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. ]
[ There's nothing ambiguous about the way she clamps around him, the sound that claws out of her. The hand at her thigh lets her go just to wrap his arm up and brace her by the waist, anticipating the need to take her weight, anchoring her as he works her through it. His tongue presses flat, protection from the open air, from the friction of his breath against wet skin until he can lean back in her vice grip enough to withdraw his mouth from her completely.
It's not until he's sure he's wrung out the last of what she needs of him that he eases fingers out from inside her, dragging their shared mess down over her thigh, soothing a gentle congratulation with his palm over her skin. He shifts back the few inches of tub he'd given up earlier, making enough room between them that he can coax her toward him, help her sink down into the water.
The sounds she'd made over the moments before play on cruel auto-repeat, the ways she'd twitched and grasped him kicking hard back into mind each time he banishes one with a huff of ragged breath. But it's down only onto the raised seat of his thighs that he guides her, heedless of his hunger. Sated in one sense even as he's starved in the next, scalp tingling from her grip, jaw aching. His face is flushed and lips still wet from working her as he searches her face, avid, eyes dark with want, bright with having got what he wanted. ]
Easy. [ Voice a rough, low husk. He runs a palm up over the impression of gills so his thumb can settle under the swell of her breast. ] I've got you.
[ her eyes are wet. her vision blurry. her breath tight in her chest, tighter as his fingers brush the too-sensitive folds of skin that make her gills. and for a moment, she thinks maybe she has lost the ability to breathe air for them. because they tingle with numbness and flutter when he touches them, a whole-body shiver.
she slides down against him, sinking to her knees, settling into his lap. her wet cunt pressed flat to one of his thighs under the water, which seems to anchor her somehow. inky though it is with that strange black secretion.
her arms wrap more fully around his shoulders, and she shifts to press closer to him, burying her face into his neck, chest to chest, breathing deep of him, steadying herself. but that water, the poisoned water, is making her skin twitch, tingle, ache. for him.
breath by breath, she steadies herself. reaches one hand between them, groping for him as a way of regaining some semblance of control in this. ]
[ Close, closer now, and the easy comfort of proximity, of her body draped and pressed to his, does the opposite of calm him down. Yearning spikes, drops deep, feeling her hot against his thigh and craving her, craving—
Then her hand finds him in dark waters. His hips buck violently up at just that simple first contact, impossibly startled by something so easily seen coming, thighs jumping and breath tearing harshly from him, scraping sound out with it as it goes.
It tapers off into a voiceless laugh at his own expense, prizing his eyes back open to watch her, hungry, waiting to see where she'll take him. ]
[ wry and with a lazy, goading smile, she asks, ] Do you always react like you haven't had your dick touched in years, or ... ?
[ she trails off, realizing as she grips him solidly that she does not want the answer. that she knows already that it's a matter of their own intimacy, the intensity of this strange thing tugging between them. of knowing and unknowing.
she straightens her thighs. pushing herself up enough to shift over him. to guide him clumsily between her thighs, to the wet clench of her cunt. but she doesn't take him inside yet. rubs the head of his cock along the length of her instead, jolting with a little whimper when that nudges her clit. ]
[ A sharp fff- disperses into panting as his head drops, all focus directed to clamping down on the urge to judder upward again at the feel of her on him, the promise of her so close now. The sound she makes has him twitching in her grip.
With the metal of the tub's edge pressing an indent into his palm, other hand grasping Nami's waist like a man adrift, it's all he can do just to keep still, to keep from rutting up, pushing down. But keep from it he does. Holds himself in place save for a shallow, barely there rock of his hips that he can't quite contain, eyes blown dark with need for her when he raises his gaze again.
No words left now. The total concentration required just to keep from ruining the tease, to be grateful and desperate and patient in the receipt of her mercy as her heat coaxes eager formless murmurs bridging plea and encouragement from him already taking everything he has. ]
[ her voice is quiet. private. rough, too rough to properly tease. they both know how ruined and desperate she is, how this fragile thing is splitting her apart as surely as him. ]
Waiting patiently, even without being asked. [ she brushes her mouth against his cheekbone, her nose nudging his brow.
she doesn't draw it out further. can't bring herself to, not now. instead, she sinks down onto him, taking him inside of her, and the movement is familiar but the feeling, the feeling is not. she'd only had him in dreams. her mind remembers, but her body doesn't. her cunt yields to him, stretched apart to accommodate the shape of him.
her breath catches in her throat, her shoulders tightening and hunching up around her neck. her hands settle on the top of his chest, bracing herself, holding him, savoring the warmth that slips under her skin, finally stirs her cold blood. ]
[ Finally, finally— he can't help the slip of sound guttering unsteadily out of him as she sinks down, mouth falling open around nothing, eyes squeezing briefly shut - staggered, drifting in the heat of her, the closeness. It takes effort to prize his eyes open again, eager to watch her, and he's rewarded with a mirror of his own tension, his own unlikely comfort.
He needs a second. Seems as though she does too. And so for a moment he sits perfectly still, letting her get used to the feel of him, getting used to the feel of her.
Then a hand raises up out of dark waters, skimming from her thigh up her side, nudging past her arm so he can skate his palm over her breast, swipe a thumb over her nipple in counterpoint to the arm he wraps solidly around her waist. And just like that he's moving, rocking his hips back through their limited range of motion so he can roll up into her again, slow and sure, breath heaving raggedly from him as he does. ]
[ it takes a few, sun-blinded moments for her to put to words the discomfort in her chest that knots and swells as he rocks up into her, holds her, fills her. she hasn't had it like this before, not outside of that dream in the void. stephen's movements are slow and steady and —
intimate.
the notion is as poisonous to her as the strange black venom he secrets, which makes every inch of her it covers prickle like a limb that's lost and regained circulation. she presses her forehead to his, breathy whines squeezed out of her chest by force.
she settles her arms around him. it's too late to withdraw from this. if he's going to burn her, she's going to let herself feel the warmth of it. her hips roll to compliment his movements, a steady synchronicity that draws him deeper. his cock isn't the biggest she's had before, but he finds new places inside of her because she opens her hips and plunges him deep within like he belongs there. ]
Is this what you wanted? [ she asks, voice low against the side of his face. ] What you were running from?
[ Fingers splayed out over her ribs, Stephen's breath falls in pants, each running the risk of catching in his throat and pooling out as strained sounds that mingle with hers. And god, when she starts to move with him...
He gets a little lost. In the press of her forehead, the hold of her arms, the churning of their hips together and apart like a tide. She lets him in, welcomes him in. He doesn't notice his eyes have gone half-lidded until she speaks and they blink abruptly open, go wide to stare at orange hair and the door over Nami's shoulder as he chokes off a little sound of shock. His hips lose track of their rhythm, stuttering up into her.
Is this what you wanted? He can hear the threat in it whether she put it there or not. Truth here means being seen more clearly than he'd seen himself in years before a tumble through the multiverse set him straight. So danger lies in any honest answer. Risk.
She knows that. Has to. It's why she asked. And he wants her satisfied, doesn't he? Wants himself satisfied, too. ]
Yes.
[ Breathed out past her ear, shaky admission. He grasps her a little tighter, grunting roughly as the shift of their hips draws him deep and the reality of her under his hand hits at just the same time the sound of his own voice does. He turns his head, nudging his nose against her cheek, knowing she won't let him kiss her now, angling his mouth in invitation anyway. ]
Yes. [ she agrees, the syllable wrenched from her throat. affirmation. encouragement. maybe a little cruel reminder. he hadn't asked if it was the same for her, but that word is a confession too. it's the same for her. she won't tell him as much, won't let him ply vulnerability out of her beyond what they already have.
but she will kiss him. a messy parting of lips that devours him in a kiss that is all crackling recognition of how his beard irritates the soft skin of her face. she had kissed him gently, before. a thousand small moments at the breakfast counter, stepping out of the shower, stopping by his office. easy, casual, sincere. this one is unrecognizable. this kiss will swallow him whole.
she bites down on his lip, and her teeth are needle-sharp, tearing into his skin. the sharp taste of metal doesn't discourage her. it is the only thing that makes this gentle coaxing pace tolerable, excusable. the panting into his mouth, the blood, the digging of her nails against his shoulders.
every thrust is cruel. dagger-like, in how it splits her open, slow enough that she can feel every stretch of muscle all over again like the first push. steady enough to drown her without reprieve. it's a marathon, when she's only ever sprinted. ]
[ For a second the turn of her face to meet him evokes a tumble of dreamt memories, expectations queueing up behind them. He's surprised that she'd even entertain it— and then she crushes into him, takes her teeth to him, and the exclamation that accompanies the puncture of fresh holes is far from unhappy. His blood smears between them like the inky mess he's making of her ribs, her nails biting at him too, and it's perfect. It's honest.
He's not fucking a memory. This is no alternate timeline, no conjured reality where either of them are better than they are. He had resisted being here with everything he had, spent weeks avoiding it. She, already committed to it now, expresses her resistance with his pain.
There's no attempt to withdraw. Stephen pushes into the sting, gifts her more of himself to devour, mouth hungry and open and wanting as he shifts under the water, wedging foot and knee against the edge of the tub to find a new angle, new leverage to drive up into her. He holds her tight, keeps her close, relinquishes nothing of his greed for her as he starts to curl himself in deeper, more intently. Each movement more deliberate, each breath more strained.
This can't last much longer. He'll give her everything he can while it does. ]
[ he anchors himself and drives up with sudden, startling force to meet her, and nami's lungs empty into him. it rattles her. not just the movement, but the sense that he has seen something she hides away and it makes him want to scour and reach some deeper part of her, lose himself in it.
her reservations, her hesitations, are well lost to her. floating on the distant horizon, vanishing from view. she will remember them later, after, and feel uneasy for how much of herself she's given. but in this moment, she holds nothing back. loses herself in the tingling oversensitivity created by the ink he spills on her skin, until every brush of his fingertips on her ribs feels like it's across raw nerves. she is responsive, sounds of pleasure weaving into her labored breaths, fingers curling in his hair to hold him close, steady.
she is his until the end, when instinct wins. she tightens around him, wringing him in her arms like she could strangle him like this, and buries her face in his shoulder instead of letting him see her cry out. her climax overwhelms her, a shuddering fracture that curls her in on herself, turns the pace of her movements erratic and sharp until it suddenly stops. ]
[ It's a miracle he makes it to the point of tipping her over. One day, when he knows to credit it, he'll have to give thanks to the fluid that leaks from him, tainting the water, making an instrument of her skin. For now when she shatters he's suspended, flash blind, pleasure bright and her voice felt in the meat of his shoulder while somewhere, inexplicably calm, he starts to catalogue each little sign of her undoing.
The wrenching cling of her. The violent, stuttering shifts. The sound, as heard smothered so close to his ear that it both muffles and amplifies. His first real memories of their bodies in relation tuck neatly alongside a cloth taken to an unsteady ankle, a roll of her eyes, her back to him in the dark.
Then time catches up to him. It hits once she's already stilled, breath locked painfully back in his throat as everything seizes, hips churning up unbidden through one, two last frantic searches of her— and then his face is pressing against her hair, mouth open, shedding sound like skin as he lets himself go. He's an echo of her in that moment, arm tight and grasping, face hidden, hips driven high until the edge goes fully crested and he can finally - light as a feather, heavy as lead - settle them back down to the floor of the tub.
If there's any water left for them to sit in, that will be a miracle too. ]
Edited (don't ask me why i preferred this basically identical version of the same sentence I Just Did) 2023-12-13 23:43 (UTC)
[ she remains tangled in him while her breath evens out. while the water cools. tells herself it's the weight of her limbs and the trembling in her thighs that warns her not to try to lift herself up. that it's not the heat of his body against hers, and how she has missed it at night, because you can't miss what you've never had.
she has it now. even uncomfortably slotted into the makeshift bathing tub together in the middle of a stranger's room in the fucking boarding house, it's better. her heart pounds in her chest, strong enough that he must feel its frantic cadence too.
she doesn't want to separate. doesn't want to pick herself up and return to aloneness. there is comfort in tricking herself into being able to depend upon him. there was a reason the void had given that to her.
there comes a point, though, where it's inexcusable. unjustifiable. she turns her face towards him, briefly, forehead pressed to his cheek, nose along his jaw. breathes in. then— ] Your beard itches.
[ A gust of breath. It's a laugh, warm, throat just too lazy now to catch it with sound. He gives it a second, rifling through a rolodex of possible comebacks - ]
Your teeth are sharp.
[ If we're having a your physical trait has caused me the greater discomfort competition. Though in her defense, unlike his beard her teeth have only menaced a single part of him tonight. His hand, where its fingers had pressed little grooves into the skin of her side, loosens up to trail its fingers lightly up along her back, over her shoulderblade. Though they drag what remains of an old mess upward, nothing new leaks from his palm to coat her skin.
Reminded by his own comment, his tongue sneaks out curiously to prod at his lip, taste the saltmetal and hiss in a breath. This one, too, gusts out in a ghost of a laugh.
He's not in any great rush to ask her to vacate his lap. ]
[ she points this out a little ruthlessly, but given that she tongues at her front teeth and finds them loose, it feels better to put him on his heels than to engage the changes to her body in a more meaningful way.
she doesn't really want to think about what's going to happen when this set falls out, like her own teeth had when replaced by these. she lifts one hand from his back, stares at it on the rim of the tub and wonders if she's imagining that the webbing between her fingers is smaller now.
likes he needed arlong further embedded beneath her skin. she closes her eyes, breathes out slow and frustrated. then she reaches into her mouth to wiggle at her tooth. blood spills from the gum. yeah. it's definitely on its way out. she takes her hand from her mouth and starts to pick herself up off of him.
they might have dreamt of being married once, but that level of intimacy had not been the real them, and it certainly had not involved pulling teeth during the afterglow.
her body is a mess of black ooze, though the bathwater has it running down her sides like it's bleeding away except for where it catches in the dips of muscle and bone. ]
[ It's a fair comment, and with it bursts the bubble: they've moved on from peace and holding and back into an easier - more difficult - alignment. The next outward breath is a sigh, bidding the last stretched handful of moments a regretful goodbye as Nami prizes herself up to her feet—
And Stephen's brow furrows as he remembers - or at least resumes an awareness of the implications of - why he'd been in the bath in the first place. She's covered. It trails off of her in sheets and streams of stained water, but there's still too much for comfort. ]
You should stay. [ He realises how that sounds after he's said it. Knows instinctively what kind of reaction he's likely to get now she seems to have crossed the threshold of tolerating closeness. ] I can refill the tub. Give you some privacy if you need it.
[ Redundant as that was even before this, and especially now. But the point is he'll get of her hair if it means she can clean off. ]
[ she whips her head towards him again, briefly bewildered by the offer. but of course it's not a real offer. he was as distant as she was. as unused to relying on others. this is borrowed knowledge, she thinks—or maybe just observational. he doesn't seem to make a secret of his isolation.
it never occurs to her that it's out of respect for her own. ]
I didn't realize we were on watching each other pull out teeth and scales terms.
[ she opts to hook her finger between her lower lip and her gums—not to reveal the bleeding, but to at least indicate that she is worrying at them. the black ooze gets on her gums, too. numbs them, strangely enough, where it had done the opposite to her skin. ]
[ Oh. Attention homes in past his concern about his own impact on her to the places where whatever she was becoming might be starting to come apart. The mouth she draws his attention to, the patches where he remembers scales. Her gills. ]
I'm not squeamish.
[ Firm. A broad enough statement that it might speak for more than just the debriding of the monster from her body. ]
But you need to get that stuff off of you. I don't know what it'll do.
[ That stuff. Him. She needs to get him off of her, as soon as possible. ]
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no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
It's not until he's sure he's wrung out the last of what she needs of him that he eases fingers out from inside her, dragging their shared mess down over her thigh, soothing a gentle congratulation with his palm over her skin. He shifts back the few inches of tub he'd given up earlier, making enough room between them that he can coax her toward him, help her sink down into the water.
The sounds she'd made over the moments before play on cruel auto-repeat, the ways she'd twitched and grasped him kicking hard back into mind each time he banishes one with a huff of ragged breath. But it's down only onto the raised seat of his thighs that he guides her, heedless of his hunger. Sated in one sense even as he's starved in the next, scalp tingling from her grip, jaw aching. His face is flushed and lips still wet from working her as he searches her face, avid, eyes dark with want, bright with having got what he wanted. ]
Easy. [ Voice a rough, low husk. He runs a palm up over the impression of gills so his thumb can settle under the swell of her breast. ] I've got you.
no subject
she slides down against him, sinking to her knees, settling into his lap. her wet cunt pressed flat to one of his thighs under the water, which seems to anchor her somehow. inky though it is with that strange black secretion.
her arms wrap more fully around his shoulders, and she shifts to press closer to him, burying her face into his neck, chest to chest, breathing deep of him, steadying herself. but that water, the poisoned water, is making her skin twitch, tingle, ache. for him.
breath by breath, she steadies herself. reaches one hand between them, groping for him as a way of regaining some semblance of control in this. ]
no subject
Then her hand finds him in dark waters. His hips buck violently up at just that simple first contact, impossibly startled by something so easily seen coming, thighs jumping and breath tearing harshly from him, scraping sound out with it as it goes.
It tapers off into a voiceless laugh at his own expense, prizing his eyes back open to watch her, hungry, waiting to see where she'll take him. ]
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[ she trails off, realizing as she grips him solidly that she does not want the answer. that she knows already that it's a matter of their own intimacy, the intensity of this strange thing tugging between them. of knowing and unknowing.
she straightens her thighs. pushing herself up enough to shift over him. to guide him clumsily between her thighs, to the wet clench of her cunt. but she doesn't take him inside yet. rubs the head of his cock along the length of her instead, jolting with a little whimper when that nudges her clit. ]
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With the metal of the tub's edge pressing an indent into his palm, other hand grasping Nami's waist like a man adrift, it's all he can do just to keep still, to keep from rutting up, pushing down. But keep from it he does. Holds himself in place save for a shallow, barely there rock of his hips that he can't quite contain, eyes blown dark with need for her when he raises his gaze again.
No words left now. The total concentration required just to keep from ruining the tease, to be grateful and desperate and patient in the receipt of her mercy as her heat coaxes eager formless murmurs bridging plea and encouragement from him already taking everything he has. ]
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[ her voice is quiet. private. rough, too rough to properly tease. they both know how ruined and desperate she is, how this fragile thing is splitting her apart as surely as him. ]
Waiting patiently, even without being asked. [ she brushes her mouth against his cheekbone, her nose nudging his brow.
she doesn't draw it out further. can't bring herself to, not now. instead, she sinks down onto him, taking him inside of her, and the movement is familiar but the feeling, the feeling is not. she'd only had him in dreams. her mind remembers, but her body doesn't. her cunt yields to him, stretched apart to accommodate the shape of him.
her breath catches in her throat, her shoulders tightening and hunching up around her neck. her hands settle on the top of his chest, bracing herself, holding him, savoring the warmth that slips under her skin, finally stirs her cold blood. ]
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He needs a second. Seems as though she does too. And so for a moment he sits perfectly still, letting her get used to the feel of him, getting used to the feel of her.
Then a hand raises up out of dark waters, skimming from her thigh up her side, nudging past her arm so he can skate his palm over her breast, swipe a thumb over her nipple in counterpoint to the arm he wraps solidly around her waist. And just like that he's moving, rocking his hips back through their limited range of motion so he can roll up into her again, slow and sure, breath heaving raggedly from him as he does. ]
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intimate.
the notion is as poisonous to her as the strange black venom he secrets, which makes every inch of her it covers prickle like a limb that's lost and regained circulation. she presses her forehead to his, breathy whines squeezed out of her chest by force.
she settles her arms around him. it's too late to withdraw from this. if he's going to burn her, she's going to let herself feel the warmth of it. her hips roll to compliment his movements, a steady synchronicity that draws him deeper. his cock isn't the biggest she's had before, but he finds new places inside of her because she opens her hips and plunges him deep within like he belongs there. ]
Is this what you wanted? [ she asks, voice low against the side of his face. ] What you were running from?
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He gets a little lost. In the press of her forehead, the hold of her arms, the churning of their hips together and apart like a tide. She lets him in, welcomes him in. He doesn't notice his eyes have gone half-lidded until she speaks and they blink abruptly open, go wide to stare at orange hair and the door over Nami's shoulder as he chokes off a little sound of shock. His hips lose track of their rhythm, stuttering up into her.
Is this what you wanted? He can hear the threat in it whether she put it there or not. Truth here means being seen more clearly than he'd seen himself in years before a tumble through the multiverse set him straight. So danger lies in any honest answer. Risk.
She knows that. Has to. It's why she asked. And he wants her satisfied, doesn't he? Wants himself satisfied, too. ]
Yes.
[ Breathed out past her ear, shaky admission. He grasps her a little tighter, grunting roughly as the shift of their hips draws him deep and the reality of her under his hand hits at just the same time the sound of his own voice does. He turns his head, nudging his nose against her cheek, knowing she won't let him kiss her now, angling his mouth in invitation anyway. ]
Yes.
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but she will kiss him. a messy parting of lips that devours him in a kiss that is all crackling recognition of how his beard irritates the soft skin of her face. she had kissed him gently, before. a thousand small moments at the breakfast counter, stepping out of the shower, stopping by his office. easy, casual, sincere. this one is unrecognizable. this kiss will swallow him whole.
she bites down on his lip, and her teeth are needle-sharp, tearing into his skin. the sharp taste of metal doesn't discourage her. it is the only thing that makes this gentle coaxing pace tolerable, excusable. the panting into his mouth, the blood, the digging of her nails against his shoulders.
every thrust is cruel. dagger-like, in how it splits her open, slow enough that she can feel every stretch of muscle all over again like the first push. steady enough to drown her without reprieve. it's a marathon, when she's only ever sprinted. ]
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He's not fucking a memory. This is no alternate timeline, no conjured reality where either of them are better than they are. He had resisted being here with everything he had, spent weeks avoiding it. She, already committed to it now, expresses her resistance with his pain.
There's no attempt to withdraw. Stephen pushes into the sting, gifts her more of himself to devour, mouth hungry and open and wanting as he shifts under the water, wedging foot and knee against the edge of the tub to find a new angle, new leverage to drive up into her. He holds her tight, keeps her close, relinquishes nothing of his greed for her as he starts to curl himself in deeper, more intently. Each movement more deliberate, each breath more strained.
This can't last much longer. He'll give her everything he can while it does. ]
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her reservations, her hesitations, are well lost to her. floating on the distant horizon, vanishing from view. she will remember them later, after, and feel uneasy for how much of herself she's given. but in this moment, she holds nothing back. loses herself in the tingling oversensitivity created by the ink he spills on her skin, until every brush of his fingertips on her ribs feels like it's across raw nerves. she is responsive, sounds of pleasure weaving into her labored breaths, fingers curling in his hair to hold him close, steady.
she is his until the end, when instinct wins. she tightens around him, wringing him in her arms like she could strangle him like this, and buries her face in his shoulder instead of letting him see her cry out. her climax overwhelms her, a shuddering fracture that curls her in on herself, turns the pace of her movements erratic and sharp until it suddenly stops. ]
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The wrenching cling of her. The violent, stuttering shifts. The sound, as heard smothered so close to his ear that it both muffles and amplifies. His first real memories of their bodies in relation tuck neatly alongside a cloth taken to an unsteady ankle, a roll of her eyes, her back to him in the dark.
Then time catches up to him. It hits once she's already stilled, breath locked painfully back in his throat as everything seizes, hips churning up unbidden through one, two last frantic searches of her— and then his face is pressing against her hair, mouth open, shedding sound like skin as he lets himself go. He's an echo of her in that moment, arm tight and grasping, face hidden, hips driven high until the edge goes fully crested and he can finally - light as a feather, heavy as lead - settle them back down to the floor of the tub.
If there's any water left for them to sit in, that will be a miracle too. ]
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she has it now. even uncomfortably slotted into the makeshift bathing tub together in the middle of a stranger's room in the fucking boarding house, it's better. her heart pounds in her chest, strong enough that he must feel its frantic cadence too.
she doesn't want to separate. doesn't want to pick herself up and return to aloneness. there is comfort in tricking herself into being able to depend upon him. there was a reason the void had given that to her.
there comes a point, though, where it's inexcusable. unjustifiable. she turns her face towards him, briefly, forehead pressed to his cheek, nose along his jaw. breathes in. then— ] Your beard itches.
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Your teeth are sharp.
[ If we're having a your physical trait has caused me the greater discomfort competition. Though in her defense, unlike his beard her teeth have only menaced a single part of him tonight. His hand, where its fingers had pressed little grooves into the skin of her side, loosens up to trail its fingers lightly up along her back, over her shoulderblade. Though they drag what remains of an old mess upward, nothing new leaks from his palm to coat her skin.
Reminded by his own comment, his tongue sneaks out curiously to prod at his lip, taste the saltmetal and hiss in a breath. This one, too, gusts out in a ghost of a laugh.
He's not in any great rush to ask her to vacate his lap. ]
(cw: teeth/tooth loss gore)
[ she points this out a little ruthlessly, but given that she tongues at her front teeth and finds them loose, it feels better to put him on his heels than to engage the changes to her body in a more meaningful way.
she doesn't really want to think about what's going to happen when this set falls out, like her own teeth had when replaced by these. she lifts one hand from his back, stares at it on the rim of the tub and wonders if she's imagining that the webbing between her fingers is smaller now.
likes he needed arlong further embedded beneath her skin. she closes her eyes, breathes out slow and frustrated. then she reaches into her mouth to wiggle at her tooth. blood spills from the gum. yeah. it's definitely on its way out. she takes her hand from her mouth and starts to pick herself up off of him.
they might have dreamt of being married once, but that level of intimacy had not been the real them, and it certainly had not involved pulling teeth during the afterglow.
her body is a mess of black ooze, though the bathwater has it running down her sides like it's bleeding away except for where it catches in the dips of muscle and bone. ]
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And Stephen's brow furrows as he remembers - or at least resumes an awareness of the implications of - why he'd been in the bath in the first place. She's covered. It trails off of her in sheets and streams of stained water, but there's still too much for comfort. ]
You should stay. [ He realises how that sounds after he's said it. Knows instinctively what kind of reaction he's likely to get now she seems to have crossed the threshold of tolerating closeness. ] I can refill the tub. Give you some privacy if you need it.
[ Redundant as that was even before this, and especially now. But the point is he'll get of her hair if it means she can clean off. ]
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it never occurs to her that it's out of respect for her own. ]
I didn't realize we were on watching each other pull out teeth and scales terms.
[ she opts to hook her finger between her lower lip and her gums—not to reveal the bleeding, but to at least indicate that she is worrying at them. the black ooze gets on her gums, too. numbs them, strangely enough, where it had done the opposite to her skin. ]
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I'm not squeamish.
[ Firm. A broad enough statement that it might speak for more than just the debriding of the monster from her body. ]
But you need to get that stuff off of you. I don't know what it'll do.
[ That stuff. Him. She needs to get him off of her, as soon as possible. ]
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(cw: more tooth gore)
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(cw: suffocation :) )
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(cw: magically approximated medical ventilation, blood)
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(cw: more teeth gore)
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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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