Kleine Füchsin

“Nik—” You find you can’t even mumble his name, let alone breathe anything but the musk of him until you’re dizzy. But your mouth is full of his tongue, your hands full of his hair, and all you manage is an urgent, guttural sound as he hauls you off the ground with a strength that is all sinew and battered will. For a second you are weightless in his grip, then hard against the wall, shoulder blades pressed flush, legs parting because there is no other place for them to go. His jaw is rough and the stubble there leaves red trails down your throat as he bites, tastes, makes recollection of every inch of your skin. You dig your nails into his scalp and drag, needing to feel a pain that is real and not just the echo in your head.

You tug at his shirt until it rips, you want him stripped bare, all the way, and that violence of removal is matched only by the vivid sense-memory of his mouth on you. You clamber, claw, make yourself the animal and the scientist both as your teeth drag across the meat of his shoulder, not kind, not careful. You taste the salt of him, the copper, the deep ugly tang of want and he growls and responds in kind, hoisting you higher so that your hips wrap his waist, heels digging in for leverage.

You wonder if you were ever truly alive before this, or if you were simply waiting to be brought to life by the pain of missing, by the exquisite terror of being claimed. You no longer know the difference between being consumed and being preserved; all you know is that you want, and you take. You lower your mouth to his chest, catching hair and skin and scar in the way your teeth snap, and as you grind against him, you feel the hardness of him and the ragged edge of your own composure. He grabs you by the wrist then shoves your hand lower, pressing your palm to his cock and holds it there, as if to say: Look what you’ve done. What follows is not seduction so much as surrender - abject, arrogant and animal. “Fuck me.” You say it as a command because that’s the only way you can admit it, and when his whole body goes taut, the satisfaction is a venom that burns hot and raw in your neck. He wants this, too, no, that’s no longer adequate. He needs it.

He answers with a sound and presses you harder against the wall, his lips dragging the column of your throat as if reading you line by line. His hands rove up your sides with a roughness that is pure gratitude, gripping tight at your ass, your thighs, wherever he can leave a mark. The air is cold and you are heat and all the sudden you’re dizzy from how easily he lifts you, how he presses you into the patch of dying sunlight like a wildcat pinning prey. Your legs open for him, and the next sound out of your mouth is not a moan but a threat.

“If you stop, I’ll kill you.” The words are ugly and sweet, and you mean them. You think. “Solnyshko has claws, we like that.”

He chuckles, and then he’s got his hand between your legs, and it’s so fast, so perfectly, stupidly crude that you can’t decide if you want him to go slower or faster or just never, ever stop. He rubs you through your pants, his palm broad and fingers blunt, and you are so wet so fast you nearly shame yourself. You huff at the numbness the fabric provides and don’t care to bother with his frustration when you adjust to shimmy from your bottoms. And just like that you are bared for him and he wastes no time. He is rubbing against your clit, careful at first then sloppy, and all your grand declarations about what you want and your hollow threats are reduced to “please, please, please.”

You should feel small, you should feel humiliated, but the look in his eyes is not amusement - it’s hunger. You want to snap at him to stop fucking teasing you, but what comes out is just broken syllables, vowels blurred by the thick pad of his thumb. He is relentless in the way only a man once starved could ever be – he circles, presses, flicks with precision then withdraws just as you are about to come undone. Your hands claw at his arms, trying to anchor yourself to anything real, but he only smiles at you, that terrible hungry smile.

“Poor little Warden,” he says, his voice a low smirk in your ear, “so stubborn, so fierce, and now look.” His thumb is on you again and you hate him for knowing exactly the torque and speed that makes your hips buck, hate him for the filthy bloom of heat between your legs. “Is good, da? You want more?” You nod but it isn’t enough, he makes you say it, makes you beg by holding you there, just shy of the edge. “Say what you want, Solnyshko.”

“Fuck me.”

He laughs, genuine and ugly and perfect, and then because he is a bastard, he makes you say it again, slower, meaner, as if he needs the sound of it in his mouth to make it true. “I said Fuck me, Nikto.” You say it and mean it and the world narrows to the rectangle of light you’re pinned inside, the sweat on your back and the pleasure of his hand. He drags it out, just long enough to watch you break, and then the rest is pure physics. “Da, da.”

He nods and finally moves a hand to free himself; his cock is heavy and flushed and you don’t even hesitate, you take him in hand and line him up, a scientist after all, and when he pushes inside you, you both sigh. The rhythm is nothing you control, but you don’t care, you want to be ruined, want to risk the world for the stretch and press of him. He bites your jaw, your collar, anything he can reach, and you answer with your nails and with curses and with the hoarse music of want and need. He buries himself inside, slow, and you fight to take him, fight to ride the pain into pleasure because gods, you want to feel it ruin you. He groans when he bottoms out and sinks his fingers, blunt and callused, into the meat of your ass to hold you there, impaled and twitching, refusing to let you squirm away. Your hips cant forward a hitch and you clutch at him, then whimper, a soft, sharp sound that embarrasses and compels you both. He makes a sound in reply - a hush, a sh, sh, sh as if you’re a trembling animal in his arms, and he rocks in smaller, deeper motions that fill you with heat. He fucks you slow, deliberate, as if memorizing the exact shape of your cunt, mapping where it aches just for him. Within minutes, whatever was left of the old you is gone, wrecked and built fresh around the rhythm of him. The wall at your back bruises you, but it’s nothing compared to the heat tearing you open, nothing compared to knowing that you have never, not once, been so thoroughly out of your own mind. “Warden,” he mutters and nips at your jaw a wordless demand. “Good?” He bites it out and you can only nod, can only hold on as every thrust deepens and slams you tighter to the wall, to him. You mark him back with your nails and he only slams harder, proud of it, savoring your violence. Then he slows just a little, enough to make you mad with want, and you rasp out a plea that is mostly just his name, desperate and stupid. “Again,” he orders. “Ask again. Say it.” He’s cruel, he’s so fucking cruel, and he won’t give it to you until you say the words.

“Please,” you say, and you are shaking, “I want you, goddess, I want you to-”

But he clamps his hand over your throat, not choking, just holding you still. “Nyet, Solnyshko, not just want. Say what you need.” His cock twitches inside you, somehow harder from the cruelty, and all the breath in your body riots to get out but won’t until you speak.

You clench your jaw, stare him down, fight the embarrassment like it’s a living animal, but he wants the words and you find yourself giving them to him. “Fucking breed me,” you spit, and he shudders, the groan vibrating all the way through his hand and into your bones. “Breed me. Fill me up,” you repeat, and the words are ugly and perfect and dangerous. You know what this means, you know what you’ve invoked. And he does, too.

He’s all motion now, his rhythm turned savage, not caring for grace, not even for your pleasure, just for the pulse of it, the ruin of wanting you so full that nothing else could matter. The stretch of him is as punishing as it is perfect; you lock your ankles and cling for dear life, dragging your hands over his back. He pulls back to see your face, to make sure you see him, and there is nothing in his eyes but the wild certainty that this is what you asked for. His hips hammer, harder, faster, and you reach for any power left in your body but it’s gone, offered up to him with every wrecked gasp.

He fucks you like the world is ending, or maybe like it’s just beginning. You can only babble now, stupid, high noises on every thrust, and he loses coherence, too. The only language left is body and heat and the hard, bright line of pain where your shoulder grinds into the wall. He lets go of your throat just long enough to wedge his hand back under your ass, the other bracing your head so you don’t smash it to the concrete. It’s weirdly kind, the way he holds you together just to tear you open a second later.

You bite his shoulder hard and the sound he makes is a benediction. “Good girl,” he rasps, the words more instinct than intention, and you want to slap him for it but you’re too busy falling to pieces. You don’t even have time to recover before he breaks from you, hauling you off the wall and across the tiny space to your bed. You hit the mattress on your hands and knees, gasping, every nerve in your body trilling with shock and heat and he’s behind you in an instant, his hand pressed to your lower back, pinning you, the other fisting through your hair and pulling until your spine arches like a bowstring. You want to turn, to see his face, but there is only the press of his cock, slick and heavy at your entrance, and the drag of his breath in your ear.

“Solnyshko wants to be bred?” he snarls, the words more animal than man, and slaps your ass hard enough to jolt you forward. The pain is bright, a hot flare that pulses through every inch of you, and your legs quake on the mattress. It’s everything you want; it’s everything you’re afraid to name. You bite the pillow and muffle the moan that rips out of your throat as he presses in again, slow at first, stretching you wide, then all the way, every inch a claim you’ll never be free from.

“Say it again,” he hisses, his hips rocking you into the sheets, the pace slow again. “Tell me.”

Your voice is muffled, half-sob, half-moan. “Breed me, Nikto. Please, oh fuck-”

He laughs low and mean, and lets go of your hair to grab your hips, his thumbs digging bruises into the meat of you as he slams in, over and over, relentless. The sound of skin on skin is obscene, echoing off the concrete walls as further proof of your undoing. All that matters now is the animal rhythm, the throb of your cunt and the pulse of his cock, all sensation, all need.

He fucks you cruel and deep, savors the way you whine and plead for more, for harder, for anything that will fill the gnawing ache inside you. Your mind blanks out, every word but his name gone, every scrap of dignity stripped loose and made a toy for him to break. He keeps you on the edge, the flat of his thumb circling your clit, two fingers hooked in your mouth when you try to inhale anything but the wet, sweet air between you. He doesn’t let up, doesn’t let you shy away or pretend to decency; he fucks you through every plea, every shamed gasp, every desperate clutch of your hands against sheets and his burning wrist and your own belly - fuel for a want that is older than language.

“Come for me,” he orders finally, and the way he says it is as if he’s always had the right, as if he’s only now remembering that this body is his to command and your mind shreds, your nerves catch fire, and you feel it building, a pressure so vast and uncanny that when it hits, it’s like nothing you’ve ever known. You can’t help the keening whine that bubbles up from your lungs and you come so hard you see white, a hollow bell-curve of sensation that spikes and then fractures and then-

You squirt. A frantic, disbelieving rush, slick and hot across your thighs, and it takes you a full second to realize what’s happened because you’re still coming, still spasming with every thrust of his cock. There’s a startled pride in the way he watches it, a groan that climbs up from the base of his chest, and then he’s gone feral, slapping your ass again, once, twice, as if to milk every last shockwave out of you.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, ruthless, perfect, then pulls out just enough to slap the head against your clit, smearing your own slick back into you, and then he presses inside a third time. He splays you open, holds you there, and when you collapse it is only because there is nothing left to hold you up, no muscle or willpower that could possibly resist what he’s taken from you.

“Fucking perfect,” he grinds out, and then you feel it, his own unraveling, the way his hands go frantic at your hips and he buries himself so deep you swear you can feel the shape of him against your womb. He comes with a crack in his voice, a break that is as much pain as pleasure, and the heat of it floods you. Gods, there’s so much; it leaks out and you feel it sticky and obscene on your thighs, and you want it, you want every bit of it. “Cyka blyad.. Da, da tak khorosho, Solnyshko.” - - - - - - There’s a long silence after. He’s still pressed to you, his cock pulsing inside, twitching once again before he finally pulls out with a hiss through his teeth. The loss is sharp and leaves you gaping, empty, but then he collapses beside you, his arm flung over his eyes as if to shield himself from the world. You’re on your belly, the mess of him leaking down your thigh, your body singing with bruised, splendid shock. You turn to face him, your breath still scraping at the inside of your ribs, and all you want is to bite him again, to claw your initials into his chest so he can’t forget who did this, who claimed him.

He looks shattered, jaw slack and eyes half-lidded, the color high on his cheekbones making him look almost fevered. You reach for him, run your nails down the plane of his chest, and he flinches, not away but into your hand, as if you are permission itself. You could laugh at how unguarded he is now, how in the aftermath of all that violence you have him soft and willing and more human than you thought possible. But what you see in his eyes as he opens them and stares up at you from the tangle of sheets and sweat, is not defeat at all. It’s the opposite, a knowledge, a grim, perfect acceptance that the two of you are irrevocably, immutably fused by this. You’ve made a monster, and it matches yours molecule for molecule.

You lay there and catch your breath, replaying every moment, every ugly, beautiful breach of protocol, the catalogue of his hands and his teeth and the way your own body humiliated itself for him and for the first time in years, you believe in equilibrium.

- - - - - - The next seven days are a blur. The paperwork arrives in a courier’s pouch, ribboned and sealed and stamped with the High Mother’s insignia. You read it on the steps outside the sanctum, letting the bright noon sun bleach the text until it looks like any other dispatch, any other deliverable. Officially: ‘Persistent pairing sanctioned; with special dispensation for observation, and advanced rights of cohabitation and breeding. Congratulations on your acquisition of this Feral yield, Daughter.’ You stare at the signature and, for the first time in months, almost cry, but you don’t, you just fold the paper and run thumb after thumb over the wax as you walk back to your room.

Nikto hasn’t changed in these seven days, not really, but similar to the slow drift of seasons. Nikto is quieter now, sure, but it’s deeper than that. The edge of misery in his silences has dulled, his stare less frequently fixed on threats only he can see. He still circles the perimeter, still checks each lock and latch as if expecting the walls to buckle in the night, but it’s a ritual now, not a compulsion. When he meets your gaze across the table or the bed or the length of sunlit hallway, the look is not that of a trapped dog, but a creature who has finally mapped the new country of his own life and found it, if not safe, at least survivable. It was then, watching him trace the line of a scar on his own wrist with a quiet, almost absent focus, that you understood. All the protocols, the sanctioned pairings and assessments, the careful cataloging of viable traits - it had all been a cage of your own making, an insulation against a life spent alone. The quiet, desperate ache for status had been a hollow substitute for this: the raw, ungovernable truth of a man who could unravel you with a single murmured command, who could map your every shuddering nerve with his calloused hands and remake you not into someone better, but into someone real.

She lifts her gaze as you approach and you are caught in that river-clay gaze once again. “You have your recommendation, then.” Her voice is neutral but the inflection is apparent, a test, perhaps.

You near her desk and place the file on top of her current reading with the practiced, silent deference of someone who’s delivered a thousand such reports and seen just as many disappear, unread and into the vaults. “I do.”

She gestures for you to sit, but the gesture lands like a command. You take your place across from her and fold your hands, rehearsing in your mind the script you’ve spent the last few hours refining - the one that offers Nikto the maximum possible chance at life and not just survival, the one that codes your selfish want in the language of resource optimization and post-collapse breeding utility.

She opens to the first page and her eyes scan the words. The silence between you is heavy with the distant hum of generators and water pumps when finally, at last, she says: “Compliant, cunning, emotionally stable. No evidence of subversive intent.” She turns the page. “Impressive breeding scores.” There is the faintest flicker - was that a smile? “Yes,” you say, your voice pitched lower to keep it from sounding too eager or too defensive. “He exceeded projections across nearly all parameters.” You focus on keeping your hands unclenched, fingers tapping against themselves. “I realize the original concern was his ability to integrate, especially given his record, but those concerns have proven…unfounded.” You meet her gaze for an instant and then drop your eyes. “In fact, he displays exemplary compliance when approached with what I’d call calibrated trust.” The High Mother turns the page, not quite hiding the way her mouth moves at the corners. She is measuring you as much as him, and you know it. “You mentioned in an earlier petition that you believed his volatility was a function of environment.” The inflection on environment is almost affectionate, as if she’s quoting a particularly precocious child. “Or trauma. You claim to have ‘solved’ him?” “I believe I have.” You say this with all the certainty you can muster, and it almost feels true. “His, ah, his aggression is a direct product of uncertainty, not inherent deviance. When provided a stable structure - routine, transparency, respect - he is, frankly, more reliable than most male specimens. I observed no indications of malingering or subversion. His responses to all stressors were within or better than expected ranges.” “And the breeding trial?” She doesn’t look up but the edge to her voice is softer now. “Unprecedented,” you say, and it’s not even a lie. “His…fertility is robust. His thresholds for arousal and function exceeded most available metrics.” At this she does look up, “You wish to recommend repurposing for breeding, then.” You feel the flush in your cheeks but you answer clearly: “I do.” She closes the file in a single, deliberate motion, as if sealing both your fate and his within the thick manila. “You spent more than the minimum twelve,” she says, not in judgment but in observation. “Of course, Ma’am. I wanted a complete profile. No corners cut.” A pause. “And you don’t feel…compromised?” You feel the underside of the question press at your ribs. This is the performance, the big test: do you own the desire, or do you disavow it? You hesitate, though only for half a breath. “If you’re asking if I’m emotionally attached—” you swallow, tasting the salt of the admission, “—I would say that my judgment is only enhanced by the stakes involved. If anything, I’m more invested in ensuring success.”

She leans forward, elbows to the tables surface, her hands steepled over the file. “The program has lost two Seedwardens this cycle,” she says, her voice heavy. “One to violence. One to...a failure of clarity regarding personal boundaries.” She inhales as she reminds you once again. “We are not, as you know, the Iron Daughters. Nor are we animals. But if I am to approve this, I must know you are still capable of self-differentiation. That you can, at a critical moment, choose the Mother over yourself.”

You stare at the ridged cuticle of your thumb, picking at the edge, and think: Is there a self that is not compliant, not a vector for the collective? You were taught to believe the answer was no, but your own body hums with a treasonous energy now, the desire to claim sticking to your teeth like resin. You look up and meet her gaze, and for the first time, you permit yourself to acknowledge the truth, to force it through the narrowest part of your throat as if it were a splinter that needed excising.

“I am, always, the Mother’s,” you say and the word lands with all the finality of a verdict. “But I will not lie, there is want.” The silence is immediate and all-consuming and the room devours your voice as if it were a nutrient starved for in the roots. “This one, Nikto, he occupies more of me than should be permitted. If it is a failing, I will own it rather than conceal it. But my recommendation is unchanged: he is a greater asset inside than out. I am better able to manage him than anyone else.”

The High Mother sits with your words, the pause stretching thin. Then, at last, she proclaims: “Honesty. Good.” Her mouth creases, and this time there is no mistaking the foreshadow of a smile. “Permission is granted. Continue the full trial; house him in your ward. Give the Council something worth the risk.” The stamp of her palm is so soft it almost feels ceremonial, and the file is swept into the lane of finished business. When she looks up, the challenge is gone, replaced by a gravity that tells you the next words are not for the record, but for you alone.

“You are more like your predecessor than you like to admit,” she says, voice a rasp now. “But you may outlive her, if you know how to savor what you harvest.” You blink, momentarily stunned that the performance has landed so cleanly, and with none of the barbed examination you anticipated. The High Mother sits there and the implication is clear: this is your victory if you are hungry enough to seize it. Surely, it cannot be so simple. No one has ever wanted anything in this world and gotten it without fighting for it, right? Right?

You glance down at the file, “I want, if at all possible, to keep him in my care.” There. The words are out, unveiled and naked. “For the duration of the trial, and, if the Council approves, beyond it. Permanently.”

Her eyes now glint with a reawakened curiosity. “Unusual for a Warden to petition for lifetime retention.” The syllables uncoil in the air, and you sense the trap: are you willing to bind yourself to this asset, this creature, for as long as you both live?

“Yes, I know.” you say before thinking, and then, to cover the eagerness: “It is less disruptive. I have already established protocols that work for him. And for myself.”

She sits back, her hands folding, her scrutiny less predatory now, more... maternal. “You wish to claim breeding rights for yourself alone?”

You go cold, and then hot. The word claim clings to the roof of your mouth, sticky and forbidden, but the urge to reject, to walk back the hunger is gone. You hear your own voice, steadier than you feel: “Yes, Ma’am..” You swallow.

“It will cause controversy,” she says, and her smile is slow. “You are certain?”

You nod, a break in the ritual of submission. “I am.”

There is no further argument. She leans forward and softly says, “You have the instincts of a Keeper, not merely a Warden. I will approve the petition, and note your attached claim. But understand this,” her voice goes cold, “if you fail in this and he turns on you, there will be no transfer. You will be paired until one or both of you are compost with the maggots.”

You resist the urge to shudder, recognizing both the magnitude of the risk and the rare, humming sweetness of being believed in, however conditionally. “I understand,” you say and all you can hear are her words from before: "It is always daughters asking for their own knives,"

She nods, once, and just like that you are dismissed.

- - - - - - You leave the Chamber without pausing to reassemble your own mind; it is scattered and wild, your feet carrying you too quickly through the honey-hued corridors. The guards offer no resistance, though one glances at your face and looks away, as if the heat of your conviction has made you temporarily unsafe to perceive. You are halfway down the last hall before you realize you have not, in fact, prepared a single word of what you will say. That you might have to look him in the eyes and admit to needing him, not as a possession or a protocol box to check, but as something more dangerous, more glorious and ruinous and entirely, entirely yours.

But it doesn’t stop you from letting yourself into your own sanctum, your hands shaking and damp. The door shuts with its usual thud, and the scent of lingering musk is suddenly so precious it could make you weep. He’s there, by the window, shirtless in the honeyed light, two fresh cuts across the bridge of his knuckles - when did that happen? - and the room’s stillness is absolute.

He turns and looks at you and in that instant you see laid out in his face the whole spectrum of expectation: the readiness for violence, for discipline, for disappointment. You see, too, the flicker of something as fragile and hard-earned as trust. Goddess, you could dash it so easily, could break him with a single word. The power of it makes you dizzy. But you don’t.

Instead, you steady your voice, retrieve the last scrap of protocol, and say: “The petition was approved. You’re mine to keep.” It comes out rough, maybe meaner than you intend, but he hears the truth in it. The change in his posture is small but seismic: his legs widen fractionally and his eyes settle into your face as if he’s trying to commit it to some deep, safer memory.

But he says nothing, he doesn’t have to. The whole sanctum buzzes with the aftershock of your declaration, the faintest edge of laughter in his breathing, like he can’t believe the reprieve either.

You want, madly, to break the moment open - to split his chest, to kneel and kiss every inch of him that has ever been wounded. Instead, you just cross to the table, wordless, two animals staring at each other in the hum of dusk. You could touch him, now; you could order him, or beg. The options are as infinite as they are paralyzing.

“Are you angry?” he asks at last, his voice low as if expecting disappointment or a lie. He’s looking at your hands, which you realize are balled to fists against the table.

You shake your head and force the fingers open, splaying them flat on the scarred wood. “Goddess, no.” You hesitate, then add, “I’m afraid.” You watch him process this, cocking his head and studying you.

“Of me?” he asks.

“Of how much I want you,” you reply, and it feels like the bravest goddamn thing you’ve ever done.

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.”