[ by which she means not at all. it's self-contradictory and muddled and he's clearly not-okay enough to struggle to articulate it. she feels a little better about the itching of scales. ]
[ From theirs, in somebody else's metal tub, taking advantage of the empty room to wash sweat, sex and the perpetual ooze from his body. The water's already black with it. At least this way he can't see if his skin's moving. ]
[ less muss less fuss. she heads down that way, rubbing at the flaking skin revealing some of her scales. the tattoo on her shoulder is peeling away, a sawtooth design giving way to real fish-like scales.
[ The knock, a nod to civility as everything else warps obscenely around and inside them, has the ridiculous effect of injecting him with a sudden shock of nerves.
A lift of his fingers swings the door open to put paid to that, and when she steps inside he's reminded immediately that he isn't the only person her offer might have saved the trouble of things getting this far. He's been selfish.
What a surprise. ]
—Sorry.
[ Far enough gone to not even withhold an apology. It must be bad. ]
[ conversational. like he's not slick with ink all the way up to his elbows, like he's not submerged in a metal tub in the center of the room, like they are discussing a leaky pipe.
except that she walks around towards the tub, starts stripping off her shirt. ]
[ the shirt drops to the ground. then, after it, the short-cropped bodice that the people here used in place of bras. she steps on the heel of one shoe to lift out of it. all very perfunctory. the coming home kind of undressing that he has and hasn't seen before, that she has and hasn't done before in front of him. ]
Yet you didn't call me until now. [ it's not hard to guess why. the pain of asking for help was made worse by having refused the offer. but that's precisely why she wants to hear him say it. if asking for help after he'd refused her hurt, it still wasn't an equal to the sting of rejection that had come with knowing that she, too, would be on her own with the growing sprawl of scales that claws its way up over her deltoid and towards her neck, shining gold. ] Where'd you start? The brothel?
[ There's a thinly veiled hunger in the watching, waiting for skin he knows (doesn't know), a body he's missed (has never known.) Only the deferential set of his expression can't last as he gets a taste of what he wants and finds it not as he remembers. His brow furrows, inky water shifting as he sits up a little straighter, instinct to reach for her quelled only by the palpable tension carried in her idle gait, her statement, the line of her questioning.
If you let this go on much longer, you will do harm.
Too late a warning when it had landed. Here's some evidence of harm already done. Speaking of... ]
The clinic.
[ Not that he'd been looking for the kind of help he'd received. And not that somebody else offered help and this time I accepted is going to do him any good in this specific context, even though it's almost every story he has. ]
The brothel later.
Edited (missing words, redundant words, past my bedtime tagging going well) 2023-11-12 22:42 (UTC)
[ the opposite of her trajectory, then. she'd started at the brothel, ended up in the clinic, and only then had he called. it hasn't made a difference. the scales have stopped climbing, but they haven't gone away. the skin around those that started is still sloughing off. one of her eyes is still strangely uncomfortable with the half-slimy feeling of a second lid.
she unbuttons the back of her skirt and lets it drop down fall. bends to tug down her underwear, too. reveals a short tangle of orange hair between her thighs and long legs with tan lines from her shorts, the same ones that she'd had in the dream in the void. the same ones that webbed around her neckline. ]
What makes you think this will help when that didn't? [ she approaches the tub. ]
[ He doesn't want to answer, the admission everything he'd like never to unpack, and he expects she won't like what she hears. But as she bares herself in full and he recognises close to every inch of her, familiarity coiling around the want and making it heady, more consuming the closer she comes, the danger of saying it out loud gains an allure all its own. ]
[ she stands at the foot of the tub. rests her hands on the rim of it, leans over to narrow her gaze on him.
and what if it does help? does that change things? the possibility frightens her. nothing has slaked her hunger so far, not in the way that people talk about anyway. but he had been the one that she'd reached out to. ]
[ And it doesn't matter. Some version of him had known whatever part of her had found a home in his dream of another life. It's enough to have it take all of his not inconsiderable will just to keep himself from pressing forward, at risk of overstepping at the critical moment.
Instead he meets her gaze and holds it, intent. Oddly calm now, the thing he's waiting to become gone still with anticipation. ]
[ this close, the stripes of the gills on her ribs are visible. lightly pink in the shadows of bone. every little piece of her just a shade off of human. she's becoming one of them. not just arlong's crew, but a fishman proper.
she hates the reminder. hates catching glimpses of her reflection and realizing that she looks like she belongs amongst them. ]
It's not always good. To have someone that means something to you.
[ she drops his gaze in that moment. swallows the rest of the thought. chokes the sentiment down. then she climbs into the tub with him, carefully placing her feet on either side of his legs. the water, dark with ink and blackening ooze, sloshes around them. some spills out to the floor.
they've not done this before. sharing baths, showers. fitting their bodies around one another in various cramped spaces. ]
[ All agreement today, apparently. But he does know. He's spent enough years avoiding connection to understand the instinct even if he doesn't know its cause for her.
And here, as she takes her first steps into the liquid mire he's made of the bathtub, his good behaviour finally slips. Arms dip into the water to coil around her legs, disrupting it all the more as he draws himself toward her and her toward him if she'll let him, keeping just enough of a hold of himself to press his face against her thigh and breathe deep. ]
[ his hands are slick. not wet like from bathwater. slippery. the inky ooze on him is viscous, it clings. she lets him draw her closer anyway, even though it'd be simple to slip free of that grip, even though it should repulse her.
she drops her hand to his hair, lets too-sharp nails curl against his scalp. she'd planned to settle down with him, straddle him, make room for her knees around his hips and make this quick and perfunctory and move on with her life.
this is better. ]
Convince me. [ she offers, tentative. ] Do you remember how I liked it?
A thrill leaps through him, head shifting under the close-to-clawed hand in his hair until he can look up at her from where his face is still pressed against her thigh, mouth open, breath panting unevenly against her skin as everything zeros in, stretches out, moment feeling taught as a tripwire.
He doesn't need telling twice. A few seconds of eye contact is enough to lurch him out of inertia, one arm reaching higher to root a hand against the small of her back and urge her into him as he straightens, other hand dragging down her leg and settling there, anchoring her close. Stained fingertips press hard into the flesh of her thigh, sending little spasms of pain through his fingers for him to barely notice.
With his lips already parted Stephen tilts his head and pushes his nose into the hair between her legs, tongue pressing out broad and flat to drag a greedy wet stripe over all he can reach of her, dipping between her folds to make his way back up to her clit. He swirls his tongue there, swipes with it, starts to lap at her in teasing little licks to ease her in.
Flashes of times (never) before start to layer over each other in his thoughts, a mess of remembering, and the feedback loop is heady enough that it bleeds from him, fragments of sound and blurred image gifted to her as they form. Satisfaction is marked with a deep, resonant hum and the mindless rolling shift of his hips under the water making shallow waves on the surface, yearning for the feel of her even as he savors her taste, her smell, the tension of her thigh under his hand. ]
Edited (obligatory edit 3 seconds after sending) 2023-11-17 23:29 (UTC)
[ his intensity draws a gasp out of her. unmoored by the reality of what had before only been dreams, memories, a life that she'd had but never had. heat licks up into her chest. it's different than the other encounters she's had and she hates that this is true because it's him, because there are pieces of herself in that void-world that were real enough that she still feels bared before him. seen.
and he does remember, does seek out familiar patterns that some part of her knows had never really happened, had been hallucinations. this is no hallucination. he is solid, clinging to her, drawing her into him and burying his face against her with such earnest. ]
Stephen.
[ she wavers. whatever stoic reservation she had sustained getting to this point crumbles in two breathy syllables. she braces one hand on his shoulder, the other tightening in his hair, holding him against her.
no matter how she tries to hold it in, hold herself together, he draws a throaty, wobbling sound of her throat. a trembling knee here, a jerk of her hips there. the water in the bath quivers too, rattling upward into loose droplets that suspend in the air inches above the surface of the rest of the bathwater, as carefully tense as she is. ]
[ There. Nami lets him hear her, can't help herself, and whatever was left of Stephen's survival instinct surrenders to her cause. Teasing turns to toil, working her with wet and warm and sucking pressure, a single-minded determination to push her over the edge. It doesn't matter if she's had enough once she's crested, if he's left behind with as many problems left to solve as he had when she walked in. He wants her undone. Owes her an undoing.
His hand drags down from the small of her back, two fingers prying into the space between her thighs and the heat of her. He draws parallel tracks over the skin there, insistent, framing her, fingers curling on each stroke in tactile show of intent but not yet dipping close enough to risk pressing inside at the slightest lapse of his final shreds of self control.
It's dangerous. He knows that. Whatever he's oozing can't be anything good and it always starts with the hands, already the leg he's grasping is slick with little rivulets of fresh thick fluid - flashes of black slime slip into the cursemark telepathy he's projecting to her, a warning even as he asks over that same connection: ]
( Inside. Can I? )
[ Let her choose her own path. Stephen's so close to past the point of sense that it's all he can do just to give her the option. ]
[ if she was smart, she'd say no. it's dangerous. probably poisonous, if she's being honest. it could hurt. the back of her thigh where his grip has oozed that slime already prickles with a combination of numbness and the so-cold-it's-hot sensitivity. a warning.
but if she's being really honest, she wants that. she's been chasing out control, carefully avoiding any acknowledgment of her precarious position. but she is a backstabber, an opportunist. she had betrayed luffy and the straw-hats, and she had betrayed zoya, and who else would she betray before coco village was free?
so maybe she deserves to hurt for the hurt that she's caused. ]
I came here for you to fuck me. [ she tells him, like it's a foregone point. her breath is short, and even as curt as the words are, they come heavy and labored. she bends one knee, makes more room for his hand between her thighs, welcomes him inside the tight clench of her body. ]
[ That's all it takes. He doesn't hesitate. One quick drag of his fingertips through saliva and whatever of her own slick wet he's already earned and he's pressing one finger inside, sinking up into her, mouth going slack for a second to groan out delight and heave in breath. He pulses that one finger, testing, fingertip hooking to stroke against her wall - and after that he's done with caution.
A second finger joins the first. A couple of shallow thrusts, shifting position to make room for his hand without having to abandon her clit, and then logistics cease to matter. The fact that he will pay for this tomorrow ceases to matter.
He fucks her. As he'd all but begged to do. As she came here for him to. As he's wanted to since he woke, haunted, from a dream. ]
[ she sways, shoulders collapsing forward, grip tightening on his hair and his shoulder. the next sounds are strained, little whines that she tries to swallow down, hapless and short and pitched with need as his fingers search out places inside of her that she has never touched.
that he has never really touched, except now, even if it arouses a sense-memory of the same.
it's different now, though, even than that fantasy in the void. the strange venom on his fingers mingled with her arousal, and for a moment, the chill is like ice. she chokes out a startled sound as it spreads up her spine, fanning out all the way to her fingertips.
she clenches around him, pressing his mouth tighter to her, tight enough that as her sensitivity spikes she can feel the firm pressure of his jaw. her eyes go wide. a guttural sound comes from deep in her chest as her hips twitch. the cold is gone and in its place is the hypersensitivity that makes her aware of every nerve in her body and every ridge on his fingertips, drowning in the wet-warm of his tongue.
she comes. faster than she has before, fast enough that it almost hurts. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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[ by which she means not at all. it's self-contradictory and muddled and he's clearly not-okay enough to struggle to articulate it. she feels a little better about the itching of scales. ]
Where are you?
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[ From theirs, in somebody else's metal tub, taking advantage of the empty room to wash sweat, sex and the perpetual ooze from his body. The water's already black with it. At least this way he can't see if his skin's moving. ]
I can come back.
[ If she's there. If she'll let him in. ]
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I can clean it up after.
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[ less muss less fuss. she heads down that way, rubbing at the flaking skin revealing some of her scales. the tattoo on her shoulder is peeling away, a sawtooth design giving way to real fish-like scales.
she knocks at the only fully closed door. ]
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A lift of his fingers swings the door open to put paid to that, and when she steps inside he's reminded immediately that he isn't the only person her offer might have saved the trouble of things getting this far. He's been selfish.
What a surprise. ]
—Sorry.
[ Far enough gone to not even withhold an apology. It must be bad. ]
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[ she steps inside, despite the question. shuts the door firmly behind her. it is loud enough to send a message. ]
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I thought I knew better.
[ Explanation, not answer. And anyway - he was wrong. ]
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[ conversational. like he's not slick with ink all the way up to his elbows, like he's not submerged in a metal tub in the center of the room, like they are discussing a leaky pipe.
except that she walks around towards the tub, starts stripping off her shirt. ]
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[ People. He doesn't elaborate, watching her, attention fixed and following, relief stirring as she goes for her shirt. ]
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[ the shirt drops to the ground. then, after it, the short-cropped bodice that the people here used in place of bras. she steps on the heel of one shoe to lift out of it. all very perfunctory. the coming home kind of undressing that he has and hasn't seen before, that she has and hasn't done before in front of him. ]
Yet you didn't call me until now. [ it's not hard to guess why. the pain of asking for help was made worse by having refused the offer. but that's precisely why she wants to hear him say it. if asking for help after he'd refused her hurt, it still wasn't an equal to the sting of rejection that had come with knowing that she, too, would be on her own with the growing sprawl of scales that claws its way up over her deltoid and towards her neck, shining gold. ] Where'd you start? The brothel?
[ it had been her strategy, anyway. ]
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If you let this go on much longer, you will do harm.
Too late a warning when it had landed. Here's some evidence of harm already done. Speaking of... ]
The clinic.
[ Not that he'd been looking for the kind of help he'd received. And not that somebody else offered help and this time I accepted is going to do him any good in this specific context, even though it's almost every story he has. ]
The brothel later.
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she unbuttons the back of her skirt and lets it drop down fall. bends to tug down her underwear, too. reveals a short tangle of orange hair between her thighs and long legs with tan lines from her shorts, the same ones that she'd had in the dream in the void. the same ones that webbed around her neckline. ]
What makes you think this will help when that didn't? [ she approaches the tub. ]
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You mean something.
[ To him. And he craves her for it. ]
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[ she stands at the foot of the tub. rests her hands on the rim of it, leans over to narrow her gaze on him.
and what if it does help? does that change things? the possibility frightens her. nothing has slaked her hunger so far, not in the way that people talk about anyway. but he had been the one that she'd reached out to. ]
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[ And it doesn't matter. Some version of him had known whatever part of her had found a home in his dream of another life. It's enough to have it take all of his not inconsiderable will just to keep himself from pressing forward, at risk of overstepping at the critical moment.
Instead he meets her gaze and holds it, intent. Oddly calm now, the thing he's waiting to become gone still with anticipation. ]
What difference does that make?
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she hates the reminder. hates catching glimpses of her reflection and realizing that she looks like she belongs amongst them. ]
It's not always good. To have someone that means something to you.
[ she drops his gaze in that moment. swallows the rest of the thought. chokes the sentiment down. then she climbs into the tub with him, carefully placing her feet on either side of his legs. the water, dark with ink and blackening ooze, sloshes around them. some spills out to the floor.
they've
notdone this before. sharing baths, showers. fitting their bodies around one another in various cramped spaces. ]no subject
[ All agreement today, apparently. But he does know. He's spent enough years avoiding connection to understand the instinct even if he doesn't know its cause for her.
And here, as she takes her first steps into the liquid mire he's made of the bathtub, his good behaviour finally slips. Arms dip into the water to coil around her legs, disrupting it all the more as he draws himself toward her and her toward him if she'll let him, keeping just enough of a hold of himself to press his face against her thigh and breathe deep. ]
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she drops her hand to his hair, lets too-sharp nails curl against his scalp. she'd planned to settle down with him, straddle him, make room for her knees around his hips and make this quick and perfunctory and move on with her life.
this is better. ]
Convince me. [ she offers, tentative. ] Do you remember how I liked it?
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A thrill leaps through him, head shifting under the close-to-clawed hand in his hair until he can look up at her from where his face is still pressed against her thigh, mouth open, breath panting unevenly against her skin as everything zeros in, stretches out, moment feeling taught as a tripwire.
He doesn't need telling twice. A few seconds of eye contact is enough to lurch him out of inertia, one arm reaching higher to root a hand against the small of her back and urge her into him as he straightens, other hand dragging down her leg and settling there, anchoring her close. Stained fingertips press hard into the flesh of her thigh, sending little spasms of pain through his fingers for him to barely notice.
With his lips already parted Stephen tilts his head and pushes his nose into the hair between her legs, tongue pressing out broad and flat to drag a greedy wet stripe over all he can reach of her, dipping between her folds to make his way back up to her clit. He swirls his tongue there, swipes with it, starts to lap at her in teasing little licks to ease her in.
Flashes of times (never) before start to layer over each other in his thoughts, a mess of remembering, and the feedback loop is heady enough that it bleeds from him, fragments of sound and blurred image gifted to her as they form. Satisfaction is marked with a deep, resonant hum and the mindless rolling shift of his hips under the water making shallow waves on the surface, yearning for the feel of her even as he savors her taste, her smell, the tension of her thigh under his hand. ]
no subject
and he does remember, does seek out familiar patterns that some part of her knows had never really happened, had been hallucinations. this is no hallucination. he is solid, clinging to her, drawing her into him and burying his face against her with such earnest. ]
Stephen.
[ she wavers. whatever stoic reservation she had sustained getting to this point crumbles in two breathy syllables. she braces one hand on his shoulder, the other tightening in his hair, holding him against her.
no matter how she tries to hold it in, hold herself together, he draws a throaty, wobbling sound of her throat. a trembling knee here, a jerk of her hips there. the water in the bath quivers too, rattling upward into loose droplets that suspend in the air inches above the surface of the rest of the bathwater, as carefully tense as she is. ]
no subject
His hand drags down from the small of her back, two fingers prying into the space between her thighs and the heat of her. He draws parallel tracks over the skin there, insistent, framing her, fingers curling on each stroke in tactile show of intent but not yet dipping close enough to risk pressing inside at the slightest lapse of his final shreds of self control.
It's dangerous. He knows that. Whatever he's oozing can't be anything good and it always starts with the hands, already the leg he's grasping is slick with little rivulets of fresh thick fluid - flashes of black slime slip into the cursemark telepathy he's projecting to her, a warning even as he asks over that same connection: ]
( Inside. Can I? )
[ Let her choose her own path. Stephen's so close to past the point of sense that it's all he can do just to give her the option. ]
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but if she's being really honest, she wants that. she's been chasing out control, carefully avoiding any acknowledgment of her precarious position. but she is a backstabber, an opportunist. she had betrayed luffy and the straw-hats, and she had betrayed zoya, and who else would she betray before coco village was free?
so maybe she deserves to hurt for the hurt that she's caused. ]
I came here for you to fuck me. [ she tells him, like it's a foregone point. her breath is short, and even as curt as the words are, they come heavy and labored. she bends one knee, makes more room for his hand between her thighs, welcomes him inside the tight clench of her body. ]
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A second finger joins the first. A couple of shallow thrusts, shifting position to make room for his hand without having to abandon her clit, and then logistics cease to matter. The fact that he will pay for this tomorrow ceases to matter.
He fucks her. As he'd all but begged to do. As she came here for him to. As he's wanted to since he woke, haunted, from a dream. ]
(cw: overstimulation/hypersensitivity)
that he has never really touched, except now, even if it arouses a sense-memory of the same.
it's different now, though, even than that fantasy in the void. the strange venom on his fingers mingled with her arousal, and for a moment, the chill is like ice. she chokes out a startled sound as it spreads up her spine, fanning out all the way to her fingertips.
she clenches around him, pressing his mouth tighter to her, tight enough that as her sensitivity spikes she can feel the firm pressure of his jaw. her eyes go wide. a guttural sound comes from deep in her chest as her hips twitch. the cold is gone and in its place is the hypersensitivity that makes her aware of every nerve in her body and every ridge on his fingertips, drowning in the wet-warm of his tongue.
she comes. faster than she has before, fast enough that it almost hurts. ]
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(cw: suffocation :) )
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(cw: erectile dysfunction jokes, but also still further teeth gore...)
(cw: references to eye gore... and teeth gore...)
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