It’d been hell the last few weeks, stuck inside with only bland, ordinary food to staunch the hunger that still gnawed at your stomach. You could still hear the screams, the buzz of static electricity in the air, you could even still feel the ghostly stretch of the retractor in your mouth. How those faceless faces had poked around at your gums, pulling and ripping free teeth. Your tongue runs over the backs of your teeth; all still there yet sharper, modified to their liking.

Your toes curl again against the grass, dirt buried beneath your toenails and pressing against the bruised and abused keratin. The pain only has your heart racing, hammering away in your chest like a flightless bird or a hindered rabbit. They touched that, too, your heart. Poked and prodded at it whilst you lay awake on their table, felt them jab it with their long needles until your heart seized in your chest—only to be brought back to its fast pace with a shock of electricity.

They never let you speak during the medical examinations, often having your mouth sewn shut or forcing your jaw to lock around a rubber bite block. They never told you why they silenced you, or why they looked at you as if you were capable of leaping off the table mid-heart surgery to rip their heads off. It was only logical that it was for their own safety, their own need to survive—but it always felt like there was a secret reason as to why they kept you quiet, subdued. Unable to scream or shout.

Something shifts through the darkness, and it’s like your lungs are filled with renewed vigour when you take a deep breath in. Footsteps, running, and multiple at that. All confusion and contempt for your keepers is quickly washed away, only the words of the good Doctor echoing through your head. 

Guide them to your home, and treat them to a meal.

So you run, with them or after them, you can’t be certain. Not until you hear a frightened scream do you catch a glimpse of one of your guests' faces. The jackhammer you call a heart spikes in speed, in excitement. You’ve heard screams like this before. They were always the most fun to play with, the most entertaining of guests. 

Genuine human fear was a great motivator, something that caused the small group of three people to push further—harder, to run until their feet bled and their lungs screamed in agony. You chase them, herd them, as you always do, as you’ve been told to do. It’s your job to welcome these people, to invite them into your home and bring them to the table. 

The forest is dense with thick trees, and you know they’re bordered by a fence made of barbed electric wire. But it seems the people in front of you also know that, as they avoid straying off to the sides in hopes of shaking you free. Instead, they remain on a steady trajectory forward. Ducking beneath low branches and nearly tumbling over uprooted roots, you can smell their fear, can taste it on the back of your tongue and that hunger in your stomach grows tenfold. 

One of the three shouts about light, about safety. It brings a smile to your lips; they’ve arrived. Your home—and they saw it as safety. It made your chest expand in pride, you’d worked hard on your home, you’d scrubbed the floors and painted intricate details onto the walls. It was your labour of love, a place where you and only one other were allowed to set foot within. It was a shame you were kept from it so often, you were stuck in a padded room for the last three weeks. 

But you were home, finally.

Lights flicker in the distance, candles that dance in the rush of wind behind the people who burst through the wooden doors. You come to a slow stop at the stone steps that lead up, and up, and up… up to the grandiose doors of a temple-like church. Above your head is a single decrepit, once-whole, red-painted gate. Its paint has long peeled away in single strips; scratch marks of the people who had tried to run. 

Your eyes drag along the door that had been thrown wide open, honing in on the splintered wood. They did that, they tore through the doors to your home without a second thought, nor did they care that they were trailing bloody footprints through the halls. You follow them quietly, slowly, listening to the sounds of them frantically trying to pry their way through the various rooms. 

The excitement that had once filled your chest had been washed away, only to be replaced by rage. A wave of anger bubbled in your chest and clawed its way up your throat, your fingers finding your throat as you meandered the halls. The skin gives beneath your nails, scratching and peeling away in crude strips, your blood is warm on your own fingers and the pain only quells the anger enough for you to catch the scent of tangy air; sweat. 

Your home was in complete darkness, the lights from outside long gone and hidden behind the wooden doors you had pushed closed until you heard the satisfying click of the locking mechanism. You couldn’t have your guests leaving early, after all, they needed to stay for tea and a snack.

Yet, despite the darkness, you knew your home well enough not to need your eyesight. You only lift your chin slightly, tilt your head to your left and sniff. It catches on the back of your throat, how it finds a home in your back teeth and makes your jaw ache. Blood. Coppery, fresh, and spilling freely in your home. They continue to deface the thing you had poured your heart into, smearing their tainted blood on your furniture without a care in the world.

You turn into the room to your left, and the air is charged with anxious silence. They’re in here, you know it, you can hear their little hearts pattering heavily against their chests. They knew you were here, and yet they hid away like rats. You rove your eyes over the furniture you know to be hiding in the darkness, and with one calculated step forward—the door behind you slams shut with a deafening clang of metal, and then, as you expected, someone screams.

“Shhhh!” It’s you who shushes them, and they immediately do. No doubt unaware it was you who had made the sound. You can only grin in the darkness, they were so like tiny animals with how easily they listened to commands in the face of fear. “You’ll only wake him up.”

The silence is suffocating in the wake of your words, and you can only swallow the saliva pooling in your mouth. You blink, and something lands on your face before it vanishes in a beat of wings, the buzz of electricity in the air has you jolting into action. Your limbs feel rigid as you walk towards the far wall, brushing your hands along the wall until you find the chain that dangles from the ceiling. And with a single pull, there’s a guttural groan in the walls before the room is set alight with the flickering flames of multiple lanterns.

Immediately, you find the terrified wide eyes of one of the people who had tried to curl up into a corner, going as far as to contort their body painfully in hopes of avoiding your eyes. You can only suck in another breath, plastering a smile on your face that pulls at the bruises and scarring left around your mouth from the medical staff who had treated you last. It does nothing to soothe the man in the corner; instead, he openly whimpers like a child. 

Your gaze turns away from the man, immediately finding the other two in the room who had tried to hide from you. They never succeed in hiding from you, like a wolf that can smell the sweetest of lambs; you always find them. 

“Do you like my home?” You smile again, wider this time, until you can feel the crack of your lips and the pain of where the stitches must still be embedded in your gums. No one replies, naturally, and you can only laugh in an attempt to loosen them up. What kind of host would you be if your guests were scared stiff? “No need to hide.”

No one moves either. Their eyes wide and muscles shaking in an effort to keep themselves squished into small corners, it makes your lips quiver and the smile drops from your face. Disobedience in your own home, you can practically hear the whip of the belt from your father if you dared to disobey his orders—

“Stand up!” You all but yell, the strain on your throat burns. You can taste metal on your tongue, blood pulling from your bleeding gums, and you can only bare your teeth in an effort to stop yourself from screaming outright at them. You can’t be loud, you can’t, you can’t— 

Thankfully, or mercifully, the three people in the room climb out of their hiding spots until you can see them fully. They’re different ages, one older male and two younger females. Your eyes drift away from the man and lock onto the two girls, their hands are linked together and something stirs in your stomach. So again, you swallow the bloody spit in your mouth and turn your gaze towards the only object in this place that stands out like a sore thumb.

“Take a seat.” You gesture with a bruised hand, your nails torn and bloody. The table in the middle of the room didn’t fit with the temple you called home, it was something the doctors had put here to make things easier. “Please, f—food will be served soon.”

They don’t comment on the way your tongue contorts and struggles around the word food, instead, they turn their eyes to the table and the reactions, like their fear, are immediate. One of the girls gags, retching into the corner she was hiding in, whilst the other attempts in vain to cover her mouth and nose with her free hand. The older man staggers a step, before catching himself on the back of the chair and sitting in it promptly. You raise an eyebrow expectantly towards the two girls, they seem to be more hesitant to sit at your table.

“Sorry for the mess, they—” You choke on the words again, your tongue laps at the roof of your mouth and catches on the rough grooves of where they had torn apart the roof of your mouth in the facility. “I forgot to clean up.”

The group remains silent, only the shuffling feet of the two girls finally taking a seat with a muffled gag behind a manicured hand. Your eyes flutter a little. When had you last seen a hand so well taken care of? Yours were scarred, mangled and destroyed from the sessions with the doctors—but they were for good reason, Dr Easterman told you so. You could trust him, believe him, he said you’d get better with his help. 

Your eyes drift to the mess on the table. There are scattered plates and cups along the table, some smashed and cracked, others pristine, besides the smudging of bloody fingerprints. The neatest plate sits at the head of the table, accompanied by a chair that is much larger than the rest. 

The skin at the back of your neck prickles, sweat dripping down beneath the ragged clothes you were told to wear whilst at the facility. You wet your lips, eyes darting away from the large empty chair and to the contents still on the plates.

The meat wriggles on the ceramic, maggots that had long since hatched and grown fat with the bounty of leftover meat and fruit that had been left on the table. You never left your home in such a mess, you always cleaned it, as you were told. But they ripped you from your house three weeks ago, leaving your house to rot and decay and fill with disease.

Something lands against your face, this time closer to your nose and you’re able to make out the faint shape and blue-green colouring of the blowfly that sits against you. 

The electric buzzing in the air shifts, fading from the back of your mind until it fills your ears—it wasn’t electricity at all, the flies in the room were in an uproar at the sudden light and movement from the people in the room. You can only suck in another harsh breath, your lungs flexing painfully against ribs that had been crushed against your arms for three weeks in a jacket too small.

“I–I—... I need to…” You stop and start your sentence, eyebrows furrowing together, and pain blossoms across your forehead. Again, you’re only met with deafening silence from the three people who sat at your table. You were being a terrible host, they were disgusted by the state of your home—the stench of vomit was masked by the rot and decay in the air. Your shoulders seize up with your frustration, and your hands bury themselves in your hair fruitlessly. “The Doctor—”

A door slams in the distance, and your heart jumps with it. Everyone at the table too seems to jolt at the noise, eyes wide with renewed fear that someone else was in the building. You walk over to the door that had been sealed off with metal bars, leaning against it until you can see part of the dark hallway. It’s silent following the door being slammed open, and you can only wait and strain your ears until you finally hear it, a faint hissing sound.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

A slow gait, one that only told you that whoever it was had trouble walking without a limp. You can hear a faint metal rattling, and then a wheezing breath. Your heart rate skyrockets, and your already-bruised fingers curl more painfully around the bars that hold you in the room with your guests. You press your face against the bars, your face stretching and pulling against the metal until you can finally see the person walking towards you. 

The light from the dining room reflects off the cracked eye sockets of the gas mask on his face, the glistening of the lesions on his emaciated body next. It’s an immediate reaction, how you scream at the top of your lungs until you can feel the blood pooling on your tongue and in the space between your teeth. 

Slowly, the Pusher stops in front of the metal gate. His eyes are cold, as they always are, and he looks down at you as if you were nothing but a grunt in the machine. Your scream dies out in your throat in favour of you baring your teeth in a sickening death grin, spitting blood through the small gaps. 

“Give them the knife, the club, the fist if it’s all you got.” You recite, the words taste like acid on your tongue and the buzz of electricity in the back of your head intensifies with every word. The Pusher remains quiet for a moment longer, and you watch as his eyes drift away from you and into the room to see who is sitting at your table.

You can only see the skin surrounding his eyes beneath the gas mask, yet it’s still enough to incite the memories that had been buried beneath a sea of static electricity. You remember the face beneath that mask, how he had turned the formula brewing in his tank on you and the girls you had arrived with all those years ago. The hallucinations had torn their way through your system with a speed unlike any drug a doctor could give you, it tore apart your mind, flayed your skin and laid you bare for the Lord to see.

You remember the girls, faceless in your memories, but you remember how they had torn their own skin off. Freeing themselves from the monster they perceived themselves as, how one had ripped apart her chest cavity before grabbing at her own heart—these girls were girls you had grown up with, had made friends within the small community of the town you lived in. 

It was the Reverend at the time who had saved you from your madness in the facility, he was the one who had kept the gas-mask-wearing crippled man away from you. Until he left, muttering words of how he had felt a pull in his chest that guided him out of the facility. Never looking back at who he may have left behind. Not sparing a glance at the girl who had been found in the clutches of something much worse than the monsters that came from the facility.

“The Doctor will be saddened to hear you still cling to the Reverend's words.” The Pusher finally comments, not making a move to step closer despite the way his fingers curl around the pressure sprayer in his hand. “Maybe this time they’ll take your tongue, and then you can’t scream.”

Your nostrils flare, blood spittle dripping from the wide grin still on your face. You press harder against the bars, willing your body to be crushed so you can reach out and grasp the front of his mask. Your arm stretches out into the darkness of the hallway, yet you’re still too far to reach him. Those same cold eyes keep your own occupied, even when you snarl like a feral animal.

“Therefore, as the Lord—” You grit your teeth again, this time in agony at the shooting pain that stems from your temples, crippling your brain with a deep stabbing sensation. “COMMANDED—that I opened mine eyes, I did and did see.”

“Your mind is still caged, trapped. You need to be released, freed—” The Pusher takes that daring step forward, and your body surges with a primal urge to rip and tear the man apart. The tank on his back hisses, a single press of his finger has green gas pouring from the fumigator in his hand. “Let me—”

As if the Lord was listening, there’s a clanging sound of a mechanism being shifted and you have just enough time to pull your arms back from the door that suddenly retreats back up into the ceiling. You both stare up at the hidden mechanism, and as you look back to meet the Pusher's eyes—you see a frightened man. A weak man, malnourished and weakened by his inability to run. 

But it’s not you who he has to run from. He was awake.

Something like thunder rumbles, and your toes curl, because it’s not actual thunder that echoes at the end of the corridor. It’s a growl, an inhuman sound that could only be dredged from the depths of someone's soul who’d committed the worst of sins. The skin along your arms raises in goosebumps, the hairs standing on end across the back of your neck. You did it, you woke him, he heard you—

“Run, run…” You can’t stop the word from rolling off your tongue, excitement building in your throat when the Pusher does take a staggering step away and then promptly attempts to rush his way back down the corridor he had come from. The thump of his limp is muted beneath the heavy footsteps that rattle the walls and shake the paintings still hanging. 

With each footstep, your heart jumps until it feels like it’s lodged in your throat. A single bare foot breaches the light spilling out into the dark corridor, followed by a strong, long leg hidden beneath loose black material. He stops in front of the door, his entire frame blocking the only exit—you have no choice but to stare at the bareness of his chest, thick black tattoos that had been etched into his skin the moment he was put into the project, just as you were. 

His chest heaves with a deep breath, and with it, the blood on his chest cracks with the movement. It stains from his belly button and all the way up to his throat, no doubt coating his chin too, but you know better than to lift your gaze. You remain frozen in place, only vaguely aware as he turns his body to face the doorway, and subsequently, you. 

The fear you may have instilled into the remaining guests behind you is nothing compared to what they must feel with the behemoth of a man who takes a step into the room, ducking down low to avoid hitting his head.

A large hand tucks beneath your chin, forcing your head up despite your weak attempt to fight back and keep your gaze lowered. You don’t want to see his face, not if he were to punish you for screaming in his home. Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? It was always his, he had just permitted you to stay—so long as you kept quiet, and didn’t disturb him when he wished to sleep. 

Only one eye stares down at you, the other hidden beneath burnt scarred flesh that blends perfectly into his skin. The red of his eye matches the blood that painted his skin to glisten in the flickering candlelight of the dining room. His fingers remain curled under your chin as he scrutinises you, tilting his head to allow him the chance to see you fully with just one eye.

A thumb brushes up and presses harshly into the bruises that line your mouth, pressing into the perfect circle where they had pried your mouth open with a metal contraption. “They hurt you again.” 

His voice is as dark as the night sky, a rumble of thunder that blankets the room in a static energy. Your toes curl again painfully, the nails bending and snapping from the pressure, but you pay it no mind. Not when you’re being inspected by the only person who had been kind to you since the Reverend had left the facility. 

His calm demeanour morphs into anger the longer he inspects you, a hand coming up to brush the stray hairs away from your forehead and temples. His thumb presses in again into what must be bruises there, and you finally break your silence with a hiss.

His thumb once again comes down to your lips, pushing up into the malleable flesh until he can see the pointed teeth that now match his own. He harrumphs, gruffing out a heavy sigh when his thumb finds a new home against the freshly poked holes along the seams of your lips. The discovery has his own upper lip curling with the start of a snarl, his own canine teeth sharp and primed. The hand still resting against your jaw tightens, the clawed tips of his nails digging into your flesh—

And you let him, you let him dig his fingers into your flesh and rip at your tender flesh. You let him rip apart the side of your throat, let him rip into the ligament until it’s likely dangling in strips of flesh against your shoulder. You never complain when his anger becomes too much for him to handle, not even when he turns it on you and bares those same blood-covered teeth in your direction. 

You let him destroy you, unflinching and unfazed. Forever the perfect little lamb for the man before you. Even when you find yourself wanting to beg for him to stop, to stop hurting you, to stop ripping you apart for them to just piece you together again—but you hold your tongue, you keep silent in the face of the man who had been nothing but good for you since you had come to live in his home.

It’s only a clatter of something against the wooden table that has the metaphorical wolf loosening its jaw from around your throat, his fingers slipping away from the mangled flesh and dropping to his side. He turns his head towards the noise, only now realising he isn’t alone with you in the room. His eye scans across the group, darting between the two girls who had started to shake in their seats enough to have the ruined plates on the table shaking too. 

His eye moves again—

“Where is the third?” 

Your head whips around towards the table, the flesh on your neck stings with the harsh movement and the blood continues to pump in steady beats. But it’s nothing to the anxious energy that floods your stomach and makes your chest ache, how—he was right there, he had sat down, he listened, he was good, you were good. You did everything you were told to, you got them to the table, you invited them into your home. The Doctor must be able to see that, he wouldn’t deem you a failure now, would he?

A large hand cups the back of your head, pulling you roughly forward until your forehead is pressed solidly against a shoulder. A nose nestles its way into your hair, huffing out a soft breath that blows against your sensitive scalp. And it’s a softness unknown to you that has your eyelids fluttering closed, a cool yet soothing feeling that washes over you from head to toe.

“Find him for me, lamb, bring him back to me.” 

The next time you blink, you’re no longer standing in front of the man who calls himself Sukuna, instead, you’re standing before an altar. The air is cold, wet almost. It sticks to your skin, sinks beneath even that and wraps itself around your bones until you’re painfully aware of the lacerations on your skin—how they burn even in the coldness, how your bones poke at the night air when they should be buried beneath their flesh blankets.

That same coldness has your fingers coiling, curling up until they can’t bend any more. You feel your fingers dig into the palm of your left hand, but the right is obstructed by something wet and slick with a thickness you’ve come to know by scent alone. Blood. Your eyes drift away from the shattered stained glass windows, the moonlight painting the once whole Virgin Mary in a cruel light. 

In your hand lies a slice of that stained glass, Mary’s face staring back at you through the blood that continues to spill from your sliced hand. It clatters to the floor, further shattering into unrecognisable pieces, and the sound seems to pull a gasp from thin air. 

You look down at the altar, no longer was it bare as you had first thought when you blinked your eyes open, but instead lies the man who had tried to run away. His eyes are wide, and the whites of his eyes are splintered with blood vessels. And he’s staring right at you, outright terrified at whatever must be staring back at him. His skin is scratched, sliced and peeled back to reveal the delicate muscles beneath. It’s a surprise he’s still able to look at you. 

He doesn’t speak, as you expected, instead, you glance down to look at your own body—to find out which bone is pinching your flesh and stinging in the chilled air. Your mangled hand glides up along the expanse of your stomach, clothes sullied from blood, new and old. It hurts to breathe, to force your lungs to expand with each wet, shuddering breath you take. That same mangled hand comes to snag against something sharp, and that pain blossoms tenfold. As if you were being impaled on the sharpest of knives. 

You curl your fingers around the offending sharpness, only to find it slick with its own blood and sinew. Even through the firelight flickering and threatening to vanish entirely, you can see the outline of your rib bone breaching from the flesh cage you called your chest. 

The panic that should’ve come with the revelation of your rib being broken never comes, the pain remains real and a steady thrum that has your fingers twitching involuntarily. Yet it’s a pain you had been taught to endure, to bare your teeth and get on with it. You were told to stay still, to lean into the feeling of your bones being snapped and fixed within the same breath. 

But even you knew that this was a wound that couldn’t be so easily fixed, you were going to die. 

You couldn’t die yet. He had asked you to do something for him, and you’d be damned if you didn’t do as he asked. Your newly blood-slicked hand clamps down on the man’s leg, who still clings to life so valiantly, but it’s all for nought. He would die here, too. 

His body hits the floor with a loud thump, the wheezing gasp-like scream dies in his throat when you begin to drag him through the glass littering the floor and back through the door you once entered through. It’s a slow walk, the bone-deep pain that blossoms and spreads like a disease through your chest only causes your head to swim, and your mouth fills with that same copper that pours from you in steady beats. 

It wasn’t a large house, not as big as the others in the facility but that was something you were thankful for. You had no stairs to climb to reach your destination, a destination you could hear. There’s a distant crunching and grinding, the sound of bones being chewed and spat out by a beast. It has your steps growing heavier, louder, determined. You will reach him before you die. 

The man you drag carelessly through the house finally screams something visceral, and it’s enough to draw your eyes away from the dancing shadows coaxed by death in the distance. You look back to see his arm, broken and torn apart as if you had too taken your own sharp teeth to his flesh. It drags uselessly next to his head, nerves and tendons long torn apart. But he must still feel the pain in some capacity… as he screams again when you give another harsh tug of the leg in your hold.

And with it, comes the sickening crunch and ripping of flesh from bone. His arm rips free from the elbow where it had snagged on the doorframe, the wood splintered and destroyed enough to dig its wooden fangs into flesh and pull it free from its host. His skin stretches and tears until his body is free from the door, and immediately the resistance is gone. 

You have no time to care for his wailing, how his other hand tries to fruitlessly grab at you—grab at the air when he can’t quite curl his body up in an effort to stop you. So you continue on your death march, you let him squeal like a burned pig and it only grows louder when that distant crunching and growling grows silent in the wake of a new prize. 

The walk doesn’t take much longer, despite how your vision blurs and darkens at the edges, despite how your head feels like it’s filled with the wings of a thousand flies. The warmth of the fire licks at your exposed skin, at the bone that hinders you the more you fight the cold hands of Death. It’s relief you realise that washes over the boiling blood in your body, that has your shoulders dropping just an inch when you come face-to-face with him again. 

Sukuna. 

That was his test subject name. Not that you were ever permitted to know such knowledge, you were just a pawn in the larger game of chess. 

His eye is as red as the blood that paints the both of you thickly, and it’s already locked onto you. His body is relaxed, poised in such a way that he knows he’s the biggest threat here and nothing could stop him from enjoying his time. Except, you can’t help but notice the rigidness that lines his shoulders and jaw when his eye drops from your own to glance at the reason you hold yourself with such uncertainty. 

He doesn’t speak as he stands to his full height, head of pink hair brushing the ceiling despite how he curls his body just slightly to tower over you. His hand releases something with a thud, and with just a small glance at the sound, you see the face of the young girl who had been sitting at your table not too long ago. 

A hand reaches for you, too quickly but slows when he hears the way your breath garbles and bubbles in your throat. Sukuna was a man not known for his kindness nor his gentleness, yet his fingers are careful and delicate when they press on the surrounding flesh to assess just how much damage had been done. 

“You’re dying.” He says plainly, in a matter-of-fact tone that only came from being subjected to horrors. Death was no longer something to worry over. 

Yet he surprises you once again, as it’s not worry that etches its way onto his face. It’s unbridled rage, anger that not even you had been forced to face. As it was unlike his usual rage, it was almost sorrowful. An anger that came when one would mourn the impending death of a loved one. But you weren’t something like that, not to someone like Sukuna. Right? 

Your vision swims again when something solid presses to your forehead, your eyes blinking away the sting of tears to find the entirety of your vision overtaken by scarred flesh and fiery-red. Sukuna presses his forehead harder against your own, his anger contorts his face enough to flare his nostrils and his lip twitches with barely concealed rage. 

“You will not die here.” His words are a growl, a thunder man-made, and it has you believing him. Nodding as best you can against the threat of unconsciousness. “We’re leaving.”

Leaving? Was it time to leave your home already? You had hardly eaten. You hadn’t indulged as he had; it wasn’t fair to leave yet. You didn’t want to go back to the cold four walls of your padded cell, please, you pleaded with whatever God may still be on your side. Please, don’t let me go back. 

Sukuna hushes you with a soothing hand over the back of your head, your babbling pleas dying on your tongue in favour of savouring the rare affection. A hand trails along your arm, careful of the bruises and new cuts that had appeared. Long fingers curl delicately around your wrist, brushing against your pulse point briefly before they move lower. Prying, pulling, freeing the man still in your grasp. 

He doesn’t look at the man you had ensured he would be reunited with, he keeps his eye solely locked with your own when he stands back to his full height. That shimmer of anger remains, yet it's mingled with something else, something scarily close to devotion. Has he always looked at you like that? 

Without another word, the hand at your wrist tightens and pulls. You’re pulled behind him through the dark corridors, feet crunching on glass and sliding in the blood trail you had left behind. But none of it deters him from pulling you faster, harder. The world blurs around you, your eyes threatening to close with the effort it’s taking to just move your legs. 

The corridors seemed endless, twisting and turning in such a way that you were convinced this was no longer your house. It couldn’t be. You knew your home like the back of your own hand, had they changed it? Why would they change the layout of your house? It made no sense. 

The question rattles around in your brain until you’re met with a harsh whoosh of air followed by a sharp hiss of a mechanism, and then a coldness that only meant one thing—the outside world. Your eyes widened despite the beckoning call of tiredness. You look out into a world you don’t recognise. It’s bright, the sun concealed by barely-there clouds. When did you feel the sun on your skin last? It had been years, you had only known the darkness of night and the crude light of the operating table. 

The grass is cool against your burning flesh, and your steps become slow in the wake of the man pulling you along. He doesn’t stop you when you slip free of his grip, instead letting you pass by to look over the world you had been deprived of for so long. 

It looked the same as the faint memories that flicker to life in the recesses of your mind. Green and flowering, trees that bristled in the wind and birds that chirped as they flew by. You recognised the town in the distance, surrounded by farmland and animals that roamed within their fences. Has the facility always been this close to your home? How did no one notice it?

You turn on your heels, unaware of the pain that no longer blooms in your chest, to question the man who had pulled you with him. Except, you’re met with nothing but the never-ending expanse of corn, a field you were deep within. How? Your head burns with the question. How did you end up here? Where was Sukuna? He was just here, his hand in your own—you made it out with him. 

A crunch of grass has your head snapping in the other direction, expecting to come face-to-face with the man you were seeking. Instead, your blood runs cold. 

“There she is.” His voice is smooth as silk, thick as molasses and it has nothing but fear curdling your stomach. Dr. Easterman. “My little how-high. Wake up.”

And with his command, your once pain-free body is doused with an electrifying pain. It blooms at your temples, travelling down along your spine until your jaw locks and your joints have no choice but to follow. It hurts, it burns and yet you can’t take your eyes off of the doctor until you’re forced to blink. 

The next time your eyes open, the blinding light of the sun is still there. It warms your skin, keeping you pliant beneath its warm gaze. You don’t dare move away from it, intent to let the warm soak into your skin and settle in your bones. But the facade doesn’t last long, not when the light grows whiter every second, diminishing until it’s contained in a small circle. 

A surgical light. 

Noises and sounds awaken next, the beep of machinery and the scrape of metal against metal. You were back in that room, the room where they tore you apart with intentions of piecing you back together in their image. The images of the life you once had fades with each slow blink, the lingering taste of burning static on your tongue has your head lolling to the side. 

“Welcome back to the World of the Living.” Dr. Easterman grins in the wake of your silence, pleased with the docility of your mind. And that grin only grows meaner, wider, when there’s a roar-like scream from the room next door. It rattles the walls, instruments shaking in their metal trays and you wonder what manner of beast they had trapped in that room. 

When Simon awakes for the second time, you manage not to expel the contents of your stomach, but despite your resilience, it is somehow worse than the original formation of his basal consciousness. Perhaps it is because you know him enough to fear him, now, for your hands to dig into the soft meat of your thighs as you watch Price align great copper plates to the span of his chest, turn a flurry of dials on a creaking, blinking machine. 

He is naked upon the table, bare in a way you have never seen before. Or at least, only seen before you had the wherewithal to pay a mind to it. When you were young, you saw a lion with a traveling carnival—King of distant savannahs, with the thick ropes of muscle to match, the rippling of fleshy mechanisms churning under his golden pelt. Despite all this, though, artificial: he’d never known the plains of his homeland, of course. Born and bred in that steel cage, under the pinstripe tents, docile despite his strength. 

It’s not an exact comparison for Simon—he’s anything but docile, for one—but you can see it, reflected in the facets of his body, as polished as a badly-cut diamond. A man built from the ground up, shaped by Price’s careful hands, as easily as God made Adam, though you suppose the Doctor isn’t quite as good a craftsman. 

As he turns the final dial on the machine, adjusting the copper wires with a careful nudge, you think of the carnival ringmaster—a tall, masked man, who wielded a whip of fine leather—and try to see the same sort of violence reflected in Price’s form. In the buzzing of the machine, crescendoing as he steps back, the vibration of the wires, and then a flash of light that blinds you before you know you need to blink, leaving supernovas bleeding out of your eyes. Simon convulses once, twice, the plates falling from his chest, shock delivered, heart blissed back to the mortal coil. 

When, finally, the light fades, and the room smells only faintly of burnt meat, Price switches the machine up and Simon slowly sits up, propping himself up with the help of his shaking forearms. He brushes a hand over the broad expanse of his chest, wasting not a minute—and it is only now that you can no longer ignore what you’ve been trying your best not to look at. 

That being, the reason he went down in the first place—the reason Price laid him out upon the table, cold and dead as his component pieces, took a needle and a thread and many flasks of odd, acerbic chemicals to his skin. That being, what Simon looks at, immediately—the new appendage that sprouts from the nexus of his body, that which you’ve painstakingly procured, already erect. Perhaps that can be attributed to the electricity, but judging from the way his eyes shoot up to you, ozone-blue that grabs you by the chest and rips you apart, you’re sure you know the real reason. 

Your heart beats a frantic, struggling rhythm. You’d swear Price could hear it, as his hand lands roughly upon your shoulder, fingers finding the gaps in your bones and clawing out a crack to settle into, stilling you solidly in your place. 

Languidly—lionine grace, confidence coating every fibre of muscle—Simon swings his legs over the edge of the table, spends only a minute there before sliding to his feet, only a touch unsteady. He takes the weakness of being brought back to life quite well. 

“I’m whole,” he rasps, stepping forwards, eyes not deviating an inch from your face. Price nods slowly, matching Simon’s forward movement and dragging you soundly in his wake, closer and closer and you’re suddenly quasi-regretting how thorough you were with your search. It was not as easy to procure a cock as it is hands, of course, but you managed—of course you did, you always do—and a fine specimen as well, thick as your wrist and long enough that, while laying, its tip kisses the stitches running up from his naval. 

“You know who you have to thank,” Price murmurs, moving his hand from your shoulder to the small of your back, giving you a light, almost playful push forwards. “Go on, pet.”

You can’t exactly tell which one of you he’s talking to. 

In any case, the dilemma is taken from you as Simon surges forwards, crossing the space between you in mere steps. You back away on instinct, but the hand upon your back is solid despite its lightness, palm spread flat and heavy enough to impede any backwards motion. Though you helped with the craftsmanship of his body, when that was finished, Simon remained dead for nigh-on three days. You’ve spent as much time away from the manor as you could—returning only in the husky hours of the night, leaving as soon as dawn spills over the horizon, padding through the streets until the soles of your shoes are worn to the skin. You have managed to, if not forget, then claw back some measure of normalcy, then close your eyes and be free as a bird with clipped wings is able. 

Now, though, you see the metal gleam of the shears in Simon’s eyes, and you cease your fluttering. You, at the moment, are dressed uncouthly for a woman but properly for a lab—clean-pressed trousers, a too-large white coat over that. He makes fixing that his first priority—with a large hand, he brushes the sleeves from your shoulders in an unexpectedly gentle motion.

You allow the coat to crumple to the floor, leaving you in only your shirt—far from any frilly blouse or gown; it’s one of Price’s smaller undercoats, worn so many times that the wrinkles adhere to the curvature of your body. Beyond that, there’s little seduction about the outfit, no blush of cleavage nor collar—you have clothes for that, too, when you’re out on the town, but they have no place in this house. 

After all, it is not as if you have to tempt the Doctor for him to pay you mind. He may like when you are dolled up in perfume and powder, but he has no qualms in any other situation. 

Looking at Simon, you’re sure that the rule holds true with him, as well. 

Though his palm settles heavily upon your—barer—shoulder, he does not do anything further, not rip the buttons from your shirt. Perhaps that’s out of respect for Price’s personal property—but still, there’s something about the way he looks at you. The burn of his eyes is somehow more uncanny than anything else he has done. Gives the impression of a flame that cannot be put out, burning on stolen fuel. Bluefire taken straight from the braziers in Hell’s ninth circle, manducating eternal on the last scraps of sinners’ flesh. 

Hypnotizing. Unconsciously, despite the breaths huffing out of you quick as a trapped rabbit, you inch forwards. This, Price does not stop—steps back, in fact, gives you room to focus all your attention upon the space in front of you. 

You reach up a hand, settle it warily upon his cheek—and when he does not snap your knuckles off, slowly begin to trace your finger over the lines that cut through his skin. The stitches have been ripped out—now, all that’s left are these lines of skin where the Doctor cut him to shreds and grafted it all back together; padded the right cheek with bone shaved off the left. Move your hand slowly down, to his collar, where one of the starkest of the cuts is—that which separates head from torso, sticking to the line of his clavicle, fine as any Lady’s necklace. 

Down. His chest is split into two, and stomach marred with a number of scars. Different, in that they weren’t acquired through the delicacy of surgery, and instead came with the torso, owned by the warrior that once inhabited his abdomen. You wonder which one killed him—was it the ragged stripe running between his pectorals? Perhaps the stab that cuts between his left ribs, or maybe a stretch of smooth, healed burns coming up around his pelvis. 

There is another clean line where the stomach splits into legs. The freshest of the scars by far, however, still faintly swollen, cuts around his cock like a collar. You recall the work of days—standing at the edge of the lab, watching Price slowly hide his inner flesh with borrowed skin, not daring to retreat as you did the first time. 

Though it was horrific, you saw Simon’s rebirth to completion—and now, you will reap the rewards, dubitable as they may be. 

When your fingers brush over the line of the cut, his stomach clenches, and he lets out a gasp in what might have been pleasure, what might have been pain. Experimentally, you cup your hands over his balls, rubbing your thumb along the line of the shaft, and the sound comes again, louder, but no clearer. You peer up at him through your lashes, trying to gauge reaction, but for once, he is not looking at you—and, instead, over your shoulder. 

It takes that to make you realize that Price is no longer a shadow at your back, and has instead retreated to the far wall, leaning against it with a heavy grunt. You could run, except you couldn’t, and a part of you doesn’t particularly want to, anyways. 

Because this is what you came here for, is it not? You could have stolen away with Price’s stipend, any of those days on the street, found a distant whorehouse or distant husband to shadow you away. The Doctor is powerful, but he is still a Doctor, no king of kings—there are places in the mainland you could escape to, let alone if you spirited away upon a ship to distant America, or further. 

No. Though sweat dews your brow and your breath quickens, you know that this is right. Only reinforced when you place a light palm on Simon’s chest, pushing him gently back—despite the lightness of your touch, he stumbles as if slapped, until he collides with the metal table with a dull thud. It must hurt, but perhaps not for him. 

There is the sound behind you of cloth rustling, and when you chance a look backwards, you see Price leaning against the wall, trousers pooling around his ankles, hand upon his cock. He tilts his head as you meet his gaze. 

“Go on.”

So you do. Lean forwards, close enough that your chest brushes Simon’s. His hand, still upon your shoulder, loosens and tightens in uneven increments, timed with the syncopation of his breath. 

Slowly, you wrap your hand fully around his cock. It still holds a tinge of the sickly pallor of the man it came from, dead upon the morgue’s table, but sensation seems to have come back well enough, judging by the low groan Simon lets out. When you run it up to his tip, it’s already wet, seeping out precum, pearls that break as your fingertips gloss over them. Behind you, there’s the distinctive sound of Price doing similar to himself—you don’t doubt that he enjoys this. 

It is, after all, another measure of separation. Always, he has had that degree of hesitancy, something that tugs him back from any full indulgence. You’re not so naive to think his moderation is any sort of angel yanking on his shoulder—if he was ever a man of the cloth, recent events have no doubt ensured that he’s far from fitting through the eye of the needle—but perhaps a cadre of devils instead, coveting his flesh for themself. Or, really, there are any number of hangups, little snags to his psyche that you would never be able to decipher. God knows you don’t get to resurrection without breaking a few cerebral eggs. 

In any case, you’re quickly distracted as Simon’s hand turns a steady pressure upon your shoulder, pushing you down. Your knees buckle without complaint, settling into a low kneel upon the floor—he’s tall enough that you still must strain to put your mouth on even footing with his waist.

Though he possessed enough wherewithal to send you down, he does not move to the back of your head, does not push you forwards. Seems that’s up to your own volition—not that you need much encouragement, as you lean forwards, taking him until you feel the weight of his tip pushing against the back of your throat. His hips jerk, thrusting involuntarily, trying to sheathe the entirety of himself into your mouth, but you’ve far outdone yourself. By which is meant; you’ve endowed him so well that you cannot take him any further. 

Despite this, it takes not a minute longer of your ministrations before his stomach convulses, and he slams back against the table, hand clenching so hard that you swear you can feel your shoulder bones crack. Your mouth is flooded with the taste of salt and something faintly formaldehyde, something faintly blood, but you swallow despite that, staring up at him as you do. 

He, for once, is not looking at you—but instead, over your head, at Price, presumably still against the wall. A moment of muted annoyance at that—again, that feeling that’s festered in you for a season, that a dozen minutes upon your knees won’t fix, the idea that you are somehow third, somehow unnecessary—but it fades when you decipher the expression on his face. 

Not his usual reverence, or even subtle interest. Instead, there’s a hardness to his gaze, which coupled with the force of his hand on your shoulder, makes you think of…

Unbidden, you remember that circus, that lion. One of the Carnies spun a tale, heady enough to enrapture you as a child, even if you can see the clear holes in it now—he’d been taken from the savannah, accordingly, after killing a rival for control of the pride. The savagery of blood, diluted by dramaticism, the need for possession in one form or another. 

Behind you, Price groans, in the way you’ve come to recognize—that little slip of noise, the only weakness he ever shows, always released unwillingly at his climax. Simon barely lets you turn, his grip is so tight, but you manage it just in time to see the long column of Price’s throat, flecked at the chin by the salt-pepper bristles of his beard, Adam's apple bobbing. Below, his hand flexes around his cock, coated in the cum that is still dribbling out from the tip. 

When he notices your stare, he pushes off the wall with his free hand and ambles towards you, hemming you in between his torso and Simon’s. Not that it’s that objectionable a place to be. Stands there for a moment, long enough that you cannot bear to stare at him any longer, and instead focus your gaze upon the backdrop of the lab—spot, eventually, a rat in a gray-green jar, slowly rotating, flaking into tatters of rot. You remember catching it. Should be taking it out again, soon, to catalogue the progression of its decay-

“Open,” Price says lightly, snapping your attention back to him. You tilt your head slightly, though you already have an idea of what’s coming. He waits not even for your teeth to crest over your tongue before his fingers are in your mouth, the warm taste of him mingling with Simon’s, sticking to your gums and settling into the ridges of your mouth. Salt and formalin, death and life and that hazy area in-between. 

Then, he looks up—meeting Simon’s gaze over your head, you know. 

“I think she’s tired out,” he murmurs, “For today. You, as well.”

He does not deny it, which you presume is an affirmation of the statement—mostly because that’s what your silence means too. 

Price withdraws his fingers from your mouth, after a long moment, uses the spit-slick fingers to tilt your head up by the chin. “Let’s get you to bed, pet. We have work to do tomorrow.”

Usually, you’d take that to mean equations, to mean staining your fingers with chalk and the flop of cold, dead things upon the metal table, cutting through them with your silver scalpel. As you stand, and begin to walk, Simon’s back not deviating an inch from yours—you can practically feel his breath brushing the hairs upon your head—you don’t doubt that it means that, still. 

I pray the lord my soul to keep

They say girls grow up faster than boys. It’s true. Your best friend—your girl best friend, that is— clumsily shoved a pile of loose leaf paper into his hands when school had resumed on Monday. When everyone knew. He looked at them, confused— like runic cryptograms of femininity, the pages were covered in doodles of hearts and centaur men, creased by dozens upon dozens of repeated intricate folds, emblazoned with line after line of glitter pen ink.

“She, uhm— she really… I think she’d want you to know— she really liked you.” He barely looked up in time to see the flutter of a navy skirt as she ran away, having finished her grave deed.

They stayed clandestinely tucked into the back pocket of his binder for an agonizing week before he’d had the courage to read them.

Johnny? As in Johnny Mactavish? Ewwwww. he’s so stupid.

All boys are stupid. At least he’s cute. His eyes are pretty. And he’s like…. Funny-stupid. Not mean-stupid.

So when are you gonna get married? Are you gonna have a hundred babies and have a dog and a cat? And live in million-pound house in London?

Shut up!!! Bitch.

Slag.

Maybe we will get married. And have a million babies and they’ll all have his blue eyes and my perfect hair and you’re gonna be so jealous!!!

And if I die

He was still in his boyhood then. When he looks back now, it was all so obvious… the excuses to hold his hand. To come over to his house after school. Begging him to join the same after school club as you. Leaving butterscotches in the little pocket on his book bag.

Maybe if he’d had just a little more time to grow into himself— to understand the fairer sex, he’d have known things. He’d have liked you back. Maybe you would’ve been happy together. Maybe it would’ve lasted two weeks.

But now there was just no way to know.

You died running. Pushing. Escaping. No more than five minutes after you’d begged fearfully for him not to leave you to pray with—

And it planted the awful little rotting seed deep in some under-used vessel in the recesses of his heart. A purpling bruise from every possibility that was shattered. Everything that could’ve been. It warped your image in his mind. How could it not, when he was taught to admire and adore innocents that had died?

You became his personal saint. And try as he might to move on, to forget, no earthly woman had a chance to compete with that. Not really.

Before I wake

He should’ve known. When he saw that patch of blue in the corner of his eye. That strictly kept length of hair. When Simon had to snap at him to get him to fucking pay attention if y’wanna keep that useless ‘ead on ya shoulders.

When he heard that little—

Please don’t go.

Right in front of the tunnel.

When your halo became a blinding light where it had been the blood of an ingenue spilled against cheap, beige and white speckled plastic flooring. When he smelled angel’s trumpets instead of rubber burnt into the grit on the edge of the steps.

When he heard the click of a three ring binder instead of the gunshot.

I pray the lord my soul to take

The first thing you do is apologize for the weeks of silence. “Sorry I haven’t reached out. Work was crazy for a bit, and then—…ah, it doesn’t matter. Sorry though.”

“That’s fine, love. Bit calmer now?”

“Uh…yes and no,” you answer cryptically. “That’s, um…that’s why I wanted to call you actually.”

“Yeah?” he prods, curiosity piqued. It’s second nature to always wonder what you’re up to. If it was possible to live in someone’s head, he’d make yours a second home.

“Are you free for lunch tomorrow?”

He puts you on speaker phone so he can check his calendar at the same time. “I can move some things around. Can’t tell me whatever it is you wanna talk about right now?”

You’re quiet for a moment before you speak again, voice a little tinny through the speaker “I just…it’d be better if we could talk face to face.”

Words like those never bode well, but Gaz shakes it off, giving you the benefit of the doubt. It might just be embarrassing or sensitive news that isn’t easily disclosed over the phone. He’s never begrudged you your privacy before; it certainly isn’t going to start now. 

Besides, whatever it is won’t be private for long. 

“Sure, love. We can have lunch. What time?”

There are things he associates with time—seasons, death, taxes. Faces too, when they change with each time he sees them, months separating his visits and meaning that each time he comes home, there are new lines and new wrinkles in familiar faces. Piercings that weren’t there before. Tattoos and pregnancies and blemishes and drooping cheeks. 

Your face, however, is a constant. Not just in that it never seems to change, but that it never leaves his mind long enough to be forgotten. 

After all, how could it leave for even a second with what you are to him? 

He’s gotten that question before. What do you think you’ll do when you find your mate? When you come across an omega that smells just right, so delicious and ripe that you have no choice but to sink your teeth in and hold? 

Gaz doesn’t have to imagine. He’s known longer than most. It’s been more than ten years since he first met you—ten years since his keen teenage nose caught the tail end of your scent and followed it down the hallway and around the corner until he could put a face to the smell. 

His memories after that moment come in snapshots. A passing teacher dragging him into an empty classroom after recognizing the look in his eye, pupils dilated and mouth agape, his whole body thrumming with desire. Sitting in the principal’s office with his hands in his lap, fists clenching and unclenching while waiting for his mother to join them, the other adults in the room watching him with blatant distrust, as if he weren’t a child too; as if this wasn’t new and overwhelming and terrifying. His mother doing her best to console him in the car on the drive home, Gaz both too old and too young for the torrent of emotion washing over him. 

He blocks that week from his memory lest those same emotions surge up and paralyze him in his tracks. It gives him nothing but grief to remember that day. If the agony of an unconsummated mate bond weren’t enough, the sheer indignity of being treated like something to worry about even to this day comes as a crushing blow. 

It’s taken a lot to move beyond those years. 

It isn’t something Gaz would wish on anyone else. His life has been shaped by a very specific kind of longing. Agony in the shape of a neck. His burden since youth has been to stave off the hunger pangs, but that hasn’t always come easy, and it’s come at a cost. 

In the months following that day, he formed a kind of tentative friendship with you, trying not to let the devastation overwhelm him when you never seemed to recognize his scent as your mate’s. To just be in your orbit was better than nothing at all. 

He lasted all of a year at the same university as you before dropping out and enlisting, his instincts steadily becoming too powerful to ignore. The military was where he learned to manage the hunger—long, sleepless nights and rigid protocol hardening him, reinforcing his weak points. Learning to live with a certain kind of absurdity, and sucking up the urge to argue when given asinine tasks like mopping up rain water in a thunderstorm or being put on pencil sharpening duty. 

Since then, time and distance have helped him soothe the ache and leash his instincts. If he couldn’t be your mate, he could be your friend at least, and he’s taken to that role with zeal. 

Hunger still clings to the inside of his rib cage though. Cramped hunger crouched beneath his lungs. All breath, all pneuma. Tight clustered and tumorous. 

These days he’s just better at managing it. 

A day after your call, you meet on neutral territory, a coffee shop around the back of a busy street in Shoreditch, a neighbourhood he’s only visited a few times in years past when you felt inclined to drag him to the Sunday market. It’s not terribly busy for mid-morning on a Saturday, but the steam wand keeps hissing in the background and the music is cranked up a few decibels higher than Gaz would usually like. The whole place smells of hazelnut and toffee. 

You though—you smell like something indescribably delicious. Floral and fragrant, so succulent that his mouth waters when he inhales a lungful of your scent. Sweet like dandelion wine. 

Time has made it easier for his heart to cope with not having you, but not his hunger. 

You make pleasant conversation for a few minutes before addressing the elephant in the room, avoiding it at first in favour of talking about old friends and family—you ask him how his sister’s PhD defence went and light up like a thousand watt bulb when he tells you that it was successful—anything to avoid the real reason for inviting him to lunch. But there comes a point when you have no choice but to suck in a deep breath and finally get to it.

“I need to ask you for a favour.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a big one,” you warn him.

“Okay,” Gaz repeats, smiling. His acceptance comes easy because there’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

“I wouldn’t—God, this is so awkward,” you start, a heavy sigh steaming up from the back of your throat, head collapsing into your waiting hands to hide your face. Anything to avoid looking at him. 

Gaz sits and waits patiently for your courage to return. Unlike you, he doesn’t fidget or cross and uncross his legs. His urges are strictly regimented, impulses beaten out of him after years of exposure therapy, so to speak. 

You pick your head back up and his heart thumps in his chest. Mostly beaten out of him. 

“Please don’t feel like I’m pressuring you into this.” His lips twitch with a suppressed grin. “I’m only asking because you were the first person I thought of, but I can always figure something else out, or go to, um…—go to a heat centre.” 

He straightens at those words. “Heat centre?” 

“Yes. My, um—” You go quiet again, the words not coming easily to you, but his mind is already racing, mouth dry when he considers the implications of what little information you’ve already offered up. “I’ve been on suppressants for a really long time. Ever since high school. I was supposed to get my prescription renewed with my doctor this week, but I’ve only been seeing her for a few months, so when she realized how long I’ve been on suppressants for, she…—it’s apparently not healthy to be on them for that long.”

“Not healthy,” Gaz repeats, his rational mind somewhere else. 

You shake your head in confirmation. “No. She said long term suppressant use can lead to different cancers and other health complications, and that I should’ve been spacing it out rather than just…suppressing my heats altogether.”

The shrill whistle of blood through his ears muffles all but your words. 

It barrels into him at full tilt. Drives the breath from his lungs and the thoughts from his head. 

“Your heat is coming up,” he finishes for you, lasering in on the microexpressions flitting across your face. Blinders on. Nothing else in the world matters as much as your next words. 

You swallow. Look away. “Yep,” you chirp, voice catching in your throat and breaking. 

A chair scrapes loudly against the floor when someone nearby scoots back. 

“You aren’t going to a heat centre?” 

“…No.”

His heart beats so hard against his ribs that his chest nearly hurts. 

“You want me to help you through your heat.” He doesn’t have to ask; your trepidation says as much, and he’s always had an eye for details. 

“I know this is awkward, and I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t an emergency.”

Gaz reaches across the table instinctively to take your hand. “No, love, it’s fine. You know you can tell me anything. I’m glad you came to me first.”

Glad hardly touches the depth of the emotion coursing through him. Honoured comes closer. It’s not like he’s never thought about you in heat before, but he’d been away so often and for such long stretches of time, that he assumed you’d gone the heat centre route. He would’ve known if you’d gotten an alpha to help you through it—would’ve smelt their stench on you whenever he was back in the city. 

But as grateful as he is that you entrusted him with this knowledge, it also nearly takes his breath away. 

“You’ve never had a heat before?”

It almost seems unfathomable. He’s had plenty of ruts before—a couple of times with a partner, usually another alpha or a beta—and never once assumed that you’d gone your whole life without experiencing a heat. 

You shake your head. “No. I got on suppressants as soon as I presented and it was just easier to live life without having to, you know…deal with heats and all of that. Just seemed like a hassle.”

His head is spinning. He grips the edge of the table to keep himself upright, but it’s almost not enough. At any moment, he might tip right over.

He won’t ask if you’ve ever slept with someone before. It’s none of his business. Even if it were, he wouldn’t want to know. 

Besides, even if you have, they haven’t had you in a way that mattered. There’s no mark on your neck or ring on your finger, and you’ve never spent a heat with someone else. 

Never until now, that is.

The answer is right on his lips when you cut him off at the pass. “Don’t answer now. I wanted to ask you in person, but I don’t want you to feel on the spot.”

“Love, you aren’t putting me on the spot.” Not when the choice is so obvious. 

But you don’t let him finish, holding up a hand to get him to stop talking. There’s a tremor in your hand, your fingers quivering slightly, and noticing that makes him pause. 

“Please just—just think about it,” you insist. 

“…Fine, I’ll give it a think,” Gaz rasps, acting like his whole entire world hasn’t changed in a blink. 

“Thanks, Kyle.” 

Your relief is palpable, so undisguised that he’d be insulted if he wasn’t viscerally aware of how much the conversation has taken out of you.  

You hug him on the way out—a gesture so natural to your friendship that you don’t notice the way he pulls you closer than normal, every inch of your body plastered to his—and he stays for a bit longer, finishing his lunch alone. He needs the time to think after what you just told him, time to digest that news without the blood ringing in his ears.

When he leaves, the sky is different. Silver sheafs of light paint the streets on the walk home, the noise of the traffic and clatter of conversation louder than ever before, the cacophony of a whole world happening around him. But it’s distant somehow, like the trickle of a brook off somewhere deep in a forest. 

He’s on the threshold of a new world, one foot dangling over the edge. For now, he keeps his balance. It remains to be seen in the days to come. 

A late, gold sun bathes the street with ribbons of light and warmth in the early hours of the evening. There’s a bistro across from the building where Simon works the evening shift in the underground parking lot, and they meet there once a week for food and a cig before Simon has to clock in. 

Gaz savours this hour and a half more than most. There’s never a guarantee that Simon will show up; his friendship is a deliberate and intentional act, not easily given but easily taken away. It’s not something that Gaz takes for granted. There may come a day when the other man never shows up again and Gaz eats at a table across from an empty chair. 

He has faith though. Their relationship isn’t so tenuous that every day he expects the worst. More than once, they’ve travelled together—one of Gaz’s fondest memories is sitting with Simon in a piazza in Florence and conversing over espressos and lemon tarallucci. For a time after leaving the military—close to around six weeks, give or take a few days—Simon even slept on Gaz’s couch until finding his own place. 

Suffice it to say, they’re closer than most people would guess. Close enough that Simon doesn’t need to be told that something’s up when Gaz is more brusque with the waiter than usual.  

“Are you ever gonna spit it out or what?” Simon finally asks, a touch annoyed with having to be the one to broach the subject of Gaz’s mood. 

The bigger man sits across the table from him with a mullish look on his face. Cantankerous as always, likely in a mood from a combination of bad sleep and old aches flaring up. He’s always touchier between the seasons, the sudden shifts making his skin go painfully dry and old injuries act up. 

Gaz’s smile is slightly sheepish when it creeps onto his face. “You could tell?”

“‘Course I can. You’ve got stupid look on your face,” Simon grunts, taking a messy bite of his sandwich. Pepperoncini slices and mayonnaise drip from the other end onto the plate. 

The one downside to eating with Simon is having to mask his reaction to Simon’s complete lack of table manners. It's a skill that's come with plenty of practice.

“My—” he pauses, choosing his next word carefully. “A friend of mine asked me to help her through her heat.”

It’s not a topic they’ve ever broached before. His raunchier conversations are usually relegated to Johnny, Soap usually the initiator. Simon keeps his exploits private, cards close to his chest; it doesn’t seem impossible that he has a girl squirreled away somewhere, but Gaz would never know if he did. 

“Ever fucked ‘er before?” Simon asks, blunt as usual. 

Gaz laughs, shaking his head. “No. It’s not like that.”

“But you’re gonna fuck ‘er now?”

“Yes. Maybe. It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated about fucking an omega through a heat?” He talks with his mouth full for a second before pausing to finish chewing and swallowing. Then he takes another bite, talking through that one too. “Knot ‘er a couple times, wear a mouthguard if you ‘aven’t got enough control, then go home. Simple.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why the fuck not?” 

He mulls over the best way to say it before deciding to just mirror Simon’s usual blunt approach. “She’s my mate.”

Simon’s indifference sloughs off all in one go. “When the hell did you bag someone, Garrick?”

His laughter this time borders on derisive. “Haven’t yet, actually.”

Simon stills, staring at him from over his sandwich. More ingredients spill from the bottom and onto the plate but he pays them no mind. The silence stretches on for a while, long enough for Gaz to catch on to the fact that Simon has no intention of responding, either too baffled or appalled to muster up a response or simply waiting for Gaz to justify himself. Likely the latter. 

“We were both too young when we met,” he explains. “Must’ve just presented when I first scented her and everyone told me to wait until she made the first move. Then time passed and…obviously she didn’t, and I didn’t want to pressure her.”

“How young?” 

“Uh…” He doesn’t have to think, but he knows how Simon will respond and that makes him hesitate. “Eighteen?”

“Jesus fuck, Gaz,” Simon groans, letting go of his sandwich in disgust.

“Look—”

“You’ve waited ten bloody years to bite her?”

Simon looks at Gaz like what he’s saying is anathema, like even the thought of not mating his omega doesn’t compute. For him, it probably doesn’t. It’s not the way things usually go. Gaz knows he’s been more patient than most. 

“I didn’t want to force her into a mate bond.” He shrugs. His own sandwich grows cold on the plate, barely a third of it gone compared to the scraps Simon still has left to eat. 

Gaz knows the excuse doesn’t hold water, but for as close as he is with Simon, he doesn’t have it in him to get to the real heart of the matter, the truth that his heart is still bruised. That there’s still a part of him that doesn’t believe this won’t all get ripped away from him in the end. That his own doubts might be the reason it all falls apart. 

“Fuck that,” he scoffs, pointing at Gaz with a mayo and buffalo sauce covered finger. “Have you told ‘er yes then yet? Never mind, ‘course you ‘aven’t, bloody fuckin’ moron. You’re gonna call ‘er after this and tell ‘er yes. Then, on the day of, you fuck her and bite her.”

Gaz rolls his eyes. “I can’t make that decision for her.”

“Someone’s gonna eventually. Has to happen. If it ain’t you, it’ll be some other bloke who gets to fuck and pup ‘er while you sit around with your dick in your hand. That how you want this to play out? Cucked by some bellend who won’t treat ‘er right?”

He nearly gnashes his teeth at Simon’s words, but he’s more civilized than that. He goes stone-faced instead, nostrils flaring.

“What was I supposed to do? Bite her the next time I saw her in the hallway?” Gaz rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that would’ve played out really well for me. Not like I wasn’t on thin fuckin’ ice the whole time with everyone.”

“Been a few years since then.” Simon picks his sandwich back up and takes such a big bite that he squeezes most of the ingredients out, tearing off a chunk of bread and meat.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” His tone is abrasive, but Simon shrugs it off, unbothered by a little vitriol. “Seeing as how I’m the one who’s been suffering through those years. Nobly, might I add.”

“There’s nothing fuckin’ noble about suffering,” he scoffs, upper lip curled. “You do the hard shit and then you get out. No sense in letting it drag on.”

He very nearly argues that point. Has to bite his tongue at the last second to keep from being crueler than warranted. As if suffering weren’t Simon’s main export; his main claim to fame.

He’s better than that though. And, if he were being honest with himself, there might be some truth there. 

When Simon leaves for his shift, Gaz sits there until his coffee goes cold and the manager comes by to gently inform him that they’ll be closing shortly, offering to pack up the rest of his food for home. Gaz nods absently, still miles away in his head.

He drives home in that headspace, mulling Simon’s words over. 

Justice is a core tenet of his. Fairness another. He’s lived his life up to this point guided by a strict set of principles, hardly breaking his rules of conduct unless forced to do so, unless given no other recourse. 

But he’s given so much of himself to the world and asked for so little in return. Is it not fair that he receive this? 

And besides, the beast in his chest rumbles, licking its chops, did you not ask for his help? 

He clicks the button on his sun visor to let himself into his condo’s garage. In the elevator on the way up, he stares at his reflection in the door and chews the inside of his cheek. 

Ten years now he’s sat on his hands and waited for a sign, rejecting the urge to simply take what his beast sees as his. The patience of a monk. Now there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A white flag waved to signal the end. And rather than take that white flag for what it is and head into the sunlight, he insists on staying put and ignoring the way fate beckons him forward. 

There’s no glory in torturing oneself, no prize to be won for self-abnegation. 

And though his answer was always yes, Gaz allows himself a moment to consider what it would take for him to say no and send you off into the arms of another man. 

He hasn’t got that kind of strength in him. He’s dangled out of helicopters with his head mere inches from the ground, jumped out of a chopper hit by an RPG, fallen through the floor of a building on fire, and been under heavy fire more times than he can count, but that would be the thing that killed him. Seeing you with someone else. Knowing that the opportunity to make you his was truly lost, beyond recovery. 

And he’s tired of the way things are, his sacrificial nature bleeding into every facet of his life. 

There has to be a time for change. 

The next morning, as soon as it’s socially acceptable, he calls you, holding the phone so tight that he accidentally lowers the volume all the way down before fixing it. 

“Thought about it enough. I’ll do it.”

Two weeks until the day.

He circles it in red on the calendar in his office and it colours his peripheral vision every time he turns his head. 

And every night leading up to that day, Gaz puts his head down on his pillow to rest and he dreams. 

Fragmented dream; images of soft thighs and sweat matted hair, lips and tongues pressed together, glutes and buttock squeezing with each thrust, panted breaths getting louder and louder, the air humid and electrified. 

Always, waking at some undetermined hour, jaw clenched, the flameform of a woman left burning in his throat. 

Anticipation whets his appetite. His stomach growls like the beast in his chest and it paces restlessly as the days stretch out endlessly, only stopping when the sun finally dips below the horizon, that time coming each day later and later like some sadistic torture levied on his soul. 

In the weeks leading up to the event, Gaz comes with you to pick up supplies even though you swear that you’ve got it all under control. A lot goes into preparing for a heat. You have to stock your fridge, make your nest, lock away your valuables in case you break anything in the throes of your heat. At the end of your Costco run, the trunk of his car is stuffed to the brim with water bottles, groceries, blankets, wet wipes, chafing cream, sports drinks, and moisturizer. 

At the door to your apartment, he moves to come inside with the bags and only stops when you protest, insisting that your nest isn’t ready yet. His lips twitch into a grin. 

“You don’t want me to help carry everything in?” Gaz asks.

“No, it’s fine. I’d rather—well, just bring everything to the door and I can do the rest.”

He humours you this time because things will be different soon. When your heat is over and he’s no longer just a friend that you can keep at a distance but a red blooded man who tended to your weeping cunt and kissed every inch of your body, things will be different.

Until then though, he can give you this. 

Sometimes he finds himself hypnotized by the tantalizing glimpse of skin that he gets when your neckline pulls and the mating gland sitting in the divot between your neck and shoulder is exposed. 

Every moment in your presence is excruciating now that he knows that the waiting has come to an end. The two week interim period feels almost flimsy, false; the veil has dropped though, and he knows what’s on the other side of it now.

Though his rut is months off, the resonance of your scent must rouse his dormant instincts and throw his hormones into whack because he puts on a couple kilograms with ease, his body preparing for your heat. He overstays his allotted time at the gym by half an hour every session, so lost in his own head that he runs ten kilometres without even realizing it. Sweat runs off him in rivulets, the front of his shirt stained a darker shade of its original colour. 

In the locker room, Gaz sets his towel down on the countertop and stares at his reflection in the mirror. The sudden uptick in mass that he’s put on in the last week is noticeable even to him, his thighs and arms bulkier, and his abs a little less defined with the added weight around his midsection. His skin is smooth and buttery from moisturizing religiously before bed every night, a nice sheen to it. 

He rolls his shoulders back and flexes, preening for the imaginary viewer in his head that looks remarkably like you. 

Johnny would taunt him mercilessly if he could see him now. As if Johnny weren’t twice as vain and pompous as Gaz on a good day. 

He looks good though. Strong. Virile. Capable of seeing his mate through her first heat. If that self-assurance makes him seem cocksure or arrogant, so be it. 

There are plenty of worse things to be. 

“Did you put in for time off?” you ask, still sweaty from a brisk walk through the park to meet him. 

“Yeah. Did it the same day I called you. Took the whole week off.”

Even for as early as it is, the park is busy. Mothers pushing prams jog by in front of the bench the two of you are sitting on, all dressed in the same leggings and puffy vests, headbands holding their hair back. The city has barely woken up from winter’s tight hold, the air brisk and the ponds gelid; small mounds of ice-encrusted snow spread throughout the park like an inverse archipelago. 

In a few more weeks, there might be buds on the trees.

The pretext for spending so much time together in the lead up to your heat is so you can integrate his scent into your system. Gaz barely suppresses a laugh when you give him that excuse. As if you haven’t had a lifetime of acclimation. As if his scent hasn’t immixed with yours by now, and yours with his. 

“I took an extra couple days off after. You know, just in case.” You shrug like it’s no big deal. 

Gaz knows better though. Your ambivalence doesn’t read as wholly true. He can see the way your throat bobs when you swallow and your fingers tighten around your coffee cup. You haven’t made eye contact with him yet despite ten minutes having passed since you sat down beside him. Despite the mild weather, your coat is zipped up to the top, the metal nearly biting into your throat.

You’re doing a bang up job of acting like this isn’t some long preamble before jumping into bed together. He can’t fault you for the fact that it’s all he can think about. It runs through his mind twenty-four-seven, running an endless track that only seems to get easier the more laps he does. 

It’s strange being with you now. Humbling. There’s almost something fascinating in knowing that though you now insist on keeping a polite distance, in a week’s time, he’ll have you flat on your back and whimpering. There’s no harm in allowing you this final bit of grace, so Gaz doesn’t protest, even though—

In a week, you’ll be his.

“Are you nervous?” Gaz asks.

You stiffen, either offended or shy. He settles on the latter when you hesitantly reply, “No. I think we got everything I needed. Um. Not much more to do now other than wait.”

“That’s good.”

“Plus…I trust you.”

His heart clenches at that, stunned into silence for once. 

“You’ve always smelled good too,” you admit. “From what I can tell. I’ve always had a pretty poor sense of smell—really, it’s shit—but you smell better than most people. And I know you’d never hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t,” he stresses. 

You smile and finally meet his eyes. If only he could tell you it with his eyes alone. Nothing could be further from his intentions. If he has his way, you’ll be better off by the end of your heat.

“It’s going to be rough though,” Gaz says apropos of nothing when you go to take a sip, nearly making you spit out your coffee. 

“Huh?” you ask, looking over at him. You wipe your mouth off on your sleeve. 

“First heats always are.” A gust of wind makes you shiver. “You'll probably be worse too, since you put it off for so long—” He chuckles under his breath when your eyes widen. “Sorry, love, I’m not having a go—I’m just being honest is all. Have to know what you’re getting into before it happens; that way you don’t freak out when it’s too late.”

“Too late?” you repeat.

He nods. “Yeah, love. Once your heat hits and my…my alpha takes over, I’m not going to be able to, uh…control myself. I’m going to want to knot you as many times as I can. It’ll be the only thing I’ll want to do.”

All you can do is stare at him, beyond words. Mouth open, teeth separated. One day he’ll have you on your knees like that, tongue out as well to run up the underside of his cock. 

“But I’ll be good to you. I promise.”

He pats your knee before standing up, and you stare up at him with your mouth slightly agape, eyes round. 

“You’re leaving?” you croak, dry throat making your voice crack. 

Gaz smiles. “Gotta head out, love. Got some errands to run. Remember to do your stretches and call me if you need anything before Saturday, alright? And thanks for the coffee.”

He tosses his cup into the bin on his way out of the park, every instinct in him screaming to turn around and go back. It isn’t time though. 

It’s coming, he reassures himself on the walk home. It won’t be long now. 

How does it happen that an alpha can have his omega within biting distance for years and still keep their hands to themselves? He asks himself this question every day, but the answer remains out of reach.  

It takes a strength of will not easily called up. A sense of honour and duty that few can touch, never mind possess. He has it in spades though, chock full of the stuff, and it’s moulded him into the kind of man capable of taking care of you. 

The only thing left unanswered is whether that strength has served its purpose. Whether now is the time to let it go.

He runs his tongue over the point of his canines. 

It’s too soon to tell.

He wakes more alert than any time in nearly thirty years of life, daylight engraved into the side of his face.

Close enough to touch. Gaz’s skin itches when he brushes his teeth and packs his weekend bag with his last few things. An hour—two tops—and you’ll be under him, soft thighs parted and slick hole stuffed full of his cock. Then days more ahead of him to do the same thing over and over and over. 

He drives to your place with a sense of caution that borders on neurotic, coming to a full stop at every stop sign and yield, on the lookout for any reckless drivers lest today be the day that he gets into an accident. There’s no margin for error today. 

The roads are clear this early in the morning though, so he breathes out when he pulls into the parking lot of your building. It’s overcast now, the sun receding behind the clouds. Everywhere around him, life keeps on happening like the world isn’t about to irrevocably change. 

Gaz lets himself in using the spare key fob you gave him a week prior. Even the halls are quiet, the day not yet started enough for people to be on their way out. It’s a Saturday after all. 

His legs seem to move without conscious thought, like he’s being pulled towards your flat, a magnet of opposite polarity. There’s a prickling awareness of another consciousness at the back of his mind. He’s been aware of it all his life, but it’s as real now as it’s ever gotten, the prospect of its omega in heat at the end of a hallway and beyond something as trivial as a door giving it more cognisance, more influence. 

Even from the other side of the door, your scent sets his teeth on edge. 

You answer the door bleary-eyed and sweaty, housecoat cinched tight around your waist and fuzzy slippers making it look like you just woke up. Visibly teetering on the edge of your heat. It’s so obvious and the smell of it so fragrant that Gaz’s instincts kick in and he pushes you back into the apartment, slamming the door shut behind him. His bag drops to the floor beside him. 

“How are you feeling?” he asks, already palming your cheeks and tilting your head this way and that. He tugs down your lower eyelid gently, checking your sclera for anything abnormal.

“A bit hot,” you admit. 

“What’s your temperature?”

“Just a little over ninety-nine degrees. What’s the matter with you? Did you go to med school without telling me or something?” 

A slight temperature is entirely normal for a heat, the body working overtime to support the increased production of estrogen.

“It’s your first heat. I’m taking it seriously.”

You roll your eyes. “It’s not a baby. I don’t think you need to ask me every five minutes if I’m dilated enough.”

He ignores the baby joke because there’ll be danger if he doesn’t. The situation is already tense enough without thinking about you swollen with his pup. That’s a dream for a different day. Instead, he helps you take off the housecoat (which must have been adding five degrees to your internal temperature) and herds you into the kitchen for a cold glass of water.

It helps but barely.

Your first wave of your heat doesn’t crest until mid-morning, and by then Gaz is practically breathing smoke, the scope of his attention shrinking until you’re the only thing he can focus on. When you twitch, his head snaps in your direction, eyes vacant apart from a slight glimmer of awareness. 

It’s getting harder to think through the fog. It’d be worse if his rut overlapped with your heat, but even just being in proximity to an omega in heat—his mate, no less—forces him into an equivalent headspace. Ears peeled for any noises in the hallway outside your apartment. Wary of another alpha intruding on you in this state.

“C’mon, baby, we’re gonna get one last snack in you before it hits,” Gaz murmurs soothingly, urging you up off the couch and into the kitchen. You stumble slightly on your way there and his heart skips a beat.

You squirm in your chair while trembling fingers bring slices of manchego and chorizo up to your lips. His gaze is intense and unwavering. Any desire to glance down at the spot between your legs evaporates when your eyelashes flutter shut and your cheeks bulge as you chew. 

You’re so sweet like this. A tender thing for him to open up and ply with victuals.

“Just a couple more, okay?” he urges, pushing the plate closer to you and shushing you when you whine. 

You turn your head away when he brings a slice of cheese to your lips. “M’full,” you complain. 

“I know, baby, but it’s gonna be a long time before you’ll wanna eat again.”

“You smell weird,” you grumble instead, turning your head into his armpit and taking a deep inhale. 

“What do you mean ‘weird’?” he asks, slightly perplexed.

“Dunno. Different.” You drag another deep breath in. “Did you put cologne on or something? Smells…uh…really good.”

His dick throbs. “No, baby. Didn’t even shower before I came over.”

“Mmm. Good.”

His arm drops to the table, the force of it making the plate rattle. Fuck but how that nearly gets him. He’s not infallible. Eventually something is going to tip him over the edge from sanity into delirium. 

If this is any indication of the days to come, there’s a chance neither of you will come out entirely unscathed. 

It happens gradually, your sentences slowly degenerating and fragmenting, and your eyes glazing over. Even the smell of your skin gets richer. 

The effect that your heat is having on him is staggering. No one told him it’d be like this. No one told him it’d be like unzipping himself and letting you inside. Like sitting still as a fire blazes around him, the flames licking closer and closer to his skin.

Then your fever spikes and all bets are off. 

“Up,” Gaz growls. He doesn’t wait for you to listen, lifting you up from the chair from under your arm and hunching slightly to scoop you up into his arms. 

You moan, clinging to him. “It’s, uh—Kyle, I…I’m really hot.”

His legs are heavy beneath him, lead weights that he has to drag across the apartment, each step tougher than the last. 

Your nest is a soft, sumptuous garden of blankets and pillows and assorted clothes dragged out of the closet and spread across the floor and bed. You must have pulled the mattress off the bed frame at some point in the last two weeks because it’s pressed into the corner of the room, draped in every single sheet and blanket you own. The bed frame sits quite awkwardly on the other side of the room, pushed out of the way so as to not get in the way, and there are foam panels plastered all over to soundproof the walls. 

Clever girl, thinking of that. 

Everything’s been rearranged. He’d caught that you’d dragged a bookshelf into the living room when he came into your apartment, but even your dresser and nightstand are tucked away in the corner of your room. It’s like you took inventory of everything you own and moved everything apart from the barest essentials needed for your heat. 

He comes down onto one knee on the edge of the mattress before setting you down. You come up onto your elbows almost immediately. There’s a look in your eyes that he’s never seen before except in his dreams. Besotted, devotional. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined that you’d ever look at him like this. 

You sit up when he comes down onto the mattress, constantly orbiting and orienting towards him. 

“Gonna take this a little at a time, okay, love?” Gaz rumbles. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you rasp, climbing into his lap when he softly urges you up. An arm braced behind him keeps him from collapsing when you sag into him. 

Pseudo-rut makes him a bit dumb, a bit clumsy. He palms the back of your neck a bit too roughly, murmuring an apology against your lips when you whimper before drawing you into a deep, toe-curling kiss. 

His stomach seizes up when he realizes that he’s kissing you for the first time. Ten years of anguish and heartache and delirious need finally culminating in your lips parting against his, the soft melt of your tongue against his when you let his tongue slide into your mouth, his blunt fingers tilting your head higher up. 

Gorgeous, perfect mouth. Kissing it feels like coming home after years away. 

God, he’s wanted it for so long. And God, your mouth tastes good, and when your tongue touches his, his head goes cloudy and his cheeks go hot. 

Clothes fall to the wayside, slowly added to the nest one by one—his pants are shoved into the crease between the mattress and the wall, your shirt tucked under a pillow. He has to reach down to readjust himself through his boxers and your eyes follow the path his hand takes, going half-lidded and hot.

He smirks, only a little bashful. “See something you like?” 

“Uh-huh,” you mumble, barely taking in his words. 

His chest puffs involuntarily, the beast in him preening. 

Touching your bare skin for the first time, Gaz realizes that he’s never felt so moored and ready. This is where he’s meant to be. Every agonizing moment of the last ten years has prepared him for this moment; not even the bite of his pseudo-rut could make him flounder. 

He traces a nipple with his thumb, following the path with his tongue when he lifts his thumb away, round and round the areola until you’re practically sobbing his name. Not enough. It’s still not enough. 

“Baby, I need to get you ready,” he murmurs when you pull at the waistband of his boxers. 

“M’ready now,” you half-snarl, tugging more forcefully, trying to rip his underwear right off. 

Gaz laughs. “No, you’re not.”

You don’t have a choice but to indulge him though. It’s his way or the highway. He’d told you that back at the beginning, after ringing you to tell you that he’d help you through your heat—it had to be under his terms or not at all. 

Your knickers get shoved under the pillow as well. Something for him to toy with later, when you’re tuckered out and not raring to go just yet. It’ll tide him over when you’re too sensitive for him to play with your pussy. 

He barely grazes a knuckle over your clit and you come, hiccupping through your first orgasm. You’re quick to come, like everything up to this point has just been foreplay. 

“Oh lovie,” he coos, pressing his lips to your temple. “It’s alright—I’ve got you.”

You jolt when he thumbs your clit again. Too sensitive. He pulls it away just long enough for you to catch your breath and for the twitches to subside, but when you start to pant again, your smelling ripening in that telltale way, he strums his thumb across it again, tucking a finger into your hole and groaning when he finds it scorching hot.

He dreamt of fingering you all the time back in high school. Thought of sitting beside you in the auditorium during assemblies and sliding his hand up your skirt until you spread your thighs and let him push your panties out of the way; cornering you in the bathroom between classes and pressing his fingers into you from behind, muffling your cries with his mouth; jiggling your pretty clit in the backseat of the bus, draping his jacket across your lap so no one else would see your wet pussy. 

The reality is so much better than he ever could’ve imagined. 

Three fingers and still you beg for more. You’re clamped so tight around his fingers that he can barely move them, not without exerting a bit more force than he’d like. You must like it though because you squeeze around his neck almost intolerably tight when he forces his fingers in.

“Good girl,” he grunts, shoving them back in. “You can take it.” 

“A-alpha?” you stutter. 

Gaz pulls you close, tucking your face into his neck. “Come here, I’ve got you. Just hold onto me, love, okay? Can you do that?”

“Y-yeah,” you breathe. 

His whole body jerks when you bite his neck. Your teeth don’t break the skin, but still he shudders, squeezing his eyes shut. Just barely keeps from telling you to bite down harder.

You have to take another break after you come, limp and satiated. Gaz uses that time to fluff the nest a bit, getting it nice and comfortable. He even leaves to fetch you a glass of water, bringing you into his chest for a nice cuddle while you recharge.

When you start staring too much again, he knows it’s almost time. 

Nervousness has no hold on him though. You came to him because you trusted him to take care of you through your first heat. 

That assurance settles him. Grounds him. There’s no one more equipped to do what he’s about to do because he’s waited his whole life for this. Whether consciously or not, his whole life has been in preparation for this moment, every choice, every heartache, every sleepless night. It’s all been in anticipation of this. 

It nearly undoes him though, despite everything. Despite the weeks spent mentally preparing, despite the strength in his body and the muscle he’s tacked on, despite his own fervor even. 

Because when he climbs on top of you and your thighs part, your hole is wet and waiting, ready for him to use it and leave a little mess behind. Just looking at it makes his balls throb. It almost doesn’t seem right that he’s about to spoil something as pretty as your pussy with his dick. Leave it stretched out and full of come. A little puffy from being knotted so many times. He should’ve gotten you a plug for after, something to keep his come inside of you. 

If his cock wasn’t so heavy, Gaz would be tempted to lean down and kiss it a bit too. It feels wrong to push inside without at least a little send-off kiss, something soft to set your mind at ease before he fucks you six ways from Sunday. 

He doesn’t have the luxury of taking his time though; your temperature is rising again, skin hot to the touch. 

Your patience is thinning too. “Kyle, I can’t wait—I can’t. I need you—” 

“I know, baby, I know.”

He strips off the last of his clothes quickly, boxers getting tossed behind him somewhere, before crawling over you again. The head of his cock looks brutish against your slick opening when he lines it up, but it stretches so prettily when he starts to sink in, gravity doing the work for him. 

Your legs girdle his waist, pillowy thighs catching him when he sinks to the hilt, breasts moulding to his chest. You’re scorching hot inside, a sweltering, blistering wetness that squeezes his cock like a vice. 

“Baby…” 

He sounds broken, eviscerated. Gutted like a gralloched animal. 

Gaz is barely able to move, barely able to pull his hips back and hump forward, the mattress shifting under him. He could probably knot you just like that. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge. 

“Ohohohohoh—” you squeak when he grunts low and deep, bearing down on top of you.

Two strokes into the softest, wettest cunt of his life and his resolve fractures into a thousand parts. Shards too splintered to ever piece back together again. 

At the back of his mind, he thought he might be strong enough to resist temptation. Thought he wouldn’t need anything as barbaric as a mouthguard or a collar around your throat to keep him from giving in to his baser urges. 

Strength isn’t what kept his urges fenced in though. Fear is what’s haunted him for the last ten years—the fear that he wouldn’t be enough for you, that he wasn’t allowed to have you for some reason, doubt crawling into his ear like an insect and whispering to him that he had so much more to do in order to prove himself worthy of you, that you needed to be the one to invite him in. 

But you have, haven’t you? 

Two strokes into the love of his life’s pussy and Gaz relinquishes himself to instinct, dropping his head, teeth sinking into the mating gland sitting pretty at the crook of your neck. It gives almost too easily under his teeth. Soft and tender skin, and then the secretions fill his mouth, blood and ambrosia all at once. Sweet dandelion wine and honeyed nectar. 

You tense up around him instantly, a garbled, watery gasp jumping from your lips, and sharp fingernails bite into his shoulders.

“Oh fuck,” Gaz gasps into the side of your neck when he relaxes his bite, head spinning as it all snaps into place, every strand finally tightening into place, draped in fate like samite, ermine, and brocade. “Oh God, baby, I’m so sorry. Oh God, baby, fuuuuuuck…”

“Alpha?” you wheeze. 

“Yeah, baby, I’m here,” he sighs, laving his tongue over the hurt. Your pulse thrums under his tongue, nervous and fast. “You just felt—hng, fuck—felt so good. Couldn’t help m’self.”

“A-alpha, you—you bit me—”

“Sorry, love, I didn’t mean to. Just couldn’t help it.”

“It hurts,” you whimper. You sound like you’re on the verge of tears.

“I know, baby, I know—I’m sorry. M’gonna make it all better, okay?”

“You’re gonna make it better?” you ask, almost pathetically, the tears beading in the corners of your eyes. 

His goddamn heart nearly breaks at the sight of your tears. “Of course I will, baby. Not gonna let anything bad happen to you—not my omega. My mate.”

There’s blood on his lip but not an ounce of regret in his being. Gaz sits up on his haunches, hands digging into your waist when he repositions you. He rolls you over onto your side and lifts a leg over his shoulder, swollen lips splitting open with the stretch, and fuck if you aren’t dripping wet. His head lolls forward as he stares, tempted to put you right back down and drink straight from the source, hook both legs over his shoulders and just go to town. 

But he has a job to do and his knot is already fattening up at the base of his cock, desperate to be wedged in a soft, warm hole. 

One hand palms your belly while the other holds your leg in place as he shuffles forward, turgid cock still slick with your juices. He pulls his hand away from your stomach briefly to readjust his cock, lining it up with your hole against before sinking in, letting the weight of his body carry him forward. 

Your eyes roll back in your head, the whites so white that his teeth ache. Not a hint of iris or pupil. 

He bottoms out this time on the first stroke, the curly hairs at the base of his cock damp with your slick. Warm, wet walls squeeze around his cock, sucking him in deeper, and Gaz curses softly under his breath. 

“With me, love?” Gaz asks.

When you don’t respond right away, he gives your cheek a light tap. “M’okay…”

The first few thrusts are mindful, slow enough to gauge your reaction and ensure you aren’t overwhelmed. His instincts dig like a spike into the back of his head, but Gaz grits his teeth, forcing back the impulse to rut between your thighs like a mindless beast. There’ll be a time for that in the coming days. 

Then he bucks forward a bit rougher, his shoulders tightening, tendons in his neck straining when his jaw clenches. 

Your breath comes short and sharp. “Oh god, oh my god…”

“There we go,” Gaz purrs. “That better, baby?”

“H-huh…?” Disoriented, your eyes roll around in their sockets until they land on him. Recognition comes slow, if at all. Poor thing, so horny that you can’t even think straight. 

“That feel good? That feel better, baby? I’ll take care of everything in the morning—get all the paperwork sorted, tell your parents and friends, everything. Not gonna let you stress about anything. Just have to lie there and take it nice and deep.”

The thought alone nearly makes him come. He’ll do everything by the book in the morning. It appeals to him on a base level, the idea of taking care of everything for you, so entrenched in your life that you don’t even have to think with him around. 

No more holding back, his beast rumbles in his chest.

We’ve always been worthy of this.

The thing under his skin has gone hungry for far too many years. It has known where to go to satisfy itself, but waited instead for the meal to come to it. 

And it has. You have. Wobbly-lipped and desperate for him to bite and hold. 

His pace is frantic now, mind turned off and glutes flexing with every thrust, thighs burning with the effort to keep the rhythm. All that matters is burying himself in you as deep as physically possible. 

Sweat drips into his eyes. Blinking doesn’t help. The air compresses around him, squeezing him to the point of bursting. 

Your pretty tits bounce with every thrust and he has to touch them. Grab them. Mould his hand over them until his palm always remembers what your nipple feels like. He loves the sounds you make when he pinches them and slides them between his fingers. 

“Wanted to touch these for years,” Gaz growls. He cups his hand under your breast, plumping it up all nicely. “Every summer you’d wear these, uh, these low cut tops…and I’d be so fucking hard, thinking about how much I wanted to pull your shirt down and suck on them.” 

“You never—oh, oh, oh—” you start, interrupted when you come again, walls contracting around his length. Gaz has to grit his teeth to keep from coming as well, not ready to come just yet. 

This one leaves you near breathless, too spent to finish your sentence. Your channel milks his cock. 

He wants to hear it though. “What’s that, baby?” 

“You…you never…said anything.”

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me back.” His vulnerability is ripped from him without warning, so used to giving you everything that he doesn’t even stop to think about what it’ll do to him.

You scrunch up your face, pouting up at him and it’s bad for his heart, it’s so bad for his heart how smitten he is with you. “‘Course I did. I just thought—I thought you didn’t—I’m, ah…”

So close to coming again, you lose track of your words, but Gaz understands, and the implication leaves him short of breath. 

So much lost time. So much to make up for. 

He leans down, bracing himself over you again. Your skin tastes salty when he runs his tongue over the shell of your ear. “You gonna take my knot, baby?” 

“Yesyesyesyes—”

“Gonna let me come inside too?”

“Yesssss—” you hiss through your teeth, tears spilling over your waterlines.

“‘Course you are, perfect girl. Gonna let me come inside and knot you because you’re mine. You’re my girl—my omega—my mate—”

It’s right there, barely a klick away. His balls are drawn up tight, thighs tensed and burning, every inch of him poised on the edge, desperate to come. 

When you reach down to grab a handful of his arse, trying to pull him in closer, Gaz chokes on his breath, tipped right over the edge. His groin pulses when he comes, that first spurt so good that his vision goes spotty. 

It’s so good—

God.

It’s hard to think. Hard to breathe. 

The breath is punched out of him, the sudden swell of his knot winding him. It locks his hips in place, the swollen flesh snug in the wet embrace of your cunt. Under him, you gasp for breath, wide eyes staring up at him.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Gaz coos, cupping your cheek in his hand. “I’ve got you, love.”

His hips grind forward in absence of any movement. Your walls flutter around his knot, too stretched out to squeeze any tighter. The energy is sucked from his body with his come, each pulse making him shudder and gasp. You must be full to the brim with how much he comes.

When there’s nothing left in him to give, Gaz slumps forward, only his elbows catching his weight, hips pinning yours down to the bed until he rolls over tentatively, making sure to keep you pressed tight to his chest. 

There’s nothing he could say that would be better than just this—draped over you, forehead to forehead, soothing his omega. Rubbing the bridge of his nose against yours. Massaging your thigh when you shift, a little cramp in your hip. 

It comes like second nature to him. It’s always been his favourite part after all—the afterglow. Pillow talk and cuddling; sweet, slow kisses with swollen lips. The fact that it’s with you only makes him enjoy it more.

When his knot softens enough to dislodge, he pulls out of you and strokes your cheek when you whine in discomfort. The sight of your poor, battered cunt makes him wince. 

He wets a hand towel in the bathroom and comes back to find you in the same place as when he left you, dazed eyes watching him curiously. Kneeling at the edge of the bed, he parts your legs to either side and crawls in closer, starting with the mess along your inner thighs and the fold of your butt. 

“Stay still,” he growls when you squirm. You go still at the subtle command in his voice, alert even under the fog of heat.

Your legs still twitch when he swipes the cloth between your legs, wiping off his leaking spend and the slick still wet on your inner thighs, but you hold yourself as still as possible, nearly biting your lip off in the process. 

“T-thank you, alpha,” you whisper, chewing on your fingertip. 

He feels his cock twitch at that, still wet with your juices. Doesn’t take much for you to work him up. 

It isn’t long before your heat crests again and you’re crawling over Gaz, hands pinning his shoulders down to the mattress. He laughs. The sound dies in his throat when you line his shaft up with your hole and sink down in one smooth motion, shutting him up oh so effectively.

Cheeky little thing. 

A few days go missing, only recalled in chunks when he’s a bit more clear-headed. Feeding you fresh fruit and slices of cheese from his fingers as you whined on his knot. Licking his own spend out of you while holding your trembling thighs open, digging his fingers into your plush inner thighs. Sucking your beaded nipples into his mouth while gliding his fingers over your clit, your cunt a bit too sore to take his knot again; not so soon anyway. Carrying you into the bathroom for a quick soak before emptying the tub and bringing you back to the bed. 

All the while, feeling your presence like a phantom limb. Like an extension of himself. Every inch of your pleasure rippling across his skin, amplifying his own. 

If Gaz had known it would be like this—

he’d have moved heaven and hell to have it. 

It’s his now though. You’re his. Mated and bound to him. So intrinsically and indelibly tied to him that no earthly force could pull you apart. 

It’s why now he can feel your mounting anxiety like a prickle at the back of his head. It’s what wakes him up so suddenly, creamy golden light spilling across the sheets and furniture when he opens his eyes to the door to your bedroom ajar. 

You’re in the bathroom when Gaz walks in, touching the mostly healed mating mark on your neck. It’s barely a puckered scar, so subtle that he might have missed it.

“Did you mean to do it?” you ask. It’s not the question he expected, but then again, Gaz isn’t sure what he expected from you. 

He nods though. No sense in lying to you. “Yeah.”

It’s clear now that this was always going to be the natural end, that any tryst between the two of you would always end here, with his mark on your neck. 

He wraps his arms around you and pulls you into him, moulding you to his chest. In the mirror, you look exceptionally fragile, still shaky and brittle from your heat, and it makes his heart ache. 

“I didn’t think I would, but I wanted to. I never would’ve if I had any doubt.”

One day he’ll tell you everything. He’ll tell you why he waited so long, what held him back all these years when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing else would come close to this. 

“You didn’t used to smell like this,” you murmur, cold nose pressed into his collar bone. You seal your words with a deep inhale, drawing all of your breath into your lungs and holding it there for a moment before expelling it. 

“What do you mean?” Gaz asks. His lips twitch when you press your nose harder against his skin. 

“It’s different. It changed.”

“I swear it hasn’t,” he laughs. “I’ve always smelled like this.” 

He can feel the way you wrinkle your nose against his skin. “Liar. You used to smell… I don’t know. Maybe like this, but subtler. Fainter.” You exhale again, more contemplative this time. “It must’ve been my heat. Everything smells so much stronger now. It’s like breathing after being sick or something. Like my nose is clear or something.”

Gaz stares at your reflection from over your head while it washes over him. Of course his life would be ruled by a comedy of errors. What might’ve happened had you not gotten on suppressants all those years ago? Maybe nothing. Maybe the past is what it’s always been and there’s no sense in looking back and asking what if things had been better. Maybe regrets are like false idols in that way—there’s nothing holy in worshipping at the altar of them. 

He makes a mental note to keep this from Johnny. Gaz will never hear the end of it if he finds out. 

“What are we gonna do now?” you whisper.