Work Text:
Playlist:
Don’t Dream It’s Over - Crowded House
I Think We’re Alone Now - Tiffany
I’m Not in Love - 10cc
It’s the end of the world.
Or at least, that’s what the radios keep insisting between weather updates and grocery ads.
The Airborne Toxic Event was supposed to bring the community together. Instead, it scattered them, family by family, car by car, each unit sealed inside its own fear. A collective disaster experienced privately. No one for all. All for themselves.
Evacuation routes funneled people into places never meant to hold them this way. Schools. Gyms. Parking lots. And for the Gladneys, the local Boy Scout camp tucked just beyond the tree line, where the air always smelled faintly of damp pine, old canvas, and something metallic that never quite aired out.
The cabins were crowded and low-ceilinged, their wooden bunks lined wall to wall with borrowed blankets and restless bodies. The floorboards groaned with every shift of weight. Somewhere, a child cried. Somewhere else, a transistor radio murmured official reassurances that contradicted the ones from an hour earlier. Jack lay awake on a thin cot, eyes open, mind louder than the room itself. The children slept anyway. Children always did.
You, one of three siblings and a set of parents, unmoored and restless, wandered the camp’s narrow paths, tracing the edges of lantern light as it bled into the dark woods. People clustered in familiar patterns, even here. The types were unmistakable: the anxious academics pacing with coffee cups they couldn’t refill, the church families murmuring prayers that sounded like gossip, the hippies who seemed almost pleased to be evacuated into the forest, as if this were a long-awaited rehearsal for something purer.
And then there were the O’Conners. You didn’t need to see their faces to know they were there. Their car, boxy, dented, unmistakable, sat crooked near the gravel lot, just as it always did. Even at the end of the world, Blacksmith had a way of announcing itself.
The shed sat just past the last cabin, half-swallowed by shadow and pine needles, its silhouette barely distinguishable from the trees unless you were already looking for it. A maintenance building, maybe. Storage. One of those structures meant to be forgotten until something went wrong.
Curiosity tugged harder than caution.
You approached slowly, boots crunching softly against gravel and fallen needles. The door was ajar, just enough to let a blade of yellow light spill onto the ground. You paused, listening.
You leaned closer.
Inside, the air was warmer, thicker. It smelled of oil, old wood, and human presence. A single bulb swung gently from the ceiling, casting uneven shadows across stacked folding chairs, cardboard boxes stamped with outdated logos, and a row of metal lockers scarred by decades of use.
And there, seated on an overturned crate, elbows braced on his knees, was Jack Gladney.
He hadn’t noticed you yet.
His hair, usually arranged with professorial intention, was disheveled, fingers having run through it too many times. One foot tapped against the concrete floor, fast and arrhythmic, stopping only to start again. He stared at nothing in particular, eyes unfocused, mouth set in a thin, restless line.
A man temporarily unmoored from his role.
This wasn’t the Jack Gladney who lectured about death with practiced irony, or the father who spoke in half-reassurances and grocery-list logic. A man alone with the knowledge that something had entered his body without permission, and might never leave.
The door creaked beneath your hand before you could stop it.
Jack looked up sharply.
For a moment, neither of you spoke. The bulb flickered once overhead, as if acknowledging the interruption.
“Oh,” he said finally, voice lower than you expected. Not angry. Not surprised. Just… tired. “I didn’t realize this place was… discoverable.”
You hovered in the doorway, suddenly aware of your own intrusion, the way disaster dissolved boundaries and made private moments public by accident.
“I’m sorry,” you said. “I was just… walking. Are… you that Hitler studies professor at the Hill?”
The older man huffs, “Yes… you a student?”
“Yeah, commuter,” you admit meekly.
He shifted on the crate, not quite offering you a seat, but not denying the space either. His gaze flicked briefly toward the door, as if checking that the camp hadn’t followed you in.
“You should be with your family,” he said, gently, reasonably. The tone of a man stating a fact rather than enforcing it.
“They’re asleep,” you replied. “I didn’t feel like pretending I was, too.”
Jack’s mouth tightened. He exhaled through his nose, a sound that carried more relief than amusement.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly it. Me too.”
For a moment, neither of you spoke. The bulb hummed overhead. Outside, a loudspeaker crackled, something about wind direction, something revised again. Jack listened, then looked back at you with an intensity that startled even him.
Jack glanced at you and took in the outline rather than the details. A loose-knit sweater vest, worn thin with use, a simple T-shirt beneath it, jeans that looked comfortable enough for walking without a destination. Practical shoes. Nothing showy, nothing deliberate. The kind of clothes chosen in a hurry.
Oh, and a scrunchie in your silky soft hair.
He shakes those thoughts away.
“They keep changing the language,” he said abruptly. “Have you noticed that? The more uncertain they are, the more poetic it becomes. It’s meant to soothe us.”
His foot began tapping again, faster now.
“Yeah, it’s weird. It’s panicking my mom.” You note calmly.
“I was told I was exposed,” he said quietly, unprompted. “Not severely. Not dangerously. But enough to be recorded.”
Jack swallowed. He had spent years lecturing on death from a safe intellectual distance, padding it with irony and historical remove. Sitting here, in a storage shed with a pretty student who had wandered in by accident, the distance felt suddenly… negotiable.
“You know,” he continued, almost to himself, “catastrophe creates a strange intimacy. The usual structures dissolve. Roles become… flexible.”
Whatever that fuckin’ means, you thought.
There was something unexpectedly reassuring in that hesitation. The way he admitted uncertainty without asking for comfort. The way his hands rested uselessly in his lap, fingers flexing once before stilling, as though he’d forgotten what to do with them when no one was watching. He didn’t look powerful here. He looked human. A man momentarily unguarded, stranded between expertise and fear.
And you realized it wasn’t his reputation or his intellect that held your attention; it was the fact that he seemed genuinely undone by the same thing everyone else was pretending not to feel. That he wasn’t trying to impress you. That he spoke as if you were simply another person in the room, capable of understanding him. In a world reduced to alerts and instructions, there was something quietly compelling about being addressed without an agenda.
“Dr. Gladney…?” you began, stepping forward towards his position on the crate.
“Call me Jack.”
“Jack…?”
“Yes Miss…”
You give him your name. It rolled off of your tongue as your mind ran through all of the uncertainty and nerves of this huge, toxic, airborne event.
He repeated your name simply, softly grunting as he leaned back.
You weren’t thinking in outcomes anymore. That was the strange part. The future had narrowed to something so thin it barely qualified as time at all, just the next hour, the next breath, the next announcement crackling over a loudspeaker that didn’t sound convinced of itself. Somewhere inside your body, something invisible might already be doing damage. No one could tell you what, or when, or how much. Only that it had happened. Only that it was recorded. You understood, suddenly, how absurd it was to keep planning as if certainty still existed.
“Jack… do you wanna fuck?”
Caution to the wind.
All around you, people were clinging to routines like life rafts, sleep schedules, prayer circles, rules that had been written for a world that assumed tomorrow. You felt the opposite pull. A need to act before fear finishes hardening into regret. Before this night became another story you told yourself about what you almost did. Jack sat there, stripped of his authority and his distance, just as exposed as you were, and the thought landed with unsettling clarity: nothing about this moment would ever be repeatable. Not the disaster. Not the honesty. Not the permission the world seemed to be offering by falling apart.
If the air could change everything without asking, why couldn’t you? If the structures were dissolving anyway, what was the point of preserving yourself so carefully?
“No,” he said finally, and the word sounded thin, almost ceremonial. He shook his head once, as if to anchor himself, to remind his body of rules his mind still clung to. “No. This is-” He stopped, exhaled, tried again. “That’s not appropriate.”
Right, of course it’s not. What kind of question was that?
A question someone asks in their final days, of course.
“Jesus, sorry… end times… ya know?” You huff a laugh awkwardly, trying not to notice how he adjusts himself below the waist. How his body clearly betrays him.
It had been too long since you’d gotten any at school, mostly because you had standards. But Jack, well, you’d seen him in his black, professorial robe before. Seen him passionate during an expo lecture.
He wasn’t so old… maybe 45… 50? That would be okay.
More than okay. He probably knew so much more than the boys at College on the Hill.
He stands from the crate and wipes his weary face with his hand, turning to look about the space before looking back at you. He stands stomach forward. He looks so… tense. Looking right at you, similar fantasies course through his mind.
He’d been married a few times after all. He’s also had his fair share of trysts.
Not with a girl so young and tight compared to…
Not with such a gap in experience. Did it matter to him? What if he was genuinely dying?
What if…
What if he threw caution to the wind, too?
Voices and random music could be heard from outdoors, as it had been for the past ten minutes.
You finally work up the courage to just leave the entirely too-awkward situation, but he stops you.
“Hey…” he begins gently.
You stop yourself from moving.
“Are you on the pill?” He asks in that deep, rich voice of his.
Your cheeks heat up, and you’re thankful he can’t see the way you react in that moment from where you’re facing. The pill could mean so many things, you tried to convince yourself. He could be worried that you’re going elsewhere for sex, and as your superior in academics, he’s concerned that you’re not being safe.
Yeah right.
“Yes.” You respond, turning back to eye his glassy complexion.
His hands on his hips, he nods, looking down.
A beat, a breath. Then he looks up.
“Sit on the crate,” he says suddenly and more sternly than anticipated.
Sit on the crate?
As if there were options in this moment. You were at a forsaken Boy Scouts camp amongst hundreds of others.
You’d take your action where you could get it.
On your way to do as he says, he catches your arm and crashes his lips to yours. Devouring your watermelon-splash-chap-sticked lips. His lips are plush for an older gentleman. You grip his collar at either end, arching up into his abdomen, tasting him back. He tastes like whatever he last ate, something vaguely balanced, a bit sweet.
“How old are you?” He pulls away, eyes nervous.
“Twenty-one.” You answer much too quickly.
“Good,” he grunts back, kissing you all the way down into the position he sits you in on the crate. Palming your breasts. He moves his hands and works at your jeans’ button and zipper with ease, pulling the denim down your thighs and tossing them out of the way.
He grins when he sees your undies.
They’re not sexy. Exactly the type you’d see in a moment of emergency. White, cotton, and a lot of coverage.
As if knowing what he’s teasing about immediately, you shirk yourself of them. “Yeah, yeah, old man…” You huff.
He only grins as he adjusts in his knelt position, knee crackling. He kisses the inside of your thigh. An apology for his antics, and a promise for how worth it this all will be.
After all, he’s probably dying, and you’re probably going to find this amusing in twenty years. At least, that’s what he thinks.
His kisses trail down to the pretty stripe of bush you have, carefully shaven for access to your tight cunt, but artistry on the pelvis is also kept in mind.
He trails his tongue from ass to cunt, undoing his belt and pants to stroke himself. You whine, from your position, you couldn’t see.
The glow from whatever light source past the mesh window blinds made him golden. Greys streak through his hair, the hair you grip as his mouth finally focuses on your cunt.
“Jack, you don’t have to do this.”
Lustful eyes look up from between your legs to meet yours.
“I want to. Gets me hard. Gets you ready,” he mutters against your pussy. He uses his right hand to swipe your pussy and stroke himself with your wetness on his hand. “It doesn’t feel good?”
Quite the contrary. You’re close to finishing. The pressure in your stomach says so. That hum of pleasure buzzing through your lower half. He knew just where to lick, just where to touch.
“Feels so good,” you counter, writhing on his tongue, t-shirt sliding up your torso.
After a moment, his hands find the edge of the crate to help him stand. His grip moves to your thighs, parting your legs, and his height forces your hips off the crate.
“This may be the last pussy I get before we… I die, hope it’s an honor…”
You giggle, even in your awkward position. “A most great one.”
His thick, cut cock prods at your entrance, but he doesn’t enter yet. Just keeps your hips up as he slicks his cock against your core. He breathes heavily, you watch. Oh, this man, he knows how to do this.
He finally slides halfway in, head falling back, hold nearly faltering as he groans.
“Tight,” he mutters up at the rusty ceiling. He bucks in and out for a moment, still only halfway. His movements get further and further in with each stroke, and you take every bit of it. He’s thicker than any man you’ve had.
He kneels one leg onto the crate to level you, thrusts growing more needy and jerky.
His moans are brassy and delicious. Every girl’s dream to hear, but often, men are too embarrassed to let go. Not Jack. No, Jack thought he was about to die. He moved that way, too. Thumb on your clit, moving at a rapid but effective pace.
Laughter from a campfire outside nearly pulls you from the fantasy, but Jack’s able hands bring you back, one finding your throat and squeezing gently.
“So pretty, keep your eyes on me,” he muses warmly as his belly falls over your pelvis as he thrusts into you. You whine and nod at his directions, needy eyes finding his. He presses down on the thigh over his shoulder to go deeper, and does.
“Fuuuuuck, Jack!” You sob in bliss, taking every inch of him, your hands prodding your cheeks further apart, below.
He only grunts and keeps his pace, thumb still working you. He stands up straight, withdrawing from you, slapping your ass.
“On your stomach,” he says as he maneuvers you.
The crate is irritating against your stomach, but you could get over it quickly as he entered you with ease right away.
He held a vice grip to your hips, sliding you back and forth on his cock, grunting and moaning at the feeling of you clenching on him. He hit an even better spot from this angle, and you held that opinion, especially as his thumb found your asshole. You whimpered at the pressure but welcomed it too, with a buck of your hips backwards.
He chuckled at your movements. So needy, so good for him.
He felt a pressure build as it often did during these moments, but you were so uniquely tight, and he fit so perfectly inside of you, he let himself mourn the fact that this would be a one-and-done tryst.
He let his fingers leave bruises in their wakes, leaned down over your gorgeous, arched back, and fucked into you while he kissed your shoulder.
You let him guide your movements with his plunged thumb, moaning his name and pleas to cum.
Then you did, and he couldn’t help the grin he had.
Maybe he still had it… Mr. J.A.K. Gladney.
That thought was cut short as he came blissfully and deeply inside you. He groaned as he felt himself spill into you… fuck, you still clenched him even after finishing yourself. He tried to eye his cock in you over his stomach to no success. His eyes squinted, head fell back as it stole all of his energy, all of his drive to keep thrusting.
He bent over you, withdrawing his thumb from your ass, but leaving his cock in you.
You meekly turn and crane your head to look up at him. He huffs contentedly and kisses the side of your forehead.
“Did I do okay?” He asks with a small grin.
“More than… but I should be asking you if you feel like you’re going out with a bang…”
He frowns slightly and slaps your ass. “Not funny,” he attempts to pull out.
You buck your hips back to keep him inside. “You’re not gonna die anytime soon, Jack.”
He quirks a questioning brow. He wished that were true.
“I’ll keep you so young you beat your ailments,” you wink.
She would end up correct…