I'll be the gas, you be the lighter

Well I hope this ain't the part where your last words rip through my heart

She's been getting shit sleep again. Part of it's that she's been opting into most of the night shifts at the ranch, when there's a foal to watch for. Something about working under the stars makes distance feel easier. Not that the world shrinks, but that it feels like she gets a piece back for a while. It's stupid, a sort of personal superstition she's made, but even knowing so she isn't willing to give it up. The other part is all the damn noise. The kind from restless thoughts pacing around her own head. Even though she's begging herself to stop, she keeps on wearing down the hallways in her mind.

She's mad that she's doing any of it. Chewing herself out hasn't stopped it though, just made her teeth sharper and quicker to offer them to anyone else. It's gone steadily south as the season's worn on. Mud and rain have shortened everyone's tempers, hers now cutting into the quick. Wyatt finally had enough of it today and snapped back, so now her hand's bruised and she came in here like her absence could be enough apology. She'd make a real one, later. Right now she's trying trying to find relief from the gnawing.

Her body is a rising wave among her blankets, arching for a moment off her bed before she collapses back down, a stifled groan of defeat grinding out. Her head twists back and forth between her pillows, long made askew with all her tossing, a thrash of gold frustration. Her hands thump at her sides, swallowed by the navy cableknit sweater. Breath is ragged but sharp when it comes, each exhale forced out with offense. "Just," she bargains with the empty room, exasperated. "Please."

She stares up at the ceiling for a moment. She loses track of hiw long, but her breaths have become even again and her pulse isn't kicking. A sigh pours out and she tries again. Her fingers slip beneath the waistband of her sweats and panties, fingers working a rhythm between her thighs, desperate for release from this fitful attempt to improve her mood. This normally works, especially if she hasn't been laid recently, but while she keeps getting close to the edge, she can't get herself over it. It's headed that way again, the pressure building between her thighs, climbing but not breaking.

"Fuck," she hisses, head tilting back. "Vesper," she groans as if he's there, her body craning against her hand. "Help me finish," she begs, but its more than just a voice cast to her room, more than memory or fantasy taking shape. She reaches out for the tether and channels him. There's countless reasons not to, but she's too lost in this madness for reason. She just wants it to end right now, and she knows he could provide something, even if its just a glimpse of what she needs.

Colt

It's like the furniture is gone, but there's an imprint left behind

doves and ravens fly the same

Vesper appears with the snap and sting of sudden summoning, shadows shrinking back from a ceiling he doesn’t recognize, from the scent of sweat and salt and something animal, and for the barest breath of time Vesper blinks, caught between worlds. The heat of the Rage Room still clings to him, the distant echo of Danta’s voice fractured by the tether's cruel urgency that suggests surely something was wrong. He was called, and by instinct he reaches for the shape of Colt's mind, hunting for danger, for fire, for—

Oh.

Oh.

The truth burns through him like alcohol on open skin. Not a threat, not fear, just need; knotted and sharp and unmistakably hers. The colours of her thoughts pulse in rhythm with the flush of her body, each jagged shape crying out for pressure, for relief, for him, and gods help him, he has seconds before the channel snaps shut and he's gone, so he doesn't hestitate.

Shadows surge and tangle, pushing aside the hands working between her thighs as he blankets her with his body. His mouth crushes against hers, catching a breathless gasp as he presses her into the mattress. Her heat sears him through the cable knit and the cotton, the ache of her splitting him open before he can even think of restraint. One shadow presses hungrily against her clit, circling once, hard and deliberate, before another plunges inside her with the confidence of someone who’s known her rhythm before. His hips rock forward, an involuntary grind of want and adrenaline as his hand fists in her hair, pulling her head back until her mouth opens beneath his, pliant and cursing, and gods, he drinks from her like he's been dying of thirst.

His other hand cups her breast through the sweater he left her, thumb brushing across the hard peak of her nipple before he tweaks it, rough and greedy. "Cum, Colt," he growls, his voice a gravelled snarl against her jaw, against the firelit shell of her ear. The word is a command, a gift, a curse. "Now."

But, ah, nothing in the world is fair. Not time, not magic, not him, because even as her body tightens, the six seconds vanish like smoke between clenched fists, and so does he.

VESPER

Styling stolen from Sky (obviously)

Well I hope this ain't the part where your last words rip through my heart

He descends on her like rain in the desert. Too quick to soak in entirely, a rush that could be destructive, but also needed so desperately that she takes in every part of him that spills against her. Heavy-lidded eyes only have a moment to behold him in full, his name shaping the breath in her throat, and then she's caught entirely in his storm.

His duty to the summon is brutally executed. He leaves no part of her unattended, and in a matter of six seconds, he undoes her for a lifetime. The weight of him settling upon her is an immediate flare of heat that winds throughout her entirely. Her hands easily relent to the assurance of his shadows as they push in for control, the broken moan of relief that swells exhaling hard into him as his lips collides with hers. She rushes up in a grip to claim him, fingers sliding wild and careless across his face, through his hair, hard and trembling. She bows against him, chasing every bit of contact, obedient to the will of his hand and mouth as he tugs her open even further.

The expert press of his dusk against her clit would have been enough, but the unexpected slide of more that fills her perfectly, and the velvet steel of his voice, they destroy her. Her orgasm breaks like it means for her not to survive it, the first splinter arriving right as he's gone. The shout that tears from her is something grieving, the ache of the sudden loss swallowed back by a blinding pleasure so intense her entire body coils into heat and ruin, no longer belonging to her in that moment. Already starting to cool from where his body's memory departs with a prickle, the sting on her nipple one of the last to fade back into normalcy, she rolls from one orgasm into the next effortlessly.

Her body trembles quietly. She lays there, surviving the aftershocks of his visit, an arm slung over her face to soak up the sobs that shake her as much as the fading heat. Eventually sleep tugs her from feeling either.

[FIN]

Colt

It's like the furniture is gone, but there's an imprint left behind