and he doesn’t say that he wanted to. But he’s here, and maybe that’s all that matters, maybe it’s enough for you to let him slip his fingers up beneath your shirt, nipple punished between his thumb and index, mean and nasty. Other hand down the front of your jeans, sliping against your wet, fingering your cunt.

He doesn’t work hard at making space for himself in your too tight hole, merely tugs your pants down to your knees, tangled and trapped in him the way you’d always been, and with a hand on his cheek you find purchase to turn yourself over, shoving at his jaw roughly as you go. “No—like this. Like this,” you demand, belly down, ass up. “I don’t want to look at you when we do it. I don’t want to do it looking at your face,” you tell him even though you do love him. 

He’s quiet for one victorious second, big hands wrapped around your hips, fingers flexing, swallowing it. “Are you trying to hurt me?”

“Yes.” He shifts, hooks you over his arm across your belly, hips up, cunt presented, swollen, needy sex like a wound. “Is it working?”

You listen to the drag of his zipper, the shift of his clothes. You close your eyes, enjoy the return of sound.

“Always.” And then it’s the warm, blunt press of a cock that’s going to hurt, and you feel very calm, entirely hungry. The pain in your cunt will be the kind you’d ask for in a few seconds; he notches, swipes, presses mean again at your clit. 

“Let’s not pretend we’re something we’re not—you’re not—real.” And when he wedges himself into your too-long-untried cunt, it hurts. It hurts in a real way. Like he’d rip you in half and not care if he could. Hurts in a mean way. 

He starts off hard, unforgiving, like he’s taking the pound of flesh he feels he’s owed for being made into a Ghost right here, fucking you on the dirty, cold floor. 

Hunched over you, bulging arms braced around your head, wrist clasped in a death grip, breath in your ear, and he fucks you like an animal. A groan and a spit, and he’s telling you, “You’re so fucking good, best cunt in the whole goddamn world.” The wet squelch, the splash, splash, the moan like a whore agrees with him. 

“It always hurts,” you tell him, whispered between a sob for more or harder. 

“You like it,” and it’s a pant ending of a soft kiss to the corner of your mouth where a tear rests. Something gentle to remind you that even as a monster, he’d never hurt you in a way that couldn’t be turned back. Maybe. 

“What if I don’t anymore?”

He swings his hips back, cunt dragging, when he pushes in again it’s to batter against your womb. “Don’t you?”

“Don’t stop,” is all you can say. You press your hips back, spread your knees as far as your tangled jeans will let you, back arched like you need it more than you can even say. Bent and pummeled to defy nature or some such other thing, and his balls slap heavy and stinging against your clit, cockhead at your womb again, again. 

“Come on my cock, be a good girl.” Like he knows you’re just there already, pulsing and throbbing and ready to soak him, wet cheek fucked raw against the ground with every one of his pounding thrusts. His fist is so tight in your hair, around your wrist, it burns almost worse than your knees against the old wood, hand gone to numbness. 

But it’s so hard to give someone so much when they never give anything in return, and it pains you to do it now. Your stomach pulls tight, heat all swirling in your pelvis. “You’re never good for me,” you moan, cunt twisting into a knot. And then you come, fluttering around his pouding length, the slap of his thighs against your ass. He shoves your shirt up so that your breasts are naked to the cold air, fingers digging too hard to be for anything other than his own vindication. It makes you come harder, cry harder. 

And then like a switch, soldier on display, he flips, goes slow and soft and languid. Long deep thrusts, pressing your belly down into the ground and stretching out on top of you—longer than a river, broader too, similarly overpowering. His whole too heavy weight pressing all the air out of you, prone and caged and power stolen. He slams into you, but it’s slow and punctuated and precise now. Tip at the front of your cunt so that you know exactly what it is he wants from you, another one. 

“Do you ever wish I was a better man?” He asks between thrusts.

You can’t lie. Look at you—fucked and frozen. “No.” The hurt hurts good, you like it like this. You like that he’s a Ghost. 

He kisses your mouth now, gives you his tongue to taste. Cloves and you love him so much and it seems so unfair that it be so short, the love, when the forgetting is so long. 

“Can you tell me that you don’t love me?” It’s a begging, it is. “That you never did—so that I can forget.” He pulses and throbs inside of you, thrusts get harder. He’s about to fill you full of come. “So that I can move on. Force me, please.”

He presses his mouth to yours again and with teeth, the bunch of his mask suffocating you. “Can’t lie to you, darling. I never could,” —not the lie you want.

And you should’ve expected it, he’s never been the merciful sort. When you beg please, please, you’re not sure if you’re asking for more of his come, for harder, for mercy, for the lie. Like so many other things now, it doesn’t really matter. He sends you into another orgasm, and he’s lazy about letting you milk him. Mouth slick against your own, breath panting hot against your cheeks, white blond lashes, too long and too pretty for such a beast, tangling with your own. 

He lets it be slow. He lets it last. 

And one more time is better than a last time—the once more negates the lastness of it. Now, it only exists in perpetuity. This is the lie you’ll tell yourself as he throbs and spurts once more, whispers your name into the shell of your ear, asks for his back. I got one more time. I got one more time. Now it all lives on forever, Simon. Now the house is no longer abandoned. Now we’ll exist here in this memory like so, forever. 

He’s gone when you open your eyes again, sleep or unconsciousness, maybe he never was. And as you right yourself, your clothes and the thick leak from the overwrought place between your legs—no, he was, or was he?—your body doesn’t hurt as it should, only cunt-sore, looking at the dark you shaped hole in the floorboards next to you. You can't tell if the hurt now comes from the want or the truth, sound is gone again. 

Outside, there’s snow on the ground. When you look up, it’s falling from the sky, against the surface of the pond, lost to the dark. A celebration happens somewhere, across the distance, in the town, you don’t know for what—or can’t remember. There are fireworks in the sky mixing with the ice.

You realize, or you think, or you hear someone say—does it really matter, it comes off the wind or the trees—a reminder that you’d come here to mourn something. To this place you lived in now. To the dream house.

[I’m mourning all the things that happened to me. I’m mourning the way I’ve been, the way I was. It was terrible, I hated how I’d been, but I still have to grieve her. I have to not hate that poor girl I used to be.]

The barium, copper lights go off and off and off, and it’s bombs dropping, pyrokinetic shelling, your life imploding, the end of everything. Him—a ghost. 

Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning—now.

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