#vent writing i guess

[insp]

Jamison wakes to someone kissing his neck.

There it is again: a shy yet steady pressure pathing from the hollow of his throat.

He isn’t dreaming. He can’t be. His dreams never happen like this. When they settle in, they yield shrouds of choking smoke and swatches of dripping ruins and sheets of glistening metal. Plumes of fire spark the way, flickering with faded echoes of forgotten things long since passed. Garbled voices find him in the dark, a constant and deafening roar, ramping and ramping and ramping until it’s as if an engine means to split his head and he can do nothing but gasp in empty paralysis. When he’s dreaming, the wasteland always rises up from beneath and swallows him like quicksand—

And yet someone is kissing him.

His neck, his shoulder, his collarbone, his cheek, his jaw. It’s soft, hesitant, in gentle patterns of twos and threes, and with a tenderness that sends pleasurable prickles down his spine. A soft weight pools over top of him, centered somewhere over his chest, an anchor to keep him from lapsing back into smoke and nightmares.

After he spends another moment blinking in blackness, he lets the rest of his senses guide him. A leg hooks around his, joining his ankle hidden amongst the sheets. The warmth of a hand presses down by his sternum while the mattress dips at his right side. Disheveled drapes of hair brush his cheek as a kiss presses to his jawline, delicate and silky and threaded with a familiar spice. The dim bleed of a crystal catches in his peripheral; the pressure shifts, and then the moon glides in to frame his face; another kiss at his chin.

Realization sculpts his thoughts, and he finds himself at a loss for words.

This feels… god, he doesn’t know. Good? It feels good? It feels so good he ought to be dreaming but he isn’t because his dreams are never like this and yet it doesn’t quite make sense to him because surely she’d ask before coming in here—but it feels good, like that tight, elated feeling he gets when he watches his creations burst, like that lilting drum on the undersides of his ribs when he gets a shred of praise. It’s all gentle strums on his heartstrings and enveloping warmth cornered inside his lungs, guided by a grounding touch that sweeps the sands away and lets him breathe.

Try as he might, he can’t remember a time anyone has cared to kiss him awake.

And that sort of… hurts, he thinks, but in a good way—because while it might not have happened before, it is happening now, and that is something he can live with.

Tentatively, he lets his left hand coast up the curve of Satya’s back. Her nightgown rumples under his thumb, but he keeps stroking in scattered patterns as she traces a trail of kisses along his clavicle. Each touch earths tiny coals in his skin.

A part of him wants to ask why she’s here. He should know better than to assume she’d want to visit like this on her own accord, especially in the dead of night. (Or morning? Is it morning? It might be. He does tend to lose track of time after the sun sets.) Perhaps shades of her own came skulking out from beneath her bed and chased her here? While he does not think of himself as a particularly effective nightmare deterrent, if she would rather spend her time with him until sunrise, he isn’t going to complain.

In fact, he could get used to this. He really could. He doesn’t sleep well and when he does manage to doze off it is often out of necessity, but waking up like this? God, it’s almost unfair. Exhaustion weighs his movements, heavy and lethargic with fatigue, but he doesn’t want to fall asleep again because he might miss her, he might miss this—and she feels so warm and comforting and he wants to do so much more than knead small circles into her back but he is so unbelievably tired, his heart a fluttering mess—

And then Satya sinks down into the pillow beside him, a kiss against his shoulder. Her right hand slides across his belly and locks with his left, and although he cannot cradle her completely without his prosthesis, he crooks his elbow inward and tries nevertheless.

Jamison nuzzles into her hair and lets his consciousness slip.

Squeezing her fingers, he hopes she’ll still be here when he wakes.

Losing himself might not be such a bad thing after all, he thinks, his mouth hot on her neck.

Even as a child, it has always been difficult for Jamison to keep his thoughts straight. Everything seems to race, a constant leap from one topic to the next, prompted by swatches of conversation and pretty things that catch his eye and loud cracks of sudden noise that fissure through his chest like the thrum of thunder. His attention is a soft putty pooled in someone else’s hand; thumb and fingers mold it into a different shape every few minutes, forever driving his focus to something else, something else, something else, to insignificant things that hold no true bearing, and yet regardless of where it catches, it always boomerangs back to lovely sets of charges and bundled sticks of dynamite and bottles of chemical compounds he knows by sight and smell alone, no labels required.

He can never be certain where his thoughts will take him, but there is one thing he is certain of: everything is better when she’s near.

He doesn’t even remember when it started. It must have been a few months ago at the very least. Over the course of the past half year, her presence has gradually become a more comfortable and familiar phenomenon, one that seems to have somehow crept up while his back was turned so that it could envelop him without his cognizance. Whether it was tinkering in the workshop or slapdash dinners in the mess hall or those rare moments stolen out by the beach, she would ensnare him with quiet snickers and subtle humor and the plots of very cheesy Indian films, and then there came the times where he’d be aboard the ORCA with her in the adjacent seat and all of him seemed to suddenly settle, as if simply having her near granted him this new, superseding focus that could somehow ascend the distracting clamor of everything else.

It is perhaps one of the more remarkable things he’s experienced. Not because being consumed so utterly by something that isn’t gunpowder and grenades makes him feel all fluttery inside, but because shipping out is a delight for reasons beyond exercising his thumb upon a detonator’s switch and because returning to the watchpoint means more time spent entangling with her. Formal events are bearable, his downtime is an envious balance of production and dalliance, and assignments are barely assignments at all.

But he still loses himself, just as he always does. He loses himself in her like he loses himself in coils of wire and chemical amalgams during late nights upon the workshop floor because he must finish this set of explosives, he absolutely must—because doesn’t know when his thoughts will still long enough again for him to focus, for him to properly work, for him to put all the little pieces together without thinking about the twenty other things he should have done the other night or last week or a bloody fortnight ago.

Satya isn’t lovely sets of charges or bundled sticks of dynamite or bottles of chemical compounds, but she might as well be. The rest of the world could erupt into nuclear holocaust, and he’d never even notice.

“Please,” she says against the wall, and it is decidedly disheveled and shed of all the pleasantries such an entreaty would entail; “if you don’t stop teasing, I don’t know what I will do with you.”

“I’ve got some suggestions if you’ve got an ear.” Aching and hard, Jamison mouths yet another kiss along the column of her neck. He is flush against her back, his left hand plunged beneath the pleats of her sweeping sapphire saree petticoats. “Thought you wanted to wait ‘til we got back? You’re the star of the show, after all. Guest of honor. Probably be a bit conspicuous if she went missing. What about the monkey and the others?”

“I’m not worried. Patience is one of their virtues. They will survive not seeing me for twenty minutes.” Satya glances over her shoulder, gold-hazel eyes mirthful and alight. Loose locks of jet hair ruin her perfect bun. “What about you?”

Sparks snap in his belly. “Patience was never one of mine.”

“Then hurry.”

Jamison hates wearing suits, anyway.

His heart is his own cannonade as he thrusts in. Her saree is cumbersome and the folds flow far past his legs, but she feels exquisite and the crystal in her left palm etches the circled faces of moons into his bare back and her thick thighs around his hips lock him in. He kisses an exposed shoulder and shudders at how hot and wet she’s become, thoughts mussed, nerves exulting. Stifled noises catch in her throat with each swift movement of his hips, and he leans her back against the wall with his hands clamped on her generous rear, breathing heavy curses into her hair and against her mouth.

It’s hard to handle how inexplicably good she feels. She is at the center of everything with her gorgeous eyes and radiant skin and lilting accent, and the posh, raucous gala he’d never wanted to attend seems so impossibly far from this darkened corridor, an entire universe away, inconsequential and boring and completely pointless. He’d rather let his focus drip away, let his hands wander, let her come around his cock; he’d much rather lose himself here with her than work himself back into that stuffy suit jacket and sit around tables of their merry ragtag band of teammates and clusters of too-important VIPs, all demanding to see the bombshell sighing his name.

Satya is all consuming, even as she crumbles apart. With a helping hand between her legs, she kisses him to suppress the noise, and all he can seem to think is mine,mine,mine, a punctuation at the hilt of every thrust. Her muffled moans splinter through him like a thunderstorm and the tight heat around him feels sublime and nothing else in the world matters more than how perfect everything is in this moment, however brief—her prosthetic arm hooked around his neck, her legs squeezed around his hips, Jamison on her talented tongue.

When he comes, it’s hard and pulsing and messy and good, but she ushers him on until he’s entirely breathless and spent, a deep exertion corded in his thighs. He leans his metal arm against the wall to allow himself a moment to recover, and as he draws in long, jagged breaths, the world slowly starts to bleed back in, blot by blot: her hiked saree, his discarded gear, the slickness of their sweat, the twilit corridor, the opulent gala below, the evening’s warm air.

She presses her forehead to his, nose to nose, eyes half open. Her hair may be out of place and her petticoats may be rumpled and her saree may have come unpinned, but she is just as magnificent now as she was at the night’s inception.

Jamison kisses her, overcome, his thoughts as still as a looking glass.

Hi, here’s more of the Bloodborne AU nobody asked for! And here’s some tunes for the mood.

Jamison wakes to a pale sky and hard stone splayed beneath his back.

Sweet smelling flowers cluster by his head. The surrounding garden breathes with the passing winds, soft blades of grass whispering unintelligible secrets by his ears. The air is cool, gentle, the breeze a welcome touch, but no matter how many times he’s come back, everything has a sticky sort of dampness that clings to his clothes and burrows down through his marrow, the kind that hangs around the riverside or amongst weathered gravestones.

Death, he supposes. Not that it ever truly comes.

Slowly, he digs his elbows back into the cobble path and lifts himself into a sit. All of his gear is still present, although his weapons lie in a scattered heap beside him. He doesn’t need to sift through his pouches to know that all of his blood vials are gone. The pain is gone, too, he realizes, just as it always is. It’s always gone when he wakes. And while that would be a good thing, the pain is what lets him know he’s not dreaming.

Jamison flexes his hands through his leather gloves. Even his arm and leg are back in this place despite their absence in the waking world. It’s surreal, like the Dream somehow grew an empty doppelganger when he was young, long before he’d contracted his childhood illness, and now that he’s begun to hunt, it’s decided to let him use that vessel here while wrenched away from the waking world. While he does not presume to know anything about the Dream or its intentions, he does know that it is sanctuary. From enemies. From reality. From beasts. From death.

It is always quiet here. It is always peaceful. It is always at some indistinct time between sunset and twilight on an overcast day, and it is always shrouded in a thin layer of mist. The moon always hangs overhead, and there are always ethereal pillars stretching skyward in the distance. And as always, there are the soft undercurrents of prying whispers.

Combing his right hand through his blond hair, his missing hand, his phantom hand, he leans over and grabs a hold of the boom hammer’s haft. It’s a heavy, comforting weight, corporeal and mortal and grounding, and he plants the head against the cold stone and leverages its strength to heave himself upward. The bulky form of the cannon lies at his feet, and it occurs to him that he’ll need more ammunition before he wakes again. The last of his reserves had been spent on the Vileblood and that slavering beast, and while bloodmade bullets will do in a pinch, quicksilver is far more effective. A better bang, he thinks, and without the mess of drawing blood to shape down the barrel of a cannon.

As Jamison hefts the hammer over his back and dredges up the cannon from its nest of flowers, his brow knits in thought, trying to recall what brought him hurtling back into the Dream. It’s a liquid blur at first, shifting somewhere back beyond the edges of his consciousness, and then he remembers, he does, quite clearly: the beast had lunged at him, snarling with jagged teeth and flaps of severed skin sagging from its body, and it struck the final blow down his back after a too quick feint; it tore through fur and flesh and muscle and let its poison seep down through him, coursing into his veins with every heartbeat.

Not the best way to go, if he’s honest. Fawkes the Hunter has died far better deaths.

But the Vileblood finished it off, didn’t she? She did. She must have. Or at least he thinks she did. The last thing he remembers is her staring down at him as he died, knelt over his body with fierce gold flickering in her eyes. He can’t imagine the bloodstarved monstrosity would have left her alone long enough for her to watch him bleed out, or even to witness the poison still his heart. She must have eviscerated it with the strange magic blades he’d seen slice from the construct integrated into her prosthetic arm. She was certainly skilled enough to bring it down; he’s sure of that, especially with how swiftly and brutally she’d cut at him during their own battle before the beast intervened. If she really had finished it off, that must mean she’s still alive somewhere in the forest—waiting.

The whispers follow him as he walks down the cobbled pathway. His boots crunch against small pebbles and soft earth, stamping over faint voices murmuring up from beneath small headstones. The path winds past gated gardens encircled by black spiked bars and trails up to the dilapidated house perched atop the far hill where the gifts of the Workshop can be found. If he plans to go back and meet her, he must be prepared. The silent pact they’d made to pause their skirmish and destroy the beast was only temporary, or so he assumes, and he expects nothing but her full ferocity upon his return.

Jamison tightens his grip on the cannon at the memory. Truthfully, her full ferocity had been a sight to behold. No other beast had tested his abilities in such a way; her presence alone had nearly been enough to reduce him to bloodcraze. He felt it sing through him as he came at her, a deafening chorus spilling from between his lungs, the hammer’s spark a smear of red lightning in the inky night of the forest. He has no doubt she’s different from all the rest: she is cold, calculating, intelligent, and most of all, she is breathtakingly vicious. She granted him no quarter, allowed him no free swings, dodged every cannon blast, and for every inch he let her take, she punished him for it dearly.

She is not new to the Hunt, it seems.

Clusters of malformed messengers watching from worn headstones follow Jamison’s movements as he scales the hill. Their droning murmurs overcome the whispers beneath the wind; sometimes he can discern what he thinks might be words, but he can’t be certain. The cannon becomes easier to carry as he ascends, his strength pouring back into him from the Dream, and he finds himself drawing a deep breath in shivering anticipation.

Absently, he wonders if she will come after him again. It is true that he had stumbled across her by mere chance, but he is the Hunter, and he is bound to hunt like the rest of his brethren. From the measure of her skill and whatever strange blood fills her veins, it seems she must require a hunt as well. The thought of her scouring the forest for him lights a pyre of excitement against the undersides of his ribs.

Yes, yes, he remembers now—with chips of iridescent gold burning in the fading dark, she watched him die, watched the life leak from him onto the forest floor, and with a bloodgem clutched in one palm, her voice carried with him into the Dream: “You madman.”

Jamison slings the boom hammer from his back and cracks it onto the wooden floor of the old house. He grins under the stare of the dusty spines of old books and the shrouded benches by the altar.

“Well, you’re not wrong,” he says.

The Workshop awaits.