[ We've missed you he types and deletes. I've missed you. There then gone. I miss you. None of it makes it to the final edit. It's nothing she doesn't already know. ]
Is he awake?
[ In any other place it wouldn't matter. He knows now even more than before, even with their magic lost to the wind, how capable she is of being her own first and last line of defence. But the mark across her throat changes things. Truth and obedience. He won't put her at greater risk. ]
[ No, he says, and the part of her carved out by Saber takes it as it is (good, she doesn't need him either) while another feels the twinge behind her ribs at wanting a yes. The possessive curl of displeasure at the thought of Tony and Stephen being fine without her, maybe even relieved she's gone. ]
We're in bed. I wore him out tonight.
[ If that makes Stephen jealous, then--good. They shouldn't feel right without her there. ]
[ It does make him jealous, a petty little flair. More than that though, it makes him angry. That she's there, with a man who has stolen her safety, stolen her warmth from their bed in every way that counts. ]
Good. You wore us out, too.
[ Even apart they're together. The physicality of it ebbs and flows, and maybe if he were free to dispel the building tension it would be easier to shift his focus away, afford her something adjacent to privacy. But he isn't. And even if he were, it's a welcome shared focal point when he feels Tony start to drift, can almost see the future in there hollowing out spaces to make a home for itself where parts of him used to be.
He won't be sending Saber any thank you notes. But parts of it - the parts that make easy sense, that need no translation - have been almost a relief. ]
He would have had to touch you, I suppose, if your hands weren't much use.
[ She should tell him she's sorry, but the pleasure she's felt tonight built to frustrating peaks and crashed into nothing, without Tony's permission, his voice at her ear. Saber gets to use her in every way he wants and all she can do is ride the edge, sob when she's close and loses her grasp. It's not fair if Stephen and Tony get something easy, while she's gone--though she supposes it's not easy, if they can feel the frustrated ache of her, too. ]
[ He alone amongst them has given his up voice to nobody. He doesn't need to answer uncomfortable questions - isn't compelled in the same way as those with their mostly-healed throats or their far-seeing minds. But, ]
I asked him not to.
[ Difficult for him and Tony both, he thinks, but there's a time and a place to play with the kind of power Tony wields over them now, and tonight they'd have called if they thought she would answer. Could answer. As it was, they compromised. No resisting it entirely, and he'd needed too badly to make sure Tony slept to waste the chance to help him get there, but there was no need to pour more salt in her wound than that.
So Tony rests, finally, chest rising and falling steadily for who knows how long before some fresh mania of knowing comes to drag him from the bed, and Stephen lays there watching him, aching for him, wondering if his noble choice wasn't the crueller one after all. ]
[ Fix it. Maybe it's the acknowledgment of wrongness, the offer of a solution that doesn't exist, that cracks something in her that was already splintered. They're all broken, aren't they? Tony's scrawled prophecies on the walls and windows, her desire to hurt them both so she can heal it. Fix it.
And with Stephen, she wants to confess. Lay herself bare, so he can--yes, fix it. Punish her for everything wrong inside.
Saber's warm beside her, but she tucks in on herself. Afraid he'll wake up and see she's talking to someone else, afraid of the vice around her heart, physical, real, as she puts feelings for another into writing. ]
It hurts.
It hurts that I can't
feel anything when I'm with you. When I want to so badly.
[ The reply is immediate. The truth hurts. Stokes up fresh hate so fast that he cannot keep his words in, means every one of them when they light up her screen. ]
I would kill him if I could
[ If I could. He hasn't stopped to question whether or not he's capable of killing Saber in his current state, or to remember that his hands couldn't do it unless she granted her approval.
None of it is worth considering when the fact of it is that he can't kill her. ]
[ She wouldn't stop him. Feels some twisted pleasure at the thought of it, even if they'd just be making their own ends, toppling all together and all at once.
And there's some strange relief in that, too. At being free from it, but not apart. ]
When I get home I want to atone. I want you to take it from me. Everything that's wrong inside
[ Fix it. He can fix it, he's the only one who can. ]
There is a small, well part of him that wants to tell her no once that word really lands. Offer to soothe her in any way but that, hold and coddle her and reframe her wrongs until she no longer wishes to expel them. Home should be for safety. He doesn't want to inflict on her what she must already find in the man she keeps going back to in order to feel.
But the siren song of what is owed and what is asked for is louder than his own little voice. The barest taste of the edge of a confession, of something wrong that needs expunging, and he's alive with it. Anticipation high.
He has a duty, she has a need. Who is he to deny her when she's asking him so plainly? When there is so little else he would deny her now, and this is what he's here for? ]
Yes
[ Yes. Of course.
But she will have to earn it. Maybe that will be the difference in the end between what he'll give to her and what he'll force the man who lays at her side to take. She will give of herself freely, and that will be her true repentance. Punishment her prize. ]
Would you have sought him out, if he and his knife didn't find you first?
[ Life at the Cloister was simpler, in some ways, than this. Shar granted oblivion: in her arms, you were no one. You were darkness, a void, memory obliterated to serve a greater purpose.
The Flock is a cacophony, memories scattered and shared, senses blurred, no boundary between what she feels and the others--and still the constriction of those feelings when she's not with Saber, strangling every other voice inside.
Perhaps this is its own punishment from Shar. It's hell, Shadowheart thinks, a knot of nothing and everything devouring itself behind her ribs.
Stephen, at least, is an answer. Refuge, respite. She needs to be clean and he can grant her that, can't he? ]
Yes.
[ It takes longer than it should for her to send it, the little dots indicating her response forming and disappearing more than once. Shame coiling hot in her stomach, but it will be worse if she doesn't get it out. ]
Not to give him my heart. But I like the way he makes me feel.
[ Ironic, isn't it? She hadn't caught it before. ]
Like I'm just
something for him to use.
I don't have to be anything else. I don't have to be good.
[ It takes the edge off of the bitter pill of her words that they, even muted by the medium, constitute confession and sing through him like sunlight. But as always seems to be the case with him these days, crowding clouds wait to blot out that sweet light. ]
You just have to be his.
[ Another time that might not feel so personal. Now though, joined as they are, there's no hiding the muddying of the waters as her answer churns up filth from the bed of his thoughts.
She wouldn't have given herself to him here, and he understands that - he respects it. He'd earned her ire, her mistrust. He'd hurt her, deliberately, calculatedly, and thrown every opportunity to show any hint of remorse into the dirt.
But there she is. Happy object, willing plaything. Saber held to the lowest possible standard, allowed to believe he has a right to her while it suits her to be claimed, until they find themselves here: him contemplating murder in cold blood in spite of his once-cherised oath, her with her cunt and her heart stuck perpetually in the wrong houses. All of it avoidable.
She's right. There is plenty in her that needs to be excised. ]
When you come home, you will be nothing but good.
[ He had more questions. They don't feel so pressing now. The familiar creep of purpose claws at him, gives voice to the muck of his feeling. ]
You will do as you're told. You will say please and thank you and you won't talk back. If you break the rules I set for you or fail to follow instruction, we will start over. And when you're on the edge of breaking and you still feel nothing but empty, you will remember that this is his gift to you, and that it's too late to give it back.
[ That is how she will atone. By offering up every moment of relief she bought from Saber, feeling the sunk cost of it sit heavy in her overwrought body as it writhes just as easily under another man's hands. ]
[ You just have to be his. Saber's been Shadowheart's guilty, ill-kept secret for months. The extent of it, she thinks, was still hidden: her desire to be taken and obliterated, shaped into a toy without autonomy. In Saber's bed, spread open on his cock, she's not a girl with shards of stolen memory, abandoned by a goddess who molded her into a weapon. She's just simple, base pleasure, kept on the leash of it no matter how many times she tries to walk away from him.
But now she's told Stephen, and he's shown her she's right to feel shame like an oil slick inside her. Shadowheart squeezes her thighs together where her hand's already at work between them, the heel of her palm grinding against her clit. It doesn't matter how wet she gets at the thought of him lancing the poison from her--she won't be able to cum. Still, she types clumsily back, one-handed against the pillow: ]
I'll be good for you. I'll be good.
[ Only Saber doesn't let her go, the next morning. It's evening when she shuts the door of her house (their home) behind her, leaning back against it on wobbling legs. She doesn't presume to walk to the armchair where Stephen sits, doesn't want to hasten his discovery of how Saber's left her. Her hair is loose, sticky from his spend; eyeliner smeared from crying, from pleasure and overwhelm and shame. There are bruises, mean and dark, down her jaw and throat, and beneath the thin cotton of her dress they cover her tits. Saber ruined her underwear, so she wears none, aware this is its own perversion of the first time she came to Stephen: when they were other people, and she'd prepared herself just for him, sweet and yielding. Now, Saber's cum trickles down her thighs instead, her cunt slick with it.
Tony's not here. Shadowheart can't decide if that helps or makes it worse, when she turns the lock on the door one-handed, unsure if she's ready to face Stephen's expression (his instruction, rules, inevitable punishment) once he takes the full measure of her.
Softly, aware the clench of desire she feels in the asking is sick, ]
[ In the dark, with a sleeping body at his side and his anger churning in his chest, it had been all too easy to promise her the threat of an Exactor's oblivion. In the morning, he holds onto it as best he can, though the sharper edges are sanded down over breakfast, trying not to sour a morning when Tony is mostly lucid. When he goes out to help in the village, Stephen tells him he'll see him later, swallowing the anxiety that curdles in him to let him go out there alone. There's nothing to be done about it. He has an appointment to keep here at home.
Only she doesn't appear. He spends the day in idleness, lonely hands unable to do what small helpful tasks he might be able to complete around the house without the presence of others to aid him or permission from the one who owns them now. His frustration builds in the discomfort of his solitude, all the more when he's forced to know what's keeping her so long, and when Tony comes home he is not sorry when he crowds him, seeking some relief from the pressure of it, the hollow feeling of being alone.
Evening approaches, and Tony's drawn to another severed part of himself, a part Stephen too yearns to visit and soothe. He almost goes with him to find Lanfear, almost leaves their house empty and cold in order to chase a warmth he's barely felt all day. But he promised Shadowheart his service, and for all she's left him rotting here waiting for her return, he's not sure he can stand the thought of her arriving, emptied out again, only to find their home empty too.
By the time he hears the door, he's tired. Drained from a day of abstention from proximity, the pulled taut feeling of all of his bonds gone far from him, the stress of not knowing how they are when all four of them have of late been doing very badly. His righteous fury, burning so hot last night and flaring again throughout the day, is an old fire's dying embers now. She locks the door behind her, and his soft sigh is equal parts relief (she's here) and resignation, steeling himself to do as he said would, make her as sorry as he knows she needs him to.
Her question helps. A finger jabbed into the wound of his lonely day, one she's spent kept so close that she's now filled and covered with the evidence of it. In the moment, the insult is less Saber's presence in the room than the thoughtlessness of her greed. ]
Did I ask you to speak?
[ He pulls himself up out of the chair, turns to finally take her in, and the stony indifference on his face is a necessary mask when he finds her bruised and skewed and sticky. There is a little war inside of him. Some small flare of yesterday's fury, but most of it is fear for her, hurt for her, frustration. Hate. He has to remind himself that there are parts of this she likes. That her staying there with him, coming back looking like this, is not entirely the fault of the scar at her throat. That she's asking Stephen now for more of the same, and he doesn't need to abandon her here to go and pluck the hands from her aggressor with a power he no longer has at his disposal. ]
Take off your clothes.
[ Part of it is that he wants her uncomfortable: a window somewhere left open, no fire in the grate to warm her, and nowhere left to hide her transgressions. Really, though, he just wants to see the map of her skin so he can begin to chart the safest course through cruel waters.
He doesn't move to help her. Let her shred this dress too. He'll fix it in the morning. ]
[ If Shadowheart felt exposed in her shame through their messages alone, it’s nothing compared to the stony face that greets her—the weariness she can feel in Stephen, the loneliness that doesn’t wholly dissipate with her presence. Saber goads and pokes and prods, feeds off her defiance and drinks deeper when she bends and then breaks for him. There’s always a fight, with him.
She doesn’t want to fight Stephen. She’d thought, in their splintering last month, that maybe that’s all they would ever do again; that they’d meant nothing to each other (that she’d meant nothing to him, realized too late that she wanted to mean something).
It hurts more, to mean something now. If Shadowheart has ever loved anyone in her real life, separate from Saltburn’s implanted memories, she doesn’t remember it—not the feeling, nor the person, whether it lit her from within or she had to smother the fire before it caught. When she thinks the word love, it’s knotted roots in her belly, Stephen’s memories of Christine and Tony’s of his wife. Black nothing where she should have her own to match theirs.
She feels and doesn’t feel. She wants and feels sick with the wanting. The scar at her breast chokes the feeling from her, and maybe that is a kind of love—the kind Shar taught her, bringing only loss with it.
Shadowheart holds Stephen’s gaze, at least, eyes reddened as her hands move to the ties at the front of her dress. It should be Stephen and Tony’s hands in tandem, lifting her hem for her, kissing her shoulder as they undress for bed. She knows by now what happens without their help: her fingers fumbling the knots, tangling them further. Still, she forces it, her jaw closed tight, until something rips—the seam of a strap, slipping off her shoulder.
She pulls sharp, then, to get the rest over with, more seams tearing until gravity does its work for her, and the dress is pooled around her feet. Her body exposed to him, used and dirty. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
No. I just wanted to make sure.
[ We've missed you he types and deletes. I've missed you. There then gone. I miss you. None of it makes it to the final edit. It's nothing she doesn't already know. ]
Is he awake?
[ In any other place it wouldn't matter. He knows now even more than before, even with their magic lost to the wind, how capable she is of being her own first and last line of defence. But the mark across her throat changes things. Truth and obedience. He won't put her at greater risk. ]
no subject
We're in bed. I wore him out tonight.
[ If that makes Stephen jealous, then--good. They shouldn't feel right without her there. ]
no subject
Good. You wore us out, too.
[ Even apart they're together. The physicality of it ebbs and flows, and maybe if he were free to dispel the building tension it would be easier to shift his focus away, afford her something adjacent to privacy. But he isn't. And even if he were, it's a welcome shared focal point when he feels Tony start to drift, can almost see the future in there hollowing out spaces to make a home for itself where parts of him used to be.
He won't be sending Saber any thank you notes. But parts of it - the parts that make easy sense, that need no translation - have been almost a relief. ]
nsfw ➡️
He would have had to touch you, I suppose, if your hands weren't much use.
[ She should tell him she's sorry, but the pleasure she's felt tonight built to frustrating peaks and crashed into nothing, without Tony's permission, his voice at her ear. Saber gets to use her in every way he wants and all she can do is ride the edge, sob when she's close and loses her grasp. It's not fair if Stephen and Tony get something easy, while she's gone--though she supposes it's not easy, if they can feel the frustrated ache of her, too. ]
no subject
I asked him not to.
[ Difficult for him and Tony both, he thinks, but there's a time and a place to play with the kind of power Tony wields over them now, and tonight they'd have called if they thought she would answer. Could answer. As it was, they compromised. No resisting it entirely, and he'd needed too badly to make sure Tony slept to waste the chance to help him get there, but there was no need to pour more salt in her wound than that.
So Tony rests, finally, chest rising and falling steadily for who knows how long before some fresh mania of knowing comes to drag him from the bed, and Stephen lays there watching him, aching for him, wondering if his noble choice wasn't the crueller one after all. ]
We'll fix it when you're back.
no subject
And with Stephen, she wants to confess. Lay herself bare, so he can--yes, fix it. Punish her for everything wrong inside.
Saber's warm beside her, but she tucks in on herself. Afraid he'll wake up and see she's talking to someone else, afraid of the vice around her heart, physical, real, as she puts feelings for another into writing. ]
It hurts.
It hurts that I can't
feel anything when I'm with you. When I want to so badly.
no subject
I would kill him if I could
[ If I could. He hasn't stopped to question whether or not he's capable of killing Saber in his current state, or to remember that his hands couldn't do it unless she granted her approval.
None of it is worth considering when the fact of it is that he can't kill her. ]
cw ideation
[ She wouldn't stop him. Feels some twisted pleasure at the thought of it, even if they'd just be making their own ends, toppling all together and all at once.
And there's some strange relief in that, too. At being free from it, but not apart. ]
When I get home I want to atone. I want you to take it from me. Everything that's wrong inside
[ Fix it. He can fix it, he's the only one who can. ]
Please
cw general exactor themes warning ongoing
There is a small, well part of him that wants to tell her no once that word really lands. Offer to soothe her in any way but that, hold and coddle her and reframe her wrongs until she no longer wishes to expel them. Home should be for safety. He doesn't want to inflict on her what she must already find in the man she keeps going back to in order to feel.
But the siren song of what is owed and what is asked for is louder than his own little voice. The barest taste of the edge of a confession, of something wrong that needs expunging, and he's alive with it. Anticipation high.
He has a duty, she has a need. Who is he to deny her when she's asking him so plainly? When there is so little else he would deny her now, and this is what he's here for? ]
Yes
[ Yes. Of course.
But she will have to earn it. Maybe that will be the difference in the end between what he'll give to her and what he'll force the man who lays at her side to take. She will give of herself freely, and that will be her true repentance. Punishment her prize. ]
Would you have sought him out, if he and his knife didn't find you first?
no subject
The Flock is a cacophony, memories scattered and shared, senses blurred, no boundary between what she feels and the others--and still the constriction of those feelings when she's not with Saber, strangling every other voice inside.
Perhaps this is its own punishment from Shar. It's hell, Shadowheart thinks, a knot of nothing and everything devouring itself behind her ribs.
Stephen, at least, is an answer. Refuge, respite. She needs to be clean and he can grant her that, can't he? ]
Yes.
[ It takes longer than it should for her to send it, the little dots indicating her response forming and disappearing more than once. Shame coiling hot in her stomach, but it will be worse if she doesn't get it out. ]
Not to give him my heart. But I like the way he makes me feel.
[ Ironic, isn't it? She hadn't caught it before. ]
Like I'm just
something for him to use.
I don't have to be anything else. I don't have to be good.
no subject
You just have to be his.
[ Another time that might not feel so personal. Now though, joined as they are, there's no hiding the muddying of the waters as her answer churns up filth from the bed of his thoughts.
She wouldn't have given herself to him here, and he understands that - he respects it. He'd earned her ire, her mistrust. He'd hurt her, deliberately, calculatedly, and thrown every opportunity to show any hint of remorse into the dirt.
But there she is. Happy object, willing plaything. Saber held to the lowest possible standard, allowed to believe he has a right to her while it suits her to be claimed, until they find themselves here: him contemplating murder in cold blood in spite of his once-cherised oath, her with her cunt and her heart stuck perpetually in the wrong houses. All of it avoidable.
She's right. There is plenty in her that needs to be excised. ]
When you come home, you will be nothing but good.
[ He had more questions. They don't feel so pressing now. The familiar creep of purpose claws at him, gives voice to the muck of his feeling. ]
You will do as you're told. You will say please and thank you and you won't talk back. If you break the rules I set for you or fail to follow instruction, we will start over. And when you're on the edge of breaking and you still feel nothing but empty, you will remember that this is his gift to you, and that it's too late to give it back.
[ That is how she will atone. By offering up every moment of relief she bought from Saber, feeling the sunk cost of it sit heavy in her overwrought body as it writhes just as easily under another man's hands. ]
➡️ 🎬 nsfw, cuck-adjacent content
But now she's told Stephen, and he's shown her she's right to feel shame like an oil slick inside her. Shadowheart squeezes her thighs together where her hand's already at work between them, the heel of her palm grinding against her clit. It doesn't matter how wet she gets at the thought of him lancing the poison from her--she won't be able to cum. Still, she types clumsily back, one-handed against the pillow: ]
I'll be good for you. I'll be good.
[ Only Saber doesn't let her go, the next morning. It's evening when she shuts the door of her house (their home) behind her, leaning back against it on wobbling legs. She doesn't presume to walk to the armchair where Stephen sits, doesn't want to hasten his discovery of how Saber's left her. Her hair is loose, sticky from his spend; eyeliner smeared from crying, from pleasure and overwhelm and shame. There are bruises, mean and dark, down her jaw and throat, and beneath the thin cotton of her dress they cover her tits. Saber ruined her underwear, so she wears none, aware this is its own perversion of the first time she came to Stephen: when they were other people, and she'd prepared herself just for him, sweet and yielding. Now, Saber's cum trickles down her thighs instead, her cunt slick with it.
Tony's not here. Shadowheart can't decide if that helps or makes it worse, when she turns the lock on the door one-handed, unsure if she's ready to face Stephen's expression (his instruction, rules, inevitable punishment) once he takes the full measure of her.
Softly, aware the clench of desire she feels in the asking is sick, ]
Are you going to fuck him out of me?
no subject
Only she doesn't appear. He spends the day in idleness, lonely hands unable to do what small helpful tasks he might be able to complete around the house without the presence of others to aid him or permission from the one who owns them now. His frustration builds in the discomfort of his solitude, all the more when he's forced to know what's keeping her so long, and when Tony comes home he is not sorry when he crowds him, seeking some relief from the pressure of it, the hollow feeling of being alone.
Evening approaches, and Tony's drawn to another severed part of himself, a part Stephen too yearns to visit and soothe. He almost goes with him to find Lanfear, almost leaves their house empty and cold in order to chase a warmth he's barely felt all day. But he promised Shadowheart his service, and for all she's left him rotting here waiting for her return, he's not sure he can stand the thought of her arriving, emptied out again, only to find their home empty too.
By the time he hears the door, he's tired. Drained from a day of abstention from proximity, the pulled taut feeling of all of his bonds gone far from him, the stress of not knowing how they are when all four of them have of late been doing very badly. His righteous fury, burning so hot last night and flaring again throughout the day, is an old fire's dying embers now. She locks the door behind her, and his soft sigh is equal parts relief (she's here) and resignation, steeling himself to do as he said would, make her as sorry as he knows she needs him to.
Her question helps. A finger jabbed into the wound of his lonely day, one she's spent kept so close that she's now filled and covered with the evidence of it. In the moment, the insult is less Saber's presence in the room than the thoughtlessness of her greed. ]
Did I ask you to speak?
[ He pulls himself up out of the chair, turns to finally take her in, and the stony indifference on his face is a necessary mask when he finds her bruised and skewed and sticky. There is a little war inside of him. Some small flare of yesterday's fury, but most of it is fear for her, hurt for her, frustration. Hate. He has to remind himself that there are parts of this she likes. That her staying there with him, coming back looking like this, is not entirely the fault of the scar at her throat. That she's asking Stephen now for more of the same, and he doesn't need to abandon her here to go and pluck the hands from her aggressor with a power he no longer has at his disposal. ]
Take off your clothes.
[ Part of it is that he wants her uncomfortable: a window somewhere left open, no fire in the grate to warm her, and nowhere left to hide her transgressions. Really, though, he just wants to see the map of her skin so he can begin to chart the safest course through cruel waters.
He doesn't move to help her. Let her shred this dress too. He'll fix it in the morning. ]
no subject
She doesn’t want to fight Stephen. She’d thought, in their splintering last month, that maybe that’s all they would ever do again; that they’d meant nothing to each other (that she’d meant nothing to him, realized too late that she wanted to mean something).
It hurts more, to mean something now. If Shadowheart has ever loved anyone in her real life, separate from Saltburn’s implanted memories, she doesn’t remember it—not the feeling, nor the person, whether it lit her from within or she had to smother the fire before it caught. When she thinks the word love, it’s knotted roots in her belly, Stephen’s memories of Christine and Tony’s of his wife. Black nothing where she should have her own to match theirs.
She feels and doesn’t feel. She wants and feels sick with the wanting. The scar at her breast chokes the feeling from her, and maybe that is a kind of love—the kind Shar taught her, bringing only loss with it.
Shadowheart holds Stephen’s gaze, at least, eyes reddened as her hands move to the ties at the front of her dress. It should be Stephen and Tony’s hands in tandem, lifting her hem for her, kissing her shoulder as they undress for bed. She knows by now what happens without their help: her fingers fumbling the knots, tangling them further. Still, she forces it, her jaw closed tight, until something rips—the seam of a strap, slipping off her shoulder.
She pulls sharp, then, to get the rest over with, more seams tearing until gravity does its work for her, and the dress is pooled around her feet. Her body exposed to him, used and dirty. ]