Kleine Füchsin

She doesn’t even try to bother with pleasantries, she just steps into the threshold and stands there. “You’re behind schedule.” She keeps her hands flat at her sides, a clipboard in one hand. “High Mother wants your rec, Seedwarden.” Her tone is curiously flat; was she warning you, or evaluating you? It was both, more than likely.

Your mouth goes dry. You’d been expecting this, certainly, but not so soon; the protocol was to run the subject for a full cycle, minimum twelve days, and your log was missing several You have to swallow twice before you can meet the other warden’s stare. “I thought I had until tomorrow to consolidate my notes and the entire assessment?” you say, keeping your voice at that neutral, sanded-down register.

She slides her gaze to Nikto who is already back to surveying the perimeter of the room, a specter of tension rolling across his shoulders before jotting something on her clipboard. “There’s a new intake,” she says, “High Mother will have your rec by dusk. If it’s not on her desk, she’ll assume noncompliance or failure.” The way she says it makes it clear that you’d simply have no choice but to compile everything - every note, every sketch - and hand-deliver it to the High Mother before the day’s end.

You force yourself to nod, searching her face for judgment or empathy or even the slight kinship that all Seedwardens supposedly share. She regards you for a moment and you feel the weight of her stare. You want to ask her to come in, to sit and catch a breath and remember for a moment what it was like to talk to another human being about anything except protocol and compliance, but when you glance over your shoulder at Nikto, already circling the room, you realize that she is not here to offer comfort or even solidarity. She’s here as a reminder that the knife is always sharpest when it is pointed at your own neck.

She jots a last note and then, softly, actually whispers: “If you need to fudge it, do it. The next intake is a feral so wild the Daughters want him thrown in the mulch. You are replaceable. Get it done tonight.” Then she is gone; the door closing and leaving you standing there with nothing but your heartbeat and the sounds of Nikto’s feet padding along the cold concrete of the room. “High Mother wants a decision, tonight.” You speak once more in that formal tone you’d used when you first met and for once, you wish he would interrupt, would goad you into another fit for dominance, but he only waits for you to continue.

You step all the way into the room and sunlight stripes his bare forearms, catching on the dark hair that covers him. You reach for your notebook and the motion bores you even as you make it, the ritual as tired and threadbare as the discipline you’ve spent ten years cultivating. “I’ll need to run you through a psych exam and then a final physical. After that—” You don’t finish, you won’t have to. You can see it in the way he settles his weight, the way his jaw tightens and releases. He knows the protocol.

“You will write what you want,” he says, but the sentence is equal parts resignation and invitation.

And you wish you could dispute it, offer some sort of illusion of agency, but the machinery of this new world doesn’t allow it. You have never been less in charge than you are now, standing in the gentle sluice of morning with this ruined man and the taste of last night’s violation on your tongue.

“If you want a say, now’s the time.”

He shrugs, then turns away from the window. “Make me breeder. Or let me work. Does not matter.” There is a pause, “Just don’t send me to the Iron Daughters.” He says it without inflection, but the words hum with a current of old dread. You nod, but your chest aches. Not for pity, gods, never pity, but for the hideous accuracy of his read on the world. He will live or die at the whim of women who consider themselves gardeners, but who can only ever prune and cut and hope the new shoot takes. “And what if I petition to keep you?” If you petition to keep him? The words seem absurd even to yourself, painted in the bright silly colors of some child's fantasy. But the moment you say them aloud, the gravity in the room shifts. “What if I keep you for myself, here?” You regret the phrasing the moment it leaves, as if you are offering a home to a stray dog instead of a man who could unmake you in his sleep. It’s a foolish thing, to believe possession is any less a sentence than the pit or the breeding bank. But the word ‘keep’ lingers between you, sticky and childish, and you wonder if he will spit it back in your face. But he doesn’t; his gaze simply fixes on you, those blue eyes so shocking in their clarity. “Mh- So this is what the Seedwarden wants?” he says with the same flatness he fixes onto every word and the question lands in your chest so squarely that for a moment you feel the phantom sensation of his hands on you again. You cross the room, pull the notebook close to your breast as if you could shield yourself, and you want to laugh at the pretense: that you, after everything, are still performing data collection instead of trembling under your own skin, raw and newly alive simply due to blossoming feelings and want.

“What the Seedwarden wants is irrelevant,” you say, but the lie is so shabby you swear it does nothing but highlight your own wanting. The urge to keep, to claim, to never have to archive a single muscle or tendon of this man for anyone else’s use or amusement, is all-consuming.

He makes a sound in his throat, a laugh so low that it is almost only an idea of a laugh. “Nyet,” he says. “It is only thing that matters.”

You clutch the notebook; there is so much language inside of you, so many words baked into the lattice of your duties, but none adequate to spell out the need that rises up: the need for him to be here tomorrow, the next day, the one after, not as inventory but as constant. You force yourself to look him in the face, to not shrink away from the ruined beauty of those blue eyes and you scoff. It aches a little, that modest show of bravado as you tuck a strand of hair behind your ear. “So you’d rather be a breeder than a fighter, then?” You ask as if this is some sort of trap and not a fucked up gift in this world. But he doesn’t flinch at it, just rolls his shoulders and looks you over slow. “I’d rather be myself, but this is impossible, no?” Gods, that was the last thing you were expecting, but what are you if not the agent of useless wants and the bureaucracy of desire anymore? “You make it sound so simple.” You mutter as if you aren’t already taking the mental weight of the paperwork and sleepless nights it’s going to take to make this petition stick. He shrugs like a man with nothing left to lose. “Simple for a woman with your words,” he says. “You keep me, I fuck you, I do not die. Is good deal.” And gods you can’t help but glare at him with the heat of shame and fluster burning in your gut. You want to tell him it’s not about that, it’s not like that and that you’re not just some poncy fuck from the Enclave looking for a toy, but the words stick to your tongue. And not after last night, not with the way your hands shook for hours. You do want him in a way that isn’t scientific, or even post-collapse pragmatic, but so bright and venomous that you wish it would just burn off in the scorching heat of the sun. “So help me Goddess..” You exhale and the sigh is embarrassingly loud, but he doesn’t smirk at it. He’s not toying with you, it’s worse - he’s being honest, or whatever passes for honesty. So you let the air settle, let it sting, then you do the thing you’ve never done, not in all your time crawling up the ranks: you give ground. One inch, maybe more.

“Fine. You want honesty?” you snap, but it’s brittle, and he knows it. “I want to keep you,” you say and it’s the truth, but it’s also a curse, and there’s no stanching the wound now that it’s been made. He straightens, and the ease in his limbs is not arrogance but a relief. For a full minute neither of you speak, both of you circling the unsayable. And then you break further. “I want to keep you,” you say and then because apparently you have decided to simply destroy yourself today: “I want- “ but the rest of it snags somewhere in your throat, indecent and too large so you look away. “I can’t hand you to the Daughters. And the breeding program-” You stop, press your thumbnail into the spine of the notebook. “No. That’s not - I’m not doing that.” You look back at him, “Is that enough for you?” He is quiet and his gaze drops once to the notebook pressed against your chest, then comes back up to your face, and something in his jaw shifts. The rough sound he makes is almost involuntary, dragged up from somewhere low. “So you do want to fuck me.” “Yes! By the fucking Goddess, yes! And if I can’t have you, I’ll burn every file, shred every form, and salt the earth where your name was ever written so no one else can touch what’s mine!” Your lungs fill on silence that follows, but the rush isn’t oxygen; it’s acid - jealousy, humiliation, and a hunger with no genuine purpose. You want him only for yourself, and that is the most primitive, undignified thing you’ve ever admitted aloud. You’re mortified, andd you can feel it in the way your scalp prickles and your face goes hot. You want to die, or at least to collapse into the folds of idiocy and never emerge, but Nikto doesn’t gloat, he doesn’t offer some sharp commentary. He just stands there as if every coil and tension in him has found its root. “Good. It is good you are not dead inside like the others, denying their want.” He shrugs and bends a knee by the table and begins gathering your scattered notes from where they’d fallen from last night. Methodical, gentle, as if proof against the accusation that he was ever anything but yours to claim. “This,” he says, “is how you keep quiet what matters. You must hide your hunger, but not so much you forget to eat.” He straightens the edges of the papers and sets them down in front of you, then finds your pen and places it on top. “You want to keep me, you must write it in the file. Put how I am docile for you, how I help. No proof of defiance.”

You want to tell him you already know, that you’ve been burying deviances behind layers of euphemism and elegant handwriting since before he stepped foot in this sanctum. But it is different, seeing him collude with you like this, seeing the way he moves closer, shoulder to shoulder - it is almost conspiratorial. You can feel his heat through your shirt, and you’re overwhelmed by a swelling, idiotic pride that this man, this so-called animal, has elected you his accomplice.

You piece together your reports in the order he suggests, weighting them towards compliance and steadiness, omitting any mention of the nights or the edge-of-dawn hours when your hand had been on his chest, or elsewhere. Within the hour, you have the file assembled. There are lines you never thought you’d write in the margins, notations about cooperative affect, about steady compliance with all Seedwarden requests, and, because protocol is protocol, a careful record of ‘breeding viability, reproductive capacity, and physical stamina.’ You write these delicately, as if the gentleness of your words will dull the wildness of your desire, but it does nothing. It only makes it worse: You want to write, All this and more, more, more.

You make him sit for a final physical, taking measurements that have nothing to do with the Council’s requirements and everything to do with your own greed to inventory every cell, every inch, to carve a record into existence in case he is wrenched out from under you next cycle. You pretend the touch is all professional, but the way your hands linger, the way you knead the lines of his forearm, these are not things you were trained to do and you both know it. And you try to keep it clinical, but every time your hands pass over his flesh - the taut belly, the thickly corded thigh, the webbing of old injuries - you can feel his gaze waiting, purring, daring you to claim what you catalog. He sits passively, but his passiveness is a lie: he is a man who has studied the mechanics of want in every breed of captor, of scientist, of woman. And he knows that now, for the first time, you are measuring for yourself. Your fingers brush up, just below the seam of his shorts, and his mouth twitches, a faint smile wedging open your composure.

You glance up.

“You are trembling, Seedwarden.” The phrase is all teeth but no threat, just truth, as casual as the roll of skin beneath your palm. Your cheeks get hot, and he lifts his chin as if offering his neck for the cut. “You want to touch it?” he says, not a leer, just the observation that in the space between theory and body, sometimes it’s your own hands that break the rules first.

You set your jaw, “I’ve already observed,” you reply. “You made sure of that.”

But he knows, and you know, that this morning the ritual is different - it is invasion by consent. His thighs widen just enough and you re-align the fabric, smoothing the shorts over his hip, and realize it is an act of ownership as much as decency. You want to look away, of course, but today was no such day to waste time. So you don’t, not really. What you do instead is let your hand land at the top of his thigh, half a centimeter above the rough press of his cock, and you palm him through the shorts, once: slow, deliberate.

He stiffens like he’s been waiting for this, the thrum of want in him is electric and immediate, and - fuck, it’s not just him. It’s in you, too, this mirrored hunger, this idiotic ache to keep repeating the gesture: to touch, to confirm, to lay claim in a way that a file or a report never could.

But today isn’t about hunger. Today’s about getting it done.

So you withdraw and begin filling the page with measurements, notes, and notations that skirt the line between fact and longing:

‘Pulse 82 at rest, 135 after forced stress.’ ‘Consistent, articulate, no evidence of neurochemical override.’ ‘Responsive - Shows promise for breeding.’ And that is that. The file is thick and the handwriting, for once, is steady as you sign off on the last page. It will look impressive on the Mother’s desk and it’ll look like every other file, except this one, for the first time in your life, is a piece of you as well. With the performance complete, you press your palm to the cover, then run both hands through your hair so that by the time you look up again you can pretend to be the thing this world built you for: dutiful, calculating and composed.

His hand slid between your legs and cupped you, a gesture so proprietary it felt like a brand. He tilted his head to watch your face, his eyes narrowed, irises flaring with something feral. His thumb pressed into the peak of you, pinning you in place as you shuddered, and he studied every clench of your jaw, every helpless shiver, as if deciphering a brutal dialect spoken only by predator and prey. “So small beneath me, ja?”

Your hips gave a buck, heat rising to your scalp. He grinned then, all teeth and satisfaction, and curled a finger to test how much you’d yield for him, how much you’d open, and your traitorous hips rolled into the pressure, hungry for more.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice lower than before, more controlled, and you did, christ, you did, and in that instant, you saw not just the hunger but the terror behind it, the need to keep you alive because letting go of you meant letting go of himself, of the last thing that separated him from becoming what was outside. You met his gaze and what passed between you in that moment was not permission but a willingness to be seen through and devoured. He held your ankle firm and pressed his finger into you, slow as a knife testing the ripeness of a peach. The heat of it made your thighs tense, the slow slide both a question and an answer that set something molten loose in the pit of your stomach. You expected him to gloat, to be rough, but the weight of his patience undid you more. He only pressed as far as he thought he needed, then curled his finger gently, prying a high, shameful gasp from you that hung in the air between your faces.

“Gutes Mädchen,” a purr of words that rattled in your skull in a way you hated, the German as intimate as his breath in your ear. He kept his finger inside you, slowly moving it, searching for the angle that made you writhe with want. You could feel how soaked you were, the way your traitorous flesh gripped him, begged for more, and he noticed. Of course, he noticed. He watched your face like it was the last honest thing in the world. Like if he could memorize every twist of your brow, every stutter of your lip, he might be able to map the boundaries of himself, too. His thumb rolled in a slow, feathering pressure, and you felt the fight evacuate your body from the inside out. You ground your teeth in a desperate attempt to wrench back even a semblance of dignity, but the nerve at your core stuttered every thought into electricity and all that exited your mouth was an exhale and the smallest, most pathetic mewl. “K-Köni-”

He watched, his eyes greedy and blue with the heat of his own want, but he didn’t rush you, he just circled his thumb, slow and precise, and you realized that whatever was left of your defiance had become the fuel for this whole sick engine. He wanted your surrender but he wanted it earned, wanted to see it born out of your fighting him, not your rolling over and showing your belly.

So you fought - hips twitching to escape, thighs threatening to press together, your hands clawing at the unyielding grip of his wrists. And he allowed it, hell, he even encouraged it, his pulse leaping at every new attempt to unseat him, his breathing ragged against your temple as he leaned in closer. You muttered a curse, or tried to, but the pulse of his hand at your cunt ruined every syllable and it came out as a wrecked, broken sound. “F-Fuck- nnnngh-”

He pressed his cheek to yours, lips at your ear. “Das ist es, show me.” It was almost gentle, as if he pitied the war in you, as if he wanted to be the end rather than the means. A sound caught in your throat that died before it could get out, flipping at the last second into a breathless, desperate plea. “Please-” You didn’t want to say it, but you needed him, needed the shape of his name in your mouth, needed the want in his eyes to be sharp enough to leave scars. The world outside could swallow itself for all you care; right now, you were reduced to where your body ended and his began. Your hips rolled to meet his palm, the friction building a pressure behind your ribs that threatened to knock your logic clean out of orbit, and he felt the break in you - the exact moment you gave up on punishing him, on resisting - and his smile turned soft and sinister all at once, his breath hot against your jaw.

He added a second finger, stretching you, and your whole body shivered around the sudden fullness. It was greedy, the way he worked you: not just for the sounds, but for the sight of you coming apart, for the knowledge that he was what made you shudder and whine, not the monsters in the woods. He drew from you a litany of noises, each sound a little more desperate than the last. He pressed and swirled his thumb until your hips rocked up to meet him, and still, he held you open as if it was the only thing in the world worth claiming.

Your thighs trembled around his hand, and you tried to turn your face away, but his other hand moved from your ankle and caught you by the chin, his thumb digging into your cheek, forcing your gaze to meet his. “Lauter,” he ordered, ‘‘Louder’’. What came out of you was a deeper, rawer sound and the bastard watched you, all appetite, and when your eyes went glassy with the threat of tears you couldn’t so much as articulate, he crooned. “That’s it, Kleine, so gut, I have you, I have you-”

You felt your body coil, and you blinked away the tears that threatened to spill. He hummed his approval and responded by fucking his fingers into you just so, the angle perfect and the rhythm exact until heat washed through your belly, pooling deep before crackling up your ribs, your heart, your scalp. It rocked through you, impossible to swallow back, a surge that made your body seize and writhe until you were certain the whole damn forest would peel open its ears to listen. You pressed the side of your face into his shoulder, desperate to muffle any threat of noise as your cunt clenched around König’s fingers, greedy and furious and so slick you could hear the smutty drag of the motion even over your pulse thrumming in your ears. His palm soaked up every tremor and shiver, and he worked you through the aftershocks, relentless until you nearly sobbed from the power of it. Your body trembled, limp in the cage of his arms, and for one humiliating instant you let your head rest against him, gasping for enough air to remember your own name.

And König let you have the softness. He stroked your thigh, soothing the tremor in your muscles as you came down, crooning once more. You barely registered the scrape of his stubble against your thigh as he pressed a kiss to the trembling muscle. “Brave girl,” he breathed, his voice thick with wonder, the words so at odds with everything outside that they churned your stomach and sent more heat down your legs. “So good for me-” He flexed onces, knuckles still buried inside you, and you winced, gasping softly, and he drew back just enough to sweep his thumb down your slit, gathering the slickness. “Like you were made for it. For me.” You hated that it landed. Hated that the words made you flush with a pride that was built of confusion and the fluttering of a butterflies wings. His hands gentled, the grip at your jaw becoming a brush along your cheek, knuckles trailing along your heated cheek. If you had any hope of drowning the world out, it was only by latching onto this one small, awful oasis of need. He let your legs fall together and shifted up, pulling you with him until you collapsed over his chest like a limp doll. The world outside had not paused, and neither did the sounds, but you felt the space around you shift. The hunger in his words turned into something possessive, a gravity so relentless you could feel it in every inch of your skin. “You did so well,” König whispered, as if you were a child who had braved the needle at the doctor’s office and needed to be rewarded for not biting through your own tongue. “I told you, Kleine, I would never let anything happen to you. You’re mine now, Rotwood cannot have you.”

•·················•·················•

The map scraps you’d been given put Dornau at ten minutes out if you’d followed them correctly. The path from here on out cut through an odd, sickly corridor of trees and your boots found every root and rut. By some miracle (or perhaps the gift of exhaustion) you made it the rest of the way through the Rotwood with your hands buried in your jacket pockets. Maybe it was the aftermath swimming in your blood of what you’d just allowed yourself to do, but for the first time since leaving Waldheim’s walls, you felt something close to relief. Didn’t matter, the things that haunted the Rotwood’s root-and-sap mind either gave you mercy or had found better amusements. It was only when the forest began to thin at the edges that you noticed the silence wasn’t hungry anymore. The last two kilometers evaporated underfoot, replaced by the sustained whorl of blood in your ears and the soft crunch of leaves and twigs beneath your boots. When you finally spotted the break in the trees, the dim lights of the settlement materialized and a signpost, god, a signpost painted poorly with “Dornau”- your knees gave a soft, involuntary dip and König chuckled. But as you approached closer, something felt… wrong. The main gate to Dornau was ajar, a young birch growing close enough to keep it propped open. Roots had crawled over and through the chain-link, twisting around it like a natural braid. Your whole body tensed for the kind of life you expected to erupt at the sight of newcomers or traders, but there was no greeting. No percussive bark of the dogs you’d seen on the last supply run, no hum of a generator, no distant clang of buckets or laughter or even argument. If anything, the air seemed thin, the sound stripped out of it like meat boiled off bone. There was nothing. You exchanged glances, combed every frame of your memory for something equivalent to this, and felt the answer arrive as cold as the dead: Dornau had done something terribly wrong.

Around the perimeter you noticed where it must’ve started: a fresh fist of root bursting through where the asphalt should have been. You skirted it and tried to map the differences between this place and the memory you held of Dornau. “They tried to burn it back…” you heard yourself say, and König’s hand found your elbow, pulling you back towards him. “Scheiße.” His voice was level, but you could taste the bitterness behind it. There were burn marks, maybe three days old, blackening the grass and the tangled mesh of chain-link around the fencing. The way the scorched earth sheared off the edge of the perimeter left no doubt: someone inside had tried to burn the woods back, had summoned fire to redress the old balance. They had built the walls high and topped with razor, but none of that mattered when in the end the Rotwood reached inside anyways.

“They should have known better,” König learned in and murmured at your shoulder and you nodded. “Yeah, they all should have.”

You stepped over a fallen branch as you approached the gate, only to noticed it wasn’t a branch at all, but a length of someone’s arm, blackened crisp and shucked clean at the end. You gritted your teeth and kept your eyes off the detail. A few meters past the entry, the ground was riddled with new growth. Roots emerging from anywhere they could, wrapping, coiling, strangling.

Nothing moved. The cabins and outbuildings were all roughly upright but looked abandoned, doors hanging open, and some windows shattered. You recognized the flavor of absence and it felt like walking into a house moments after a fight. But you followed the line of rot anyway, mapped it with your eyes, and saw how it worked in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree - first the fence, then the outermost structures, and finally, at the settlement’s heart, the bodies where people had gathered, trying to huddle for safety when they should have run.

They were not strewn about, not displayed as if slaughtered. They were worse. They’d been integrated, folded in by the Rotwood’s patience. The first was a face, paler and waxier than any you’d seen, its mouth still open in a frozen mid-scream where the tree had chosen to split it. The chin and cheek canted up from a root that crushed the collarbone flat and she stared at you with a dread so intimate you nearly dropped your own jaw. Further on, others, people you recognized, some you only vaguely remembered from old supply runs, became artifacts of the forest, heads or hands or whole spines buckled and extruded from the bark. It was like they were frozen entirely, preserved. A small part of you hoped they were dead instead of having to live in this perpetual state.

And König saw them too, of course. His face was set in that terrible, blank mask, and you saw his eyes calculating paths: not just how to walk in, but how to walk back out. You followed so close you could feel the nervous heat of him and you couldn’t help but reach for his hand. “König.” You whispered, standing up on your tip toes to reach his ear. “We strip what we can carry and we leave. Right now. Before it decides we’re staying.” He pressed his face to yours and nodded, confirming what you both already knew: every time someone had tried to turn the Rotwood into an enemy instead of a weather, a geology, a law, this was what came next. What was left of you, what was left of him, was only relevant while it was moving, breathing. You could only hope that Dornau’s food stores hadn’t suffered the same fate as their sentries. You exchanged a tight, wordless look, pushed through the main square, and shoved your way inside the barn where they kept the supply lockers.

You found the storage already breached - cabinets gaping open, rootlets probing every crack and crevice. But the oddest, ugliest mercy waited: the root had, in its own idiot (or perhaps not) logic, preserved large quantities of vacuum-packed protein and grain, curling around the objects but not through them. As if even the Rotwood found the contents indigestible. You tugged a few free, checked the seals on the cans, and scraped mildewed wrappers from the off-brand energy bars, tossing each into your rucksack. König worked with a speed you’d never seen, clearing shelves by armfuls, never daring a word, his face knotted into the hungry joy of the desperate. He didn’t even react to the mummified foreman whose lower half rooted into the wall behind the desk, eyes glassy and awful, mouth still open mid-protest.

And you kept moving. “I think this is about all we can carry, König. We’ll report it to the Council when we get back, maybe they’ll send a salvage team for what the Rotwood hasn’t claimed.” “Ja, and they’ll make us guide them.” He grunted and you both worked with the speed that only true panic allows. You looped the straps of your rucksack over your shoulder and didn’t bother to check for treasures or supplies beyond what was immediately reachable. König had already shifted back to the door, and you trailed him into the thinning dawn.

The two of you moved back through Dornau in a broken zigzag, dodging the pulses of root that writhed when your boots vibrated the old asphalt. The silence was so total it felt like being wrapped in wool, and you couldn’t unsee the faces in the bark, the way their final moments stretched out long after the end. You wanted to apologize to every one of them but didn’t even try; any sound would be an offering, and you had nothing left to give.

At the gate, the Rotwood pressed close, crowding the settlement’s ruins with greedy insistence, but in the new daylight you saw the truth: every last inch of chain-link and perimeter wall was grafted over with a mesh of roots and compound thorns, glittering with dew or sap - you couldn’t tell which, and didn’t want to think about it. There were no more sentries, no last stand. Dornau had been devoured, digested, and shat out in a single, silent act of natural violence.

You waited, your back stiff, and König stood beside you as you reached for his hand. When your fingers threaded through his, you looked up to offer a soft smile, something that survived the walk through the woods and the horror in the ruins of Dornau, but the sun crested over the line of trees. For a second, König’s head blocked it and the next, you were drowned in light so sharp and total it erased his outline, erased the world, erased you.

You screw your eyes shut and in the freeze-frame of that afterimage, you saw every moment of the past hours burned onto the inside of your eyelids: the hunger, the clutch of his hands, the soft thud of boots on loam, the way the world was always about to end and then, absurdly, didn’t. You were alive. He was alive. And for a splinter-second, this felt like a gift. “König,” You lift your free hand to shade your eyes and find his face. “Tell me we’re going to make it back.” “Ja, natürlich,” he said and squeezed your hand. “You see? I kept you alive here, I will keep you alive all the way back. Even if the Rotwood eats the road behind us, even if Waldheim’s Council changes their mind and locks us out - you will make it, and you will be mine on the other side.”

It was not spoken as a threat, but more like a fact that had always been true, waiting behind the milk-glass haze of every memory you carried from the old world. König had decided, and so it would be. •·················•·················•

On the return, the woods seemed to part almost willingly for you and König and you found it was easier than before, as if you’d earned passage, or at least a temporary clemency. The air felt less like a noose and more like a pressure gradient, adjusting to your presence rather than crushing it. You felt as if the Rotwood saw you, and for once, did not attempt to make you small or lost or alone - the only evidence of its scrutiny was the persistent, silent accompaniment of your doubled shadow, always a step behind, always ready to caress your outline into the dust. This was when you let yourself look for it and saw a sense of dignity to how it consumed. The Rotwood did not scour or pillage or even punish; it rebalanced, made use of every inch that it took. When you stepped between the trunks on the way home, boots squelching in old mud, you caught yourself flinching, waiting for the eyes and sounds of the Stag, a Husk— but then felt a fresh, unambiguous certainty that it would not harm you unless you deserved it. The greatest change though was inside yourself. Before, every new sensation was a threat: a branch, a glance, a sentence, a desire. Now it was invasion, yes, but you discovered in yourself the capacity to receive, to endure, to mutate. Let the world learn you, you thought, and it would find you had bite. But you didn’t have the same bite as a man who destroyed to control, you had the bite of someone who survived because of stubbornness, because of a refusal to yield - even to the Rotwood. A ‘mutual respect’, that’s what König called it, and when you felt the sickness of hunger or the wrongness of the world scabbing up your skin, you held your chin higher and spat in the eye of whatever wanted you small - besides König, of course. König respected you, sure, but he loved the lever of your helplessness - loved to pinch you into the palm of his hand and squeeze, to draw from you every confession of want or need and rub his authority in it. He was never cruel with it, not really. But he liked you small. Enjoyed when you flinched, or when you pretended to hate his shadow, only to edge back into it whenever the Rotwood grew teeth again. He played on it in little ways, too: if you faltered over a fallen log or rolled your ankle, his hand was already there, clamping your bicep, righting you and then making a show of holding you steady even after you’d found your balance. He would grunt his approval, and sometimes he would rumple your hair or pat the crown of your head the way a man would to his favorite dog. You seethed at it, on occasion, though more often than not you found yourself wanting more.

Somewhere in the Rotwood, somewhere between the mouths of roots and the hollow faces in the bark, and the first time you’d let yourself shudder and break against his hand - something had snapped. Call it imprinting, call it trauma-bonding, call it whatever the fuck the old world’s therapists would have labeled it, but it was real and alive and it stalked the both of you as you made your way home. It didn’t even have the kindness to manifest as tenderness, christ no, that would have been merciful. It instead appeared in every hyper-sensitized inch of air between you, in every way you bristled if he lagged behind you, or left you out in the open for even a second longer than normal. It appeared in how keenly you wanted to outrun him, to make it to Waldheim’s gate first and see if his promise to keep you had any staying power at all. Luckily for you, and perhaps him, the wait wouldn’t be much longer. The Rotwood’s monsters kept a dignified leash-length for the rest of the hike like a reluctant armistice, enforced by a mutual exhaustion, and you found yourself almost missing the constant edge of panic. It was like walking through a haunted house after the actors had clocked out: the props still frightened, the darkness just as thick, sure, but nobody leaped from behind a curtain. Even the sense of surveillance was different now, more like being escorted than stalked. Eyes tracked you from the periphery, but none of them pressed closer. It felt as if the Rotwood was testing boundaries, wanting to see how far you would carry yourself before remembering to look back. Even the ground, greedy with its roots and fungus for so much of the journey, now gave way beneath your boots, the earth squashy but yielding, inviting you to walk back into your own world. You could no longer tell if the ease in your blood was relief or a trick, if you’d become the perfect prey, or maybe the first to be recognized as kin. Didn’t matter when the familiar heaviness of smoke hit the back of your throat, a taste you knew as well as your own pulse. Waldheim’s incinerator. You knew that stench like your own heartbeat. You thought about running ahead to get it over with but knew the risk wasn’t worth it; noise carried here and to be loud was to disrespect the woods. So you paced yourself beside König, matching his careful stride, both of you pressing on through the thinning line of birches and oaks until you saw the ugly outline of the settlement wall in the near distance. The air changed immediately, the Rotwood’s breath replaced by the staleness of civilization, and the tang of smoke only grew richer the closer you got.

The persona of hunter and prey that had governed your entire passage frayed at the edge of Waldheim’s property, replaced by the looming certainty of witnesses and the petty hierarchy that awaited inside. You felt your shoulders tense as you took in the familiar features of the wall: the makeshift rampart of scavenged shipping containers, and above them, the watchtowers with their patchwork of glass and plastic, reflecting the sun. You kept your eyes on the motion in the towers, and as you neared the perimeter, the first of the guards clocked you through binoculars. A silence followed and all eyes were on the two of you, and you realized with a sick pride and a heavy gut that nobody had expected your return. Least of all, the both of you together.

The gate opened slow, and you could see the settlement’s head already waiting, her posture disapproving, arms folded like she’d prepared to scold, but König cut the air with his voice, leaving no room for niceties. “Route to Dornau is gone as observed,” he said, ignoring the councilwoman’s lifted brow and the rapidly growing audience around the gate. “Rotwood closed it. We entered through the north break. Dornau is…” He flicked his eyes to you then back: “Dornau is compromised. No survivors..”

He let the implication suspend in the air, drawing the attention of the entire yard. “They’d attempted to burn it. Three days ago, maybe four. Rotwood accelerated and overtook all living structures and residents.” He clenched his jaw, remembering the sights then waited, tracking her eyes as she scanned for loopholes or hidden hope. Finally, she asked, “Supplies?”

“Mechanical, storage, and medical still untouched,” König said. “Rotwood took flesh, not objects. We gathered what we could. Estimate two more days before the Bloom overtakes the granary and equipment shed. Salvage window is closing, but full expedition could recover most everything. Everything else is lost, Ma’am.” He added the ‘ma’am’ as a blade. The councilwoman gave a short, sharp nod, then spread her hands in a gesture so rehearsed it was almost funny. “You both need decon and immediate report. After that – König, you’ll brief the southern patrol on the north break, directly. You,” she said, pinning you under her gaze, “Medical.”

You were halfway to the medical hut when you realized the world behind the wall hadn’t changed at all. Chickens still clucked, sheets dried on lines, men stared down from the watchtowers with the same bland expectation as ever. And for one feral heartbeat, you resented them: their routines, their baked-in certainty that someone like you would do the job and come back whole. That you could ever come back whole.

A nurse with kind hands squinted at your skinned knuckles and the spatter of mud and rot that caked the hem of your jacket. She asked after your health in the voice of someone who had drilled the question into the bones of every patient. “Anything make it through?” she prompted, running a finger along your jaw, looking for swelling or bites.

You thought of König’s teeth, the bruises already blooming on your hips, “Nothing I can’t live with.”

She raised a brow, but let it go. •·················•·················• You’d been in Waldheim a few hours before he finally came to your door. You’d done your duty, walked to the medical hut and back, smiled at the nurse’s jokes, submitted to the Council’s debrief, even managed to look through three different supply manifests for salvage priorities because someone needed to prove the trip hadn’t ‘ruined’ you.

Of course, none of it mattered. Not when the thud of his boots on your porch announced his presence. You half-rose from your bed, when his shadow blotted out the last of the sunset through the open door. The threshold seemed to buckle beneath him, every hard edge of his figure made harder by the dusk. You tried to say something, anything, but he’d already closed the gap and put his hand against your cheek, his fingers pressing into the bone as if to remind himself you were real, that this was not the Rotwood’s final stage of torment.

He studied your face in the low light, his own expression emptied of the brutality you recognized on his lips just hours ago. The thumb on your cheek trembled, just once, as if he was fighting a memory left in the Rotwood. “Kleine,” he said, quiet. “König.” You said his name back, a little softer than you’d meant and he caught it, his head tilting just enough to give the moment weight. Then his mouth was on yours, a kiss not built from want or even need, but from the audacity of survival; from triumph squeezed through the sieve of days spent sleepless and filthy and haunted by something bigger than either of you. It was a collision, and when your teeth bumped, he didn’t apologize, just pushed in harder - hungry, hopeful, already mapping this new world where you had both somehow made it home.

You let him pin you to the wall, your spine nudging the grain wooden beam, his hands never still. One bracketed the side of your neck, fingers flexed just shy of pressure, and the other laced into the notch beneath your ribs. He tasted like canned fruit and coffee and the last sweat of the walk home, a mix that made your senses swim in a way that almost overrode the shame of how fast you reached for him. Almost. “Not letting go,” he rasped and the words rang less as a promise than a fact of physics. You tasted the ache of how badly you wanted to be ruined and you’d joke to yourself later that you’d survived fungi and trauma and the end of the world, only to be split open by the earnestness of a possessive bastard with a t-shirt mask and a penchant for muttering your name as if it could ward off the dark. But for now, the only thing that mattered was the rough edge of his palms sliding beneath your shirt, the heat of his mouth at your collar, and the way the rest of the settlement, for one rare hour, could drown in silence. The world outside the small heat of your room ceased, not even Rotwood’s memory could worm in here, the certainty with which he wedged his thigh between yours and claimed every inch as territory to be mapped, retaken, and held in trust for the bad nights.

“Look at me,” he ordered, familiar to before, and you did, shame and want and defiance all fighting for the same inch of your face. His thumb found your chin and forced your gaze to meet his. You tried to remember any vocabulary for this feeling - need, madness, victory? Maybe victory. Survivor’s guilt in reverse, a hunger big enough to inherit an entire new heaven and earth. You almost laughed, but it caught in your throat.

He grinned, both sharp and soft together. “You listen better now, Kleine.” You could feel how he needed the proof of you, the solidness of your bones, the way your mouth opened for his thumb and then his tongue and then every other thing he asked of you. Yet there was no time or space for gentleness, not when both of you had survived such horrors and come out practically untouched, no. He’d made a promise - that you’d belong to him, and you could see the animal logic of it flash behind every flick of his gaze, every squeeze of his grip. This was not affection. This was not even lust. Not in the traditional sense, this was the caging of a monster that had trailed you both through the woods, starved for a meal, now unwilling to let its prize slip away in the mockery of so-called ‘safety.’

He devoured you. There’s no other word for it, not with the force he used, not with the way his hands bracketed your hips, then your throat, as if checking, again and again, for fracture points and to ensure you were real, that this was real and not some hallucination given to him by the Choir. He kissed you up and down the jaw, teeth nipping and scraping, intent on leaving a visible trail of heat and bruise along your throat. You found yourself shoving at his chest with both hands, not to force him back but to test if he could be made to move. He couldn’t, not unless you sincerely wanted it; he only read the resistance as provocation and drove into it, into you, with renewed vigor. The press of his thigh caged you against the wall, and he ground you there, using every shift of muscle to remind you of your new place.

You’d never considered yourself the sort to give in. Rage and want were old friends; you’d grown up balancing them in one palm, always making noise, always bristling against authority. Yet every time his hand covered your mouth, or his teeth dragged a noise from your throat, you felt the relief of not being in charge, even if just for a moment. You let yourself be held there, let the blood rush up your neck and face with the embarrassment and the want of it, let him see the wildness in your eyes as he pressed his tongue past your teeth.

He crowded you back, herding you with hands rough at your hips until your ass met the edge of the cot and then again until you collapsed backward onto the sheets. He didn’t undress you all neat and chaste, no whispers of sweet nothings, no, he yanked impatiently, shoving your shirt up and off, pawed at buttons until they sprang loose, left his shirt in a pile at the foot of the bed. He wanted you under him, spread and taken, and his hands made a show of framing your wrists above your head, pressing them to the pillow, his thumbs pinning pulse points like he could keep you from slipping away if he only held tight enough.

But even then, even with all his force and rough handling, his face said what his mouth didn’t: that he couldn’t believe you’d both made it back, that this was not a trick or a honeytrap for the Rotwood to snatch him up in the middle of wanting. The hunger in his eyes was rimmed with a kind of terror; not just for your body, but for everything that might be lost in the gap between wanting and having. When he clutched your jaw and kissed you again it was less a question than plea, and you answered with teeth, with tongue, with the low, unsparing sound you let leak between your molars as he slotted his hips against yours.

He breathed into your mouth, voice gutted and low: “You fight me now? You want to make me beg?”

“I want you to shut up,” you said, and he did momentarily, only to smother the rest of your protest with his palm, holding your face still as he worked his other hand down between your legs. There was nothing delicate in it, but there didn’t need to be; he knew you, mapped your want with the brute logic of a man who’d planned this a thousand times in the Rotwood and had now, finally, found a world where the wanting didn’t kill him. Where the wanting fed you both.

He shoved your underwear to one side, two fingers slick and blunt at first, testing but not asking, finding you already warm and open for him. The shudder up your spine made him grin against your cheek. There was no art to it, only necessity: he fucked you with his hand until your thighs quaked and you bit your own tongue to keep from making noise.

“Go on, Kleine,” he whispered, “I want all of it.”

You wanted to snarl back, to say something that would knock him off his axis, but every attempt at wit drowned in the slosh of your pulse and the pulse of his fingers. Then you realized, he wasn’t prepping you just to make you come, not now. This was the methodical stretch before the main event, the slick ease of resistance and careful prying open - engineered with the clinical, almost perverse patience of someone who had been engineered for breach, for entry, for the violence of insertion. König slid his fingers from you, slow and deliberate, gathering the wet with his thumb before smearing it up over your clit again, a smear of ownership that made you jerk and whine. Then he wiped his hand off on your thigh.

He freed his cock next, and the audacity of his size made you want to laugh, made you want to shout, made you want to spread wider or else bar the door and run. It was every bit the threat as you’d imagined. He stroked it once, his eyes never leaving yours, and the look on his face was nothing less than feral pride - a man who’d fought a goddamn forest and won, and now intended to plant his flag in the first thing that felt like home.

He crowded your knees apart, hooked a hand under your thigh and jacked your hips up so your ass barely touched the bed. He lined himself up and rather than slam into you as you half-expected, he dragged the crown slowly, teasing the soft, slicked length of your slit until you sobbed with the need for him to just get on with it. He pressed in, inch by slow inch, and you had to clamp your hands around his forearm, already prepared to ask him to stop, to joke about how you might actually die from this, when he stalled out, only the tip inside, and looked up at you with a gleam like he was waiting for you to beg.

“Are you going to fight me every time, Kleine?” he panted, voice with restraint.

You glared straight back, even as your body writhed under the pressure. “Only if you’re too chicken shit to finish what you started.”

He grinned, exposed his teeth, and then he started to push in earnest. The stretch felt ferocious, like your body was splitting into halves and your center was being remade around the fat, deliberate press of him. He groaned - an actual, honest-to-god, from-the-chest groan- and you realized with a strange pride that you were giving as good as you got. The pace was punishingly slow at first, every forward thrust met by a tiny buck of your hips, an effort to take more, to have the damn thing over with, to be as full as a body could hold.

But even through the roughness, there was a persistence in the way he watched your mouth, like a need to see if the splitting stretch would break you or make you melt. He held your thigh up, his thumb digging into the bone. With every thrust, he angled you to keep your gaze on his, as if he could fuck the world quiet if only he could watch it happen in the flick of your pupils. And he tried. Gods, he tried: every rocking movement felt calculated to undo you, to drive the want in deeper, to make you into a home for this hollowed-out ache in him that could not be filled by words.

And you answered it. Every time he fucked into you, you rose to meet him and he grunted at the way your cunt tried to rip him apart or swallow him whole, you couldn’t tell which. The air was a mess of sweat and the tang of blood from where you’d bitten his shoulder, and he loved it, ate it up, every sound, every shudder. He released your wrists and braced himself on the bed beside your face, the other arm still locked beneath your knee, pinning you at the edge. His whole body was a shuddering brace around you, a frame of meat and desperation, and still he was not content to just take.

He needed to be seen, to be felt in the parts of you that the world never respected. He bent to press his mouth to your ear, the words shredded by breath and the slap of skin. “You’re doing so well, Kleine,” he panted. “Taking it all, just for me.”

You whimpered, half in pride and half in disbelief, and bucked against him, grinding his pelvis flush to your own in a show of impossible greed and he laughed and thrust harder, punching the air out of your lungs until all you could do was gasp, clutching at his arms as the pressure inside you doubled, then tripled, then crackled apart like old wood. There was no space for dignity anymore, though perhaps there never had been.

You weren’t sure which happened first: the tide of heat rolling up from where your bodies met, or the involuntary curl of your toes against the sheets, the way your gut twisted, everything inside you clenching so hard you thought you might break in half. He’d warned you, with every pass of his palm and every precision in his voice, that there was no escaping this - no yanking yourself free, no outmaneuvering the physics of him. Yet you still tried. Some bruised part of you wanted to last longer, to out-grit him, to take the pain and turn it into a memory you could hold over him later. But the rhythm was relentless, and the sound of his hips breaking against yours, the slap of skin, the wet, animal noise smothered every last attempt at resistance. Your stomach tightened, the pressure building, and a warning stuttered in your throat, but he was already there, riding each whimper, each shudder. He bent his head to your neck, teeth raking, and you sucked in a breath so sharp it left you dizzy. “K-König—”

You didn’t mean to sob his name, but it wrenched up out of you, higher than you’d ever let yourself sound, and he answered it with a guttural, broken groan right at your ear. “Kleine,” He said the word again, your new name, and when you came, it was not the tidy, neat thing you had always tried for in the rare dark privacy of your own hands. No, it hit you in aftershocks, your body spasming around him, your voice gone ugly, overheated. You felt the way your heat clamped down, pulled at him, and he shuddered over you, the edge of his self-control blown open by your surrender. “Oh Gott, Ich bin gleich soweit—”

He braced you by the knees, his thrusts turned ragged and desperate. He managed to lever himself back and pulled out hard at the last second, his cock slick against your clit and then the hot spill of finish smeared splatter-warm over your belly and lower ribs. He growled something and collapsed, catching himself before landing on you entirely.

There was a liminal moment where your vision pixelated at the edges and the only thing you could hear was the whine of blood in your own head and his heavy breathing. His hands gentled, one braced under your thigh, the other dragging slow circles over your stomach, smearing the mess he’d left there like a claim. And for a long, long time, neither of you said anything. He pressed his forehead to your shoulder and laughed, a single, sharp exhale with no humor, then rolled you onto your side, his hand never leaving your skin. “Ach, see? You belong to me Kleine, told you the Rotwood couldn’t have you.”

That was when he came down to you, pushing the air out of your lungs with the breadth of his hunger. His mouth was on your neck, your jaw, biting and unsparing, and the sound he made was not language, but a low rumble not unlike a beast. You wanted to spit another insult, wanted to twist his words and force them back down his throat, but what came out was a sound that was more a moan or maybe whine or some abject surrender. He made a pleased noise at that, a smug, knowing exhale into your pulse, and ground his hips until the friction stole breath from your mouth again.

The Rotwood pressed against the shack, and the thing inside you - the want, the terror, the blazing need - ached for something more than fear. You snaked an arm out and cupped the back of his head and dug your nails into the meat of his nape, pulling him closer, daring him to bite you again, harder. He simply obliged, teeth sinking in just shy of pain, then soothing the bite with his tongue. “Kleine..”

His hand slid between your legs and cupped you, a gesture so proprietary it felt like a brand. He tilted his head to watch your face, his eyes narrowed, irises flaring with something feral. His thumb pressed into the peak of you, pinning you in place as you shuddered, and he studied every clench of your jaw, every helpless shiver, as if deciphering a brutal dialect spoken only by predator and prey. “So small beneath me, ja?”

Your hips gave a buck, heat rising to your scalp. He grinned then, all teeth and satisfaction, and curled a finger to test how much you’d yield for him, how much you’d open, and your traitorous hips rolled into the pressure, hungry for more.

“Look at me,” he said, his voice lower than before, more controlled, and you did, christ, you did, and in that instant, you saw not just the hunger but the terror behind it, the need to keep you alive because letting go of you meant letting go of himself, of the last thing that separated him from becoming what was outside. You met his gaze and what passed between you in that moment was not permission but a willingness to be seen through and devoured. He held your ankle firm and pressed his finger into you, slow as a knife testing the ripeness of a peach. The heat of it made your thighs tense, the slow slide both a question and an answer that set something molten loose in the pit of your stomach. You expected him to gloat, to be rough, but the weight of his patience undid you more. He only pressed as far as he thought he needed, then curled his finger gently, prying a high, shameful gasp from you that hung in the air between your faces.

“Gutes Mädchen,” a purr of words that rattled in your skull in a way you hated, the German as intimate as his breath in your ear. He kept his finger inside you, slowly moving it, searching for the angle that made you writhe with want. You could feel how soaked you were, the way your traitorous flesh gripped him, begged for more, and he noticed. Of course, he noticed. He watched your face like it was the last honest thing in the world. Like if he could memorize every twist of your brow, every stutter of your lip, he might be able to map the boundaries of himself, too. His thumb rolled in a slow, feathering pressure, and you felt the fight evacuate your body from the inside out. You ground your teeth in a desperate attempt to wrench back even a semblance of dignity, but the nerve at your core stuttered every thought into electricity and all that exited your mouth was an exhale and the smallest, most pathetic mewl. “K-Köni-”

He watched, his eyes greedy and blue with the heat of his own want, but he didn’t rush you, he just circled his thumb, slow and precise, and you realized that whatever was left of your defiance had become the fuel for this whole sick engine. He wanted your surrender but he wanted it earned, wanted to see it born out of your fighting him, not your rolling over and showing your belly.

So you fought - hips twitching to escape, thighs threatening to press together, your hands clawing at the unyielding grip of his wrists. And he allowed it, hell, he even encouraged it, his pulse leaping at every new attempt to unseat him, his breathing ragged against your temple as he leaned in closer. You muttered a curse, or tried to, but the pulse of his hand at your cunt ruined every syllable and it came out as a wrecked, broken sound. “F-Fuck- nnnngh-”

He pressed his cheek to yours, lips at your ear. “Das ist es, show me.” It was almost gentle, as if he pitied the war in you, as if he wanted to be the end rather than the means. A sound caught in your throat that died before it could get out, flipping at the last second into a breathless, desperate plea. “Please-” You didn’t want to say it, but you needed him, needed the shape of his name in your mouth, needed the want in his eyes to be sharp enough to leave scars. The world outside could swallow itself for all you care; right now, you were reduced to where your body ended and his began. Your hips rolled to meet his palm, the friction building a pressure behind your ribs that threatened to knock your logic clean out of orbit, and he felt the break in you - the exact moment you gave up on punishing him, on resisting - and his smile turned soft and sinister all at once, his breath hot against your jaw.

He added a second finger, stretching you, and your whole body shivered around the sudden fullness. It was greedy, the way he worked you: not just for the sounds, but for the sight of you coming apart, for the knowledge that he was what made you shudder and whine, not the monsters in the woods. He drew from you a litany of noises, each sound a little more desperate than the last. He pressed and swirled his thumb until your hips rocked up to meet him, and still, he held you open as if it was the only thing in the world worth claiming.

Your thighs trembled around his hand, and you tried to turn your face away, but his other hand moved from your ankle and caught you by the chin, his thumb digging into your cheek, forcing your gaze to meet his. “Lauter,” he ordered, "Louder". What came out of you was a deeper, rawer sound and the bastard watched you, all appetite, and when your eyes went glassy with the threat of tears you couldn’t so much as articulate, he crooned. “That’s it, Kleine, so gut, I have you, I have you-”

You felt your body coil, and you blinked away the tears that threatened to spill. He hummed his approval and responded by fucking his fingers into you just so, the angle perfect and the rhythm exact until heat washed through your belly, pooling deep before crackling up your ribs, your heart, your scalp. It rocked through you, impossible to swallow back, a surge that made your body seize and writhe until you were certain the whole damn forest would peel open its ears to listen. You pressed the side of your face into his shoulder, desperate to muffle any threat of noise as your cunt clenched around König’s fingers, greedy and furious and so slick you could hear the smutty drag of the motion even over your pulse thrumming in your ears. His palm soaked up every tremor and shiver, and he worked you through the aftershocks, relentless until you nearly sobbed from the power of it. Your body trembled, limp in the cage of his arms, and for one humiliating instant you let your head rest against him, gasping for enough air to remember your own name.

And König let you have the softness. He stroked your thigh, soothing the tremor in your muscles as you came down, crooning once more. You barely registered the scrape of his stubble against your thigh as he pressed a kiss to the trembling muscle. “Brave girl,” he breathed, his voice thick with wonder, the words so at odds with everything outside that they churned your stomach and sent more heat down your legs. “So good for me-” He flexed onces, knuckles still buried inside you, and you winced, gasping softly, and he drew back just enough to sweep his thumb down your slit, gathering the slickness. “Like you were made for it. For me.” You hated that it landed. Hated that the words made you flush with a pride that was built of confusion and the fluttering of a butterflies wings. His hands gentled, the grip at your jaw becoming a brush along your cheek, knuckles trailing along your heated cheek. If you had any hope of drowning the world out, it was only by latching onto this one small, awful oasis of need. He let your legs fall together and shifted up, pulling you with him until you collapsed over his chest like a limp doll. The world outside had not paused, and neither did the sounds, but you felt the space around you shift. The hunger in his words turned into something possessive, a gravity so relentless you could feel it in every inch of your skin. “You did so well,” König whispered, as if you were a child who had braved the needle at the doctor’s office and needed to be rewarded for not biting through your own tongue. “I told you, Kleine, I would never let anything happen to you. You’re mine now, Rotwood cannot have you.”

•·················•·················•

The map scraps you’d been given put Dornau at ten minutes out if you’d followed them correctly. The path from here on out cut through an odd, sickly corridor of trees and your boots found every root and rut. By some miracle (or perhaps the gift of exhaustion) you made it the rest of the way through the Rotwood with your hands buried in your jacket pockets. Maybe it was the aftermath swimming in your blood of what you’d just allowed yourself to do, but for the first time since leaving Waldheim’s walls, you felt something close to relief. Didn’t matter, the things that haunted the Rotwood’s root-and-sap mind either gave you mercy or had found better amusements. It was only when the forest began to thin at the edges that you noticed the silence wasn’t hungry anymore. The last two kilometers evaporated underfoot, replaced by the sustained whorl of blood in your ears and the soft crunch of leaves and twigs beneath your boots. When you finally spotted the break in the trees, the dim lights of the settlement materialized and a signpost, god, a signpost painted poorly with “Dornau”- your knees gave a soft, involuntary dip and König chuckled. But as you approached closer, something felt… wrong. The main gate to Dornau was ajar, a young birch growing close enough to keep it propped open. Roots had crawled over and through the chain-link, twisting around it like a natural braid. Your whole body tensed for the kind of life you expected to erupt at the sight of newcomers or traders, but there was no greeting. No percussive bark of the dogs you’d seen on the last supply run, no hum of a generator, no distant clang of buckets or laughter or even argument. If anything, the air seemed thin, the sound stripped out of it like meat boiled off bone. There was nothing. You exchanged glances, combed every frame of your memory for something equivalent to this, and felt the answer arrive as cold as the dead: Dornau had done something terribly wrong.

Around the perimeter you noticed where it must’ve started: a fresh fist of root bursting through where the asphalt should have been. You skirted it and tried to map the differences between this place and the memory you held of Dornau. “They tried to burn it back…” you heard yourself say, and König’s hand found your elbow, pulling you back towards him. “Scheiße.” His voice was level, but you could taste the bitterness behind it. There were burn marks, maybe three days old, blackening the grass and the tangled mesh of chain-link around the fencing. The way the scorched earth sheared off the edge of the perimeter left no doubt: someone inside had tried to burn the woods back, had summoned fire to redress the old balance. They had built the walls high and topped with razor, but none of that mattered when in the end the Rotwood reached inside anyways.

“They should have known better,” König learned in and murmured at your shoulder and you nodded. “Yeah, they all should have.”

You stepped over a fallen branch as you approached the gate, only to noticed it wasn’t a branch at all, but a length of someone’s arm, blackened crisp and shucked clean at the end. You gritted your teeth and kept your eyes off the detail. A few meters past the entry, the ground was riddled with new growth. Roots emerging from anywhere they could, wrapping, coiling, strangling.

Nothing moved. The cabins and outbuildings were all roughly upright but looked abandoned, doors hanging open, and some windows shattered. You recognized the flavor of absence and it felt like walking into a house moments after a fight. But you followed the line of rot anyway, mapped it with your eyes, and saw how it worked in concentric circles, like the rings of a tree - first the fence, then the outermost structures, and finally, at the settlement’s heart, the bodies where people had gathered, trying to huddle for safety when they should have run.

They were not strewn about, not displayed as if slaughtered. They were worse. They’d been integrated, folded in by the Rotwood’s patience. The first was a face, paler and waxier than any you’d seen, its mouth still open in a frozen mid-scream where the tree had chosen to split it. The chin and cheek canted up from a root that crushed the collarbone flat and she stared at you with a dread so intimate you nearly dropped your own jaw. Further on, others, people you recognized, some you only vaguely remembered from old supply runs, became artifacts of the forest, heads or hands or whole spines buckled and extruded from the bark. It was like they were frozen entirely, preserved. A small part of you hoped they were dead instead of having to live in this perpetual state.

And König saw them too, of course. His face was set in that terrible, blank mask, and you saw his eyes calculating paths: not just how to walk in, but how to walk back out. You followed so close you could feel the nervous heat of him and you couldn’t help but reach for his hand. “König.” You whispered, standing up on your tip toes to reach his ear. “We strip what we can carry and we leave. Right now. Before it decides we’re staying.” He pressed his face to yours and nodded, confirming what you both already knew: every time someone had tried to turn the Rotwood into an enemy instead of a weather, a geology, a law, this was what came next. What was left of you, what was left of him, was only relevant while it was moving, breathing. You could only hope that Dornau’s food stores hadn’t suffered the same fate as their sentries. You exchanged a tight, wordless look, pushed through the main square, and shoved your way inside the barn where they kept the supply lockers.

You found the storage already breached - cabinets gaping open, rootlets probing every crack and crevice. But the oddest, ugliest mercy waited: the root had, in its own idiot (or perhaps not) logic, preserved large quantities of vacuum-packed protein and grain, curling around the objects but not through them. As if even the Rotwood found the contents indigestible. You tugged a few free, checked the seals on the cans, and scraped mildewed wrappers from the off-brand energy bars, tossing each into your rucksack. König worked with a speed you’d never seen, clearing shelves by armfuls, never daring a word, his face knotted into the hungry joy of the desperate. He didn’t even react to the mummified foreman whose lower half rooted into the wall behind the desk, eyes glassy and awful, mouth still open mid-protest.

And you kept moving. “I think this is about all we can carry, König. We’ll report it to the Council when we get back, maybe they’ll send a salvage team for what the Rotwood hasn’t claimed.” “Ja, and they’ll make us guide them.” He grunted and you both worked with the speed that only true panic allows. You looped the straps of your rucksack over your shoulder and didn’t bother to check for treasures or supplies beyond what was immediately reachable. König had already shifted back to the door, and you trailed him into the thinning dawn.

The two of you moved back through Dornau in a broken zigzag, dodging the pulses of root that writhed when your boots vibrated the old asphalt. The silence was so total it felt like being wrapped in wool, and you couldn’t unsee the faces in the bark, the way their final moments stretched out long after the end. You wanted to apologize to every one of them but didn’t even try; any sound would be an offering, and you had nothing left to give.

At the gate, the Rotwood pressed close, crowding the settlement’s ruins with greedy insistence, but in the new daylight you saw the truth: every last inch of chain-link and perimeter wall was grafted over with a mesh of roots and compound thorns, glittering with dew or sap - you couldn’t tell which, and didn’t want to think about it. There were no more sentries, no last stand. Dornau had been devoured, digested, and shat out in a single, silent act of natural violence.

You waited, your back stiff, and König stood beside you as you reached for his hand. When your fingers threaded through his, you looked up to offer a soft smile, something that survived the walk through the woods and the horror in the ruins of Dornau, but the sun crested over the line of trees. For a second, König’s head blocked it and the next, you were drowned in light so sharp and total it erased his outline, erased the world, erased you.

You screw your eyes shut and in the freeze-frame of that afterimage, you saw every moment of the past hours burned onto the inside of your eyelids: the hunger, the clutch of his hands, the soft thud of boots on loam, the way the world was always about to end and then, absurdly, didn’t. You were alive. He was alive. And for a splinter-second, this felt like a gift.

•·················•·················• You open your eyes to a familiar ceiling of rough planks, their knots swirling above you like eyes in the dark, and as the world came into focus, a yawn bubbled up from deep in your lungs. Your ribs ached; the bad mattress did nothing for your spine, and even with König’s body curled near yours, you felt as if you’d spent the night sinking through the floorboards. The stink of the hunter’s hut - mouse piss, old sweat - flooded your head and every other sense, sour and familiar.

You stretched, slow and reluctant, feeling the bruises left by the night’s panic. It was a slow stretch, full of ache, as you pulled a twig from your hair, still blinking away the film of sleep your eyes carried. You rolled to greet König, feeling the familiar weight of his arm over your midsection once more. But something was off. The weight of his body next to yours was too still, too cold and sent a warning through your flesh before your mind could name it. “No.. no no no no..” You repeated the word as if it alone could rewind time. Your vision tunneled; your mind frayed at the corners like old flannel, trying to flee the present tense of the world and nestle somewhere, anywhere, safer. The dread surged up your spine, feral and familiar - a living cord that braided itself through your insides and cinched tight above your stomach, same as it had a hundred times before. And every time, it ended here. “P-Please, please don’t go-” You begged. You begged the Rotwood, the air in the room, pleaded for sense, for mercy, for the memory of him to snap upright and hold you together one last time. The words dripped out, not with grace but with a child’s despair, a low chant that made your teeth ache. There was a great, cyclical embarrassment to it, how you always returned to this: clutching a corpse’s wrist for pulse, pressing your face to the cold zipper of a jacket as if scent could bring back what the dirt and roots had already claimed. The voice that issued from you was ugly, not the proud survivor of the tales you told yourself while awake but the battered animal that sputtered and whined in your sleep.

He did not answer. Of course, he didn’t. You hauled yourself upright and your hands shook as you reached for König again, no, not König, never was, not in these moments, just the freeze-dried memory of what you’d lost here and what you would continue to lose, over and over, so long as this body could not learn to stop craving touch. So long as the Rotwood decided to remind you.

You stared at the figure beside you with the hollow disbelief that always trailed grief’s second and third act. It was not him, hadn’t been him for at least 2 months now, but you replayed the endgame anyway, as if one day the outcome might shake loose and scatter a better version. But it never did.

The journey had been real, all of it, the months of scarcity, the dogged trudge through Rotwood’s miseries, the wild, doomed momentum that carried you toward Dornau like a cannonball made of flesh and hope and old, sour longing. The desperate lunge for food, for medicine, for fuel; the half-starved laughter in the wet black of the woods; the way he stripped his own fingers to bone on the roughness of the trees to keep you from slipping into the Bloom. You’d been lovers, yes, but not in any way that could be written or mapped. There was only the urgent grafting of skin, the bandage of voice and hand, the feral attachment of two animals who understood that every other touch in this world would aim to consume them. You had tried to outrun the Rotwood’s census, to be more stubborn than the road, but in the end, the Rotwood took him anyway.

You remembered less of the hour than you did the pitch the Choir used that called to you from inside: The way the voices slipped beneath your bones, slipped behind the scaffolding of your mind and set up shop in the dark. “Kleine,” it would say, crooning just as he had, and every time you heard it, it got a little bit truer, wore the shape of his mouth with more precision until it could have fooled even his own mother. And that was how it always started, every morning you wept after dreaming, mourning, then the Choir.

Sorrow hit you in great, shuddering waves - messy, sniveling, pulping whatever dignity you had managed to claw back during the day. But loss, even loss as big and starved as this, never survived long before the forest’s attention slipped in behind it. The Rotwood, for all its violence, was delicate in these moments. A touch at the base of your skull, a hush weighted with curiosity, then the green fuse of dread as you felt the thinking happen inside your head.

The voice was syrupy, maternal, a trick of a thousand old loves and hungers, and this morning it spoke to you in his register, not quite right but heartbreakingly close. “Kleine, you never listen. Never have, even now.” The emphasis was heavier on the vowels, a warble of affection and threat blended so smooth it almost tasted sweet. “You lose what you cannot keep and blame the world, but you could stay here. Stay and never lose me again.” The bed beside you indented - the weight of root, or the suggestion of it, or maybe just memory so thick it mimicked physics. You gripped his wrist, thumb kneading the knob of bone, and whined his name into the mattress, half-hoping the sound might reanimate sinew. “K-Köni, please-”

You could have spent eternity like that - curled up next to him with your mouth jammed in the crook of his cold shoulder, your hands rigidly encircling the wrist you would have given your own bones to stitch back to warmth. And it was as if the Rotwood itself heard your thoughts. Roots eased up from beneath the floorboards slow, the fibrous ends exploring the dark air between your knees before coiling with patience that mocked the panic in your chest. You didn’t resist, there was no point to, not anymore, not without König. Their touch was exploratory; each tendril paused on your skin, learned the contour, then pressed on, climbing with incremental confidence over your calves and thighs. One inched beneath your thigh, the other gently cuffed your ankle, and you understood in some deep, hive-mind way that the forest wasn’t taking, wasn’t devouring, it was holding you. Not as a mother holds a babe, but in the way König would’ve held you before. You pressed your cheek to the chill of his shoulder and let the roots do as they would. You had tried to belong to a man, to a settlement, to a route on a map. Now you belonged, root and muscle, to a bigger system. You half expected the roots to begin stripping away at your clothing, to unspool you from yourself, but they threaded over you with infinite patience. This wasn't the violence of the Rotwood as you had always feared, it was something worse: it was patience.

Little by little, they pulled you closer to his side, arranging you in the safety, in the comfort of a lovers grasp, and your body shook - not in fear, not any longer - but in a kind of spastic gratitude, a relief that this, at last, was the story that would not be rewritten. Then you heard him one final time, “Kleine,” it said, “Bleib hier, Kleine. Du bist so mutig. The Rotwood will never have you, not unless I let it.” The words, hollow-edged and so heavy with promise it broke something inside you, settled over the ache of your ribs and the fear that had ruled you for so long. You wanted in that last, thinning flicker before will dissolved to say you didn’t believe him, to laugh, to curse, to spit all your pitiful resistances back up at the ceiling like you had so many times before, but all you could do was bury your face in the cold crook of his shoulder and let the Rotwood do what it did best.

The roots tightened, not enough to hurt, not enough to break skin - they knew better than that. The Rotwood had learned the shape of your pain long ago. It knew where the fractures were. It knew what pressure to apply. It had learned from him and that was the part you hated most. Not that it stole his voice. Not that it wore his hands, his words, the little pieces of him you had left scattered throughout your memories. The worst part was that it had listened. It had watched. It had understood that König was never the thing that kept you alive because he was stronger than the forest. He kept you alive because he gave you a reason to keep choosing yourself.

And now there was no reason left.

Your fingers curled tighter around his wrist, cold still, but you smiled anyway. Because the forest could take your blood, it could take your bones, it could take the roads, the cities, the names people carved into stone to prove they had once been here. But it could not take this, and somewhere deep beneath the floorboards, beneath the soil and the ruins of everything that came before, something vast and ancient settled around you. The Rotwood had spent months learning how to imitate a man.

But it had taken only a few moments to learn what it meant to love one.

The one with the baseball cap cocked its head, turning an ear toward the shack. You ducked, your fingers tightening around the window sill. You looked back at König, but he was facing the wall, one arm thrown over his chest in a posture of spectacular unhelpfulness. The boots by the bed. You risked one step back and then another and jerked the laces of your boots tight with a nervous speed. The floorboard groaned and you eased up the weight of your foot. If these really were just people, just hungry, ruined settlers, you would have to help them. Rules, duties, all the Council’s old bullshit came crowding back, but it wasn’t morality that pulled you toward the door, it was the sense that last night’s voices had primed you for something much, much worse than a trio of ragged foragers. Besides, you were less than a day from Dornau, if you could get them there, even limping, maybe they’d have a shot. You crept back to the window and peeked once more. The foragers hadn’t noticed you; they had gone back to their foraging, heads down, pulling at clusters of mushroom with such intensity and confusion it looked like they might eat the dirt itself. You nodded to yourself and got to work on the barricade at the door. ‘No noise, no risk’ is what you told yourself, and you did as such, not even the rattle of wood on wood as you unwedged the chair from the door handle. Every muscle in your forearms throbbed from the effort to stay silent, and you only allowed yourself to breathe once the last bit of table had been eased back and the door hung unlatched in the frame. You took one last look at König’s resting form and slinked out into the pre-dawn of the clearing.

•·················•·················•

The air slapped you with the cold, heavy weight of dew and the taste of Bloom was immediate. The three figures in the clearing hadn’t moved from the log, their heads bowed in concentration. You skirted the edge of the shack and moved toward them, your boots sinking into the moss and detritus. No words yet. You wanted to try to summon something that would pass for neighborliness or authority, but everything stuck in your throat and you had to hack it out a little before the sound of your own voice startled even you.

“H-Hey! You need food? Water?” Your voice was thin and wavered, but landed.

One of them looked up. Not the tallest, but the one with the hat, and you realized with a flinch that the left side of their face had been infected it seemed, by some slow, insistent disease. The eye on that side was cloudy, but the other fixed on you with the intensity of a slow starvation. Suddenly, they dropped their handfuls of mushrooms and turned fully towards you, slow and unhurried. They didn’t answer, they simply stared with a patience so blunt it was almost brutal, and for a moment the four of you inhabited the same raw quiet. The two smaller shapes, closer to your age, might once have been the kind who passed you on a settlement road without so much as a nod; now, their faces were stripped of affect, their expressions worn and tired and stilled by lines of crusted dirt while shallow scratches laddered up their bare arms and throats. A rash crawled from the edge of one’s shirt cuff to the soft spot beneath her chin, angry and glistening, and she scratched at it once until it bled. You noticed the twigs in her hair, braided in with the same deliberateness as a child’s hair for church, except these were black, slick, and absolutely still, as if their roots had set inside her skull. “H-Hello?”

You tried again, but the third, taller than the rest and thin to the point of absence, turned to finally curse your sight. They were worse, gods, they were so much worse. It became instantly clear this was only a suggestion of a person: Their scalp was a thicket of matted hair and living root, each strand slicked flat against gray skin, the new growth emerging in a monstrous crown from brow to occiput. There were places where the scalp itself had split and the roots forced their way out, holes puckered raw and then crusted with the same Bloom that feathered the clearing. Their face was pallid, the mouth set in a permanent snarl that displayed teeth blackened to the gumline. And then you saw the wounds; wrists, forearms, the delicate skin of the inner elbow, all carefully incised with patterns you hadn’t recognized - a sigil, or a series of them, almost, but now rendered in keloided tissue and blood that seemed to never stop scabbing. Not self-harm, not exactly: more like a cult, an initiation, an art performed by and against the body at the same time.

You shuddered and forced your eyes up, refusing to let the horror dominate. They watched you right back, their own eyes flicking over you with appraisal. You realized they were weighing you, like a beast scanning for threat or kin. You didn’t try another word, for this was not an encounter for language, no. The edge of the clearing felt like a membrane, and you realized that you were on the wrong side of it. Before you could take another breath, there was a crash from the shack behind you, and König’s voice cracked the air, guttural and full of violence. “Kleine!” You heard his boots on the ground and the clatter of his gear. He was out the door in a flash, his gun up, posture a hot iron of threat and warning. You could see the moment he clocked the foragers - saw the roots, the teeth, the way their bodies had surrendered or adapted or both. His jaw set, and he raised the rifle, sighted in on the tallest, froze, and lowered the barrel just as fast. He was calculating.

The three figures stopped as one, their attention snapping to him with a predatory, almost canine alertness. The one with the baseball cap let its mouth hang open in something like a grin, but the lips didn’t move. The thin one squared its ruined shoulders and took a step forward, it’s arms swinging wide, almost theatrical. A line of blood trailed from the crook of its arm, fresh and larval pink. The scent of Bloom was so strong in the damp air that your tongue went numb. “K-Köni-”

“Get inside. Jetzt.” He never took his eyes off the trio as he addressed you and you moved, not fast, not running, but backing away as if suddenly repelled. The figures watched, their heads tilting in unison, but didn’t follow. For a moment you thought it might be over, until the thin one flicked a hand in your direction. It shrieked, and the sounds came like a paper cut to the eardrum, an overlapping chorus of vowels whetted against the edge of language, a violence of longing that made your knees try to buckle and your mouth clamp shut against involuntary sympathy. The rush of it sucked the air from your lungs and made you stumble, hands to ears, but it was too late for that. The noises were not only in the air, they were in your jaw, your teeth, as if the bones of your face had become a membrane for this intrusion. You reeled back and grunted, the world contracted to a pinhole about the doorway, and only in crossing back over the shack’s threshold did you sense the pitch ease, just enough to hear the crackle of the trio’s feet as they churned forward in a grotesque half-run.

They moved straight for König, who stood halfway between you and them, his bulk a deliberate wall before rushing towards the door. He shouldered in behind you, the door slamming so hard the frame groaned. He threw his weight against it, his boots bracing the floorboards, and for one infinite second you listened to the pounding of your own pulse as the trio’s claws and fists began to hammer the other side. The force of it rocked the walls, kicking up dust from every crack and crevice. König snatched the chair and rammed it under the knob, then added the table. All of this was done with the practiced fury of a man who’d barricaded a thousand doors before.

He whirled on you, the heat in his now-bare face erasing any sense of safety you’d had from his presence. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” he snarled, the accent slicing your ears sharper than any cry from outside. “Bist du verdammt noch mal bescheuert? You see what they are? You want to join them? Is that it, Kleine?” He grabbed your arm, shaking you once, twice, harder than the situation probably called for, and only let go when you tried to twist away.

The noise outside was horrific, the three of them shrieking and slapping at the shack, their entreaties dissolving into a disgusting moan that made you shiver. You pressed your back against the far wall, away from the window, and König stalked between you and the perimeter, his presence a one-man blockade. It was then that you realized you were shaking, every muscle in your legs gone soft.

His eyes, when they found yours, were lethal, and you felt every instinct that had guided you to the door twist in on itself and shrivel. König stalked the circumference of the one-room shack, dragging whatever furniture he could pile against the door. Outside, the voices guttered into a wet, laughing bark, and then a silence so sharp you knew they’d finally given up for now. He tilted his head toward the remaining window, squinting through the warped glass, and then spun towards you.

“You listen,” he hissed, the words barely withholding violence, “I told you what the Bloom does. I told you not to let them talk to you - what do you do? You walk into their arms, Kleine, like a lamb to the fucking slaughter.” He was so close the spit almost hit your face. “You want to leave a piece of yourself out there? You want to come back with roots for a spine and half a mind? Because that’s what happens. It doesn’t stop at the skin.”

You felt yourself shrinking, every fiber of will curling into the place where a child hides after a parent’s rage has stripped the world of its logic.

“I thought-” you tried, but he cut you off and grabs the front of your shirt, tugging you closer.

“You don’t think. You follow. That’s how you live in here.” His jaw worked, and for a moment you thought he might actually hit you. But instead his hands found the sides of your throat, thumbs pressing at the hinge of your jaw. He shook you again, but less with violence and more with desperation, as if to remind himself you were not a hallucination, that you were not already gone and you felt the tremor in his grip.

“I lose one more,” he whispered, his breath hot and burning with the tang of panic, “Rotwood wins. I am all that is left in here. You understand?” The words were barely words, more like the gravel churn of a man too long at war with himself. “Don’t do that. Don’t leave me with nothing to bring home.. bitte.” You wanted to spit at the insult - lamb to the slaughter - but the air had collapsed in your throat and you grunted. König’s words splintered something in your chest, and it took a full ten seconds before your heart remembered itself and pumped. Your face burned, and your hands curled into pathetic fists, more to keep them from shaking than anything else. You wanted to punch back: I was trying to help, I was doing what I was sent to do, you asshole. But the only sound that came out was a ragged, furious half-yell that pivoted immediately into a sob. Not the pretty, dignified kind, but the ugly, traitorous kid-noise, wet and humiliating.

You hated yourself for it. Hated him more.

“You don’t get it,” you managed, your teeth grit and tears refusing to fall but pooling anyway. “They’re not monsters. They’re people. I saw their faces, König. They looked at me like they remembered being-”

He didn’t let go of you, but his hands loosened, sliding from your jaw to your cheeks, his rough palms anchoring either side of your head. And then his mouth was on yours, hard enough your teeth clicked, hard enough to grind the taste of blood into your gums. He kissed like he fought: absolutely, his hands crushing your jaw to hold you still, as if he could will every threat inside you back to quiescence just by touching you enough, deep enough, long enough.

It was not gentle, but it was what you needed. You bit him and he kissed you harder, the flat of his tongue driving the apology back down your throat before you could ever give it voice. He let go of your jaw just long enough to clutch you by the back of the neck, his thumb digging so deep along the base of your skull you saw stars. It hurt, it was wonderful, and you responded in kind, your hands clawing into the waistband of his fatigues, yanking him forward until you collided, chest to chest, heat to heat. You felt the world spiral out, an axis of violence and hunger and terrible, honest need. You bit down on his lip hard enough to taste bitterness and spat, “I hate you, König, I hate you,” and he exhaled a sound that was half-laugh, half-growl, inhaling the words as if they were the only thing that let him breathe. Your hands found anchorage at his hair and when you broke for air, your foreheads pressed together and you felt his pulse through your entire skull. You hated him for making you small, for making you need, for making it so that every fiber in your arms and jaw wanted only to break him or be broken by him.

He was inside all your boundaries, rearranging them like sandbags before a flood. And you, traitor to yourself, let him. “You’re a bastard, you know that?” “Ja, and-”

There was another sound outside. You both froze, your hands moving instantly to the nearest tool: his to the knife strapped to his hip, yours to your own. The noise was different now, more like a whimper, moving along the wall behind the shack. König raised his finger and you held your breath. You could feel it out there: not violence, exactly, but something with intention, searching for the crack in your defenses. You waited, listening for return footsteps, but there was none and silence filled the space between you once again.

•·················•·················•

The moment came and went, and you pulled yourself together, wiping the wet from your cheeks with the heel of your hand, and gave him a look that you hoped landed somewhere between ‘fuck off’ and ‘thank you.’

He caught it and, for the first time in the long, rotten history of your acquaintance, König didn’t look away or weaponize your shame. Instead, he moved to the battered counter and, without a word, started rooting through his pack. He produced a canteen, two protein bars, and a crumpled zip bag of dried fruit, the sight of it so unremarkable that you almost wept at the ordinariness.

You chewed slow, ignoring the taste, however König ate with the focus of a man who’d been unfed too often, every bite deliberate; and when he caught you watching him, he raised the bar in a mute, sardonic toast before taking another bite. You looked at the lines in his jaw, the way his cheeks hollowed and flexed, and suddenly you were embarrassingly, acutely aware of how necessary he’d become – not just for survival but as some kind of ballast for all the desperate, ugly feeling in your chest. It suffused you so hot and sudden that you bit down on the inside of your cheek, just to prove you could still own this body, still regulate what happened to it. When you uncapped his canteen and drank, the lukewarm water tasted of iron, but it grounded you.

You made the mistake of lifting your eyes to his again. This time, the look was different. There was no disdain, no teacher-pupil separation; König’s gaze was raw, hollowed out in a way that made plain how badly he wanted the myth of being untouchable to be true. When he spoke, the sound was almost gentle. “You’re shaking.”

You gripped the canteen tighter, as if it that alone could anchor your bones. “Everyone has to get something out of fear. Otherwise it’s just… waste.”

He smiled, but his mouth held a history of things unsaid. “No waste in how you live through it,” he said, the accent soft and slurring the ‘w’ into a ‘v.’

You snorted, had to, just to keep from melting right off the battered chair. “So what’s your survival mechanism, König? Machismo? Or is it just never sleeping?”

He considered it, chewing a stubborn apricot. “Maybe it is habit,” he said. “Or maybe just what is needed: watching, waiting, keeping something alive in the space fear might otherwise fill.” König chewed the last of his bar then let silence build again, this time not as a rebuke, but as a dare.

You felt the challenge in your tongue. He watched you, the corners of his mouth ticked up just a sliver, and you recognized the drift of his eyes, lower, then back to yours, as if checking to see if this was really happening and not just another of the Rotwood’s hallucinations.

So you called him on it. “Are you trying to flirt with me right now, or do you just have a head injury?”

He shrugged, and it was damn near elegant, the motion. “Maybe. Maybe not. But the world is ending, why not try to make it end on better terms?” He punctuated the thought with a grin - a real one, lopsided and unsettling in its suddenness.

It was irresistible, and you hated how much. You felt your own mouth twist, the battle between a scowl and a smile locked in bitter stalemate. But you lost, and the laugh slipped out. A little bit wild, a little bit hysterical, but real all the same.

“Don’t be gross,” you said, but it was already too late for that, and he damn well knew it.

•·················•·················•

It was only a matter of time before you both gave in. Not from any kind of romantic sweep, not from tenderness, gods no, there wasn’t any of that left in either of you, but because you needed it like extra blood in a wound, an outlet for the spate of everything too raw and real. So when you finished your last bite and set the wrapper aside, König simply reached for you and pulled you, fitting your body between his thighs as if you’d practiced this a thousand times.

And you let him do it. The press of his hands was a relief, their squeeze a pain that left you gasping. You raked your nails down his sides and then pulled his shirt free at the back, slamming your mouth into his as if you could excise the last hour with pure id. He responded instantly, opening his mouth over yours, his tongue slick and alive in the way that startled you - it was a hunger you recognized, a wound that needed a thousand tongues to ever heal over. And you rode the wave of it, grinding down on him and letting the world collapse to the radius of his legs and your heart beating like a fist on a drum.

There was no time for slow, not now. It was never going to be slow anyways. You clawed at each other, fumbling and desperate, shoving clothing aside where you could, tearing buttons out of their holes, metal and wood pinging against the floor in the dark, damp interior of the hut. His hands bracketed your jaw until it ached, his thumbs pressing your face up as if to check the eye color of what he was about to kiss. It shocked you, the way your body wanted this, this human heat and animal certainty. You didn’t care about the stink of the room or the monsters outside these four walls. You cared only about his hands making you one solid thing instead of a hundred shattered ones, his mouth anchoring the now. You hitched yourself higher on his thigh and rode, shoving his hand down, needing him to understand that your need was a noose.

“I said I hate you,” you growled, and he grinned. “Lie to me again, Kleine” he said, a challenge. You let out a noise, the sound digging itself out of your chest as you nipped at the underside of his jaw. He rumbled at it, his hands coiling up your spine, mapping knots and muscle, then pinning you in place to grind down until you were shaking. His breath turned ragged, and you inhaled it, opened yourself to the thrum of his pulse at your mouth. And for a split second you couldn’t decide if you wanted to kiss him or tear something free from beneath his skin. Perhaps both.

His fingers dug in tighter, and you registered that under every layer of aggression there was the insistent undercurrent of want, pure and animal. It shocked you to realize you’d missed the feel of him, even from just hours ago. So you pressed harder, rutting against his thigh, the friction bruising and necessary, and he took it, giving up control just enough for you to feel the power in your hips. He hissed a curse in German and his mouth found yours once more. You molded yourself to his body, letting him manhandle you, craving it, and when his hands found your ass and hauled you up to straddle his lap, you let it happen. “Dornau,” you said against his mouth, and he made a sound that buried it. “König-” You tried again and he flinched, his brow furrowing deep. For a fraction of a breath, his eyes narrowed, and he hauled you tighter in his lap, grinding you down against him with a calculated cruelty that made you clench your teeth. “Now?” he growled, half-laughing, “now you remember that?” He pressed the words into your jaw with a kiss. “You learned this from the Council women, ja? Make a man wild, then pretend there is work left to do.” His hands pressed you against the shape of himself, hard and insistent through the fabric, and it took all of your petty rebellion not to gasp his name and let him roll you flat against the table. You made a show of pushing off his chest, though it cost you. “König I’m serious-”

He stared you down and you caught the frustration braided into his want. “We’re not getting to Dornau with 2 ferals and a husk out there, Kleine.” he muttered, and before you could fire back, he responded by shoving his tongue into your mouth, silencing your objection. You let him because if nothing else, you wanted to find out if he could devour the Rotwood’s memory from your mouth. He throttled any thought of the outside world, and that was a mercy, a madness more honest than the day-to-day inside Waldheim’s walls. His hands locked on your hips, steered you in a grind that made every muscle burn and then burst with ferocious, self-consuming want. At some point, he bit your collarbone and you gasped, because the pain was real, necessary, and so much more welcome than the fear that had haunted you since the Stag first showed itself. He consumed you, and you him. It was not the first time his hands made you feel want; but this was more: a panic, a hunger surging up from a place neither of you had confessed to owning. It was like fucking on a sinking ship, equal parts survival and salve, and you realized it at the very moment he’d picked you up and lay you flat on the bed that you needed it this bad only because you believed - insanely, truly - that you might not get another chance.

He sensed it, maybe. He broke the kiss and his hand fisted tight around the meat of your shoulder. “Can you feel it out there?” His words were heavy. “It’s… wanting of you.” He pressed you against the mattress, his body covering yours. “It doesn’t get you. Not unless I let it.”

“Like you’re any less of a monster?” you said. The line was calculated, meant to provoke, but it only made him drag your hips to the edge of the mattress. He grunted at your taunt and in a single movement, he braced you at the hip and wrenched your bottoms down past your knees. Your calves caught briefly on the bunched fabric, your underwear half-mangled in his fist, and the chill of the room hit your skin. You tried to twist away, but he shoved you down with a palm splayed over your belly, and held you there, his eyes raking the length of your body with a hunger that made you squirm. He stripped away what was left, tossing it off the bed onto the filthy floorboard, then hooked your knees over his arms and forced your legs apart until your hips nearly ached at the stretch. “Nnh-”

“You think I wouldn’t die for you?” His words were sincere in a way that made your bones want to crawl out of your body and hide. “You think I’d let the Rotwood take you, Kleine? Not even the choir will find you. You will be safe-” He yanked at your ankle, hard enough to bruise, “-because you belong to me.”