old rancid men✅

It was a dark and stormy night. No, seriously. Settled deep in the Midwest as it was, Wrenwood was prone to regular lashings from storms so bad that they made you reconsider your choice of university with frequent and fervent sincerity. There were a plethora of reasons you’d ended up attending — price, location, job opportunities, price, price, price — but all of them seemed to pale in the face of every oncoming downpour. And even though you were frugal, everything about living there was just so damn expensive. Groceries in your fridge whittled, your electricity bill seemed to climb and climb and climb, and the hefty tuition bills charged to your account didn’t help either. Naturally, you sought out a part-time job. Such was the way of the student.

Of course, your schedule was restricted by your classes, which knocked out most of the well-paying options immediately. Pared down to part-time jobs with night shifts, you suffered through the hiring process for a half a dozen different positions and got rejected from all but one — a convenience store attendant, located a reasonable walking distance from your apartment. Not ideal, but beggars really could not be choosers. The guy who owned it seemed nice enough, if a bit harried, and you had shown up for your “interview” far overdressed and out of your element. Regardless, you got the job.

At first it had been an irritating intrusion on your schedule — another block stacked atop the perpetually teetering tower of responsibilities that you barely managed to keep balanced — but, like all things, you grew used to it. Nights previously spent studying, going out with friends, or even just sleeplessly scrolling your phone were now sacrificed to the upkeep of the store. Long stretches both flew and crawled in the liminal space of the linoleum aisles and half-stocked shelves. You never could quite dispel the hum of the fluorescents, no matter how loud the music in your earbuds was.

There were definitely worse jobs. Even though you were in a shadier part of Wrenwood, nobody seemed to bother you. Some regulars you grew to recognize. The rest were transient faces, stopping in for cigarettes or candy or some other frivolous vice paired with brief cash register conversation and a well wish. Most of your shifts were spent perched on a wobbly stool with your laptop balanced on the counter and some assignment or another open on the screen. Sure, day shift always left you a list of tasks — clean the bathroom, restock the shelves, prep the hot food bar — but nothing was ever that hard. Nor particularly time-consuming. In fact, without your studies dogging your every step and filling the hours of your shift, your job probably would have been way more boring. And, to top it off, the paychecks were sorely needed; you nearly felt your wallet weep in gratitude every time the direct deposit landed in your account.

Not so bad overall. Sure, you had occasional odd customers, but they didn’t bother you too much. Skeevy old men, persistent frat-esque guys your age, a few women who eyed the cigarettes behind the counter too hard for you to not squint at them. Standard fare. Not nearly enough to make you consider quitting. Not even the crop-up of murders around the city made you reconsider your schedule. Someone would have to pry the job from your cold dead hands before you ever put in a two-week notice. The thought made you huff with barely-there amusement, even as your face twisted into a resigned frown at the sight of the weather outside.

Hubris really would be your downfall one of these days. Even on your way to work, when you had watched the bronze dregs of the sunset succumb to the inexorable march of gathering thunderclouds, you hadn’t expected the rain to be that bad. Not enough to warrant an umbrella. You’d lived in Wrenwood for a few years now. To say you could handle rain was an understatement. Hell, you were even wearing a sweatshirt with a hood on it.

…Right. Watching sheaves of water spill down the windows past pasted-up advertisements just made your mood sink more and more. Neon signs across the street warped through the deluge; wobbly lines of blazing red and blue fought the diffuse glow spilling from your storefront through streaks of harsh rain. It drummed hard enough on the roof to be audible. Pelted the pavement with enough strength to bounce off already-gathered puddles. Every few minutes, thunder snarled outside, followed in short order by bone-white flashes that lit the damp street in stark detail for half-second increments.

In short, getting home was going to be miserable. Morning shift came to relieve you at just past four; you lingered by the counter for several minutes, making idle chatter in a hopeless attempt to prolong being dry. It didn’t make much difference. More time spent past your shift’s end just meant less time to sleep, and you had a class with mandatory attendance tomorrow (today?) that you did not plan on missing. If you were quick, you could make it home and get a reasonable night’s sleep in. Weighing your options between encroaching on much-needed rest and soaking yourself down to the bone for fifteen-ish minutes, you eventually (and begrudgingly) settled on the latter.

With a final goodbye to your coworker, you tugged your bag as close to your body as possible, then stepped into the back office to clock out. Another hundred-ish dollars to your next paycheck. It would be eaten sooner or later by some irritating extraneous expense, but having your hard-earned wages confirmed was some small comfort.

…Comfort that was, predictably, instantly eclipsed by the wash of icy water that hit your face on your first step outside the door. Flinching away from the downpour, you yanked your hood up and tightened the drawstrings, zipping the jacket all the way up to your chin. Your bag would just have to deal with the water stain; if your earbuds got fried, you were so fucked. Eyes squinted tight against the offensive rain, you pushed forward, leaving the warm, safe haven of the corner store with measurable regret leadening your footsteps.

Wrenwood in the day was only sort of dismal; the industrial core of the city (where you lived, of course) had long since been left behind for shinier, newer real-estate investments. Gutted for all its profitable assets and left to die, what had once been a bustling packing and shipping hub of the Midwest was now a rotting corpse of brick buildings and dingy alleyways. Water, incessant and intrusive, seeped into your shoes as you walked, chin tucked tight. Soon. You’d be home soon, and you could shower and collapse into bed, as was par for the course these days.

Every few seconds, you glanced up into the sheets of rain to make sure you weren’t on a collision course with anything. Or anyone. The latter didn’t really apply at this hour; for a city of its size, the streets were unnervingly empty late at night like this. One hand snaked under your hood to tug an earbud free, testing some unformed hypothesis. Nothing. Just rain, that sound of wet static crackling against pavement and puddles and brick siding. Visual and audial noise washed away anything further than five feet from you. A single car rolled by and you jumped despite yourself.

Whatever. Despite the lingering feeling of unease — only natural to feel disquieted in a normally-busy street now totally deserted, you assured yourself — you pushed onward. You’d made this walk a hundred times now, half of them at this hour. Nothing had ever bothered you. It was fine. You were fine.

Regardless, you tucked a hand behind your back and brushed over it in an attempt to dispel the crawling sensation running over your spine. Maybe it was just because of where you were. An actor on cue, the carcass of the Wrenwood Hotel loomed suddenly out of the dark, and you almost flinched.

It used to be nice. It used to be beautiful. Stately and grand, a leftover of when the city was younger and wealthier and roomier. At least, that was what your regulars told you. The hotel burned down years before you moved to Wrenwood, following the murder of its owner and an FBI agent. Huge thing. National news. You remembered hearing about it in high school, though it was never more than a blip on your feed. It was different, though, to read about it as a news excerpt on your phone and to walk past the place in real life. The smoked-out husk of the first floor sat, squalid and eye-level, as you walked by. Exposed support beams were still hung with scraps of peeled wallpaper — jagged teeth still decorated with flayed meat — and you averted your eyes from the darker remains of the lobby.

The place had always given you the creeps, to say the least. Some city official had promised to finally have it bulldozed this year — that you highly doubted — but it had been condemned since it had burned. Squatters didn’t even linger; it was strange to even get close to it, so seemingly devoid of life and yet so heavy you almost struggled to breathe in its presence. Jesus. Your own dramatics shocked you; it was, after all, just a rundown building, and one you walked by every day no less. For all intents and purposes, it should have been no different than every other shoddy health code violation you passed on your commute, and yet…

You shook it off. You were psyching yourself out for no reason. The late hour and your long shifts and generally exhausting life must have all been getting to you at once, and you felt it like a dead weight on your back. Soon. You’d be home soon. Blinking bleary eyes, you swung your head from its gravitational pull towards the derelict remains of the hotel and pushed onward. As you went to resettle yourself back into your hunched, generally-miserable posture, you caught sight of something in the crammed alleyway running down the side of your field of vision.

A person. No, two people. One was weird enough for the late hour. Two in an alleyway set all kinds of alarms off in your head. Tugging both earbuds loose, you, despite yourself, stopped in your tracks. You rescinded your earlier thought. Hubris wasn’t going to kill you. Nosiness was.

One of them laid flat on the ground, face-up to the rain that leaked past debris overhang and crossing telephone wires. The other was crouched down, leaning over the supine form with what looked like concern. You weren’t dumb. Maybe someone sprawled in an alley at four-whatever in the morning wasn’t there because of the most ideal circumstances… but you weren’t an asshole either. You were supposed to help, right? Or call someone, maybe?

Or maybe just ask… but something stayed your tongue. Maybe it was the same thing that stayed your feet. The distinction didn’t really matter. All you did was stand in the rain, water soaked deep into your shoes and jacket, peering through falling sheets as best you could. A long shaft of light fell from a separate streetlight, its glow just barely enough to highlight the people in the alley. Your knuckles tightened hard around the strap of your bag; the tip of your shoe dragged through a puddle as you leaned forward an inch. Some twenty feet away, mostly obscured by rain, all you could make out was their blurry forms. Some pale skin. The bleached-looking wet sheen of the mobile stranger’s coat… and the strangely limp way the other one moved. And then, in a rush of horrifying, immediate realization, it dawned on you why, exactly, that the other one was not moving at all. And sure, maybe “drunk” or “unconscious” could have explained away the lack of response, but the laxness of the motions, the strange weight, the unnervingly delicate way the other one handled it — they picked an arm up gently, then let it drop to the ground. Like poking roadkill to see if it was dead.

Because they were dead.

Because you were looking at a dead body.

Lead solidified in the pit of your stomach and dropped, and you stood there, stupid as a deer in headlights, staring at what was presumably a fresh crime scene. There was no rulebook for this. Nothing stated what you were supposed to do after Occam’s razoring yourself into witnessing a murder. Should you have expected this? You kept up with the news. There was a rash of dead bodies being discovered around the city, all with the same odd bruising covering their corpses. But nobody ever thinks it’s going to happen to them. You never think you’re going to come across a serial killer until the body’s staring you in the face. Some sense of virtue kicked in, suggesting meekly that you call the cops, and self-preservation stomped it out immediately. Like hell you were going to do that. A much better idea — keep walking — presented itself, and you took that one instead.

One step back. Water splashed up around your shoe. And then the kneeling person stood. Air whooshed out of your lungs in one harsh exhale; the chill you’d picked up was no longer just from the rain. Big. Bigger than any person you’d ever seen, even from a distance. They just kept standing, the motion continuing forever, legs too long to be human. When they turned around, motion slow and deliberate, every hair on your body snapped to attention.

You pivoted sharply on your heel and started to walk, pace just shy of running, hoping that if you pretended like you saw nothing — like you had just been passing by originally — then you’d be left alone. Something tightened in your chest, sharp and hard and paranoid, and you made the horrible mistake of looking behind you.

Holy hell. The stranger had cleared twenty feet of distance in seconds and was now standing where you had been moments prior. Standing. Looming. Enormous. Taller than you had even previously thought, so tall that it-they-he firmly straddled the line of inhuman. Long pale snakeskin billowed around thick legs, and half of a sallow face — barely visible through the rain — peeked from beneath a drawn hood. Panic shot down all your limbs at once, a violent full-body electric shock that spasmed your lungs in a hard gasp.

One arm raised. Something whizzed past your ear. The projectile disappeared into the downpour, too fast for your eyes to track, and holy Christ, you were running. Shot at? Had you just been shot at?

There was a certain exhilarated delirium that came with being pursued. Sprays of rainwater accompanied each strike of your feet against the pavement. Your heart had climbed straight into your throat and begun a violent, rabbit-quick slam in your ears; the hole left behind in your chest had tightened inexplicably. The taut ball behind your sternum fought to escape, threatening to rip free via your mouth in the form of uncontrollable laughter, or screaming, or something. The last time you’d been seriously chased was on the playground in elementary school. This was something else entirely. This, in fact, was running for your life from a monster that looked as though it had crawled straight from the recess of a childhood nightmare. You wanted to scream. You wanted to cry. Your lungs burned with exertion, though, and you couldn’t afford to divert oxygen toward making noise. It was there, it was still chasing you, and it had to have been gaining.

The rain, relentless as it was, blinded you and tripped you up in your already terrified state. Helpless to your hostile environment, you slipped on errant soaked detritus and nearly fell. For a brief, horrifying moment you pitched forward, legs barely wheeling under your weight fast enough to keep you upright. As you righted from your stumble, something pierced your back, right above your shoulder blade; at the sharp pinch of pain, you let out a yelp, eyes bugging out of your skull.

Blindly, dumbly, you slapped a hand against your back until rain-wet fingers slid over a smooth object. You grasped at it, skidding to a graceless halt and gasping for air in order to study the thing. The weight of it was unfamiliar in your palm. Light. Unobtrusive.

Smooth glass rolled against your damp skin for a moment, following the cup of your hand. In your panic-dumb state, you didn’t realize what it was for a moment. The long needle on the end, tipped in ruby from your blood, and the milliliter markings on the side clued you in.

A dart. He’d shot you with a dart gun. And judging from the droplets of leftover liquid left inside the tube, it had immediately emptied into you upon contact.

“Oh, God, no,” you stammered out loud, voice weak and lost to the endless wash of the rain. The empty dart slipped from your palm in your mounting horror, and you stared at your twitching fingers for a second before whipping around on your heel. Your pursuer had halted some ways away — farther than you thought — with their arm outstretched in a familiar pose. Holding the gun, you extrapolated.

A thousand nightmarish possibilities washed over you, each worse than the last. Maybe it was some neurotoxin and you’d be dead in under a minute. Or maybe it was a paralytic designed to immobilize you — or an anesthetic — in order to haul you away into the darkness of Wrenwood’s back alleys, never to be seen again. This had to be some nightmare that you’d wake up from — but the rain was too cold, too wet, too real, and the monster standing down the sidewalk, just outside the glow of the nearest streetlight, did not vanish even when you blinked.

For what it was worth, you didn’t collapse. Nor did you pass out. But you definitely felt something. As foreign as it was, it took a moment to recognize the feeling. Warmth. Liquid heat surged through your veins, centered at the pinpoint on your shoulder. It fought the chill of the rain with such sudden intensity that you were sent reeling while standing, twitching from sensation. From your back all the way down to the tips of your fingers, and even further down to your pelvis, to your legs, so far down in your feet that it felt like you were leaching heat into the pavement.

What was happening to you? What did you get injected with? It wasn’t a high — or if it was, it was like none you’d ever experienced before. You were just so hot. Every vein and capillary felt dilated, blood all warm and loose and pressed right up against your skin from the inside. Errant raindrops on your cheek felt as though they were going to sizzle straight off you like a hot pan.

The stranger’s arm lowered. Panting through your mouth in an attempt to calm your heart rate, you stared at the monstrous form and it stared right back at you. Distinctly Nietzschean. From here, you could see more detail. Did you want to see more detail? Fat droplets slid heavy down the long, long, long snakeskin coat. Shiny black boots stood, unmarred and unbothered by the weather like the wearer, in a puddle that would have been ankle-deep for you. And that face. Still half-obscured by the hood, you could see now that it was not just pale but gray, completely devoid of color or life, marred by whorls and lines all the way down. A dark scar jutted down the center of the chin, trailed all the way down the throat and disappeared beneath the clasps of the shirt. So human and so not.

A slow tilt of the head inspired a fresh wave of terror. Even though you were superheated, your mind was clear enough to still feel fear, and it mounted at the flagrant act of being studied. Considered. Every motion of yours was tracked by a predator you knew you had no chance against. You stumbled back a few steps, cold and hot sweat both racing down the back of your already-soaked shirt, and threw yourself down the nearest alley. Movements sloppy with panic, you banged your hip painfully off a trash can and swore loudly. Tearfully. The harsh exclamation echoed off the wet brick siding that boxed you in on all sides.

Alleyway odor rose to meet you, untouched even by the downpour, and you felt nauseous on top of too hot and too cold and soaking wet. Sharp clicks — the report of boot heels against damp pavement — dogged your own rapid footsteps. Were you crying? You couldn’t tell. That tight ball in your chest had returned. You struggled to breathe around it as you were pursued down alley after alley, organs feeling as though they were slowly liquefying from molten heat.

A turn, a turn, another turn, and you—

Choked. Fingers snared in the hood of your jacket and yanked you backwards. Finally, the scream trapped behind your sternum broke loose — the sound was raw and hurt your throat as it ripped free. Soaked shoes sliding haplessly over the ground, you cried out as you were physically pulled back several feet; within seconds, hands like lead weights settled on your shoulders and physically spun you to really come face to face with your pursuer.

Or, rather, face to chest.

Violent, uncontrollable shivers kicked up over the entirety of your body as you craned your neck back, back, back to make real, true eye contact for the first time. And even that you weren’t afforded. The hood had shucked back a few inches at some point during the chase, revealing an intricate headpiece settled squarely over the eyes. Impassive lenses — one on the left, a triangle of three on the right — stared down at you; one of them glowed a menacing red, a scarlet pinpoint that burned to look at for too long.

Glowing red. Hot. Free word association surfaced in the panic-fear-exhaustion soup of your mind. You felt much like the end of a cigarette, what with all of the previous adjectives applying to you, and for all intents and purposes you were damn near close to burning out.

A smile split the sallow, cracked lips, and your eyes widened even against the rain. Teeth, crowded and crooked and golden, grinned down at you, wet with spit. Dim light reflected off them with flair. Not human. So not human. As if the stature and skin color hadn’t clued you in already.

Your mouth fell open to scream.

“Shh.” The stranger’s voice was remarkably measured, considering the circumstances. He (it?) didn’t even seem winded. “There’s no need for that.”

His hands were so large and so heavy that they effectively pinned your arms to your sides, despite resting on your shoulders. Although they were big enough that his thumbs brushed your collarbones, they remained still, letting the implication of strength do the work. Rings glinted along the edge of your vision, large and gaudy.

Living in a low-rent place as you did, rats were not an uncommon sight. A few times, you’d even had the unfortunate luck of stumbling across them stuck in a trap, metal bar snapped shut across the crushed neck and the small body limp in its unforgiving hold. Unpleasant, sure, but never anything memorable. Sympathizing, though, was a far cry from empathizing. Standing there in that alley, pinned down by something you had no understanding of, you knew suddenly exactly how those rats felt. So small, so alone, and so very subject to forces far beyond your resistance or control. “You gave quite the chase,” he continued. “But all things meet their end.” There was some unplaceable lilt in his words, a self-assuredness that crawled into your ears and curled against your tympanic membrane.

“You— what— who are you?” you choked, struggling to process his enormity through the heat cooking your brain.

He tilted his head a few degrees, as if considering the question for a moment. “Forgive me. I have been quite rude, haven’t I? Dr. Victor Gideon. And you are?”

“What did you do to me?” Panic sharpened your tone into an accusatory knife as you bulldozed right through the thin, ridiculous veneer of courtesy. “You— you killed someone, I saw it, I saw in the alley, I—”

He tutted gently, lips pursing. “So much for formalities,” he mused to himself. The fingers on your arms tightened just barely, and a fresh surge of heat crashed over you from your biceps downward. “Yes, what did I do to you?”

The contemplating question brought itself to the forefront of your mind. Heart rate still jacked up from warmth and terror, you couldn’t quite bring yourself down into lucidity, no matter how hard you tried. All the damp rainy air you sucked in through your open mouth seemingly did nothing against the waves of heat that washed over you every few seconds. How ironic — the worst fever you’d ever felt, and you were soaked to the bone in icy water.

Even worse, you started to itch. It was easy enough to ignore at first, especially when you had been sprinting away, but now… everywhere felt constricted. Like you were too big for your own skin, like something was pressing along all your seams from the inside. And it seemed especially bothersome on your upper half, radiating outward from where the weight of his hands pinned down your arms. Were you dying?

“I feel sick,” you started tremulously, unable to stop the outpour of words. “I’m so hot, I can’t even… What— what was in there? What did you put in me?” Rawness shredded the edge of your words, shaky with tears. Fear had rendered you to something simpler, so embarrassingly stupid and hysteric compared to the stranger’s— Dr. Gideon’s calm collectedness.

He gave you a long up and down look. Not lecherous. Scanning. Gentle whirring started up from somewhere far above your head — the small red lens of his goggles flared in activation.

“I have to admit, I simply intended to dispose of you. But this reaction… Unbelievable. A miracle.” It wasn’t really an answer to your question. His thumbs stroked over your collarbones through your shirt, and your entire body shuddered in response. Sodden fabric rubbed against your feverish skin, and a jolt of warmth shot all the way down to your pelvis.

Your pelvis? Your knees buckled, body buoyed by his gentle, solid grip, and your jaw hung slack in shock. Some of the initial warmth still lingered, a pervasive buzz nestled right beneath your epidermis. Otherwise, it had consolidated itself into a sluggish drip of molten honey, saccharine and searing, that trickled down your spine and settled itself right in between your thighs.

You were aroused. Horrifically, unbelievably so. Fresh dread washed over the still-lucid parts of your struggling brain. Whatever was inside of you was changing you, and it was making you helpless to every touch of his ridiculously gentle, ridiculously large hands. 

A dark tongue flickered out into the rain for a moment. You barely caught it before you were being effortlessly lifted; a shaky yelp fell free of your mouth as your shoes were pulled off the pavement. His grip tightened some, hands shifting downwards to pin your elbows to your sides so he didn’t drop you. No visible or audible effort. Like you weighed nothing. The obvious strength displayed so casually elicited a shameless, weak groan from your chest.

Now eye-level, you stared into Dr. Gideon’s goggles from beneath heavy lids, feeling every square inch of contact on your skin and breathing through an open mouth.

His tongue flicked out again (forked, you noticed), head leaning forward to get within the general vicinity of your neck. Sweet rot filled your nose — he smelled like something long dead, misted with strong antiseptic — but you didn’t even flinch, too focused on his proximity. He must have heard your pulse stagger, because a light chuckle huffed out of him. With a dizzying wave of engineered want, you realized he was smelling you, tasting the air radiating off your superheated skin.

“Unbelievable indeed.” His mouth remained open for a moment, cracked lips parted, and you caught a brief glimpse of slits flexing along his hard palate as he registered the scent of commingling fear and arousal. The unpleasant cocktail had mostly manifested itself through sweat, and a fucking lot of it.

“Please let me go,” you panted, although your conviction was vanishing by the second. Every beat of your overworked heart sent more of whatever he’d injected you with pulsing through your veins; all it did was worsen everything you felt.

He pulled his head back an inch, clicking his tongue, a note of amused pity in the soft murmur of his voice. “No, no. Not now. You’re much more… special than you realize, you know.” Obscured by his goggles, his eyes flicked over your burning face, dedicating your tortured expression to memory. “Besides… you don’t truly want that. You feel it. My master’s work.”

Every soft ‘S’ hissed on its way out of his mouth, so irresistibly persuasive that you found it difficult to disagree. Truth be told, you really didn’t, even if what he was saying made no sense. The longer he held you up there, broad palms affixing your arms to your sides, the more that pervading heat throbbed beneath the fly of your jeans. Humiliating. In the back of your mind — lucidity felt like a distant dream — you still felt scared. It was hard not to, considering what (who?) was cooing over you at the current moment. But if he had wanted to harm you, really harm you, wouldn’t he have done so already?

And he was so big, handling you so gently…

Your head lolled forward, vision swimming from both the rain and… whatever he had injected you with. Eyes sliding downward, you tracked the dark, ugly wound that slashed down his chin and trailed all the way down his chest. An autopsy scar for a sort-of corpse. Very fitting. The longer you stared at the bulk of his body, the more your delirious mind wandered; how would that tissue feel under your fingertips? Was he hot to the touch? Cool, as his pallor suggested? Smooth? Or was there hair dusting the barrel of his chest, and did it go further down, and Jesus, you’d like to see further down, wouldn’t you?

Something in you was disgusted, that reasonable part of your brain that had long since been shoved to the back by panic and whatever else was coursing through your veins at the moment. He smelled like death, and his skin was cracked and veined along the edges like peeling makeup, and Christ, you had witnessed him toying with a corpse (of his own making, no doubt), and yet… every second he held you aloft, every word that slipped free of his lips — so deliberate, so methodical — it all seemed to compound into a single shiv of desperation currently digging into your lower abdomen.

He must have taken pity on the way you were slowly melting through his fingers, because his elbows bent and he pulled you close enough that your heaving chest brushed his. Tucking his mouth near your ear, you shuddered when he spoke; that calm drawl sent arousal lancing down your spine like heat lightning.

“Let me alleviate your… symptoms,” he offered. “And then we will see what a miracle you really are.” Something wove into his voice at the end, an exhalation that softened the word, all breathy and shaky.

Whatever the hell he was talking about, you didn’t care. You were running a fever that should have killed a normal person. Rain competed with sweat, droplets racing each other down the curve of your face. Your cunt was aching for something, anything, in it at this point, and here was the good doctor offering treatment. Who were you to refuse?

“Please,” you breathed into negative space, and he huffed against your ear, pleased. As if he didn’t already know your answer.

“Wonderful.” That massive head tilted, and a damp, featherlight touch against your searing hot neck drew a true moan from you. It flickered a few times more, and you realized that it was his tongue, escalating from smelling to tasting.

Even his restraint struggled. Mere seconds passed before he abandoned the delicacy and really slid his tongue over the side of your neck, drawing up the sweat and rainwater and dregs of perfume with greed. A groan rolled from his own chest, vibrating against your skin, and you clenched your hands into fists so tightly, you damn near punctured your palms with your nails. Forked. Right. The twin tips of his tongue were foreign sensations, but God, not at all unwelcome.

His mouth paused, open, wet muscle held frozen against your skin, and you almost cried from lack of stimulation. Long inhalations pulled over your skin; the feeling of him sucking in your scent, feeding those flaring slits, made you slump in his grip. You wanted to reciprocate. Or escalate. One of the two. Either way, it required not being several feet off the ground with your arms locked to your sides, and you were so febrile with want that you were ready to start squirming in his hands.

A soft, wet noise signaled him pulling his tongue back into his mouth; sharp teeth brushed against your slick throat as he retracted in full.

“Perfect,” he hissed, gilded teeth glinting in a jagged grin as he gave your flushed face a once-over. “All of my research, and I had never once considered this. We have so much to do.”

The world spun around you for a moment, wet pavement and chipped brick smearing across your vision as you were physically shifted from upright to decidedly not. He deposited your warm, twitchy body over his shoulder with no effort; the action drew a groan from you. With the repositioning jostling your shoulders, your bag slipped down your arm, taking your earbuds and phone with it. Gravity snatched up your possessions with a vengeance; you watched through bleary eyes as everything fell to the ground with a wet thump.

You couldn’t find it in you to care. Your bag being tossed to the pavement seemed a distant concern compared to the way the bulk of his shoulder felt pressing into your stomach. Thick fingers curled around the back of your thigh, just above your knee, and pressed inward to secure you, maddeningly close to your cunt. God, please, yes, your brain whined. With nowhere else to express your frustrations, you clawed and pulled at the back of his coat in random intervals, kneading the rain-slick snakeskin like a cat.

The trip took several years and no time at all. In the course of your panic, you hadn’t realized where exactly you’d been chased to. A turn, a turn, another turn. And then he’d caught you. You’d gone in a circle, all the way back around to an alley adjacent to the ruins of the hotel.

Everything went mute. Rain no longer soaked your back. Old char and decaying wood filled your sinuses, accompanied by the flowery scent of rot. In the hotel. You were in the hotel. He was carrying you in there. Something in the back of your head shrieked in alarm — if you go in, you’re never going out — and you ignored it immediately when his fingers lightly squeezed your thigh to ensure your stability. He stepped through a few doorways — you heard him musing to himself intermittently, mentioning names you didn’t recognize or even care to parse — and moved through the smoked-out husk of the once-grand lobby with practiced ease.

Stairs. You were going up. You went up. He hooked a sharp turn. Opened a door. Ancient hinges squealed, metal fighting metal as he entered.

“Ah. This should do nicely.”

You didn’t care. He could have fucked you in that alley and you wouldn’t have minded.

“Allow me to apologize for the choice of venue,” he said, strange methodical lilt still hanging in his words. “I would have much preferred to do this at my center, but… well. I doubt you would have lasted the trip.”

As he spoke, he pulled your pliant body off its perch and settled you onto the remains of what used to be a bed. Dust wheezed up around you, disturbed by the motion, and some of the box springs creaked ominously under your weight, but nothing snapped or poked you. Good enough. It didn’t really matter, because as soon as your arms were free, you were clawing for the zipper of your coat.

Your surroundings were dismal. Faint light glowed through the half-blown-out window from the street below; errant raindrops streaked into the room, wetting nearby floorboards. Wallpaper peeled down in long curls, exposing timeworn wood carved up by visiting squatters or nosy explorers. Furniture dotted the room. All of it was a blur. The man (still questioning that label) looming over you sucked in your attention like a black hole.

If Dr. Gideon had been tall while standing, he seemed doubly so from your vantage point lying down. Your eyes flicked wide, some kind of sense finally pushing through the heady delirium that was strangling your normally sound reasoning. The thing standing over you was not a person, and if he ever had been, those days were long since gone. You were trapped in a barely-standing building with something more than capable of killing you, and some mystery substance still pumping through your veins, threatening cardiac arrest. Something turned violently in your stomach at the realization that you no longer had a choice in whether or not you were leaving this hotel. Somewhere along the line, you had relinquished that responsibility to him.

Golden teeth glinted down at you. That smile had returned, stretching around off-color gums and cutting harsh lines into weathered cheeks. His head tilted, goggles catching the faint light; he scanned your body again with piqued interest, lingering on your torso as if peering right through your ribcage. Your fingers stuttered on your zipper.

“Come now,” he chided, leaning over you and sending his long shadow creeping up your sprawled body. A hole sawed itself through the bottom of your stomach and dropped. One massive hand, rings shining, came down. Fingers crooked, he brushed the backs of his knuckles delicately over the curve of your cheek. 

The skin-on-skin contact felt so ridiculously good that all sense of reasonable fear shattered immediately. He was overwhelmingly cool to the touch, a blessing against your searing-hot flesh. Pallid skin ghosted over your hairline, then down the side of your jaw; your teeth clenched in response.

Your reaction did not go unnoticed. It was less like you were a lover and more a particularly attractive experiment. He studied you with immense interest as he tried different stimuli out on you, pleased for some secret reason with all of your feedback. A few times, you caught his tongue darting out, forked flesh catching the air as it humidified from your damp skin. Smelling you, no doubt. He seemed particularly enthused by that.

“Sweet girl.” Fingers trailed down to your throat, nudging your jaw upward in order to press down on your jagged pulse. “So willing. Such a perfect vessel.”

You could be. You were. If he said so, you were. Desperation renewed, you tightened your hold on your zipper and ripped it downwards, shucking off the soaked fabric of your jacket and shoving it away from you on the bed. A short gasp fell from your mouth — the cool air was a phenomenal relief, but even that wasn’t enough.

“Yes,” he hissed, voice low and airy, surveying the way the damp fabric of your shirt clung to you like a second skin. Soft whirring filled the air above your head as his lenses refocused. His fingers dragged lower, touch incredibly gentle for a man of his size, and hooked carefully in the neckline of your top. “Such immediacy. We… may not even need Miss Ashcroft for our endeavors.”

His musings flew over your head. Redundant, unnecessary, inapplicable. Whoever Miss Ashcroft was didn’t matter; if you weren’t touched in the next ten seconds, you felt liable to explode. Broad fingertips pressed into the blood-hot skin of your exposed sternum, and you moaned at the light prodding.

“Please— lower, God, lower,” you gritted out, a fresh wave of embarrassment crashing over your already-hot face from how easily the pleading fell from your lips.

Soft shifting — the material of his jacket, his swept-back hair rustling over the collar — as he tipped his head to the side, pursing his lips while he considered you. “Can you feel it? Taking hold of you?” His fingers abandoned your neckline and trailed lower at your request, smoothing over your stomach. “I can see it. It’s in your blood, you know.”

The bottom hem of your shirt was pushed up. Every muscle in your abdomen twitched at the feeling of fingertips ghosting over the overlying fat. Your hips twitched upwards, inching off the tattered bed to chase more of the touch. Yes, you could feel it, couldn’t you? A molten fist had locked around your guts, its white-hot knuckles splayed around your intestines from the inside. Like a newly-generated hindbrain, it nudged your thoughts to places they never should’ve gone and kickstarted biological processes that should have stayed safely dormant.

Not the only hand I want buried in me, you thought deliriously, peeling your arms off the bed to fumble with the button of your jeans. With a frustrated grunt, you pried it open and all but tore the denim down over your hips. Dr. Gideon— Victor tutted gently and pushed your hands aside; you were more than willing to let him do the work, although you still writhed and huffed with manufactured impatience. More and more of him eclipsed your field of view, shrouded in his snake leather jacket and still grinning down at you with row upon row of crooked, wet gold.

He was horrifying to look at, really, but your desire-addled brain smoothed it over some. Maybe it was just the fact of how deep in the uncanny valley he was buried. He talked like a human. Walked like one, too, if you disregarded how long his strides were. But his corpse-gray skin — riddled with veins and peeling like paint and scaly, even, in some places — and his forked tongue locked behind gilded teeth, and the dark scar slashing down his chin and chest — all of it threw you off badly, raised warning flag after warning flag in your mind. Really, it triggered something deeply primitive; staring a predator in the face like this, in such a vulnerable state, was not something to aspire to.

And yet, there you were. There you were with thighs kicked open and face burning hotter than the surface of the Sun, desperate in your invitations for him to touch you.

Huge knuckles brushed the skin of your thighs as he tugged your jeans downward and collected your underwear along the way; you helped by toeing off your boots, which landed with obtrusive thumps somewhere on the battered wooden flooring. All of the fabric soon followed. Threadbare sheets, years-old and long since moth-eaten, rasped against the flushed skin of your ass.

Your thighs didn’t even attempt to close when the cool, stagnant air of the derelict room rushed to meet your damp cunt. You just wanted relief. 

His tongue darted out again, head jerking slightly at the obvious scent of your arousal. Jaw hanging slightly slack, he pulled in a long breath, staring down at your neglected sex for a long moment of consideration.

“Perfect,” he repeated, but you had a distant sense that it wasn’t exactly praise for your appearance. Or even you. “The culmination of progress, yes…” Words rasped out of him gently as that brick of a hand trailed downward, pallid touch grazing over the nest of coarse curls between your thighs. You keened helplessly. “...and the key to liberation. Though,” he slid a fingertip down the length of your soaked cunt, “there are many forms of… release.”

At the gentle push downward, a strangled noise tore itself free of your throat. His preoccupation with next and after and the future should have been worrying, but all your feverish brain could focus on was now, now, now. And even his clinical detachment was a veneer; his breathing had picked up into something shakier, words slurring into hisses more frequently and more bass creeping into the pitch of his voice. You had just as much of an effect on him as he was having on you.

“Victor,” you groaned, his name appearing at the forefront of your mind as a more effective means to beg. The reaction was immediate; a sharp hiss of a breath sucked in over his teeth, and his knuckles twitched against your swollen folds. “Please, it hurts, I need it—”

“Shh,” he soothed, though a curious quality had seeped into his vocal timbre. Strangled, somewhat. One broad fingertip pressed itself against your twitching entrance, and your hips immediately bucked to work it in. As big as two of your fingers combined (and maybe bigger), hot tears pricked at your eyes to accompany the wave of immeasurable relief that crashed over you at having something pushed inside. “Relax. Treatment is only as effective as you allow it to be.”

Cold. Uncomfortably so. And even despite the arousal drooling from your cunt, he was still so big. Chilled metal — his rings — pushed awkwardly against your hot flesh. Your walls spasmed around him, adjusting as best they could. Without warning, another digit joined the first, and the first spark of discomfort flared between your legs.

“Ah—!”

“Incredible,” he mused distantly, delighting in the wet sounds he drew from your cunt on each inward push. Your thighs twitched, entrance stretched around the width of his fingers. His rings butted up against the slick hole, threatening intrusion but never following through. “You’ve already prepared for me. For what’s to come.” A disbelieving chuckle wheezed out of him. “My master’s genius never ceases to amaze.”

Your fingers clawed fresh tears into the sheets, though you couldn’t care less. Lips parted to gasp and wheeze your way through the pleasure, your lids flickered shut; hot stabs of sensation shot up your spine with every methodical thrust of his hand. His ramblings — presented so calmly that they almost seemed sane — were just white noise, threads of bass buoyed on shaking, elated breaths that faded into the background beneath the sounds of your verbal and physical need.

Resistant metal shoved against your cunt again, then pressed. Your eyes flicked open in surprise, a shocked exclamation attempting to jut out of your mouth — and then the ring popped in, muscles flexing to allow the extra stretch. Knuckles curled against your walls, fingertips dragging against the roof of your cunt and hitting something delicious there, and you groaned, dumb with need. The pain, the insistence, something should have tipped you off or frightened you into sobriety — but you laid there, back arching and hips writhing, letting Dr. Gideon feed his fingers into you up to the knuckle.

Rivulets of your own arousal dripped down his hand, seeping out around the plug of his digits. He held his hand flush to you for several moments, no longer pumping but curling, massaging the twitching muscle with methodical intent. The rings pushed and shoved inside of you, their texture and temperature both odd and the stretch sending twinges of pain flaring down your thighs.

“Such wonderful acquiescence,” he purred, speech as soft as it was sibilant. “A perfect host. All you need is your command.” He flattened the meat of his palm against your swollen clit and you sobbed, back arching in your delirium. It was too much and not enough all at once — too full and too empty, too sensitive and too numb. Your thought from earlier aligned with his present words. Whatever was inside of you was changing you.

Sudden emptiness wracked you. With an obscene noise, he withdrew from your cunt, knuckles and rings and every other ridge on his fingers popping free. Your thighs jolted on reflex.

“No, no, no, please,” you started, spit-wet lips struggling to form the words. That maelstrom of vicious, aching need in your gut had been only temporarily quelled by the stretch of his fingers. Without them, it returned tenfold, angry and desperate like a tantrum buried among your own offal. Brain dissolving from internal heat, you lifted weak arms off the bed and reached out for him.

He had withdrawn, and you felt his absence massively. With gargantuan effort, you rolled your head off the bed to stare up at him properly, aching cunt still drooling and feeling as though it was puppeteering you. He had straightened up, and was studying where your arousal had trickled down his hand. Even through bleary eyes, you saw the way the glossy liquid caught the light; it had seeped into the valleys of the scaly plating running down the back of his hand, filling the cracks of his leathery skin.

Curiosity got the better of him, evidently. He brought his hand to his mouth, and that bastard tongue flicked out to drag twin tips down the rifts of his skin, collecting how you tasted. A hiss of interest left him, and even though his eyes were obscured by his headpiece, you felt them dart to your face with instant intrigue. Or maybe something hungrier.

Wading knee-deep through syrupy hysteria, you wanted to say something. Wanted to tell him to just make you finish, wanted to tell him to fix you, because your body was toeing the line of how much stimulus it could take, and you wanted, more than anything, to not be there. The realization should have been an icy deluge of shock — that you didn’t want this, you just wanted to be home — but it seemed a distant, unrelated train of thought compared to how badly the mess between your legs throbbed. Even if he let you go now (and that was a big if, considering the sizable print below his belt buckle), what would you do? Limp home and use your vibrator until its battery died? There was no telling when this feeling would go away. Or if it would go away.

He was the doctor, wasn’t he? He would make you feel better.

Enormous hands settled on your hips and squeezed the flesh there before lifting you up from that new anchor point. The bedsprings creaked as your weight was pulled off them, and you wheeled your arms back to clutch at the sheets again for support. Gravity bowed your spine, left the crown of your head brushing the mattress. Your legs hung limp in his grip, splayed open like a sprawled doll, and he pulled them apart in order to inspect your cunt from this new vantage point.

Breath — colder than it should have been — huffed over your folds; the featherlight brush of his tongue accompanied a brief suck of air as he took in your scent all over again. You groaned dizzily, fighting the blood trickling to your head.

“You’ll have to forgive me for the rush,” Victor murmured, voice constricted. “My work keeps me quite busy. So little time for, ah, pleasures of the flesh…”

With that, he lifted your hips to his mouth, and your jaw fell slack. Those cracked lips parted, and you caught a brief glimpse of his tongue slithering out in full before your head rolled back. His mouth was no warmer than the rest of him, but Christ, if it didn’t do the job. In a single wet slide, he dragged his tongue from your drooling hole to your clit and sent fireworks exploding behind your screwed-shut eyelids. The expanse of muscle was so big that it covered your cunt in its entirety when he held it flat, and when your swollen clit twitched against his tastebuds, he moaned against you.

Combined spit and arousal slid down your ass and hit the bed far beneath you; your thighs twitched helplessly in the surety of his grip and you threatened to tear more holes in the frayed sheets with how hard you white-knuckled them. With the blood fighting between rushing to your head and feeding your swollen cunt, you felt decidedly dazed, and every slide of his tongue through your folds was absolutely not helping. Did it really matter now whether the arousal you felt was manufactured or not? Pleasure was wringing you out for all you were worth, and your frayed nerves didn’t seem to care about whether or not you had actually wanted all of this pleasant touch to begin with. Warring with the tug of gravity, you pushed your hips against his mouth in weak rolls, greedy for more.

And more he gave. Aided by his size, he closed his lips around the entirety of your cunt (you wondered vaguely if this was what being on the receiving end of a blowjob felt like) in the messiest approximation of a kiss you’d ever experience; his tongue rolled along your folds as he sucked you into his mouth in totality. You wailed, the sounds of a dying animal tearing from your chest as you writhed in your uncomfortable arch. Unable to get away from the stimulation, you sieved through his fingers like sand, feverish mind struggling to keep up.

Seething gasps of barely distinguishable praise were pressed into your cunt, more vibrations than audible sound. Seeking a better hold on you, his hands pulled your thighs apart fractionally and he pushed his mouth against you; as he spoke, you felt the pricks of his uneven teeth against your most sensitive parts, as though he were preparing to tear a chunk out of you. Gilded fangs jabbed at you firmly enough to leave dental impressions — you were certain there would be bruised divots surrounding your cunt when he pulled away. If he pulled away. He certainly seemed happy enough buried between your legs.

The seal of his lips around you broke with a damp pop, but he remained where he was. Slick, ridged muscle ran up your cunt again, swallowing down your arousal before pushing upward; the swollen flesh of your clit rested heavily in the chevron-tip of his tongue, throbbing in that little valley in time with your heartbeat. The good doctor’s anguine qualities had not gone unnoticed, but you were quickly coming around to appreciate them rather than be put off — a learning curve that reached its peak when he inclined his head, goggles brushing your lower stomach, and pushed the twin tips of his tongue into you, keeping the heel of the muscle pressed against your clit.

Too much. Too much. The simmering fist of arousal that had been clenched in your gut since he’d caught you in the alleyway finally released its grip. Gasping and writhing, you shuddered through your orgasm — everything sounded so far away compared to the rushing of blood in your ears. Tightness abounded in your skull from your upside-down positioning, and there were dots dancing along the edge of your vision that surely didn’t mean anything good. All of it paled in comparison, though, to the hot fan of pleasure that emanated outwards from your cunt, and you rocked your hips in agonal motions against his tongue.

Victor remained still, letting you ride it out for what felt like years before lowering your hips to a much more agreeable position. Thick strings of spit connected your cunt to his mouth for several seconds, only giving way to eclipsing tension when he brought your body far enough down. Some of the blood pooling in your head finally evened back out, and you gasped as awareness came back to you.

“Magnificent.” The word was a single rapturous hiss. Wetness was smeared across the entirety of the lower half of his face. No embarrassment coursed through you. No shame warmed your cheeks. Just exhaustion.

Just exhaustion, and…

Your stomach sank.

Neediness throbbed in the pit of your stomach again. Again. Like an incoming tsunami, it had only receded temporarily before returning with force. Frustration welled up in your eyes, threatening to spill over your lash line in a humiliating display of defeat. You were so spent. All of the running, the touching, the stretching, all of his mouth — your body couldn’t handle much past it, and yet there it was, clamoring for more in its stupid animal desperation.

“Oh,” Victor hummed, false pity in his tone and something darker and much more excited thrumming beneath it. “It’s still within you. You can sense it, can’t you?”

Dread settled low in your stomach, curling its dead weight around your incessant arousal. His hands tightened on your hips and moved them again — your back slid over torn-up sheets, and you marveled distantly at his seemingly limitless strength — but not up. Towards. Your knees bumped the solid bulwark of his stomach before falling apart again, and he pushed his massive body between your legs with only a little repositioning. The feeling of being stretched flared along your inner thighs.

“What are you— gh, fuck!” Your question was cut off by the manual press of your sticky cunt against the intricate welding of his belt buckle. Body betraying you, your clit throbbed at the insistent pressure, wetness smearing flagrantly over the Ouroboros. Minute motions of his hips rocked the metal against your swollen sex with slick little sounds, and your breaths frayed into wheezes. It felt good. You didn’t want it to feel good. You wanted to be done.

“Yes,” he groaned, holding your body in contact with his. The ridged buckle dragged and slid over your clit and you spasmed at the touch, especially so soon after an orgasm. Oversensitivity spiked along your frame and you gasped, trying to keep your head above water. “You will— ah, you will be so much more. You are so much more. If I had only known sooner, yes...”

The sentence fragments made no sense, and sounded even worse forced through the wall of jagged wet gold that comprised his teeth. You crushed your cheek into the sheet — a bedspring poked obtrusively at you through the mattress — and sucked in air to keep from crying out. At this point your clit burned from the direct contact, but the differentiation between it being pleasurable and it being painful was falling away swiftly.

Your view tilted. He offloaded your body easily to one hand, palm splaying across your lower back to keep your hips lifted, and used the other to pry open his belt, fingers sliding over the slick metal. The jingling made you blink swiftly, moisture wicking from your mouth. You forced yourself up on shaking elbows just as he worked his fly down, and you kind of wished you hadn’t.

Proportionate everywhere, you realized immediately, staring down the length of his cock with rapidly mounting trepidation that almost instantly subsequently sharpened into honest terror. Close to the length of your forearm and just as thick, the jut of his cock didn’t look like a sexual organ as much as it did a weapon, and reality closed around your throat like a clamp vice. No, not reality. His hand. One broad palm wrapped gently around your neck and brought you up off your position on the bed; the other shifted to grip your hip tightly enough to support your weight without bearing it on your throat. Fully aloft, you twitched in his grip, unable to look away from his cock.

Not going to fit, you thought, the first clear sentence to cut through your fevered haze in what felt like hours. So not going to fit.

He didn’t even grab the base of it, just moved your body to line up your cunt with the head. Your hands grasped at anything in reach and came up with fistfuls of damp snakeskin.

“Wait, wait, I— I can’t,” you started, panic threading its way through your choppy words.

“You will.” Not a reassurance as much as it was a statement of fact. “Just another facet of treatment,” he hissed, shifting his hips slightly. “We won’t delay in administering it.”

There wasn’t much you could do. At the very least, your mystery condition combined with the previous orgasm had both slickened and loosened you up obscenely — even then, the press of his dripping head against your entrance made you blanch with apprehension. Too big. He was simply just too big. His fingers tightened around your throat just slightly, a reactionary flex to the feeling of your cunt sliding against his cock, and your pulse spiked. His self control had been nominal so far. And really, if he wanted to kill you, wouldn’t he have done it earlier? But despite your rationality, your slurried brain still felt that pulse of base terror at being in the grip of something so very capable of killing you. Should you writhe too hard or rebuke too harshly, he could very well just crush your neck and leave your half-naked body in the hotel for some poor soul to discover weeks later. A rat in a trap.

You swallowed hard enough that he felt you do it against his palm.

His thighs shifted apart an inch and he slid the head of his cock up and down your cunt a few times — pushing it over your clit in the process — before it eventually caught on your entrance. Bracing, you hooked an ankle loosely around his bulk and screwed your face up, unwilling to watch as you were split in two.

“Sweet thing.” Unimaginable pressure against your cunt and a hot flare of pain, and then— a slick pop as the head sank in. Your eyelids tightened shut so hard that you saw colors in all photonegatives for a brief moment. Sound fought to come out of your mouth and failed. A tremor ran through his massive frame at the feeling of your walls fluttering around his tip. “You were made for this. You were made for me.”

His voice balanced on cusp of harsh and soft, velvet gone throaty with want as he stretched you open. Conviction wove so well into his words that you wanted to believe them. Wouldn’t it be easier to believe them?

Fat veins throbbed against the rim of your entrance, constricting and twitching as he worked more of his cock into you. At some point, your breathing had hastened into shallow, quick gasps, your body lax in his grip to keep yourself from tearing open. So human and so not. The length of him was decorated liberally with strange ridges and scales like his hands, and the odd, leathery texture did not go unnoticed the more he fed into your struggling cunt.

Both hands tightened on your body, the one on your hip decidedly more so. With a short jerk, his hips jolted upward, shoving the last few inches in. At the same time, he pulled down, tugging your body down on his length like you were little more than a toy. The simultaneous motion bumped the broad head right into the obstinate block of your cervix, and you winced with an obvious grimace.

“So tight,” he marveled harshly. “The wonders truly never cease.”

He spoke through gritted teeth, gold flashing in your bleary vision for a moment before he tucked his chin to his chest and sucked in a supremely controlled breath. Even then, there was an audible tremor to it. You fought to breathe at all; his cock felt like it was nestled right in between your lungs, and you dared not move for fear of ripping yourself open.

And then his hips rocked, and you almost blacked out.

There had been some deep fear in you that Victor’s restraint would finally fail during this particular zenith — blurry half-formed images of him yanking you up and down his cock like a toy, uncaring of any blood or tears spurred by his actions — but it was far different. Like the rest of the encounter, he remained deliberate. Methodical. Steady pumps of his hips paired with careful up-and-downs of your body to match the movement. Your jaw hung slack with overstimulation and sheer exhaustion, unfocused eyes staring into the abyss of the room beyond his head.

“You’re, ah, doing so well,” he purred as he rocked up into you at a pace too fast and too slow for your muddled brain to handle. “So receptive, so willing…”

Maybe you should have been scared of the after. Warm pleasure unfurled in your stomach with each drag of his ridged cock against your overstimulated walls, culminating in a slow leak of wetness around the ridiculous stretch of your cunt. As much as it was fogging your mind, it felt good. But what about the after? When you were done? Was he just going to let you go? The way he spoke certainly implied not, and the insinuation that you weren’t going back to your apartment afterwards made something within you ice over with dread.

Another roll of his hips nudged against your cervix, and you found much purchase in the realization that, yes, laughter was the best medicine, but fear was proving to be one hell of an aphrodisiac. Your fingers twitched in their now-loose grasp of his coat. Every clench of your cunt around him felt unfinished with how stuffed he had you, like you couldn’t quite complete the motion around the intrusion.

Your world tilted again, only marginally. Shifted a few degrees back — now he pushed more forward rather than upward — your head lolled back, muscles lax with hazy euphoria and overexertion. The motion changed, though, and the feeling of him hooking his hips up on the in-thrust made stars explode across your vision. Stretched as much as you were, every part of your walls felt as though they were being stimulated by his cock, and the pressure on the ceiling of your cunt — dragging down that one delicious spot — was hauling you towards another orgasm shockingly fast.

Arm shaking, you forced yourself to release one fistful of snake-leather and instead dropped your hand to your cunt. The circles you drew over your clit were barely even shapes — mostly trembling back-and-forth lines — but they were good enough, and you cried out at the sorely-needed stimulation. He hissed at the feeling of your walls spasming around his length and responded in kind with a forward push.

The second orgasm felt like it was dragged out of you by force. A ragged whine tore from your throat and you twitched in his hands, mangled ecstasy flickering over your drained body. Your fingers slipped off your clit, hand draped limply between your thighs; your other hand tightened down hard in his coat, seeking any kind of anchor point as your climax rocked you.

His motions harshened some afterwards, hips graduating from rolling to really thrusting as he sought his own finish. Praises — slurred around the edges — fell from his sallow lips in between rough panting, and if you weren’t mistaken, a thin sheen of sweat had collected atop his pallid skin.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the words were choppy, slithering out one after the other in not-quite-separated succession, “wonderful, perfect.”

You barely hung onto consciousness when he pushed his hips flush to yours and came, cock kicking and pumping inside of you with jerks so violent they felt like they shook you from the inside out. It wasn’t warm — nothing about him was — but it was viscous and there was an egregious amount of it. A few more rolls of his pelvis pushed it as far it would go, the sticky head of his cock kissing your cervix painfully every time, before you felt him beginning to soften. No longer feeling fit to burst from every slight reposition, you figured it safe enough to roll your head up and twitch your hips in response.

His lips were parted, face downturned as he watched the way his cock slid out of you inch by inch. There was some resistance at the flare of the head, but a gentle tug pulled it free with a slick pop, and you flushed again at the noise. Thick cum immediately began a humiliating drip out of your cunt, the fluid sticky and catching on every dip and valley of your skin. Empty. You’d never felt so empty, despite the full load of cum fucked into you.

It remained heavily resting on your mound, ridiculous in size even when soft, and you stared at it with heavily-lidded eyes for a moment. Some of the ringing in your ears subsided. You remembered, slowly, where you were; that sweet scent of rot filled your nose all over again.

 Except that time it wasn’t from the dilapidated hotel room and its decaying furniture, it was from Victor’s mouth. He brought you up to face-level with him again, scanning your fucked-out expression from behind his lenses with a slowly growing smile on his face. His thumb stroked along your sweaty throat in what might have been fondness.

“You see it now.” His tone of restrained madness, absolute certainty in the insane, never left him. “How… special you are.”

You didn’t have words to voice agreement with. You just gaped at him like a dying fish, shallow breaths sucked over spit-wet lips. Maybe you did agree. Did it really matter if you didn’t?

A few beats passed. The only thing that signified the elapsing of any time at all was the steady, sluggish progression of cum down your inner thigh as he held you up and mused to himself.

…Something warm gathered between your legs, and dismay twisted in your chest. For a brief moment, you thought it was something else — prayed, actually it was something else, anything else, but you knew. After all, it was hard to mistake arousal for anything else, especially after this.

Either he felt your pulse spike or he just knew, because he smiled at you. The fingers around your throat tightened beyond a simple flex, and as fucked-out as you were, you didn’t even panic when you felt your consciousness fade.

The last thing you heard before slipping into blissful torpor was his voice.