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Adrian wasn’t a sentimental man. 

He walked the tightrope of psychopathy with a grace that most sane people lacked entirely. He didn’t flinch when he took a life, when he hurt someone, when someone hurt him. That lethal indifference to the conditions of his physical body let him do what he did, let him keep the streets clean. He’d take a bullet if he had to. Would kill a kid happily if Peacemaker couldn’t manage it. Anything for the cause, anything to ensure justice was carried out. 

He wasn’t sure if he was someone who felt love in the way others felt it, but he felt an equivalent. When you stripped him down to bare bones and organs, there were names carved messily on his heart just like anyone else. People who had managed to win his disgustingly solid loyalty, his devotee tendencies. Chris had been the first, then John, and now you. 

You hadn’t meant to put your name there, hadn't even realized he’d handed you the knife until the wound was already bleeding. You were nobody special, certainly not someone capable of dismantling an alien race. You were just a friend of a friend, someone who existed in quiet pockets of solitude and occasionally visited Emilia when you knew she was nearing an edge. That’s how it started, how he’d cemented himself as an irreplaceable aspect of the life you now shared with him. 

You worked a job that normal people worked, being different from them only in the tremendous weight of your worry. Your co-workers weren’t dating the deranged defender of their homely city - that was just a you thing. Your co-workers weren’t completely consumed by the possibility of a criminal getting the better of their partner, of having to see headlines about it, of having to watch people celebrate it. 

You were. You could barely breathe with the gravity of it sometimes. 

When the butterfly threat had been neutralized, you were thrilled to have Adrian go back to thieves and dealers. It wasn’t ideal, but he loved it, and you loved seeing him fulfilled. More importantly, he could handle those threats. He made it look easy with how equipped he was for it

Post 11th Street Kids, you and him had managed weeks of peace and domesticity. Nothing deadly hung over your heads anymore, just quiet nights and shared laughter over the absurd headlines being written about him. It was perfect, and it was calm, and it was yours. Something the two of you had all on your own.

After Chris tasked your lover with helping him clean up the corpse of his doppelganger, you knew that time was over. Something new was starting, and at the core of Adrian’s involvement was, yet again, Peacemaker. 

You never liked him much. You’d been excited to meet him after hearing the man you love speak so fondly of him. How he was a legend, how he was a role model, how they were best friends. After you’d met him, though, you saw the acidic truth that Adrian’s dedication wasn’t always reciprocated. In this case, it wasn’t even respected. 

You’d tried your hardest to voice it, to tell him what you’d felt, what you’d seen. How it seemed like Chris enjoyed him only as long as he was useful, only for the purposes he could serve. He’d looked heartbroken before you even finished talking, so you stopped. You cleaned it up, said Peacemaker just wasn’t your kind of person, but that Adrian was his own man. If he valued the friendship, that was what mattered. You showed your distaste through pointed stares and flat tones whenever you saw him, letting his pleasantries rot in the air like neglected fruit. 

Chris had been the cause of your first fight in months. Something entirely too burdensome for such a late hour. He’d called for Vigilante a little after 9, saying that he needed something in the other dimension, and he wanted backup for it. You told Adrian that the request was ludicrous, that not only was it late, but that it wasn’t his problem. Whatever strife the helmet-clad asshole was dealing with was something of his own doing. He should stay, go to bed, stop running to Chris’ every beck and call. 

He slammed the door on the way out. You went to bed angry. Something you both had promised never to do. 

The door didn’t slam on his way back in. He shut it gently with the hands of a man who’d lost a battle. His footsteps dragged, presumably staining the floor of your holy place with inevitable sins of the outside. It woke you up immediately, the irregularity. He didn’t walk like that. He didn’t open things like they’d yell at him if he pressed too hard. He entered spaces as he was, grand and malevolent. It made you nearly question his identity, question whether or not it was him who’d just walked into the bedroom. His breathing was audible for a moment, sounding like his lungs were shaking the oxygen out instead of fondly pushing. 

You sat up when it was clear he was standing still, waiting for something. The room was dark, but light from the window made him decently visible to eyes that had been in darkness for hours. You saw his lips part, as though he was trying to speak, but he just couldn’t. 

The sheets were parting around you before you even registered you were moving, allowing your legs to straighten as you stood up. You moved over to his slouched form, all the accumulated rage from before dissolving into nothing but cold air. Was he hurt? Why wasn’t he saying anything?

“Woah, hey.” His neck was craned down, eyes drooping cruelly to the floor, like he couldn’t bear the sight of you. Your hands burned with the heat of his flushed face, tilting his head back up to eye level. “What happened?” 

The second he felt the heat of your fingers, the warmth of life, he collapsed into you, forcing you on to the wrinkled sheets of your shared bed. His arms wrapped around you like a ravenous snake readying the prey for consumption. His forehead met your shoulder, nearly crushing you with how close he pressed himself. His cheeks were wet, he’d been crying. 

That put the fear of God in you. Adrian Chase didn’t cry. 

“Saw you die over there.” You were surprised at how cohesive his speech was, although slurred and thick with bottomless horror. His arms gripped tighter, somehow. Like he was trying to tuck you inside his chest to stop the ending he’d seen. “I saw you in the street and some guy just…” 

You didn’t have words that could properly convey the hurt radiating off of him. You weren’t equipped to talk him off this particular ledge.

You put your hand on the back of his head, wrapping both your arms harder against him. Reassurance felt wrong, and comfort felt unreachable with how shaken he was. He could clearly tell you were still alive in the world that was his, but it seemed like he couldn’t digest it. Like your voice, and your smell, and your presence wasn’t enough to stop the fact from slipping through the cracks in his heart. 

“I’ve just been sleeping, Adrian. I’m okay.” 

You said it as softly as you could, not wanting to shatter the stillness of the air. He nodded against your chest, but he still shook like he was watching what happened play on loop. 

“I know.” 

You sunk your head down slightly, kissing the side of his head and further messing up his curls that had puffed from the exertion of his outing.

You felt his hands find home on your hips, pushing his fingertips into the pliable flesh in a very specific way. Something he only did when he was needy, when he was aching for the intimacy of being taken, of being seen. 

His name slid through your barely parted lips, a warning in the softest degree. He was mourning, barely holding himself together enough to tell you what happened. You didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want him to do this and then regret in the morning. 

“Please, I know. Just need to feel you.” 

You went to object, truly. Some vague declaration of his ill mind, his sleep deprivation, his grief. The start of it met his ears both irrefutable and insignificantly. It didn’t matter what you’d almost said, because the latter half died off at the first roll of his hips. The attire you rested in every night was made of thinner material than the clothes you wore during the day, making it that much easier for him to catch you at just the right angle. 

A heavenly groan fled from his lips, settling as a tiny vibration against the skin of your neck. Your hands were gripping him tight. Tighter than anything that could be covered by the guise of comfort. 

This was greed. Something mindless and insurmountable found only in the childish grinding, in the shameful moisture once again flowing from his glossy eyes.

“Fuck - just like that. Just need this.” His head stayed put against the crook of your collarbone, as though you could shield him from whatever sights were hidden behind his eyelids. “Don’t even wanna be inside you. Just need you close to me.”  

Sounds you’d never heard yourself make were pouring mercilessly out of you, not even encroaching the territory of the man above you. He was pitiful, exhaling whimpers so sharp and so wonderful that they could have sliced your skin on impact. It was a magical thing to hold him like this, to be someone so deep within him that this was the result of seeing someone with your face fall victim to circumstance. 

He was evidently hard now, and you swear the material of his suit was even rougher when felt through more layers. It’s solid and it’s perfect. The friction of his pumping hips burns you in a way you’d never anticipated, licking stripes of smooth fire up the length of your spine. 

“You’re too good for me. ‘m sorry I need you so much.”

You couldn’t think properly enough to interject, simply resorting to shaking your head in disagreement. The pressure of his evident bulge made you continuously clench around nothing, made your inhibition pour out of your ears like soap. You could feel evidence of your own arousal soaking through your underwear. You needed him just as bad, just as carnally.

“But I really fucking do. Couldn’t live without you. Wouldn’t want to.” 

He was so strung out that his sentences were bleeding into each other, wobbly and coarse. He was certain of only one thing - you. Your state wasn’t proving much better, head dizzy and fingers tight in his hair. The rhythm you’d managed to find with him was innate, as though your body knew what his was doing before it’d even been considered. It felt so fucking good that you didn’t know how to be with him, didn’t know how to be anything in that moment except whatever he chose to make you. 

“Couldn’t live without you either, Adrian.” 

If someone had heard an isolated recording of that response, they would most likely assume you were inebriated. Some type of alcohol or laughing gas making your words loopy. Devoted, even. Like someone who’d found the keys to the universe. 

And being there with him, it felt like you just might have. 

“Shit -” 

You could tell he tried to warn you, tried to tell you that he was done for. He didn’t manage to get the cautionary remark out of his mouth, breathing one of the prettiest noises you’d ever heard into your neck like he was sealing a secret into you. Branding you with the time he’d cracked open before you, with the time you’d held his fragments in place. 

Maybe in the other world you were gone. A speck of dust to be blown away amongst all the other extinguished life. But here, you were his. 

And he was yours. 

The mutations hadn’t always been apparent. 

A bio-weapon mishap during the second world war had birthed the haphazard case file for a new oddity that dumbfounded scientists had dubbed Enhanced Genome Activity Disorder. The fallout of a genocide attempt had instead paved way to soldiers with increased strength and agility. They heard things they shouldn’t have, smelt around spaces like dogs, and itched at their gums when their canines started bulging. 

It had turned them rabid, way back when. The perfect pack to sick on enemies and the perfect way to build a reputation as a nation with feared strength. It worked flawlessly, for a short while. Their elasticity was greater than ever seen, bouncing back from non-lethal bullet wounds like they were paper cuts. The men were almost always found in high spirits, somehow alright with the hand they’d been dealt.  

Word spread about the impacts, and long before anyone could stop it, most of the planet was nearly unrecognizable. The weapon was gaseous, distributed across nations and consequently contracted like a world-wide wound that had been subdivided like something ethical. It was poison, above anything else. 

But it was progress. 

And so it was done. 

It wasn’t apocalyptic by any means. Many of the EGAD-affected men tore each other apart on the battlefield before they could reproduce. Some were inherently immune to the infection, staying perfectly human in the face of mass transformation. 

The studying came after the war was won. The remaining boys were moved to sites of examination, confined to the behaviors of a beast and the treatment of something lower than man, something lower than monster. 

The history of such brutality was preserved and peddled out to every sophomore textbook in the country. Every person knew vaguely what had been done back then. They knew vaguely that EGAD still got diagnosed once in a while; though, it was rarer than Halley’s comet and it was seen more as a handicap than anything revered. Anything respected. 

They taught you the classifications and buzz words as monotonously as any other atrocity done in the name of victory. Alpha, omega, heat, rut, bond. The lesson required a permission slip and a content warning but it was done as an honor to the hoards lost to the madness. It was a topic that made the students squirm, awkward glances and stupid jokes thrown out into silent classrooms in hopes of drawing attention away from the breeding patterns of the beings that had carried the nation to security. 

It was simply one of those necessary evils. Most were happy, and purely homosapian. The gene was massively recessive, hardly a thought anymore with how unlikely it was to present as generations continued. 

It’s why, upon learning that the attending for your new place of education had presented, it made you a little nervous. It wasn’t out of judgement, or pity, or any other condescending trend of superiority that people with EGAD often got stuck with. It was just new. Something unfamiliar. 

Modern medicine had come a long way for those who lived with such a thing, and ferocity was a thing of the past. Scent neutralizer was sold over the counter in huffable sticks, suppressants were an easy oral tablet and an even easier prescription. But tales of old were still smeared on present day perceptions, as hard as you tried to push against it. 

He wouldn’t have gotten so high up if he was anything but capable. There was absolutely no threat, no reason to feel fear. 

The fact didn’t stop your hands from shaking as you stood in scrubs with three of your peers. It was primarily first-day jitters, but looking around, you couldn’t refrain from attempting a guess on who it was. You wondered greatly which busy man in doctor’s uniform had lived his life with such elevated abilities. 

There was no way for a human to spot it, lacking visibility or clean identifiers. You’d only know him by name, by reputation. 

He was the last to join your pre-shift huddle, every spilled introduction doing nothing to quell the anticipation you felt waiting for your curiosity to be sated. The senior residents explained the layout, the hierarchy, what your roles were as students. You seemed to be the middle child in your group of amateurs. The youngest was a prodigy and the eldest was your usual path as a med school attendee. 

Not that it mattered. This position was a unifier, nobody above and nobody below. The four of you were there to learn. 

Which sounded easy enough, but as the final piece of your ER puzzle took his place, you understood it might be a little bit more challenging that you’d been betting on. 

As he entered the building, before anyone else had noticed him do so, you took a chance to watch. It was creepy, and most likely unprofessional, but he had a way about him that called you to witness, called you simply to observe and marvel. 

He stopped for a second not far from the entryway, eyes moving jaggedly over bustling crowds. He didn’t seem particularly determined to find anything, more of a slightly confused onceover of his environment. You saw him inhale, his chest remaining expanded as he stood straighter, intentionally halting the exhale like he had a point to prove before he could release the oxygen. His hand was reaching into the pocket of his unzipped jacket at the same time, calmly tugging a small object from the inside of it. You saw him pop the top off and bring it to his nose, breathing it in with a slight recoil. 

Must have been a scent stick. You’d heard how foul they were. Wonderfully effective, but foul nonetheless. His shoulders slackened again, his rigid demeanor fading into something more friendly. Then he was walking over. 

He spoke with an aged voice and a preppy spirit. It seemed to reverberate, bounce around your ears like your brain wanted it to absorb slowly, wanted to savor it. His name was Dr. Robinavitch - Dr. Robby - and he was thrilled to see so many new faces. 

It was a quick break once he got there, promising each of the students that he was going to have a one-on-one meeting with you to properly speak. He’d find you at some point in the little pockets of reprieve he’d get every once and while. 

Aside from that, the shift was beginning. And that was that. 

You felt tiny flecks of shame kicking up in your stomach, twisting around the nerves that were already alight with the new-kid syndrome you got from being here. You’re sure you weren’t the first to acknowledge that Dr. Robby was attractive. Knew you weren’t, if the handcuffed old woman spewing mildly homophobic remarks was anything to go off of. 

Whatever was happening beneath your skin just felt off. Visceral, in a sense. Something you could feel deeper than the few unwelcomed butterflies that chittered close to your ribs. When his voice had sounded out, it’s impact was a meteor crash to the flat terrain of your well-maintained serenity. His entire presence was nearly a disturbance, rather than an assurance of peace. 

And his cologne. You could smell it as soon as he’d gotten close to you all. It seemed just strong enough to be too much. You felt your face crease a bit as it entered your orbit, looking around slightly to be met with nothing but undisturbed faces. It wasn’t unpleasant by any means, just overbearing, just there. 

It was remarkable how layered it was. A lot of mens’ perfume seemed to smell distantly similar to each other, but his was as unique as you’d experienced. Something tinged with campfire smoke and thunderstorms, before delving into something richer, something sweeter. It was addictive, in it’s own right. Masculine without being obscenely manly, softening in the center notes. 

It made sense that his coworkers would be used to it, but the students were just now being exposed. Surely they all were as surprised as you were. Maybe they just had better self control. 

He’d seen that look, unbeknownst to you. Watched the way your features had coiled against your will, watched the way you tried immediately to set yourself straight. 

Shifts at The Pitt were already long enough to nip at peoples’ heels, to test the limits of their sanity. 

He had a feeling this shift was going to be the longest one yet. 

You’d had a similar inclination at the beginning of the shift, and the hunch had proved impressively intuitive. 

The end was dawning as real as the sun set, fifteen grueling hours of initiation that had challenged the very beats of your heart with how much gore it had to offer finally settling down. Throughout the day, you’d watched Dr. Robby pull the respective newbies off to the side for no more than five minutes, engaging in a hushed conversation and then waving them back to work. You’d been waiting patiently, watching him scurry around in search of anyone aside from yourself. 

His avoidance wasn’t personal. Logically, it couldn’t be. But, unwillingly, you were a bit jealous. And even more frustrated at yourself for being jealous. 

In addition to the newfound emotional illness, you were quickly succumbing to the physical manifestation of the same such qualms. The entire ER was hot, a vapor slurry of excreted body heat in a tightly packed chamber. You felt the heaviness of it like a stamp spanning your skin, inky and pronounced. The back of your neck was damp with sweat, only worsening hours ago when the victims of PittFest started filing in. 

It hadn’t been a massacre, but it’d felt like one. The young souls you’d lost wandered the walkways amongst the injured bodies waiting on your willing hands. And you felt it. You felt everything. 

The lights glared back at your squinting eyes in a way they weren’t supposed to. The friendly, tough-but-gooey charge nurse had a voice that you’d liked when your shift had started, but now couldn’t listen to for more than a minute or so. All things capable of overloading your system were doing just that. You were as sensitive as a live wire, fraying and sparking in any given direction like you’d never handled anything before. It was nearly embarrassing. 

And the ER was so hot. Your body felt boiled, like if someone cut you open, you’d be well done inside, solidified and steaming from the slow broil. 

That smell had been the only thing keeping you tethered. Right when you felt your feet brush the precipice of a meltdown, it had a way of finding you, curling around you like sentient plumes of smoke. It’s like it sunk into you, pushing back at the impending feeling of overwhelm. It was so alarming, because you’d hardly even met the man, and he was at least a quarter-decade older than you, but it was so safe. 

Even when he was halfway across the grounds, that cologne would creep back to you. It was a wonder that nobody had complained, nobody had even questioned what thing was so strong that it could withstand the grime-filled hallways of a hospital. But not a blip was said, not a single displeasured remark was uttered, so you let it happen. You allowed it to be what it was. 

Quietly, though. A personal and one-sided tie to the man who would pass by you, look at you, and then look away as though that would undo what he’d just done. 

The limited finalities known about the brain were known to you. You’d liked biology in school. You understood chemicals, pheromones, comfort. On whatever subconscious or subatomic level it chose to appear on. That scent was sturdy, masculine, authoritative. 

Fatherly, in a slightly gross way that made your head spin too much to dwell on. 

You doubted you’d been the first flaccid creature to find a forced serenity in something so domineering. It was assuring to have an anchor when all you did was bend around things. You could mold yourself to it, could latch onto it. And, consequently, latch onto him. Just a little, just enough to be ashamed about it. 

You could nearly feel the night air on your tongue when he’d called your name. Your scrubs had been returned, normal clothes draped over your slumped figure. When you turned around, his state was much the same. 

Your heartbeat grazed lightly at the back of your throat. He looked so cozy. Simplicity wrapped in a pair of jeans and the same unzipped jacket. Domesticity painted on each individual fiber of fabric, a faux-paternal promise of invincibility, of something you could melt right into. 

It was warm, something that should have been entirely unappealing to the fever-stricken form you were approaching. It just wasn’t, somehow. In the same impossible way you’d felt him all day despite never feeling him before. 

He asked for you to hang back a minute for the check in, nodding sideways in the direction of the stairwell. The thought of dragging your stiff legs up stairs was unbearable. But he’d asked. So you walked. 

It was two floors up, him shortly saying that it was under renovation, that nobody ever came up here. Then he said nothing else until the trek was over. Until you were face to face, surrounded by solid walls and semi-transparent tarps dangling from the ceiling.  

The silence sliced through you without hesitation, malevolent in nature and crushing in execution. You were alone with him. He’d forced you to be alone with him and he wasn’t saying anything. That scent was so strong up close. You questioned for the nth time how anyone ever managed to stay away from him when he smelled so good.

You didn’t shy away from the eye contact he held, looking frightened into the split galaxies pooling in his irises. You were confused. He was expectant. 

He finally sighed, a long exhale triggering the end of whatever bridge he’d been building in the quiet. 

“You broke my scent stick.” 

It hadn’t even been close to what you’d thought he was going to lead with. You swallowed your nerves in search of clarity.

“What?” 

The few times you’d managed to stare at him without him staring back, he’d been clawing the thing out of his pocket and huffing it like it was the one thing that could save him. It certainly hadn’t seemed broken. He’d even stopped recoiling after the second or third hit, needy enough for the salvation that it didn’t bother him anymore. 

He reached carelessly into his pocket, pulling out the capped container and holding it like it was worth nothing. To him, it probably was. Inexpensive and indefinitely needed. 

“There’s only about twelve doses in these things. Had this one for years. Never had to use it much before today.” 

His voice wasn’t harsh, but it was missing the soapy kindness it’d held this morning. You’re sure the shift had taken most of that with it, but part of you feared it was your fault. His tone remained soft in the center, just hardened a bit around the edges. It wouldn’t have been anything noteworthy if it’d been anyone else, but something about the fact it was him, it made you want to fix it. Made you skittish. 

You almost apologized in response to what he’d said, but he didn’t let you. He kept speaking. 

“I don’t mean to be blunt, but individuals with EGAD are required to notify their employers about it. There are rules for an alpha/omega dynamic in the workplace. Especially for ones in your,” he took a breath in, his jaw tightening in alliance with the action. “...condition.” 

Confusion lined your face, creasing the malleable parts and drilling down into the immovable ones. 

“No - I -” You weren’t even sure what to say in a situation like this. He was so sure. He was telling you this like you’d say sorry for the inconvenience and solve an already solved problem. “I don’t have EGAD. Why would you think I have EGAD?” 

You were close enough to be able to watch his eyes soften, slackening in a sympathy-filled stare that adults gave children when they saw good intentions get caught up in insufficient expression.

“Is that a joke?”

Your own eyes widened in defense when he said that. 

“Of course not, no. I really…I don’t have it.” 

You could feel your head shaking back and forth in tune, moistening your eyes and weakening your knees. Halfway through your rebuttal, you felt the churning inkling of a cramp in your stomach, marching quickly towards full pain by the time you’d stopped talking. 

It felt like fire. Like the heat you’d been baking in all day had finally found your interior. You leaned your back against the wall, finding it unnecessary to use your dwindling strength to stand straight if you didn’t have to. 

“Okay.” 

HIs voice was quiet, and you watched his whole face soften this time, shifting something deep in the core of you. Like a sand dune caving in at the sight. 

“Well, you’re visibly woozy, and you’re sweating. You feel hot, yeah?” 

You nodded as an answer. He’d put his obsolete scent stick back in pocket not long after he’d taken it out. You’re really wishing he hadn’t. That haunting smell was all over you, all over everything. It seemed like it amplified the cramp, amplified the craziness you felt.

“You’re in heat. Textbook. And I can -” He stopped himself, opting for something less personable. “Alphas. We can…we can smell it. When it happens.” 

He clenched his hand once, reaching up to drag it along his jaw in what looked like an attempt to keep control in his grasp. “Been trying to drown you out all day - it’s just,” he shook his head, inhaling and regretting all over again, “it’s not working.”  

The denial seeped in like infection. You’d never shown signs, never exhibited any behavior that would hint towards this diagnosis. Most people with EGAD knew before they hit double digits. 

“No,” your eyes watered as you whispered out the word, more pleading than stating. “That’s impossible. I’d know. They would have seen it. No.” 

As your panic increased, he painted tiny reassurances over your rejections, and it helped. It soothed you like aloe on a sunburn. And that was bearable. Robby was comforting to everyone. He was meant to be, he was the overseer. That didn’t make it true. That didn’t mean anything.

But then he moved closer. An infinitely small step in the gaping void between you and who you thought you were. It didn’t even look intentional, but it happened. 

And it hurt. 

The pain in your stomach turned from a low smolder to the mean drag of a knife over every fleshy bit inside you. You felt a wave of heat roll over your shoulders like a volcanic tsunami, plunging every salvageable bit of you into ash thick enough to block out the sun. And it all went down. Just the faint promise of his proximity made you wetter than you think you’d ever been. You felt yourself soak straight through your underwear, your skin sweaty and breaths heaving. 

He felt that shift too, closing the distance to help stop you from slipping down the wall. 

“Hey. I got you, kid.” His hands held your face, keeping your line of sight strictly on him. It was impossible to move down when he was up. As horrifying as this realization was, you didn’t want to be apart from him. Even if it was by a few feet. 

He sounded as strung out as you felt, but his touch felt like a lifeline. A sinking ship failing to rescue a screaming sailor, simply enjoying the process of conjoined drowning instead. 

And the name. So unabashed in it’s depravity. He shouldn’t be calling you that. He wasn’t anything to you, wasn’t your protector. This whole thing was most likely his fault, and he had the audacity to infantilize you. But it kicked around like it meant something. It felt like everything. 

You heard yourself wheeze out something akin to a whimper, half at the pain, half at the feeling of disgusted arousal pricking it’s way down your spine. “Hurts-” 

Your cheeks were proudly housing your tears now, some dripping off your chin and some pooling in the long dip between his thumb and his pointer. It only served to smear the salt back across your face whenever he wiped fresh ones away. Nothing had even happened yet, and it felt so raw. 

His scent felt fused to your cells at this point, bone-deep and blade-sharp. It lined your chest cavity and festered out to wherever it could reach. It was the most divine undoing, tainting the world with the smell of heat and home. 

“I know it does, I know.” He spoke so soft. Like you were something so precious, so worthy of gentleness that he wouldn’t dare muddy the waters with any more brazen tones. “I can make it better,” his breath was warm and minty against your lips, and you nearly sobbed at the proposal. “Want me to make it better?” 

His face was so close that, when you nodded as vigorously as you did, your mouths brushed against each other. 

“Please.” 

It was as desperate as you’d ever sounded, but at this point, you were far too gone to care. Your entire being felt like a knot waiting to be untangled by his calloused hands. 

It was the last thing he registered before submerging himself in the sullied ocean of hormones and haze that was slowly filling up the unused floor of the hospital. The kiss was etched in totality, the clash of your teeth and the taste of your tongue instantly too addictive. It felt too much like forever, like something he’d never get over. 

He pushed harder into it, harder into you. The unyielding force of him silenced the searing in your stomach momentarily. Your body was bracing - happily, at that - for what was now set in motion. 

His hands were gone from your face, fingers gripping the pudge of your hips and tugging them forward. He wanted you as close as he could get you, unhinged in his mechanisms and bordering on barbaric in the way he maneuvered you. The eager press against him allowed his cock to slot right against the place you needed, hard as stone and leaking pearly drops beneath the denim confines.

The feeling forced noises out of both of you, a minuscule sound barrier settling between your lips for just a moment while they separated. You and him were back together before you could comprehend the departure. 

He knew, buried very deep, back with the sane part of his mind, that he shouldn’t be doing this with you. He was old enough to be your father, and this was a bad thing he was doing. This was evidently your first heat. Instead of being something sacred, something rare to be shared with someone you loved, your new boss was going to fuck you in a dilapidated, in-repair floor of your workplace. Twice your age, he also bore twice the responsibility. And he didn’t care about any of it. Not when you were half-mad and humping him like you’d die without it. 

“Nowhere in the hospital I could run to without smelling you.” You whined when he broke the kiss, his face moving down beneath your ear, inhaling right where most EGAD patients had an extra scent gland. “Could have fuckin’ killed that guy in triage for how he looked at you. My pretty girl, hm?” 

He didn’t even look at you while he said it. You felt his hand swallow the side of your neck his head wasn’t on. It was like he was trying to box the scent in, trying to hoard you close to his open maw, trying to eat you alive. 

He sounded like he’d lost the ability to filter out what he should be saying and what he shouldn’t, just speaking as it came and disregarding the possibility of rejection. As if you’d reject him. As if you could. The ownership made your lips part, your thoughts slur. You weren’t just pretty, you weren’t just a girl, you were his. It cued another one of those molten waves to crash over you, and even though it hadn’t been a sincere prompt, you nodded anyway. 

A confirmation. You were his. At least as long as you were here. 

You felt the exhale of a slight laugh against your neck, the feeling grazing a knuckle up each divot of your back. You got goosebumps from it, more evidence of the begrudging submission you were melting into. 

“Yeah? My pretty omega?” 

You would have nodded again, but he moved quicker than your dragging conscience could keep up with. The hand on your neck moved up to your face, stained with tear tracks and spit. He squished your cheeks in, just enough to make your lips pucker a little, just enough to be degrading, and nodded for you. Just a slight up and down, the perfect blend of arrogant and elegant. A gesture of control and nothing more. 

You made a noise you’re positive had never left you before, needy and primal and most likely putrid to anyone on the outside of whatever was happening. It was the signal he needed, though. A similar expression leaving him before he moved back up, mouth meeting yours somehow even rougher, even better. 

Your hands fumbled for the button on his jeans, coherent enough to know it was the thing you despised most in the world. The one thing keeping you from him. 

He was much less patient, opting to rip your pants at their seams instead of fussing over buttons or zippers. You’re sure you would have been angry if it’d been any other time, but now, you were just happy they were off. You couldn’t care less about the scraps or where they ended up. He tore the pathetic, saturated excuse for your underwear away all the same. 

You felt the sting in your stomach whip around again, pounding like a drum behind a brick wall. There were nerves somewhere beneath the need, but they couldn’t be accessed anymore. Just felt, considered, and ultimately deemed irrelevant. 

When you’d undone his button and fly, the both of you were grabbing and pulling at the fabric, pants and boxers lowering just enough to allow him freedom from the material. And you got why he was cocky. Flushed at the tip, and leaking, and pretty. Genuinely pretty. You should have guessed. You thought the rest of him was pretty, too. 

You hardly got to stare, maybe a millisecond of uninterrupted marveling before he was pulling your leg up around his hip and sinking in. 

“Thaat’s it, kid.” He slurred the syllable, patronizing and ruined and gruff. It made you clench, made him groan. “That’s it” 

“Robby-” 

Without the inhibition of fabric, your arousal was dripping down your thigh in opaque droplets that he hated seeing go to waste. But he couldn’t focus on that. He couldn’t focus on anything but the feel of you. 

You were much the same. It didn’t take much for him to bottom out, the moderate burn of the stretch lessened severely by how wet you were. It felt like seeing color for the first time, like the feeling of winter-chilled air in your lungs. It was such a vibrant feeling. Your neck eased, your head thumping against the wall as his forehead rested on your covered collarbone. 

“I know, sweetheart, I know.” He whispered it, the words seeping into the fabric of your shirt like something sacred. It felt sacred, felt special. “D’you feel better?” 

“Yes -” The exclamation balled in your throat as he pulled out, stopping with only his tip nestled inside you, and pushed right back in. Your back arched from the wall, leg tightening around his waist. “Feels better.” 

It did feel better. He repeated the motion, building a rhythm that was slow enough to let you feel every textured bit of his drags, his coarse hair rubbing perfectly against your clit every time he’d thrust all the way back in. The pain that had been so debilitating at the start of this was echoing out and rebounding back slightly less at the same pace he was moving. It all hurt enough to be significant, to add to the pleasure he was giving you. 

You’d never been so sensitive. Your sensory input and your emotions felt stripped bare,and all your nerves were taking after them. Each time he pushed back inside you felt consumed by it. Entirely and completely, like you could feel it in your throat. He brushed over spots that you’d never touched, reached depths that made your hands tighten around his shoulders just so you didn’t make your palms bleed. And he took it. He moaned at the pressure, at the carnal feeling of being so lost in someone that you hurt them and it only fans the flame. 

You felt the buildup too quickly, too intensely to be ready for it. You felt your internal tides pull back like all your lifeforce was being yanked back into that same volcanic tsunami. You could do nothing to stop it. You could do nothing but hope he’d be there to swim through it with you. 

You felt something happening to him, too. Felt him almost swelling, his movements feeling tighter each time his cock pushed back into you. You’d been familiar with most of the EGAD breeding specialities. It wasn’t all that different to average people, just heightened, feral. This you were unsure of. 

“What’s -” The heaviness of your breath, along with the way he was mouthing along your neck, made it increasingly hard to speak. “What’s happening?”

 “You’re ok.” That tone, and the scent, and how close you were made it so impossibly difficult not to trust him. There was gray in his beard, and his voice was like honey, and you couldn’t make yourself not believe him. “You’re a big girl. You can take me.” 

And you agreed. You could take him. You would do anything in this moment if he wanted you to. If it meant he’d keep fucking you. 

It didn’t take much longer for you to cum around him, an ushering moment of finality to the most painful awakening imaginable. You didn’t get a chance to warn him, didn’t get a chance to do anything aside from squeeze your eyes shut and sob out a fractured version of his name that made him groan into your neck. You tipped him over the edge, a punishing warm spill of him being trapped as he enlarged. It was like a lock, stretching you beyond what you were prepared for. 

It made your jaw drop, so full it was indescribable. Good and pure and somehow completely untainted in the midst of every filthy thing that had occurred. His teeth dragged over that spot below your ear, razor-sharp and pin-tipped. 

A part of you begged for it. Some quiet, banished cells that held no shame and abided only by basic biology. But even though you were far from sobered, you knew he couldn’t do that yet. 

“No,” you rasped. You hardly even knew him. Just that he smelled like every indulgence you’d ever craved and looked like serenity. “Don’t…don’t do that.” 

He exhaled over the spot, kissing the spot so solemnly it could have made your legs give out if you weren’t so plastered to him. 

He accepted it, as apprehensively as one could accept any unsatisfactory thing. There’d be time. There’d be more times like these. Lust-drunk and nature-driven. It’d happen eventually. 

That was one knowledge you mutually shared.  Bond.

The black hand was a mark of death. 

It was a point of no return for the recipients. A threat that had proven unbeatable.

And one had just been stamped over your name. Painted pretty on a greeting card and dropped in your mailbox as if it didn’t signify the end. 

You thought about calling him. About hounding anyone who would listen just to get the words out of your head. You knew why, you knew who. You knew every in and out of what had brought this on. Still, you hadn’t expected the mafia.

The Peaky Blinders could sweep street urchin dust easily under the rug, or conquer a power hungry Irishman and his measly influence. That was nothing. That was lightwork. 

This was suicide. Clean-cut and pre-determined. Inescapable. 

Calling wasn’t enough. It was too insincere for something so heavy. You and Tommy were far from ideal. Most days you barely functioned at all. But, you’d made a vow to grit your teeth and get through him. You’d made a vow to be his. And above all your frustration, your pride sat sure and steady. 

Your love for him, too. Whatever it meant to love Thomas Shelby. 

The large doors of the Arrow manor felt unfamiliar, though they were still technically yours. You’d been staying elsewhere for a while, bored into madness by the solitude and sick with worry over his constant bartering. The walk through the halls felt like punishment, like it was costing you something vital every second you wandered the space that was meant to be warm. That you were meant to be home in. 

You found him in the bedroom, agonizingly tracing the hedges at the front of the house with his eyes. He held whiskey in his hand, the bronze of it deep and devastating through the clearness of the glass. You didn’t drink much when alone. You’d almost missed the sight. 

When he turned, the glimmering lapis of his irises nearly knocked the balance out of your knees. Thomas Shelby was never shocked, never caught off guard.

But, in this moment, he looked lost.

Your presence was so unexpected that, for a second, he thought he’d imagined you entirely. It gutted you quietly, that he was so sure you’d given up on him. Your exhaustion and your anger had been a storm, an argument, time spent away. But it’d never been finality. It had never been a conclusion. Not to you, at least. 

“I got a black hand.” 

His face didn’t shift with surprise, didn’t morph in any way at all. He only nodded, all knowing and omnipotent like the prophetic bastard he was at his core. 

“You’ll be protected.” The tired rasp of his voice drew your attention to his rolled sleeves, the slouch of his shoulders. “I’m dealing with it.” 

You hummed, the absoluteness of your disbelief twinging the air with a bitterness that was reminiscent of the air just before you’d left. 

“Dealing with the Italian mob?” 

“We managed one Changretta.” The incident was a sour one. The place where this ordeal had begun. “Polly says our odds are favorable.” 

The predictions of Polly Gray were unforgiving, and as far as the Shelbys were concerned, were to be treated as inherent truth. Still, the facts were cold and glaring. This was a threat of immeasurable damage. 

“Polly’s been wrong before. Your men are outnumbered.” 

“Polly’s the only fucking hope I’ve got.” He raised the cup that he’d yet to finish, trying to chase the fear he was choking on with the burn of familiarity. “What do you suggest I do, eh? Let them come? Let them kill us?” 

You sighed, finding the exchange almost humorous with how unchanged he remained. How unwilling he was to bend for anything or anyone. Most people couldn’t see past the calm he projected, couldn’t get a peak past the stoicism. But there were cracks. Obvious cracks to anyone who knew him like you did. To anyone who saw him. He was a brilliant man, and an enviable leader. 

But he was a scared person. That’s what it all boiled down to in the end. 

“You look like hell, Tommy.” 

He flinched ever so slightly at the sound of his name in your mouth. It looked like it hurt, like it was the kind of ache that felt so good it nearly made you relinquish your life. 

“‘Course I look like hell.” He poured the last swig of that ambrosial mahogany past his open lips like an emphasis of his surrender. “I’ve got Italian gangsters breathing down my neck and I’ve been sleeping in an empty fuckin’ bed for weeks.” 

His dragging steps led him over to the aforementioned piece of furniture, collapsing into a seated position on the foot of it. You felt the urge to touch him burn the nerves of your fingers. You wanted to comfort him, wanted to be there like you always were.

It was just different. Though petty and seemingly insignificant now, still different. 

“Why did you come?”

In full honesty, that question didn’t have a solid answer. A part of you feared they’d already gotten to him, as nonsensical as that was. You’d wanted to see how much it was taking from him, to have such a colossal rapture stewing just beyond his sights. You suppose you needed a gauge on how empty he was, how much your choices had siphoned the life from him. 

And, deeper than that, you’d just wanted to see him. 

“Black hand’s a big fucking deal. Would you rather I called?” 

He was looking up at you, the depth of the grandiose blue that stained his irises still endless, still so full of effortless persistence. It was something you loved about him, how stubborn he was, how evidently he wore it if you knew how to read him. His emotion was always stirring in his eyes, always present. It was forced to congregate there, being denied entry to any other inch of his face most of the time. Many didn’t even know he could smile, could be content. 

Your expression was as sturdy as his was stone, a connection of pure will, pure endurance. It was never a competition with him, just a tether. That was what your relationship was. A repetition, a pattern. Changing shape over the years but never changing ideology. You were one of the only people he couldn’t command, one of the only people he didn’t want to command. 

“No.” His hand ran itself over the other in a method that looked self-soothing. Something he did when his fingers pulsed for the heat of a cigarette. He didn’t reach for one, though. You hated when he smoked in the bedroom. “It’s good you came.”

And, as if he couldn’t help himself, he spoke again. 

“It’s good to see you.” 

Tommy, contrary to what the masses believed, was quite an affectionate man. In his own quiet, discontented way. What should have been common courtesy was essentially the highest honor you could get from a Shelby. It wasn’t right by any means, but when you loved one, it felt like being given Heaven itself to hear such an emotional line. 

The appropriate response didn’t wander over to you, didn’t make itself known at all. You stood opposing him with nothing of value to say. You missed him too, of course you did. But he hadn’t cracked. Not yet. 

You couldn’t either. 

“It’s late. You should stay.” He watched you shift back and forth, the stillness of the room festering into the muscle of your legs, jostling them in a way that forced fidgeting. “Not safe to be driving at night with them after us.” 

“They’re after you and Arthur more than anyone. I think I’ll manage.” 

He stiffened just a little at the denial, squaring his shoulders a bit and tilting his head at you. 

“Well,” He nodded briefly, as though settling on a thought. “You can stay of your own volition or I can have Frances slash your tires. Up to you.”  

Your eyebrows raised at the proclamation. Something among the endless list of things he’d missed in your departure, your intolerance. 

“Christ.” The image of beautiful, wrinkled Frances wielding something sharp enough to cut your wheels in her marbled sewing fingers was nearly humorous. Less so when you looked him over, when you saw how serious he was. “Don’t you think blackmail’s a little below your pay grade, Tommy?”

Your gradual outrage made him smile a bit, amused by his ability to pull the right strings, to prod the soft spots of your armor. 

“It’s my company, love. I make the fuckin’ pay grade.” It was half full of humor and half full of sincerity. He wasn’t particularly good at comedic inflection, but he could do wit like no one else. This wasn’t really either of them. This was just arrogance. Just truth. “It’s for your own good.”

You scoffed, sarcasm bleeding an infectious homicidal inkling into the ice of your stare. It wasn’t full, though. He could see the fondness lurking somewhere beneath the glaciers. The comfort that the overbearing familiarity brought. 

“Fine. Spare Frances the trouble.” 

You’d never do anything at her expense. Tommy wasn’t cruel to those he thought useful, but he’d make her do this. You could see it in his posture, hear it in his voice. 

“I’ll sleep in the guest room.” 

It was the most silent shove of his hand, the most discreet and unknowing prompt you could muster. You should have moved, should have cemented your words with intention. With walking away. But you didn’t.

Couldn’t. 

The exhale he breathed was long, heavy with something burdensome. He stood up, shrugging lightly. 

“If you want.” 

It was the predecessor to something far grander than you were prepared for. He moved forward, and still, you stayed put. His walk was slow, a practiced ease in his steps that read like a man time bent around. He was right in front of you before long. So close that his air was yours, that the heat of his body permeated your personal space. It was reminiscent of more passion-filled times, the delinquent days of your relationship. 

It simmered, warming the spot that sat so deep within your stomach, only he had ever managed to reach it. 

“Sleep with the maids if you feel inclined. But, when that clock hits twelve,” 

He gestures to the gift on the wall, something bestowed to him as a sign of gratitude. It had always seemed significant to you that he’d chosen to put it in the space you two shared. Not in his office, or somewhere easily on display, but somewhere his.

“I’m leaving this room, and I’m comin’ to find you. No matter where you end up.” 

It was inexplicably difficult to maintain your indifference when he spoke like that. When he looked at you with such a ravenous ownership. That ring he’d put on your finger bound you to him in a way that even you didn’t know the full specifics of. Just that it did. Just that you were his, even in your mild bouts of self actualization. Even in the times you didn’t want to be. 

“What if I don’t want -” 

“Don’t fuckin’ start. You want it.” 

His tone was low, ushered out of his mouth and into the open arms of your awaiting ears. The words bounded back and forth in your head, echoing like they were something holy. 

“Could go years without seein’ you and I’d still know what you needing me looks like.”

Each syllable was like a knife, pierced between the bones of your ribcage and crooked just the right way, just enough to snag your heart. It felt like trying to breathe underwater, like anything you were pulling in just stayed. No exchange, no oxygen, no life. Just him. Just the absolutely incinerating feeling of standing so close. 

“Tell me,” You could practically feel your ears perk, your pupils dilate Ready to answer whatever he was asking of you. “When you were sleeping in Ada’s spare bed, did you miss this?”

You had.

You’d missed it more than you’d anticipated. The warmth, the comfort. The want. The cold had been bone-deep most nights. Torturous.

“Did you touch yourself thinking about how good it is when you’re not being difficult?”

The callout was staggering, air crawling into your lungs with such an immense stutter that it should have been impossible. He was so shameless. Always cunning and always aware of his own footsteps bypassing where the limits sat. Thomas Shelby didn’t have limits. 

He’d practically said it himself. He made the limits. Others just followed them. 

And, due to the seemingly permanent vacancy of where your oxygen was meant to be dispersed, your speech came out quiet as a whisper. Fully saturated and essentially dripping with all the pent up desire that had been forced to bubble unaccompanied for weeks. It was barely there at all, something silent for only the two of you to bask in. 

“Fuck you, Tom.” 

That was the line that reeled him in, made him close the distance. His mouth tasted like high-end whiskey and the cruelest purgatory. Somewhere you’d always end up no matter how hard you fought against the tide. 

An indecent noise sprung from the confines of your aching chest, dissolving into the kiss of the man you could never manage to free yourself from. He gave you one of his right back, gruff and aged. It was heavy with a mass you related to, something that’d been brewing. 

He spun you, forcing your steps to walk you the short distance back to the bed. He pushed you down, the impact making you bounce slightly. It loosened the tension you’d been carting around in the time spent alone. That newfound space prompted a brief laugh to leak from your open lips.

He raised his eyebrows, but a hint of a smile twisted wryly at the corners of his taunting expression. 

“Happy now, eh?” The last bit of your legs were extended, hanging a little off the bed. He got on top of you regardless, stooping down to be just barely touching his nose to yours. “Thought I made you miserable.” 

It had been a sentence of great regret. Something you’d said in a fleeting moment of exaggerated agony and a need to hurt him. 

As if you could. As if you’d ever want to. 

“You do.” You ran your hand beneath the sagging button-up, feeling his skin like you were clinging to life itself. Like he was your tether to anything fulfilling. “But I said yes, didn’t I?”

The strangling weight of your wedding band seemed heavier in the moment. A molten reminder of the claim he bore on you. The signal that others should bow their heads if you were near. Treat you like they would him. 

Surely you’d always known what you’d agreed to. 

Some wordless alignment punctured the airflow, lowly satisfaction blending into the frequency. You could hear his smugness even with nothing to punctuate it. It just seeped from him, like he was made of it. 

His nimble hands were rushing to get your clothes off, garments being stripped away without time to savor it. This was carnally driven, eagerness lining each and every button undone, every waistband yanked down. You aided the attempts, tugging at the cursed coverings until, eventually, they relented, baring the man you’d promised yourself to and leaving you just as undressed. 

Unprotected, more so. Nothing to hide behind anymore. 

He didn’t prolong the point, didn’t give any time for hesitancy. Tommy was never a man with inhibition. He moved with intention, moved like he knew where each step would land.

He was much the same as a lover. 

You felt the head of him trace up and down a few times, the minimal beads of his pre-cum warming the weeping parts of you. You’d forgotten the mess, forgotten the little shock that ran up the length of your spine when it hit you what was about to occur.  

Then, he was pressing in. Slow, easy, and life-ruiningly good. 

It hurt in the most rewarding way. The way that made it clear you’d feel it tomorrow, the way that was a consequence. It’d been weeks with nothing, and now he was giving everything. You feared for a moment that your body wouldn’t be able to adjust at all. That it would be too much, too deep. Too specific of a feeling. 

But he’d made it work. He always did. 

And when he started moving, your hand shot up to the hardened flesh of his bicep, squeezing like a warning. Like a life raft. Like it could save you from the sensation of being whole again.

Every precise drag in and out of you felt like carving a promise into the wood of a sacred tree. You could feel him everywhere, so far within you that your heart seemed to readjust it’s beating to match his pace. 

His hand came up, interlacing tenderly with yours and pinning it beside your head. It was a disgustingly intimate display of affection. Something that proved the verbal frigidity of the constant bickering didn’t represent the connection, didn’t win the fight against the pure devotion that the two of you held like an oath. 

The love won out. It always won out. 

A specific thrust had him perfectly on that special spot. It felt like fireflies in your head, nothing but a pleasant buzzing as your eyes shut, back arching slightly on reflex. 

“Ay, look at me.” 

The words were engraved into your jaw, his lips trailing kisses on any skin he could get to. You stared up at him, hazy and crestfallen from the way he gazed at you. 

“You pull a stunt like that again, and I’ll have Arthur drag you back here by your fuckin’ throat. You hear me?” 

“I’d like - mm -” Your attempts to match his authority with some semblance of your own was outpaced immediately by the perch of his fingers on your clit. The pattern they found was signature, one that sent you reeling every time. “Like to see him try, Tommy.” 

Your words were barely audible over your breathing, approaching an edge so strong that it almost scared you. The combined stimulation of all that he was doing was too fast, too consuming after the streak of celibacy you’d been on. 

Some warning chipped the bottoms of your teeth, scraped by on the way out of your mouth, but he didn’t accept it. He kept his motions consistent, coaxing you over that edge with quiet praises and promises of reform. It was like a trebuchet, hauling you into an orgasm so complete that it made your vision white for just a beat, made your fingers somehow tighter on his arm. 

He was the much same, letting go of the most stunning noises you’d ever heard, searing the soft flesh of your shoulder as he exhaled them into you. It was the kind of closeness that remade you, carved new indents that only one person could ever fit into. 

Him. You’d been reduced and rebuilt over and over to be a vessel for him. For all you felt for him. 

He didn’t pull out, didn’t move in a way that even suggested he was going to. He just stayed as he was, conjoined and completely fused. Even as his cum started to leak out around where he was softening, he didn’t budge. He simply ran his hands over the skin he’d been separated from for too long, simply existed in a rare moment of solitude with you. 

Thomas Shelby was an affectionate man. Especially when he could show it like this.

Adrian didn’t know how to listen. He was a pro at creating falsehoods in his mind and acting on them as if they were reality. The split hadn’t been a mutual one, sure. He hadn’t even registered that the words you’d uttered weeks ago were meant to hold finality. That it was meant to be the end.

The relationship hadn’t been long enough to scar permanently, but it was long enough for the absence of it to cut deep. Long enough to have exchanged I love yous and for you to practically suffocate when he didn’t come home on time. That was what prompted it, the unknowing. Rationally, it was better to sever that connection with your own scissors than have it be sawed in half by one of the many unruly villains he was determined to beat. You couldn’t handle him dying while your heart was still beating in his hands. You couldn’t lose yourself to the constant chance his heroism would kill him. 

You’d told him this a couple times, to which he responded simply by saying ‘I don’t have heroism. I just hate criminals.’ Which, in his defense, was true. It was fair to say you probably smoothed his edges a bit in your mind. Painted his fondness of the slaughter into something prettier, something noble. But, ultimately, you did love him. And he clearly felt something equivalent to love for you. 

It’s why he kept showing up, even when you’d told him he needed to take his clothes back home. It’s why you didn’t shut your curtains at night, knowing his red visor and ruddy heart were just out of sight. It’s why you couldn’t find it in yourself to refuse him when he was waiting to follow you upstairs. 

Your apartment building wasn’t a big one, housing your one bedroom between four walls that seemed to soak up any light available and leave nothing for the people in it. You returned your keys to their rightful spot, keeping away from Adrian even as he practically buzzed with the need to be close. It was something you’d grown in tune with over the months you’d been with him. He was an energy source all on his own, vibrating like a tuning fork that frustratingly could only ever sync up with your frequency. Meeting him for the first time had felt like some sort of cosmic collision. Now, you were stuck in the endless expansion of the hit, never satisfied but always somehow destructive.

“Why are you being so weird lately?” He was mildly frustrated, but the itchy sequins of confusion embroidered his voice more than anything. You’d broken up with him almost three weeks ago, and it’d probably been longer since you touched him. Since he’d gotten to touch you. 

He had a specific affinity for touching those he cared about. He was rather indifferent to physical means of connection when it came to strangers. Anything from handshakes to sex was nothing he liked much when it was unfamiliar people. But, for those he carried close, he craved it. Bad enough to never have the words for it the few times he’d tried to explain it to you. It was deep in his bones, that need. For whatever reason, that intimacy was practically written into his DNA, and he’d been deprived for weeks. 

You sighed. Not angry, or tired, but gutted. Your will was blowing thinner by the day like sand dunes in a tornado. Your body mourned the loss of his reverent affection, and your entire being ached from how badly you missed his trailing, his presence. The people he worked with often chastised his spouting of incorrect animal facts, but you never minded. You liked his voice, liked the way he sounded interested and proud when he got to tell people things. You’d kill for the commonality of it given the current state of the two of you. 

“We broke up, Adrian. I’m not being weird.” 

His glasses slid down a bit with the creasing of his eyebrows. The way his face scrunched in confusion was something you used to love about him. You still do, in honesty. Just less openly now. 

“We didn’t break up.” The distance between the two of you felt even more vast as his voice grew slightly panicked, like he couldn’t believe you would even think about that possibility. “We had that really fucking heavy conversation a couple weeks ago, I took my shit home, and then we were supposed to talk. You’ve just been avoiding me and acting like I’m gonna kill you if you even look at me.” 

“You say that like it’s far-fetched.”   

“You’re not a criminal.” He said it like the fact it was. Though, it didn’t make the knowledge that he’d killed people for less than a prolonged look any easier to bear. “You told me you loved me.” 

“I do love you.” It wasn’t past-tense. It wasn’t a life already lived. It was here and now, a time where you’d loved him for months and would continue to love him for months after. You loved him to the point where you couldn’t, to the point where it tore you apart. 

“Then why haven’t I touched you in weeks? You know, normally I would love to be living like Peacemaker but this is some serious Harcourt shit you’re doing. It’s fucking killing me.”   

“You think it’s not killing me?” He wasn’t a stupid man, but he did have a hard time comprehending certain emotions, especially when they were being felt by others. “I’m happy you like what you do so much, truly, I am. But, whether you’re out killing petty criminals or fighting aliens for A.R.G.U.S., I’m still here, Adrian. I’m still wondering if you’re bleeding out somewhere or if I’m ever gonna see you again. And I can’t do that. It’s been killing me for months. Do you get that?”

The rant spilled from your lips like wine, bubbling out in a flow of velvet words that had been sitting amongst the shredded remains of your sanity. It was everything you’d been saying to him in your head since you’d left him, just far less elegant. Moisture pricked the corners of your avoidant eyes, not feeling like you could look at him without breaking. 

The impact of his shoes on the ground sounded out, burning a path directly toward your sulking form. He came close enough you could feel that buzzing again, his innate navigation that somehow always led him right back to you. The smell of his soap crawled slowly into your personal space, bickering with the air molecules until they departed and all you were left with was him. In your lungs, in your heart, in front of you. 

“You don’t get to break us up just ‘cause you’re scared. That’s stupid.” The tone of his voice was so low, brassy and signature. It was something so uniquely blended that only he pulled off, and the familiarity hit your knees like a hammer, nearly buckling them with the impact. “We’re like fucking…penguins, you know? They mate for life.” 

You’re sure he could have said more. You’re almost certain that you should have said something. But his stupid animal fact and that godforsaken drugstore soap that was too overtly masculine and somehow still obscenely fitting for him was far too intoxicating to think of something to say. 

You pulled him forward to close the remaining gap, tiny and unbearable. Kissing him after neglecting him for so long felt like the first breath after being resuscitated. Like all the life you could ever need sat sturdy and infinite in the soft ruggedness of his lips. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. His hands were on you immediately, like it burned not to have them on you, even over your clothes. His shoulders slumped a little, looking like the weight of not touching you was so heavy that he was stiff with it, and now he was relieved of that burden. The both of you made similar noises of euphoric relief, quiet and involuntary. It was a simple acknowledgement, conveying everything from ‘I’m sorry’ to ‘this feels heavenly.’

He kept you practically chest-to-chest after he pulled away, preferring there to be no physical distance, but knowing human bodies had their limits. His lips brushed against yours as he spoke so softly you barely caught it.

“Does this mean I can bring my clothes back over here?”  

His lips were warm as they touched the back of your fingers. 

The pose was vaguely childlike. Your hand was clasped over his mouth, the both of you crouched behind a worn sofa. It had been a reflex as the sound of the door opening had radiated throughout the space like a bomb wave. It was the sound of danger, of getting caught, of not going home. 

Of course, that wasn’t entirely fair. This was your house, in a way. Chris had needed something from the other version of you, something she wasn’t willing to give him. Playing his role as the Chris who was meant to be in her world didn’t work, so he’d asked Adrian to infiltrate and steal it from her privacy. You didn’t want him to go alone, so you went along. The two of you weren’t suited up, figuring violence would only make things worse than Chris had already made them. That’s why you could feel his mouth against your hand. That’s why the closeness felt deeper than normal. 

The lights were off in her house. The moonlight was draped elegantly over the shadowy depths of the night sky. It was a cold night. The kind that made breathing a bit crisper, movement a bit stiffer, yet your doppelganger walked in burning. She was giggly, clearly a little tipsy, and walking forward with her head turned around. She moved without purpose, like her destination loomed behind her and she was waiting for it to catch up. 

Your eyes widened as you peeked out. She was dressed up, light and careless as the good times carried her inside without judgement. You looked pretty. A thought you rolled around in your mouth sometimes but never quite absorbed like you were doing right now. It wasn’t in the clothes or your face or the way you were moving. It was more innate than that, like you were just made of it - light, beauty. It just flowed, unabashed and unquestionable. 

You looked to the side, almost embarrassed at the thought of him seeing you this way, even if it wasn’t the you he was acquainted with. It felt too intimate, too hidden. Whatever state she was in wasn’t one you felt he should see, not in the state of the two of you. You were in love with him, undoubtedly so. And he was in love with his job, liking that you were a part of it. This wasn’t professional, or cordial. This was just you, messy and grinning and raw.

He didn’t notice your worry, he was staring at her. 

At you. 

The door was shut gently a minute later, clasping fondly as it’s hinges met and it’s lock was snapped into place. He was here, too. As present in the moment as you were, both in and out of where you should have been. 

Now he was looking at you, eyes ripping away from the hole they’d been burning into the woman wearing your face.

“I told you not to leave your jacket in the car.” He walked amongst the dust and memories that clearly lined the walls of your house. It was familiar, something he evidently did often. Like he was part of the house itself. “You always get cold.” 

“How am I wrong for assuming the restaurant will be warmer than the fucking winter air?” 

You were laughing as you said it, and he had a look in his eyes as he joined you that nearly made your heart stop from where you were spying. They were glistening, practically. Pooling with a warmth you’d never been given in your world. 

“I mean, I could kill the manager if you wanted. Write a message with his blood telling them to make it warmer.” You think, from your vantage point, that he was doing a bit. It’s hard to tell with him. 

“Jesus, Adrian. You’re not Manson.” You say it with love evident on your face, the words oozing through the cracks of your easy smile. “The manager’s probably not even a criminal.” 

“Making my wife uncomfortable is a crime of the highest order.” 

Both you and Adrian had been tuned in until that point. You were practically synonymous in the snapping of your necks towards the other. You’d both heard it clear as day. 

Wife. 

“Your order, maybe. The law doesn’t care about restaurant thermostats.” 

The two of you watched as he moved closer to you. He walked so casually, not hesitating to enter your space, not flinching when he wrapped his arms around your shoulders. Your back leaned against his front like an instinct, like something practiced. 

“C’mon. Let’s go to bed. You’re gonna be groggy tomorrow.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” 

It was the most horrifying thing to watch happen, truly. This glowing, giddy version of you turned around and kissed the man you were gut-wrenchingly infatuated with. And he kissed her back like he’d been waiting to all night. 

It was a short, fleeting thing. Some quick prompt of affection before you trudged up the stairs, headed toward the room that - presumably - you shared with him. He was close behind, making insignificant conversation and sinking deeper into the space. It was baffling how, without even turning on a light, they’d torn your entire foundation into nothing but shreds. Loose shards of soul-crushing assumption that had been the only thing keeping you upright for months. Gone in minutes. 

You didn’t look at him. You didn’t say a word. You just walked into the kitchen and picked up what Chris had sent you here for. You guessed he was similarly rattled, as he didn’t fight you for the dignity of completion, of being the one to appease Peacemaker. He simply waited by the door. He simply followed you out. 

“Are we seriously not gonna talk about what we just fucking saw?” 

As soon as the portal gateway was sealed, and you were both safe in Chris’ hallway, he spoke. It was as if a spell had been broken. Like he was waiting until he was sure it was real, until you were back in the world you belonged in. 

“Why should we?” 

He gawked at you. “Are you serious?” His hands waved about for a second, as if acting out his own confusion or trying to somehow fling his frustration at you. You heard the start of multiple different sentences before he finally settled with one. “We were married. You fucking kissed me.” 

“I didn’t do shit, Adrian.” You sighed out, exasperated and alarmingly in need of someplace quiet to lick your wounds. The life you’d seen looked so peaceful, so perfect. So full of him and full of love. It made you feel like you’d gargled thorns, like your stomach was hollow. “Chris’ entire family is alive over there. You wanna talk about that, too? It doesn’t matter. It’s not our world.” 

You walked over to the aforementioned man’s dining table, dropping the object onto the surface. He wasn’t here tonight, saying something about needing to do something in a town over. Old scars, old stories. Ends that needing tidying. You hadn’t asked about it. 

He followed you just like the other him had. Obedient and speedy, needing to keep pace. He walked like it hurt him to be far from you. 

“Of course it matters. We literally saw ourselves.” He looked like he was close to pacing, practically spilling pure energy into the tiny home. “We’re married in the world where everything is better. That doesn’t mean anything to you?”

“Chris only said everything is better over there because his family is alive. That doesn’t actually mean everything is better.” You still hadn’t looked at him. You didn’t think you ever would again, in honesty. It would be unbearable having to see the absence of that fondness he held for you over there. Of having to see he clearly could love you, he just didn’t. “Yeah, we’re married, but maybe…I don’t know, fucking Hitler is still alive or something. 

“That’s what you’re going with?”

“What do you want me to say, Adrian?” 

“Fuck, dude, just something about it. You won’t even look at me.” 

You finally do look at him then. Ever the spiteful person, you can’t let him hold that over you. Even if it physically hurts to meet his eyes.

“I’m not saying anything because there’s nothing to say. It’s not us. It’s not our house, or our lives, or our world. They’re strangers. They’re just strangers who’re married. No different than people we’d pass on the street.” 

You said the words with the intention of hounding him, of driving home your indifference to what you’d experienced. But, the words cut so deep you felt your eyes start to water as you spoke. Being caught in a lie was embarrassing, but being caught this red-handed would be crippling. You wanted to look away. You told your eyes to look down, to look up, to look anywhere that wasn’t his pleading gaze. You couldn’t manage it. 

“It didn’t mean anything to you?” 

The air seemed to swirl around you, shifting into something much heavier, much more sincere. This wasn’t what you were used to. Adrian was abrasive at times, honest to his core, and irrefutably optimistic in his own sinister way. He was hyper and loyal and he had a smile that was like hope incarnate. He was never lost, never still, never serious. 

He never looked at you like this. Like you held the power to crush him. Like even if you did, he’d be satisfied sticking to your fingertips.

You tried to inhale, lungs feeling like they’d been punctured. Like the air was good for nothing except leaking back out.

“Did you want it to?”

He laughed a bit, exhaling a breathy symphony of all the bittersweet agony that’s inevitable when you’re longing for someone. You recognize it immediately. You’ve heard it countless times in your own flimsy giggles, in your own voice when you speak to him. 

“Well, it meant something to me. So…” He trails off for a moment, rubbing a hand over his jaw in a way that’s so uncharacteristically shy that it nearly makes your knees buckle. “I guess I was hoping, yeah. That it would mean something.” 

Your heart was beating so frantically and so hard in your chest that it drowned out the sound of Chris’ clock ticking, of the buzzing of the lightbulb as it lit up the room. All you could hear was the evidence of what he was doing to you. 

He spoke again, quiet and almost afraid. Desperate. “You’ve never thought about it?” 

You weren’t even sure if you were blinking at this point. Or breathing. He refused to break eye contact, and you didn’t know if you had the strength to do it even if you wanted to. You could have cried at the unfolding, at the reveal. The harrowing rasp of his voice made it sound like he needed you to have thought about it. Like he thought about it all the time. Like he needed to not be the only one. 

You don’t know where the words came from, but they poured out messy and nearly silent, like they’d been swallowed and regurgitated over and over throughout all the times you failed to tell him how you felt.

“I’ve thought about it.” 

His eyebrows tilted up just slightly, relief flooding his face in a wave so grand that it was impossible to subdue. You loved that about him, how visibly he felt things. 

“Yeah?” It was whispered, such a slight ripple in the burning atmosphere that you could have missed it if you weren’t watching him so intently. “What do you think about?”    

He didn’t say it to tease, or to lambaste. It wasn’t glazed with the arrogance you’d expect from such a titillating line. He was really asking, need tinting the edges of his voice like the most addicting vignette 

The little distance that sat between the two of you hadn’t been anything noteworthy at the beginning of this ordeal, but now it was the only thing you could focus on. He was close enough that he could reach out and touch you if he wanted. He was close enough to surely feel how painfully he made your heart thump. 

“Tell me.” 

You hadn’t genuinely expected him to want a narration of your fantasies. You didn’t even know if you’d be able to force the words out. You’d thought about everything with him - movie nights, dinner dates, waking up together. That blissful domesticity you’d seen in the other world had practically been a play-by-play of every shameful dream you’d ever had.

“Please.” 

Jesus Christ. You’d always sort of assumed he’d be a beggar, but hearing the plea seep out of his mouth like he was dedicating his deepest wish to you was something else entirely. 

“I think about us living like we did over there.” Your words were mumbled, filled with inhibition and slight confusion on whether or not you were imagining all of this. “Coming home from missions together and…slow mornings, date nights. Sappy shit, I don’t know.” 

The self-consciousness wrapped around your throat like a noose, making it impossibly difficult to choke your speech out. It felt like standing on needles, like purposefully breaking your arm. The only thing that made it bearable was him nodding along as you spoke, trancelike and involuntary. His eyes were glossy, and his pupils were so engorged that they forced the hue of his irises asunder, looking more black than anything else. 

“I think about it too. About us.” 

Your lips parted as your chest heaved. You still couldn’t force your eyes away from his, sealing something sacred into existence with each second you maintained the stare. Breaking it would be breaking the connection. Breaking the possibility. 

“Can I kiss you?” 

It shouldn’t have floored you the way it did, really. It just seemed surreal to be hearing him say it after spending so long praying he would. It made you stumble, made you stupid.

“What?” 

“I mean, I really want to fuck you. I just thought asking to kiss you fit the moment better.” 

That made your chest stutter, eliciting the tiniest gasp from you. The saliva in your mouth felt as solid as cement, like you could suffocate, like what he’d said was going to suffocate you. You knew how Adrian viewed sex. Less of a physical reprieve and more of a lesson in bonding. And that almost made it worse. He wasn’t saying he wanted to do this because he needed it and you were here. He was saying he wanted to be close to you. He wanted to be as close as he could physically get, wanted to be inside of you, wanted to be one in the same. The knowledge was so hot it burned, searing it’s way through your stomach and biting at the tips of your fingers. 

It was that fire that made it impossible to stand still, that pushed you forward to close the gap. It was an impulsiveness you’d never expressed before. Something that manifested within you only right now and only for him. Only out of the sheer need to feel him in all the ways you’d been imagining for months. 

The small noise that he made when your mouth met his was almost pornographic. It wasn’t loud, or exaggerated, but it was so perfect and so erotic that it seemed as though it should have been a part of a script. There was certainly no way something that gruff and that full of certainty could be a reaction to you. 

The momentary control you’d seized by being the one to kiss first evaporated as quickly as it’d been bestowed. The notion of making out with the man of your dreams while in Chris’ house was a little gross and felt almost like you were wronging him, but Chris had done worse than this to people better than you, so you didn’t focus on it. 

Your back hit one of the mortifyingly bland walls, and you hadn’t even realized you’d been moving until you realized you couldn’t anymore. One of his large hands was holding your jaw, while the other was on your back, using the leverage to hold you as tight as possible to his torso. He kissed hard, but achingly slow. Like he was trying to break you open, trying to see inside. 

When his tongue grazed yours, your throat tightened, a small sound slipping through the shrinking muscles. It triggered a response from him, too. Like he found it so pleasant that he couldn’t help it. Like he’d been waiting for it.

“I can feel it on my lips when you moan.” From how directly you were pressed against him, you could feel how hard he was through the inky denim of his jeans. It didn’t feel real being there, so intertwined with him. It didn’t feel real that it was you making him feel this way. “You sound really pretty when you do that.” 

He sounded as dazed as you felt, and you wondered if his head was swimming as much as yours was. It nearly started to spin as he started nipping your neck, soothing over the pinch by suckling at the tender skin. 

You hardly felt cohesive, mumbling out a ‘thank you’ that was definitely not the right thing to say.  

It made his shoulders shake in a slight laugh, only lasting a second that fled the space before it could linger too long. “You’re welcome.” 

You took him being slightly distracted by his dedication to your neck as a chance to touch him. You’d thought about doing it for so long that really having the opportunity to felt terrifying. He was so sturdy, defined in all the places you were soft, skin taught where yours ebbed and flowed. Your hands went under the hem of his shirt, fingertips resting on his sides, tracing his skin forward until you could sprawl your palms against the wall of his abdomen. He was so warm, so definite. It felt like worship, in a way. Like you were absorbing the holiness of some ancient statue, like he was holy. 

His stomach tensed at the contact, and you felt him pull away from the crook where your collarbone stretches into your shoulder. “Fuck - stop.” 

You yanked your hands away like he’d burned you, holding them a few inches away from his body in a way you hoped was disarming. “I’m sorry - I didn’t mean -” 

“No, it’s me. I’m, like…really fucking hard right now. I think I need to go because if you keep touching me, I’m gonna cum in my pants.” 

The declaration burned like hot coals had joined the blood circulating your body. You felt it everywhere, echoing in your head and ricocheting out to wherever it could reach. A jolt of panic zapped your nervous system at the suggestion of going.

“Go?” You didn’t recognize your own voice as it sounded out. There was a hideous desperation darkening the clarity. You didn’t sound respectable, didn’t sound like the person you knew yourself to be. You sounded exactly as you felt - completely strung out with need. “Why can’t we just…”

You hated the trailing off. You hated how carnally shy you were when it came to him. You were a grown adult, fully capable of just asking another adult who was clearly into you if the two of you could have sex. Other adults did it all the time. This didn’t feel like you, didn’t feel like who you were. Yet, it was all you could muster.  

“Yeah, yes. I really want to, I just - you know, I didn’t wanna push you.” 

“No, no pushing. I want to. I really want to.” It was rushed, just as obscene as it’d been minutes ago when this had started. The look in his eyes hadn’t diminished, only grown brighter. It’d been a modest smoulder before, now it was blazing in the glass pools of his irises. “Please, I swear.” 

You watched something shift, like gears on a bike switching to make it up a steep hill. Maybe it was the begging, maybe it was your hands returning to their rightful spot on his body. You didn’t care what it was because it got him kissing you again, got him grinding against you in a way you were certain you’d never get to feel anywhere outside of this moment. 

He broke away from the kiss but didn’t move off of your lips. “Not gonna fuck you on the wall. Angle’s shit. You won’t feel it right.” 

He had pulled you from the wall and started walking you backwards before he’d even been done talking. It was an explanation more than anything else, a justification on why he was steering you away from the sacred pocket of heat you two had created.

Chris’ couch was tattered, and the cushions were stiffer than they should have been, but that was all irrelevant in the current moment. He lowered you onto them like you were something saccharine, something silky and delicate that he couldn’t afford to drop. The weight of him on top of you was heavenly in an indescribable way, so different from the feeling of him in front of you.  

You felt his movements get quicker, more rushed as the wire coiled tighter, as he got more pent up. You were much the same, undoing his belt and button in a hurried attempt to get his pants off. He mirrored you, frantically tugging your down the pudge of your hips, taking your underwear with them. 

“I’m sorry, promise next time I’ll eat you out. I just really need to feel you. Is that ok?” His hands pawed tenderly at the newly exposed skin of your legs, talking through heavy breaths and loving rolls of his hips. You were both bare below the waist now, and the feeling of him against you with no barriers made your whole body jump.

“Mhm.” Your stomach felt so impossible tight that you couldn’t unclench your jaw enough to let sounds through. The confirmation came from your throat, tumbling up and hitting your sealed lips, phasing through the blockage of your cheeks just to get to him. 

“Fuck, ok.” 

He leaned down to reconnect his lips to yours, pushing into you at the same time in a moment of absolute synchronization. It hit like a morphine tap, stealing any worry or pain you might have had and filling your entire being up with nothing but him. With how he felt. 

You hadn’t been prepped, not lacking the adequate lubrication but certainly lacking the warm up as he bottomed out. The stretch ached in the best way. A kind of ownership, of marking. You’d be sore tomorrow, you knew from the adjustment period alone. No matter how good you would feel in a few moments when he started moving, this part would scar, would linger. The thought of still being able to feel him in the morning made you clench, the both of you inhaling sharply at the feeling. 

“Holy shit - don’t do that.” 

“Fuck, ‘m sorry. Wasn’t trying to.”

His hands ran up and down the plush of your thighs, stopping once or twice to squeeze the fat of your hips. He didn’t try to rush it, just waited for you to tell him he could move.

And when he started to, he moaned. Loud, broken, and absolutely incinerating. You weren’t much better, digging your fingertips into his bicep like you were drowning and it was your only chance at survival. 

“You feel so fucking good. I can’t - why haven’t we done this before?” 

You made a noise under your breath and just shook your head. You didn’t know why. Uncertainty, instability, insecurity. Excuse after excuse could explain it if you wanted it to, but nothing felt as important as the feeling of him bucking up into you. 

His hand crept up under your shirt, and it made you tense for a moment. His hand splayed flat against the lower part of your tummy, smoothing his thumb over the softness of it. Nobody had touched you like that before, so reverent and devoted to the parts you were unsure of. 

“You’re so gorgeous. So gorgeous. I can’t believe you’re letting me do this.” He sounded half out of his mind, words getting slurred a bit like he was intoxicated. Like the feeling was that addicting. Like you were.

Then, the plane of his warm palm pressed into your stomach, making the feeling increase in a tenfold and making your eyes widen a bit at the intensity. 

“Fuck - Adrian -”

“No, ‘s okay, promise. Feel good?” 

He was practically whimpering at this point, driving himself as mad as he was driving you. It was bordering on too good, too perfect. The two of you fit together in a way that was suspiciously aligned, like this kind of connection was more of a necessity than a pleasantry. Like you were made for it. 

He halted the pressure temporarily to pry your hand off his arm, grasping your fingers and moving them down before putting his hand back where it’d been. 

“Rub your clit for me, ok? ‘m not gonna last. Need you to cum with me, please.” 

The added friction made your lips open in a small sob, not realizing how badly you needed it. You felt yourself clench around him again, making his head fall forward a little, jaw falling open. The sound he made was painful, the both of you wound so tight it hurt. 

The buildup fried the ends of your nerves, emanating across your entire body in what was surely something fatal with how intense it was. You used your unoccupied hand to pull his head down, needing to feel his lips, needing to be even closer than you already were. 

He came first, warmth scalding you from the inside out, tipping you right over the edge with him. It was a mess of hands and a mix of pathetic sounds that were exchanged and consequently swallowed and stored. You could have stayed like that forever. Happily, at that. 

You felt his mouth pressing pecks into any exposed bit of flesh he could get to, a sign of that same comfort that had been given so easily between the other versions of yourselves. It was a sign of light, of connection, of love. It was a beginning, you hoped. And, as he made no move to pull out of you, you felt fairly certain of that conclusion. You felt the movement of a chuckle from where he was laid on top of you. 

You couldn’t help but smile at the audibility of his amusement. You loved his smile, loved the sound of his laugh. You asked him, “What is it?”

“Peacemaker is gonna be so pissed we had sex on his couch.”

Night shift wasn’t a place for the weak. 

Despite how insufferably tender most of the shift was, their kindness wasn’t a product of their environment. It was simply a testament to how well they could hold their heads on straight. The people never got nicer, the cases never got tamer, but they kept each other standing through conditions most would buckle under. 

And an infinitesimally small part of you ached to join that solidarity. 

It only made itself apparent when you watched. When you saw them band together on a particularly rough shift, or the steady hands on tense shoulders, the jokes, the shared coffee. 

It was kinship. A type of bond you purposefully refused indulgence in. 

They’d invited you many times, asking you to join on off-day barhops, or checking in when your steps were too fast through the hallways. 

It was rather easy for the rest of them to take a hint. The cold dismissals or indifferent responses you gave at their questions left little room for interpretation. You never asked after them, even when you knew they needed it. 

You weren’t warm. You weren’t friendly. You were an exceptional doctor and a tolerable teammate and that was enough for everyone. They knew if you were requested, you’d show up and you’d solve. And that was where your hospitality ended. 

The only good-natured boot that you could never quite force off your throat was Jack’s.

Enhanced Genome Activity Disorder hardly affected anyone anymore. After the war had ended, numbers plummeted as the mutation died off, became recessive. Jack was one of the only names in the medical field who had presented. The only one in the hospital, too. 

Until you were hired. 

The hormonal fluxes, the strength, the senses, they all posed possible issues unless disclosed. Every individual with EGAD had their status collectively shared, marked, and accommodated if needed. People looked at him like he’d hung the stars. The father-figure attending who spoke to all with a soft voice and stupid jokes. He was the poster boy for teamwork, and nobody had been alarmed when learning he was affected, that he was an alpha. 

The Alpha, Beta, Omega sub-divisions shouldn’t have mattered as much in modernity with such a tiny pool of people, but it didn’t stop people from having their biases. A lot of them feared the Alphas. They’d been the most aggressive group in the heyday of the mutation, infamous for hostility and a lack of control. Soldiers in this class had left messes of people so unidentifiable that, on some of the old battlefields, bone shards are being dug up like fossils. There’d been a lot of families with closed-casket funerals.  

People didn’t extend the courtesy to you. They’d seen Jack defensive before, but never angry. All his rigidity had always been facing the opposite direction, sticking up for the honor of his workers like any good leader would. They felt safe around him, protected, in a way you knew they didn’t with you. 

You’d also been introduced as an alpha. Though, people who hadn’t gotten the announcement often guessed it before you broke the news. It didn’t matter that meeting someone with EGAD was a statistical rarity, people were always confident in their assumptions. You were headstrong, you argued, you didn’t feel welcoming. Betas had been the first to be phased out, and the choice between Alpha and Omega led nobody to the latter. Omegas were painted as the most pristine submissives, parental to their core and sweet enough to hurt. They were horribly infantilized in the great minds of the general public. And since you were so standoffish, you simply couldn’t be something so saccharine. 

It wasn’t true. But they had no way of telling if you were careful enough. So you played into it. 

You weren’t supposed to be in this genetic dispute at all. You’d presented in your mid twenties, which by all scientific standpoints, should have been impossible. You’d simply keeled over at the end of a lab in med school, and were reborn on the grimy floor of an apartment you could barely afford. 

You’d seen a specialist, knowing firsthand that the medical information about such a condition was practical, focused more on suppression and endurance than the change itself. You didn’t develop properly, didn’t get as strong, didn’t get as fast. Your sight didn’t advance at all and your sense of smell had compensated for it. You’d been warned of complication, of infertility, even of death if it got bad enough. It was more symbiote than mutation. A quiet sickness you’d be living with until the end.  

During hormonal peaks, where your eyes buzzed with pigment and your canines protruded further, you’d seen the full damage of your stunted growth. The blue was hardly there, drifting behind the normal color like murky water. Your fangs were stubby, extending far enough to be abnormal but not enough to pose a threat. 

And it hurt. So bad that it’d knocked you out. So bad that you doubted you’d come back from it. 

You followed procedure. You got your papers, answered questions, bought scent sticks and heat suppressants, and served your sentence diligently because you still had aspirations. You still had residency, and your career, and your passion, and your love. 

It’d stolen something from you, undoubtedly. You pulled away from people, you got too focused on going forward so that the present couldn’t reach you. 

It’d brought you to The Pitt, to the place you loved. It’d brought you to people you burned when they got close and admired when they were far enough away to not feel it. Jack was the only other enhanced person you’d met, and though you knew you weren’t his, you still understood his inability to give up on you. 

The others were denied a friendship with you. It was nothing they couldn’t find in other sources. 

Jack was being denied community. Harshly, at that. He didn’t get the steadfast denial. He didn’t get why you rejected everyone around you. 

He could read arrogance if it was offered, if you thought yourself above your coworkers. He would have accepted fear, too. Shyness, exhaustion, anything with some give. Something he could push into instead of against. 

He’d seen you with your patients before, forgiving and pliable. Gentle to a fault. You demonstrated you wanted to be here, were good at what you did. Half of you just shut off when faced with peer bonding. 

His brain functioned in a pack mentality, had since he was fourteen. He could categorize hard refusal. If someone wanted no part of what he did, that was fine by him. You existed too heavily in the gray area for him to decode. You weren’t aggravated, you weren’t outwardly cruel. You came when called, you did what needed doing without complaint. You were perfectly reliable. And that clashed heavily with his desire to know you, to exchange stories and understanding. It clashed heavily with the chipped stone of your demeanor. 

You’d hardly been here a month, but when he thought too hard about your established position, his stomach tightened. Nervous at the thought of never growing, of having another person with EGAD in such close proximity and having them choose to slip right through the cracks of his open hands. 

He blames this notion for the depth of his distress. 

You’d brought a man in from the waiting room ten minutes ago. The sun was up, your shift should have been over but the day crew was still trickling in. You’d said you were taking one last patient, and he couldn’t stop you if he tried. He’d watched it happen in the same unsure way he tracks your placement throughout the night. He writes it off as being a good attending. He never manages to fully convince himself.

The man had been eyeing you oddly, working his gaze over you in a way that was too analytical to be docile. He’d looked subtly upset, like words of offense were hiding just behind his teeth, waiting for the moment he was alone enough to spit them out. 

You’d sat him down once beyond the curtain, inquiring about his pain level and his reason for visitation. He’d given you nothing but silence back. 

You re-checked his chart, presuming you must have missed a note of deafness or difficulty with processing. You saw nothing. 

His eyes left yours and drooped down to the collar of your scrubs. He’d finally chimed in, asking after the small pin that sat on it. 

EGAD markers weren’t lawful policy. They differed based on the hospital you were in, with no set look and some not requiring them at all. The Pitt did. And the protocols dealing with the disorder required transparency. If someone within your care requested the information, you had to fork it over. 

Trying to burst the apprehensive bubble that had risen in your throat, you cleared it. You gave him a simple, ‘I have Enhanced Genome Activity Disorder, sir. The pin signifies that.’ 

You weren’t forced to share your class. You weren’t forced to say anything beyond what you had, really. But he’d angered when you wouldn’t disclose your status. 

He’d shouted about his distaste for freaks treating him, for being able to work and live instead of being detained, of alpha scum pretending they were people and not monsters. 

You had stood up in the moment. Trying harder than you should have to calm him down, to hold steady when he shot up in response. He’d assumed your place on the podium, placing you where the rest of them had. He held the impression that alphas were violent, and still he squared up. You had no strength to flex, no bells and whistles that might scare him off. You just had his incorrect ideas about your place in the world and what it meant. It wasn’t enough. You knew it wasn’t enough. 

You heard footsteps rushing towards you at the same second he hit you. 

It was a clean hook against your jaw, jolting you sideways but not knocking you down. Your hands found the wall to steady yourself as the curtain was ripped open. Two security guards were restricting his arms, dragging him towards the main entrance before you even registered the third presence in the space. 

You heard his breathing; and, even through the three huffs of your scent stick you’d done today, you smelled the muddied smoke and melted sugar that you always spent the day trying to ignore. You straightened your shoulders, retreating from the wall when he tried to get closer to you.

You watched how it stung when you did it, your distrust like a rusty nail hammered straight into his rib. He wanted to help. He wanted to make you feel safe. And you backed away like his proximity was painful. 

“I won’t move, promise.” He put his hands up while he spoke, just for a second. A signal of peace. An assurance he meant to harm. “You’re hurt. Let me check your head.”

His voice dragged like thunder over mountains, settling in the deepest parts of your bones and washing out the shame that took home there. And, horrifyingly, the longer you soaked in it, the tighter your stomach wound. 

His insistence on your comfort, the way the scrub sleeves dug into his arms when he’d raised them, his tone, his words, how he’d said them. That god-awful pin on his collar, beaming like he’d saved a star and stuck in through his uniform. A reminder that you and him shared something innate, that nobody else for miles felt what you and him did. That regardless of whatever childish denial you projected, the two of you were connected by something more demanding than consciousness, than decision. 

It was too much. It was too fast. 

It was your heat, raking against you upon it’s arrival and stronger than you’d experienced in all the months you’d been having them. One you were completely unprepared for and entirely defenseless against. 

The choice you made next was reckless, surging forward and around him as he spun and trailed after you. Your incident seemed to happen at the perfect time between old and new, where night shift was too far away to witness and day shift was too busy to have seen the severity of what occurred. They saw security and the semi-chase of two tired adults and figured they’d get the details later if there was a stall. They couldn’t afford the spectacle, especially not when they were still missing staff members. 

You ignored the few times he’d said your name, asked you to stop, to talk to him. You led him into the lockers, desolate and too sterile for your sensitivity. You tried to bask in the neutrality, knowing that him in such a confined space meant a room flooded before long. 

“Please, can you talk to me? What happened in there?” 

You yanked open the door to your allotted number, biting down on your tongue when a fresh pain coiled warmly around the nerves of your abdomen. This would be your undoing. This would be how you lost your appearances, your reputation.

You were endlessly questioning why he had to have been here, why he still persisted with you, why he wanted it so badly. You could feel yourself shaking your head in response to everything he’d asked and was continuing to ask, your lips beginning to tremble from the pure weight of restraint and composure. You hoarded your stuff into your shaky grip, leaving all but necessities there to be collected another day. You needed to leave. 

He could smell something was wrong, fear and anguish leaking from every pore you had. He’d had an alpha buddy in the military, and even in uncertain times, his unease had never invoked what Jack felt with you. Every one of his instincts was alight, burning with the fight between rationality and biology. He was engineered to protect, he knew that, but this was something else entirely. 

“Hey, hey -” His legs moved before his mind could, grabbing your arm as you started leaving. He shouldn’t have, he knew immediately that he shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t let you go. He couldn’t let you go unless he was going with you. 

Something guttural tore out of you at the feeling of heat. Of pressure. Of his skin on yours. 

Your body tensed, flinching away and wrenching out of his grasp. Your brain wrestled with itself in endless circles, the need of giving in and the want of strength in solitude. 

You finally looked at him, holding your mask up with desperate fingers and an insufficient will. 

“I don’t…” You had to stop your sentence to heave, the air doing nothing to quell the pain but the absence worsening it. “I don’t need you to protect me.” 

Something shifted in the set of his expression. His lips tightened a bit, the silken interlace of concern and confusion wrapping around his blown pupils. “I know that.”

He was so eager to be on your side. It split the foundation of your resistance at the base, cracks splintering up the sides until it could barely hold you anymore. It’d be so easy to tell him. To stop struggling against the man who asked for nothing but the chance to make you comfortable. 

“I don’t think you need anything from me. I see how you handle things. I know it’s not easy.” He moves the tiniest bit closer, not wanting to repel you more but not being able to stop himself. “You’re extremely respected here, but I just…I can tell you’re not safe. And that’s important to me.” 

You felt your eyes harbor tears before you could halt their gathering. You wouldn’t cry in front of him. You couldn’t.

“I want to protect you. You don’t need it, but you’re a part of my team.” He was inches away now. Too near and too calming and too sturdy for how intangible you were. “And, more than that - you know, we’re…we share something. Just the two of us. That’s important to me too.” 

It’s such a direct claim that your structure fully breaks, the steady tightrope you’d been balancing on for a month severing completely before him. It sparks a pain that makes you double, guiding your back to grate down the lockers. Your hands try to stop it, but it’s so unyielding that it strips you of any power you possessed. Any attempts of grounding are useless with him there. You can see nothing but him. Feel nothing but him. Breathe nothing but him. Every baseless voice in your head yelling to submit, to allow, to give. 

His body jerks towards yours, trying to overwrite his politeness and rush him into action. He gets caught between his cognition and his instinct, not meeting you where you are but moving like he wants to. 

Your head is tilted down in an attempt to hide your shortcomings. You can feel the fledgling visibility of your late blooming. Nobody’s ever seen it. You vowed nobody ever would. 

And, as the floodgates break for the first time, you hear your own voice smaller than it’s ever been. 

“I’m not an alpha.” 

The words are a rush, singeing your vocal cords as the venom you’ve carried for years is expelled at his feet. He feels the heaviness of the confession. The responsibility of it. 

He crouches down, leveling the playing field and getting somewhere the two of you could return to being equals. He sighs out any lingering extremism, knowing what you need now, more than anything, is acceptance. Is leadership. 

“Look at me.” 

Your fingernails dig into the meat of your palm. You couldn’t make your head move. The command echoed like gospel, but you couldn’t make yourself abide despite your desire to. Your chest rose and fell in harsher beats. More war. 

“It’s ok.” 

The scuffed pads of his fingers made featherlight contact with the side of your jaw furthest from him. The imagery of his hand, one that had taken and given life alike, pressing into the mostly-healed bruise gifted to you by an aggressor felt almost pornographic. Such a simple statement, but one with so much promise. Acceptance and leadership. 

He turned your head, revealing the grotesque underdevelopment like it was the first sunrise he’d seen in decades. He studied the band of muted blue lit up inside your irises, iridescent and somehow indecent with how vulnerable it was. It made your eye color look sparkly, like a child had spun a ring of glitter glue inside and let it sink to the bottom. 

His thumb moved to your top lip, feeling it twitch beneath the touch. You almost leapt to warn him, to run away. But, deep down, you think you’ve wanted him like this for a while. You hadn’t let anyone touch you since you’d presented. You’d never even dreamed of being had like this. So entirely unabashed. 

He pushed up on the soft of your mouth, raising it in the spot that covered your canine, staring at your gums and teeth like you were a dog and he was your owner. It was mortifying. It was dehumanizing, surely. It was helping the pain. 

You heard the breathiest laugh leak out, as though it’d slipped through his system of defense holding together his decency. “Cute.” 

That was certainly dehumanizing. You felt the word boil, sinking into the endless heat that’d been building inside of you, on top of your skin. You’re sure he could smell it now, The half-baked thing that was a defective’s heat slurred with the arousal sprouting quickly in your lower stomach. You swear you tried for a rebuttal, to say anything that would preserve the facade you’d crafted. All that sounded out was a whimper, maimed and animal-like in a way you always swore you weren’t. 

You grabbed the arm that was close to your face, fingers squeezing his forearm. The life of it was obscene, how his skin caved to accommodate yours. How you could feel the muscle flex with the surprise of the pressure. “Don’t be mean, Jack.” 

“‘M not being mean, kid.” You’d never heard him sound like this. His voice was as wrecked as you felt. “You should have told me.” 

You nodded your head. You didn’t agree. You shouldn’t have told him because you shouldn’t have told anyone. This was your secret, your life. Your body agreed with him. And that was infuriating as it was irrefutable. 

He stood up, a large part of you panicking under the guise that he was leaving, that you’d created a false sense of security where there wasn’t one. That sense was null when he opened his own locker, the sound of keys against metal sounding out and silencing the drop of doubt. 

“Come on.” 

He pulled you up by the shoulders, his strength prevalent in the effortlessness with which he hoisted you to your feet. That did little to extinguish the flame. 

“I’m taking you home.” 

His car, you think, could have been a preview of the scent his house would have been filled with. He didn’t take you to his. He took you to yours, despite you never telling him your address. You tried to be only slightly disappointed once you were inside your place. 

It’d been a silent ride there, your body tense and leaned against the door as the intimacy of it all made you dizzy. His presence had helped with the pain at first, but the longer you spent near him, the more it was coming back in waves.

The sound of the door closing is deathly, punctuation to the blurriest of lines. You’re sweating, head tilted against the back of the wood. It’s eating you alive now, charring your soft innards and begging to be given access to your bones, your skin. You teeter on cohesion, all thoughts of suppressants, of sense, officially departing with a wave. 

He goes to make a move, presumably to pull you to the bed, to urge you into rest. Once he’s close enough, you twist your fingers into the fabric of his scrubs. Neither of you had changed as you’d slipped out the side door. Lacking both the time and the energy. 

“Jack,” you whisper. It’s disgustingly timid, faux acidity coating your mouth as the cowardly tone. You weren’t above it anymore. If anything, you were prepared to sink much lower. “I need you to make it stop.” 

Before you even finished the request, he felt the certainty of it stir in his stomach. Subconscious things he had no control of reading you like an open book. You needed him. That was the beginning and end of everything. 

“Kid, you’re not thinking right - “ 

“I am. I am.” Your hold on his scrubs tightened, nudging him even closer towards you. Urgency was evident in the way you tugged at him, in the way your features practically bent around the plea on your face. “You can fix it. You can help me, Jack. Please. I need you to help me.” 

You’d never begged for something this intently and this audibly in your life. But the ache was stifling, and you’d never wanted anything more than him in this moment. You’d chastise others when they’d talk about connection, about hormones and soul and desire. But you understood now. You understood everything. 

It was him who’d take the fall for it. He knew what kind of man it’d make him when he gave in. Fucking an omega he wasn’t with when they’re knee-deep in a heat he was only making worse. He knew the pretty picture he was painting of discipline and good intentioned care was proved wrong by how hard he was, by how bad he wanted to feel you.

“Please, Jack.”

It was that moment that snapped his resolve. You were so desperate for him, so unlike the version of you that bickered with him over everything in the ER. He used to live for those times, the chances he got to push, to make your jaw clench and your eyes narrow as you stood your ground against him. The breathy way you’d said his name, the tightness of your fist on his shirt, your scent, the begging. It was all so sweet, so good, so impossibly pure in the face of absolute debauchery. 

He didn’t know if this was corruption in it’s typical form, but he was a bad man for doing it. And he’d take it all if it came hand in hand with you. 

The collision of your mouths was lethal. He pressed you further into the door, using his stature as leverage to pin you upright. 

You dove in just as hard, lips meeting his with the force of a supernova, metaphorical horns clashing against his as you fought just for the notion of knowing he’d subdue you in the end. 

Your hands were beneath his shirt in an instant, pushing the fabric up high enough for him to pull back and part with it. He was an unfair sight so up close, so heated and real. You thought the frenzy would drive you into confidence, but you found yourself unable to touch him when the time came. You just stared for a moment, pain and ache fading into obscurity as the gravity of the situation began to tip the scales. 

As though attuned to you, he takes your wrist and brings it up to his bare chest, enveloping the back of your hand and holding it over his beating heart. You feel his nose beneath your jawbone, the ghost of his lips on your throat, the scrape of his teeth. His other hand digs into the fat of your hip. There’s nothing else outside of him, an endless abyss with no option but to drown in it. 

“Don’t start thinking, pup.” 

It’s so demeaning how it makes you preen. Unwillingly arching more into his touch and failing to denounce how good it feels. You don’t recognize the sound you make, some moaned insult that makes his shoulders sway in a soft laughter. He’s laughing at you. At how poor your attempt was. And it just makes you wetter. 

“Can smell how bad you need it.” The words rumble against your skin, and your face heats in embarrassment. This disorder didn’t make people crass. This was all him. “Lean into it. You know what to do.” 

You’re so far gone that you just nod, dragging his mouth back to yours and starting to push down the waistband of his scrubs. You get them down to his mid thigh before reaching back down to repeat with his underwear. 

He does one better, grasping the hem of your pants and tearing down the seams. It’s so easy for him, so primal that it forces a gasp from you. You know somewhere in the back of your mind that was irresponsible. That an already underfunded hospital is down a uniform now. You’ll find care for it at another time. It’s the last sensible promise you’ll make today. 

He glances down, your panties hugging your tummy and hips in a way he swears could kill him. The gusset is completely soaked through, the top of the wet spot like a beacon above the place where your thighs meet. He skims his hand over the soft bulge of your stomach, feeling the pliancy of flesh and fabric in a way that goes straight to his cock.

“Take them off. ‘M not gonna ruin them.” 

It’s half exhale, half statement. You follow, shoving them down until they’re baggy enough to fall on their own. Your movements are quick, his are quicker as he gets out of his own. He’s back on you as soon as it’s done. 

Your obedience does him in. Hooking your leg around his waist, he doesn’t tease, doesn’t taunt, he can’t stand the distance it’d take to do so. He presses into you with a single, aching thrust. He knows he should have warmed you up, should have done many things differently. But carnality is a beast in it’s own right, and your grabbing hands and coaxing sounds lured him into a quickness he wouldn’t have been able to stomach at any other time. 

The top of your skull met the back of the door with a hollow, lulling sound. He felt your hand against his pelvis, as though you wanted to stop him but put no amount of force into doing so. Your lips were slightly parted, the tips of your fangs prominent through the gap. He wanted to run his tongue against their sharpness, test just how lethal you could be. 

Like he’d done before, he took hold of the wrist that was making contact, this time bringing it up to his mouth. He kissed just below your palm, silently marking the scent gland that resided there. He felt how hard you clenched at that, starting to move in and out through the tension. 

“Always smell so good, you know that?” He’d always wondered why another alpha had such an enticing aroma. Most alpha on alpha pairings had been by choice, way back when. Scent had always drawn opposite to opposite. He can’t believe he hadn’t had this revelation sooner. “If the others could feel it like I do, kid. God, they’d never leave you alone.” 

You sobbed, outright and appalling. You joined your mouths again purely in an attempt to stop him from talking more. You had no capacity for denial right now, simply acting as an open book, sapping up whatever ink found it’s way onto your pages. And he knew that. He had to. 

His hand reaches down, thumb starting a matching pace on your clit as he drags you towards the end with him. It’s entirely too much. You’re so sensitive and it hurts but he’s so addicting that you feel nothing but complacency. You’d always used suppressants during your heats. You’d never felt anything with this kind of intensity. 

“Can feel you’re close, pup. Come on.” He’s like a metronome, pumping in and out and rubbing and talking until you’re not sure you could deny him anything at all. “Want you to cum on me. Do it for me.” 

He says it nose to nose with you, mumbling against your lips so clearly that you’re positive you can taste your own sin reflected back. And it works. That incessant reminder that he’s in control right now, that you’ll do it because it’s for him. 

You tense up hard, leaping past all acceptable boundaries because he’d asked you to. Your back arches off the wall, nails biting blunt marks into his shoulders. 

Your name leaves him in the prettiest, deconstructed way. It wrecks you and for the first time tonight, he follows your lead. The base of him swells up, warmth and wet locked in place as he helps hold you steady. 

You can feel his breath against the mating gland on your neck, chests heaving in sync.

And, for the most fleeting of seconds, you allow yourself the fantasy of being his.  

“Shit.” 

You were unable to halt the regretful notion from falling out of you as he entered your line of sight. The air was stale, filled with nothing but mourning silence interrupted by the sprinting pierce of your heartbeat. You’d run when they’d told you, taken off with such a needy pounce that, if given the chance, you’d wince at your mannerisms. 

But the chances were irrelevant. Your sanity was dying alone in a room. 

Simon had been restrained, a solid silver band around each wrist, conjoined eventually by a common chain that was secured to a bar installed for this very purpose. His one allotted item, a creaky wooden chair that was too small to hold him, was filled by his slumping body. His balaclava had been torn and punctured, jawline exposed fully, joined by little samples of his face you could make out through the other heterogeneous holes. His skin was covered in blood, the edges of the fabric forced into crusted peaks from how much of the ruddy substance it’d been made to absorb. Bits of skin that he’d shot off the infected were stuck there, too; smeared across old lines and weighing down the mask. 

He looked at you when you opened the door, agonizingly indifferent to the situation. You’d be crying, you’d be panicking, you’d be many things if it were you. But he was just dirty. Sitting there soaked in residue sourced from the bodies that had lost to both the outbreak and to him. He took it like it wasn’t a problem, like it didn’t make him sick because he wasn’t granted the right to be. 

He grunted at your reaction to him, a discarding of the harm that happened with such a blunt exclaim. “Y’shouldn’t be here.” 

The rejection made your teeth scrape, prison bars aiding the limitation of all you wished to say. 

Simon had been put in the quarantine room, the sole occupant of an empty wing that you’d silently prayed you’d never have to use. Beyond the door, directly connected to it, were four more reinforced walls made for observation. It was home of a small control panel, a large window, a first aid kit, a sink, and whatever other miscellaneous things that were important enough to be demanded. 

You exited his part of what was ultimately a large rat cage and went into the half that would become your own. You filled a bowl with saline and rooted for one of the rags left lying around, walking back to him when you had what you wanted. 

“I had to see it for myself.” 

You set the dish down on the floor, squatting in front of him to submerge the cloth in it’s confines. You wrung it out, standing back up and stepping closer. 

“Can I?” 

You listen to him sigh, defeat sinking into his posture where function typically held it up. It took a lot to make a man out of Simon Riley, to make him see outside of his own technical wiring. He just nods at you, hands clenching once when your own make contact with face.

The glimpses you get of what lies under his covering feel risqué, disrespectful. They’re something you’re only getting on account of his victimhood, a glance at the nakedness of a man on the crux of death. You wanted nothing more than to see him under different circumstances; to be someone he granted the honor of witnessing him, not just someone he trusted wouldn’t speed up his current falling. 

You swiped the rag over all the dried livelihood, maneuvering the best you could around shredded cotton that stood sedentary when you shoved against it. You were making decent progress on his chin, wondering if it’d be possible to soften the mask as well so it wouldn’t make him itch as he rotted away. 

God, you were going to be sick. 

“You can take it off.” He was staring at you so delicately, sullied by the weight of loss but giving you this one thing in spite of it. “Won’t be alive enough to think about it when you leave.” 

You’d never been so internally polarized, needing so badly for this act to be a sacred thing and knowing there was no longer time for moments of sanctity with him. 

You lifted it from his face, breathing in the intimacy and letting it jostle around somewhere more contained within you. You couldn’t tell him how much this meant. You couldn’t tell him the gravitational upending that would take place in his disappearance. These last hours were for him, were for his suffering. You were just there to help carry it. 

It took copious effort to not gawk at him. You knew he didn’t like his face, didn’t like people’s eyes on it. Your vetting would have been nauseating, just like the judgment you’re sure he’d borne many times in the past. A lot of the skin was scarred, ranging from various deep velvet gashes across his cheeks to white nicks along his mouth and eyebrows. There were old burn marks crawling up the left side of his neck and kissing the underside of his correlating bit of jaw. His top lip beamed up in a small line, breaching the right side of his cupid’s bow and ending below his nostril. 

You thought he was beautiful. Enough to steal the air from your lungs, or line verses of poems with the kind of adoration meant for nautical deities or the things nature made but couldn’t explain. You wanted to tell him so, wanted him to know you meant it. 

But he wouldn’t look at you. And you understood, fatally, that it wasn’t something to be decided on, to be expressed. He had his facts, and you had yours. These two paths no longer existed in a world where crossing was possible. He’d die thinking he’d cursed your eyes with an offense equal to what lurked outside the lab walls; and you, inversely, would tuck the sight of him into your heart where the rest of him already lived. 

You made a point to see him, and to say nothing about it. You didn’t appear bothered, you didn’t appear shocked. You just tilted his head and began grating the guts off his forehead from where they’d soaked through the balaclava. 

The soreness in your throat could be rivaled only by the feeling of swallowing a golf ball, the impending lack burrowing greedily into the soft parts of you as you swallowed all urges to weep. 

You bent down again, rinsing off the first layer of grime that’d been removed, and watching the liquid turn murky and textured as it accepted the offering you’d placed within it. You wrung it out once more, returning dutifully to your pyre. 

“How’d it happen?” 

He sniffed, the question and it’s respective answer both equally insignificant. His own lack of care was beat out every time by the desire to fulfill your indulgences. Whether spouting bad puns when you were down or reciting the tale of how he’d lost the fight, he would do it with the same urge to satisfy you. To be someone you wanted around. 

“Crowd of ‘em got too close. ‘S my job to protect you, ain’t it?”

You felt your fingers tighten around the slick give of the rag. 

“It is.” It felt like poison, that dawning. How foolish it was to forget that growing fond of a shield didn’t cease it’s purpose, that eventually it would get hit so you wouldn’t. That there was no mercy in an apocalypse. “Just wasn’t expecting it, I guess.” 

He was shifting much more now that you were touching all he kept hidden. You worried, as you brushed over knife cuts and bullet grazes, that you were hurting him. That your attempt to increase his comfort was doing nothing but burdening him. 

He wasn’t hurt, not in the way you were thinking. 

Simon took no pride in being a hardened entity, simply did what it took to keep himself on his feet. An alien trapped inside the grubby hands of mortal needs. He ate plates of solid color, foods indistinguishable from each other in his busy brain. He trained and yelled and ran and shot. He didn’t choose. He didn’t think. He had routine and he had commands and that kept him dangling above the abyss instead of drowning in it. 

That’s part of the reason he found you so intoxicating. You were malleable in the areas he wasn’t, trusted with the fate of the world and still willing to mingle with those on the fast-track to infection. Those who stood outside the walls. 

You chose him. In more ways than he lets himself think about. You chose him to talk to at night, you chose his jokes to laugh at, you chose him to defend you. Now, you were choosing to meet such an ugly sight with a softness he was unaccustomed to. You saw his shackled hands and cleaned him, cared for him. 

He didn’t understand you. He was addicted to you. He couldn’t let any of that be known on the chance he’d lose it entirely. 

He was unsure if all monsters were unlovable, but even with the possibility of exception, he was certain the rule applied to him. 

This way, at least he got to die still in your good graces. You’d think of him kindly one day, after all of this was over and you got to settle down with someone far more worthy than him. 

It was painful, having you hold him like this. Knowing that, not only was he undeserving, but that he’d never get the chance to have it again. He’d never get the chance to have you at all. 

You’d gotten him as sanitized as you could, deciding that it was leagues ahead of when you’d first entered and feeling alright leaving it as it was. You let the washcloth rest in the solution, pushing it aside and speaking before you could talk yourself out of it. 

“Can I see it?” 

A lot of your reasoning was built purely on exposure. The more brutality you could physically view, the quicker it would sink in that he was really being taken from you. That, within a day or two, he’d be nothing but a subject you studied. A carcass housing a way out of the dark. 

He hesitated a moment, debating the damage of such a thing. He knew you’d seen pictures of it, knew you worked tirelessly to unpack the virus in an attempt to kill it. He knew you weren’t a child and were capable of handling unruly sights. 

The bare truth was simply that he didn’t want you to. But that wasn’t good enough to stand on it’s own, and he couldn’t explain it further. 

“Pull it up.” He extended his arms, hands unable to reach across enough to tug up his sleeve. 

When you did, the majority of the wound was revealed. It was square on his wrist, and you had to move the cuff up as much as possible to get a better look at it. 

It was so tiny. The fragile jaw of a fetal being. Each tooth perfectly outlined under his disdain and thick coat of hair, carved cruelly and resolute into his skin. The mark’s surrounding area was a blistering red, giving way to the sour yellow of an old bruise, then finally the inky black that was spreading venom upward in veined lightning strikes. 

The virus didn’t behave like the ones you were used to scoffing at in media. It truly was a sickness, slow to crawl and slow to kill. It had taken them all the time you’d been here just to get things in the world semi-orderly again, and figure out how to cope with the raging plague that was showing no signs of stopping. You didn’t know if it had mutated yet, if it could affect people in different ways, if there was even any hope of restoring normalcy. In most cases, infection went unnoticed until it was too late. 

“‘S ironic. Dyin’ to bloody baby teeth.” 

It wasn’t a joke, but you find yourself laughing small and wilted. Your eyes are locked on his penance, oblivious to the way his world’s axis is you. That it’s probably unhealthy and definitely nonreciprocal, but in the months he’s spent with you, you’ve redefined something in him. Some ancient belief he’d thought was set in stone. 

You brush your fingers over the injury, cupping his wrist and holding him like he’s tangible light. Like he’s something with substance. Like he’s not the hollow killer he is to everyone else who values his presence. 

You value him for this. For how he feels. For who he is. 

He watches as your lips start to tremble, despite the way you tighten them in a plea to make it stop. He knows it’s not the job of the condemned to comfort the innocent, but he can’t make himself not try.  

“Gettin’ off easy for all the things I’ve done.” He jerks his wrist, nudging your hand off him. You return his sleeve to how it sat before, taking the hint that he was done holding the weight of your sadness. “Far worse fates than bein’ your lab rat, yeah?” 

You give him a small smile, the kind that clearly means nothing to either of you but is done out of courtesy. A way of saying you see what he’s doing, that you’re not rejecting him, that you’re not happy but you’d fake it for him if he needed it. 

The image of the bite stays burned on your eyelids, replaying like tv static whenever you dared to blink. You look at him in a way you shouldn’t, a way not reserved for friends. You hope the grief can justify it. You know it never will. 

“Does it hurt?” 

You assume it does, you don’t know how something with that appearance could avoid being painful, but he’s so calm. He’s talking to you like he would’ve any other day where he was the half-alive hero he always had been. You know of his time in the military, you know he’s here because he can handle things. You suppose you’re more just asking for the sake of it. For the sake of hearing his voice respond cohesively to you before the sound of it slips away from comprehension. 

“Yes.” 

He stares back at you with that same undefined look, leaning too far for people of your status. You want him to push harder, you want to undo all that’s been done. 

“We’re gonna figure it out, you know. The cure.” Blind hope supplied by a blind leader. You were a pristine picture of deceit, but it was better than spewing the truth. You’d accept your lie if it hurt you less, you hoped he’d do the same. “You won’t be like this forever.” 

He eats up your sentences with the vigor of a man who’s been not living long before he was dead; assigning that fleeting assurance to every earthly craving he’d ever had beaten out of him, every instinct he’s ignored the screams of. With that meaning, it’s almost honest. He wouldn’t be like this forever, soon he’d be nothing at all. 

It helped, in it’s own right. Hearing those words straight from the mouth of his shepherd

He can’t offer you assurances of his own, he’s never had that power. He just nods. 

“I believe you.” 

His descent was every bit as unbearable as you’d been prepping for. It felt selfish to think about how hard it was for yourself given what was happening, but you couldn’t help it. You felt his absence every second it grew, a pinprick in your soul having it’s edges plummet until the gape was comparable to a trench. A bountiful plane that used to contain multitudes, now just ash.  

You’d gone out and retrieved a new mask for him, lacking his preferred signature, but a mask nonetheless. You knew what he’d told you, felt it rip at your sluggish insides as it sunk in, you just didn’t care. He wasn’t exposed because he wanted to be, and you figured it’s only right he die with his dignity. 

It made it more difficult to look at him, the covering making him look so close to the being you loved, yet holding within it nothing further. 

By the time you’d brought it back to him, the streaks of tar had reached his neck, and you imagined yourself draping your declarations and your affections over him just as you did the cotton. It was a stupid fantasy, fit for a schoolgirl or someone ignorant to the ways of the world, but it was all you had. 

You could have spoken every word you knew of. He was too far out to accept them now. 

You’d sealed the door shut with every internal promise you’d ever made to him still inside. You swore you’d meet the god responsible for the downfall that got you here. You swore you’d show that god just how much they’d taken. You swore you’d never move on, never forget, never leave this moment. 

You weren’t sure the longevity of the storm, but you promised to bear through it. That’s all he would want you to do.  

The sound of your door opening angered you. This was a classified unit, and you felt almost protective of the creature housed on the other side of the glass. You were the one studying him, you were the one he trusted to. He wasn’t for others to see, to prod at, to understand. 

You looked to your left, the critical interruption morphing into a brown-skinned man with buzz-length curls atop his head. He was dressed in the same tactical gear Simon often was, and the sight sickened you. You’d never see him in it again. 

“You can’t be in here.” It reminded you of what he’d said to you yesterday. You lacked the warmth he’d held, extending no kind greetings to this stranger. This projectile wasn’t for modesty, this was offense. “This area’s restricted access. You need to leave.” 

It was too harsh to sound real. You didn’t speak this way so unprompted. 

Grief did odd things to people. 

“No - I know, sorry. I’m Kyle.” He appeared slightly off balance by how short you’d been, probably hearing of you as someone different than who you were presenting as. “They flew me over to…you know, replace him.” 

Your face twisted, his audacity curdling the neutrality you’d been fronting. It didn’t surprise you that the organizers had already filled his position. You didn’t even think it was a bad thing to have done. It was just the way he’d said it. 

Replace him. 

How laughable. 

His fingers pushed into the sides of his legs, fidgeting in a way Simon never did. “They haven’t given me an updated badge yet.” 

Your distaste softens where your expression does not. It makes sense. You have no qualms, logically, with the strategy being presented to you. You know it’s not Kyle you’re mad at. You know your anger is somewhere irrational and undefinable; and that you’re really just coasting on fury until your flood gates open to something deeper. 

It doesn’t make you want to know him. It doesn’t sooth the bone-deep sting you’re nursing. 

You catch his eyes drifting to the same north star yours have been locked on for the past day. His face is tight, something you can’t read proudly residing there like it cost him nothing to feel for the chained corpse in the cage. 

He pays no mind to your resentment, speaking openly, “Did you know him?”

You angle your body back to Simon and debate not answering. You lose the argument. 

“We’re all trapped here. We all know him.” 

It’s not particularly true, but Kyle is not someone you deem worthy of knowing how far in Simon went within you. You wouldn’t explain your molecules to him, or your blood, or your brain. You wouldn’t explain your heart either. 

“Well, not everyone’s in here watchin’ him.” 

A test. An invitation. 

One you had no interest in fostering. 

“Nope.” 

You stare straight ahead at Simon, too still and too human. His chest was going up and down, mesmerizing in the cynical way every natural disaster is. It’s the one thing you had at the moment, watching him breathe and wondering if at some point he was going to start lashing out, running into walls. 

You didn’t leave room to elaborate on what your brief reply meant, but the new guard seemed to be unfazed. 

“We served in 141 together before the outbreak.” You pivoted your head, interest peaked. “Never thought I’d see him like this.” 

Once, a few weeks into being here, you’d been delirious with sleep deprivation, asking Simon to keep you company at an hour far too late to be hospitable. You hadn’t expected him to agree at the time, but he had. He sat down and let you rant about fear, about death. He talked back sometimes, and every syllable exchanged made you more certain you wanted him in your life. You asked how he was so put together in the face of global disaster, and he’d shared stories about his hardest deployments, about his team. 

He’d mentioned this one. Kyle. Gaz. 

It was nice putting a face to a name. It made it easier to share a space with him, knowing that the two of you were indirectly connected through a common name. 

You felt your lungs deflate, sighing with begrudging tolerance. 

“I work in Virology, and we got here around the same time. Formed a bit of a trauma bond, I suppose.” It viscerally disagreed with your system to speak of your relationship in past tense. Something that was no longer being added to, leather-bound and left to pick up dust. “Never worked in a place where you gain a test subject from your friend dying.” 

“Mm.” The sound rings in your ears, nonverbal agreement plucking the reminiscent strings of every question Simon had ever answered with grunts. “They’re makin’ you dissect him, then?” 

It’s so blunt that it makes you laugh a bit, spiteful and agonizing as you realize how little it takes to sum up your place here. 

“Something like that, yeah.” Your gaze flits to his gun, a single second distraction from your one-sided staring contest. “A lot of the military guys kill themselves when they get bit. I’ve been here almost five months and this is the first…” Your throat chokes up involuntarily as you have to categorize Simon as one of them. “um - infected, that I’ve seen up close.” 

He lets the statement simmer, making no movement to coddle the impact of the blow. You don’t either, in all fairness. Something like that earns no gentleness. Something like that must be felt in all it’s terror. 

You continue, despite knowing you shouldn’t. 

“I still don’t know why he let this happen to him.” You infer that, if he could see his face, he’d hate it even more with that sludgy midnight syrup pumping through his veins. “He was dying either way. He could have kept his body, at the very least.” 

Kyle’s nose twitches minutely, teeth clenching visibly at the speculation on someone he once considered a teammate. You wondered if you’d upset him, if he’d be short with you. He didn’t claim to know Ghost, wasn’t in his head quite like Price had been, but he’d understood the persistent trepidation. He’d understood pattern.  

“Dunno’ how connected he was to his body. He’s useful this way. Givin’ information.” He frowned so severely that slight lines snuggled into his forehead. “More useful than he’d be dead.” 

You could have cried at how cold it all sounded. At how it must have felt for him to make that choice. You didn’t want the information if this was the cost. You wanted him to find rest. You wanted him to feel like he deserved it. 

He certainly didn’t deserve to be used as some vessel for progress. To put himself through torture on the slim possibility you’d crack the code because of it. 

“He’s in pain.” That cracked tv screen replayed the traitorous image of his injury. You tried to calculate how long it may be before you saw anything else when you closed your eyes. You had no answer. “I saw it, it -” Your voice cracked, embarrassing and entirely too human. “It was horrible.” 

“‘S what he knows.” 

It’s said so casually, with so much finality. You feel the incision it makes, feel each individual letter press through that surgical slice and burrow into the most protected parts of you. You must wear it on your face, in your stance, how much it hurts. 

It was what he knew. You understood that before it happened, and you understand it now. He talked aimlessly on occasion about how many times he’d thought about pulling the plug. All the anti-hero bullshit about how much better off the world would be without his shadowy self clogging up all the good that gets done. You saw how carnally he needed to be given a purpose. The lengths he’d go to in order to fulfill it. 

It made sense that would extend to the most deadly of cases. How much he probably wanted it to extend that far. How much he wanted to prove he was devoted, could be worth something. 

He was as stubborn in death as he was in life. 

You let your chat with Kyle fizzle out, giving nothing but a hum back to him and bathing in the solitude that came after his exit. 

You’re not sure you’d ever felt so alone. 

The next 52 hours were charted meticulously, watching every mammalian spasm he used to be unable to suppress trickle out until he was nothing but methodical stoicism. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t given you any indication he was ever going to. The question of whether the bite had just fully wiped him out became prevalent. You had watched it spread, that you were sure of, but maybe it simply didn’t take. Maybe he was just done, and the melancholic metronome of his breathing body was a fluke. The remnants of a soul once activated. 

Those 52 hours had been without sleep, sheer will and adrenaline keeping your eyes peeled, nausea battling the boredom that was sure to seep in eventually. You wrestled many times with the rational prompt of leaving, of resting, of coming back as something that could actually be of use to him. It was just harder than it seemed. 

He didn’t know you were there. Your presence was unacknowledged by him as far as you were aware. The consciousness held by the infected hadn’t been mapped out yet, but by their brutality, it had been collectively assumed they didn’t have much. 

You stayed because you were selfish. Because you needed him even when he didn’t need you back. You needed to keep him in your peripheral, needed to keep your pen jotting down every inhale that each 60 second segment contained. 

You were obsessed. You could feel it. But obsessed people got things done. 

Your resolve gave way eventually, sleep beckoning you like a mistress you couldn’t refuse. You didn’t turn the lights off when you left. You couldn’t stomach walking to your room while he sat in the dark. 

Now, returning to your post, you wished you’d never deserted him. 

The vacant balaclava was torn down the middle, the gap for his eyes parting into sagging curtains that hung loosely on his cheeks. He was on the floor, hunched, knees as close to his chest as he could get them. Half of his chair was frayed and splintered at the base of the wall it’d been thrown against, the other half a few feet away from it. And, in his hands, one of it’s legs. 

His teeth were sunken into the wood like he’d bit through butter. He wasn’t gnawing at it, wasn’t doing this for the purpose of consumption. The treatment more resembled a newborn’s painful teething. Like there was an itching in his gums so unruly that he’d take any pressure he could just to sate it. 

The front of his face was visible because of what he’d done, and you saw how far that black had travelled. It danced behind each of his scar lines like the most elegant, insufferable backdrop. The bags under his eyes were enriched with the color, the once pink shine of his gums following suit. 

But, whatever the virus had bullied him into becoming, it hadn’t tainted his eyes. They were still doughy, still unwillingly soft. It hadn’t taken that from him. 

It hadn’t taken that from you. 

You understood, then, that his hunger would overtake him if not dealt with. 

The dreadful truth about the apocalypse is how apparent it becomes that human life has never been valued. Animals had been preserved and rationed as efficiently as possible once the pandemic hit an official status. Many insect species were killed in ignorance, not wanting the risk of quicker transmission. 

Everyone knew cannibalism would arrive sooner or later, once things got serious enough. And, when you’d been taken into the lab, they informed you that you were far closer to that point than advertised. 

You hadn’t had to eat human meat, not yet. But, as they’d told you, they’d taken the populations of those condemned to death penalties and life sentences and housed them in special facilities. It was a last resort for the living, with another off-book use. 

In the case of a quarantined infected, the prisoners could be pulled from as a food source. 

Your hands stopped trembling soon after you’d gotten here, fear deep enough to lick marrow but your determination equally as high. You’d squeeze when they shook, and eventually they stopped squirming without your permission. 

This was different. This brought the tremors back. 

Death took a separate form entirely when it was forced upon you. It was filthy work, staining what it came into contact with and leaving no room for petty analysts to decipher it.

An invitation, however, was impossible to manage without letting death into yourself, as well. You were calling it. You were stepping quietly to managers and speaking quietly in code. It was less irredeemable this way, they’d said. You weren’t organizing the violent murder of another person, you were furthering the research that could save the world. 

You would have to ask for a sacrifice. And you would have to track every millisecond that sacrifice spent in the bubbling maw of whatever monster awaited it. 

You should have accounted for this, realistically. Simon was obviously going to need sustenance at some point. He had a way of dulling your professionalism, even after his own demise. Surely you couldn’t be expected to think critically when that meant feeding your best friend the rusty spirit of some guilty sulker.  

Shock and horror had no home in the new world. Only work. Only survival. And that’s all this was. His survival depended on this. 

When you left this time, you did flick the lights off. If his face had to be bared, you wouldn’t prolong it. You wouldn’t be cruel to him. 

Travel that’s blessed with a stamp of necessity from the government is almost always done by aircraft. Driving is too noisy, draws too much attention to the goods inside. 

It took about a day, following your request, for the inmate to be delivered. You hadn’t been alerted when he’d gotten there. You were bracing for a call, for someone to be tasked with summoning you considering you’d been the sole jury on this decision. But you got nothing. 

You’d been where you always were now, in observation, when Kyle simply opened the door and dragged him in as unceremoniously as any prey would’ve been. The man was almost as tall as Simon, his width meek in comparison. You’d asked for larger bait if possible, not wanting Simon to remain peckish once done eating. 

This guy would do nicely. As unfortunate as it was. 

Gagged, bound, and blindfolded. Even through all that was inhibiting him, he wore his future like a brand. You could see that he was braced for the worst, that he knew this would be the last place he existed in. 

Kyle’s face was tense in the most minuscule of ways. Lips in too tight of a line, eyes hardened as though the space behind them was vacant. He seemed to be performing the role of a puppet, hands belonging to someone grander, using him to throw fish to a shark. 

He could not be responsible for the snap of that shark’s jaw. He did not choose this. 

You did. 

You knew that Simon had seen a considerable amount of death throughout his time in the 141, you assumed Kyle was much the same. You wondered what his kills had looked like in the past. If he’d held the handle of a blade and forced the sharpness into trapped skin. If it’d been in search of information or simply in search of emotion. Something to tell him he was still alive. 

That’s what Simon used to say to you. That he’d done what others had ordered; and that life was not a force, but a currency. What others lost, he gained. The dying flicker of someone’s soul would serve as kindling for the flame in his own. The one that always burned low and cold, no matter how much tinder he dumped onto it. 

Perhaps this man would produce a similar result. Perhaps he’d make Simon real again for the split second it took for fire to catch on wood. 

Kyle doesn’t look at you, nor you at him. He walks over to the door separating you from the end of the world and holds for your approval to poach it. You settle yourself at the panel, 2 buttons of red and green await the smudge of your fingertips on them. 

Red and green. Open and close. Good and bad. 

Yet another small nod at how critical harsh duality was clung to in the post-outbreak wasteland. You used to be either alive or dead. Life got harder when a grey area was added to these 2 opposites. It was overcompensation at it’s finest, but even you couldn’t argue that some things were not meant to have a compromise. 

Your index digs into the temple of the hard green plastic, the quarantine door opening with a hiss of steam and an audible crank of the track it’s on. 

The worm wiggles on his hook. You’re tempted to apologize but make no move to. 

“Kyle,” you say. He angles himself towards you, slightly upset at your prolonging of this act. “Chains are two feet long. Try to keep double that.” 

He nods, stepping forward into the make-shift den. Simon had stayed bundled up in his corner since you’d seen him yesterday.

Now, as direct wanderers approach something they cannot comprehend, his head raises in interest. 

He’s slow to process what’s in front of him. You watch his gaze soak Kyle in it’s heady toxin, the burden of being acknowledged by a predator. His fingers twitch, the first sign of unintentional movement you’ve seen from him. You write it down, breaking his existence down into bullet points like he’d never been conscious at all. 

When his stare shifts right, his whole body bolts up and forward, pouncing like a ravenous snake. It’s so violent that you jump back in your seat, that you worry for the structural security of the pipe he’s chained to. 

Kyle barely flinches, and the pure dichotomy of soldier and civilian instincts makes you question if you’d ever have gotten along with these men under normal circumstances. It makes you question how much humanity can vary. 

Simon flings his arms in another preening yank, trying to grasp the only meal he’s been offered in days. 

Kyle seems to remember where he is and what he’s there for, and shoves the former prisoner at the entity begging to kill him. The result is instantaneous. 

Kyle steps out as quickly as he can. You, alternatively, find yourself unable to look away. 

His hands plant firmly on the man’s shoulders, his teeth hooking like fangs into flesh that is far too eager to bend and break at the will of an undead being. You watch chunks of skin be torn off in long, narrow sheets. Blood careening out like the break of a hurricane when it finally hits the welcoming shore. It spills and spills; ignored by your friend, too focused on the gooey parts that he can bite into and tear apart. 

You track all the organs you see excavated from a corpse that still lashes like it’s ignorant to what’s being done to it. Liver, pancreas, kidneys, large intestine, small intestine. 

When he reaches the brain, horrifyingly, the only thought that manages to break through the haze is ‘how cliche’. 

And you beg to know, as he chews around bone and chomps through tendon, how it feels to be so unrestrained in your animosity. How it feels to be an animal in every right, with no hint of punishment from what used to be your peers. 

Simon is big, and he eats like a glutton until every ounce of that livestock is pearly calcium on the blood-stained floor, or cubes of the finest cutlet, churning wonderfully in his stomach.  

You only remember to close the door once he swallows his last bite and strays back to his chosen corner. You chastise yourself, obligatory jabs that this is not someone who would treat you warmly should you come into contact, that the door needs to be closed for the safety of everyone involved. 

And, shamefully, that no amount of unabashed brutality could make something beautiful. That not all things deserved admiration simply because they were unconventional. 

It was a disgusting sight, truly. Not something fit for the mind of a person hoping to remain unchanged. 

But Simon had already changed you. You didn’t know if you had it in you to be disgusted. 

“Is that all?” 

Kyle’s voice draws your attention to the door that led out of observatory. His back is to you, presumably had been for the entire duration of Simon’s feeding. 

Many of the military personnel you offhandedly spoke with used their tolerance as material they could boast. They could withstand the sight of any gore any living thing could produce. They were macho enough to kill, to be killed, to hate and vandalize. 

It was commonplace for them. 

The fact that Kyle had no interest in viewing whatever had occurred made you respect him more. It made you respect yourself less. 

It was your job to witness, not his. That was believable for now.  

“Yes - yeah, that’s all. Thank you.” You didn’t know if gratitude was appreciated or expected for something like this. He didn’t seem interested in it. “You can go.” 

Then, you’re all alone with him again. Moments you used to cherish and now have to justify with academia. 

You used to chat about movies, about the past, about how the future had never been guaranteed and how it’s shocking so many people lived like it was. 

You stare at him, at the mess he’d made, and question if he’d enjoyed what he’d eaten. If he still had flavors he kind of liked and vehemently disliked. If his texture preferences had persisted, or if they’d intensified. You questioned if you’d ever figure out a way for him to tell you so. 

You sit down in the same chair you’d condemned that inmate to death in. The seat you’d been glued to for almost a week. You probably wouldn’t depart for another few hours at least, still at odds with leaving him by himself. 

Still selfishly hoping he didn’t want you to. 

You’d fallen asleep on the console that night, fogged pupils burning harsh lines into the back of your brackish eyelids. Your hand was numb from the weight of your head, having rested on your folded arms. Your back hurt, as did your legs and neck alike. 

You felt no remorse, however. Ironically, you felt more comfortable around him than you did on your stiff cot in your stuffy quarters. 

You take a moment to stretch out the ache in your muscles, standing up to see what the dark had made of your forgone companion. You assumed he’d still be curled, still be hiding his face behind his knees. You expected the shame to beget itself once more, to force his hand even after he could no longer perceive it doing so. 

You didn’t know how to feel at the absence of it. 

His stomach was lovingly pressed to the floor, shirt riding up a bit to expose a sliver of rear midriff. His left cheek was much the same, cloth and skin mingling with the icy pressure of tile. His arms were spread up and out, as though mimicking the start of wings. A vessel posed in piety, holiness encased in immortal rot and rapture. 

Bones sat atop scuff marks on the ground, the smaller ones having been snapped in half from the frenzy he’d entered when feeding. Blood had claimed most of the territory for itself, now dried and waxy in a perimeter of sacrilege around the man. This, alone, was as loud of a warning as you could get.   

Crucifixion would have been a more merciful end than this. He had that going, at least. 

You saw no movement from Simon, his face resembling that of sleep. He hadn't exhibited this behavior in the days you’d been his guardian. You hadn’t heard of this phenomenon in any other infected, never heard a whisper of something this strange. 

It was more likely his body was done being puppeted. Though, you’re lost as to why it’d happen now, why it’d happen at all. 

His chest remains stationary, his fingers don’t twitch; and, for one paralyzing minute, you’ve well and truly lost him. It feels nothing like the news he’d been bitten, nor like the sight of his skin greying rapidly.

It feels like finality. Like his body being zipped into a bag and hauled away. 

And, like the fool you’ve proven yourself to be, you run towards the end in hopes of stopping it. 

You press the button, the door hisses open, and you know vaguely that you should have called Kyle. You know blatantly that this is dangerous, that you need protection, that you could die. 

It’s indescribable how little logic means when emotion is called into question. When the soul is at stake. 

You approach him slowly, the deafening thump of your heart making your blood feel thick where it sloshes in your veins. It weighs your limbs down, makes your head light in a way that feels lethal. 

You breach the safety barrier. You can see the line in the sand dissolving by filthy ocean waves. You can feel like lack of emanating heat, so far from human yet so close to mortality. 

You squat down, shaky where you balance and careful where you analyze. You remember how often you’d taken to this pose in your childhood, examining insects or rocks, watching nature eat and birth itself in the cyclical way it always had. You felt far from intrigue when doing it now, much closer to unfounded faith than fascination. 

You raised your arms to touch him and pulled back just as quick. It wasn’t certain if the virus was spread exclusively through biting. You didn’t know if it could be transmitted through touch, if you had any cuts his illness could sneak through. 

It was common knowledge not to put your bare flesh on a contaminant, especially one so unexplored. 

You rose, planning to snag the rubber gloves that you knew sat in one of the drawers in observation. You turned, in a rush, and were pulled back equally fast.

The palm of Simon’s capable hand grasped tightly at your ankle, knocking you off your feet. Your collision was violent, your reflexes being the only thing saving your forehead from meeting the floor. You felt the flex of his fingers, the mythological strength he used to yank you backward. 

You slid against grime and gore, thrashing and clawing. Flakes of that ruddy stain piled up under your nails as you fought, never standing a chance at victory. It took a couple of weak tugs to get you close enough he could release his hold, latching onto your hip and turning you onto your back. 

The switch costed you what little leverage you had, now completely separated from any attempt you could make at freedom. You couldn’t feel the temperature of the ground through your clothes, but you felt the pressure along your spine, a reminder of your mistake harshly digging into the back of your skull. 

He got on top of you, and you ready yourself for the never ending sting of sickness. For the pierce of his canines. The weight of his body on yours is more than enough to pin you down, and the slight twitch of his head has your hands flying up in defense. 

He doesn’t lunge, he doesn’t prod, doesn’t even scratch. His chest is heaving, and you can hear the slight whistle of a whimper on each harrowing exhale he makes. It reminds you of a dog, exerted and begging after a long day. 

Up close, you can see the blood spatters around his parted lips, sprayed on and blotted off but never fully removed. There are specks of it on every bit of him, dots of deep red with some having snail trails of where they’d dripped off of him. Scarlet lines trek towards his irises, and, though burdened and bloodshot, they trudge over your face with deep concern. 

Guilt, you think, burns there too. 

He leaves the fear on your face as is, sweeping down onto your useless hands, up as though they could make any difference should he actually choose to harm you. The sight seems to make him antsy, his breaths quicken, his own fingers flinch. 

And, for some reason that must only make sense in his mind, he nudges your hand with the back of his. It’s a simple tap, one he repeats multiple times until you finally see it as a call to action. 

Your fingertips slowly find the meat of his wrist, halting his movement and making him grunt at the contact. You curl them under his sleeve, pushing it down just enough to reveal the wound responsible for all of this. 

You remained gentle, touching the bite with a kind of respect you’d only ever give Simon. This disease didn’t deserve your softness, but he did. You couldn’t embody anything harder, couldn’t bring yourself to be scientific when someone you loved was trapped inside the thing you studied. 

He visibly calms with the affection, bowing his head like a worshipper as you caress the culprit of his undoing. This ugly, spiraling thing absorbing all the care you can muster and giving it to the internal being locked inside the beast. It’s disgustingly tender, private in a way that couldn’t possibly exist under the eyes of an outsider.  

You took a moment to breathe, to let yourself feel the semi-sturdy trust being established between the two of you. It was a reintroduction, a rekindling of something that once could have burnt down a forest it you’d let it. 

You start sitting up, tactile and timidly, giving room for him to adjust as you did it. Before long, slowly but surely, he inched his way off of you, chains chittering as he retreated back to the corner he felt safest in. 

You didn’t feel solid when you stood, extremities trembling with the force it takes to befriend something rabid. You walked backwards until you were beyond his reach, not in fear of what he’d do if you turned your back, but with desire to keep him in your vision. To keep this experience painted on you for as long as possible. 

The close of the door was excruciating, motorized monotony clashing hard with the pure nuance you’d just witnessed. 

Up to this point, you’d been working with the assumption that the illness was mindless. That it ate up everything one kept inside and filled the empty slots with a ravenous famine. That it built tools that did nothing but take, nothing but eat. 

You see now that it’s no such thing. His memories remain at least somewhat intact, with a newfound instinct that parallels animals on the brink of extinction. 

This is a new battlefield entirely, an extension of the mandated finish line proctored by clueless government leaders. This was life inside of death. Light inside of dark. 

This was hope. 

The next twelve hours curdled into a primitive hypothesis that your colleagues would have called you idiotic for entertaining. 

Simon’s insistence that you acknowledge his bite made you wonder if the cogs in his head were spinning the cracked frames of what happened in the last hour he was himself. If he was clinging on to the images he could see the clearest, the ones that were fairly recent but belonged to a timeline different than the one you were in now. 

And, consequently, you also wondered what kind of outcome you could produce by playing into it. 

You harnessed all the same materials you’d had on the day of reckoning, sulking into quarantine with a bowl of saline, a rag, and a quaint reverence that only ever became apparent in his company. 

It most likely wasn’t a good idea to be approaching him again so soon. You were still entirely in the dark about what mannerisms he would take to, about if the disease was still progressing, about if he’d grow tired of your hovering and put an end to it. 

He’d touched you yesterday, you’d touched him right back. You’d stroked criticality like the scalp of a cat, patient and enamored. You didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel affected. 

The virus was slow but it was not silent. It held pride in the scrape of it’s footsteps, every bootmark an indication of how happy it was to be invading. Surely, you would have seen the black dispersion, the bruising, something. You would have seen something if you’d been contaminated. 

And you hadn’t. So you came back. 

Moth to a flame.   

He stood up when you entered, stare falling to the items balanced in your shaky hands. You listened to his breath stumble a bit on it’s climb upward, a tremor forcing his head minutely to the left. 

A raspy exhale, a twitch. You didn’t know the connotations of these actions. You made a mental note to start forming a pattern with them for the possibility of translation. 

You stepped closer, back straight and shoulders squared in hopes of appearing confident. The solution rocked gentle waves in synchronization with your strides. You loved this being, you’d been in unnecessarily near proximity more times than you’d care to count. You could do it again. You wanted to do it again. 

You wanted to be someone he let help him. 

His back stayed hugging the wall, looking almost more scared of you than you of him. He had the fangs and the nails of something nasty, something that would delight in corruption. He’d developed these sinister assailants in his exile, but they didn’t register to either of you. He let you set the bowl in front of him without ever showing intent to use his strength, so you simply chose to believe he wouldn’t. 

He had no chair this time around, so when you bent to soak the rag, you rose again immediately after. 

All the vitriolic sayings you’d heard throughout your lifetime were rigid in nature, unforgiving and immovable in their purpose. Sink or swim. Do or die. Make or break. Everything harsh and everything happening right now. You moved or you fell, these were your options. This was the ideology that was taught to you. This was the ideology you were expecting when starting this interaction. 

When reeling in a feral entity, it would kill you or it would not. 

But here, with plumes of apprehension wrapping widely around you both, equal and equidistant in your conjoined hesitance, you understood black and white were things of fiction. He feared your ethos the way you feared his potential, each image incorrect and muddied with personal insecurity. 

He was not threatening you, and you were not saving him. 

This was just perseverance, a forged connection withstanding the trials of time and hardship. Just an elevated version of any other unifying issue. Just another thing to push through. 

His jaw felt rougher than it had back then, the unhinging weapon of a killer resting nervously in your palm. You slid the damp cloth through the sewing pin pricks of his incoming stubble. It was noticeably patchy, small planes being untouched by hair due to the abundance of scar tissue. It was endearing, in a way, seeing something so specific to him after watching him be eaten alive by something general. It made the blood cling harder to him, forcing you, in return, to scrub with more pressure. 

You didn’t mind it; angling him every direction you could, cleansing the sharp edges and dipping into the texture his skin held to ensure every bit of congealed plasma was gone. 

You heard that same hurt-dog whimper rattle around in the back of his throat, sounding out with every breath he took. He said nothing as he took you in, letting you control his movement, letting you take the reins for as long as you wanted them. He basked in the sting of you seeing the sins he had stamped all over him, in the fact you were choosing to absolve them. 

Once you finished his face, you raised his hands up, one by one. You let the rag suck up every bit of extinguished life that stained his fingers. And, by the end, they looked capable of kindness again. Callused and scuffed and too big for his own good, but still something that didn’t have to cause harm if he didn’t want them to. 

For that short time, you joined him in the state outside humanity. You were two of the same unearthly species, one grooming the other so they didn’t sit in filth alone. 

Simon allowed it to happen with all the eagerness of someone who’d been craving it. An idea based on complete nonsense struck you. Not scientific, not founded on principle, just the desperate coping of someone who couldn’t make themself give up. 

“I cleaned your face last week when you got bit.”

You didn’t look up at him. You were unsure if your speaking would affect his status, if it would make things better, if it would make them worse. Your biggest fear, you suppose, was that it wouldn’t affect anything at all. 

“Do you remember that?” 

Your eyes went from his collarbones to your own shoes, preferring the sight of a red-slicked floor to that of your best friend’s gaze holding no warmth for you. 

You stay that way, despite hearing sounds beckon back and forth behind his teeth, a verbal confirmation he can no longer enunciate. Frustration drives an increase in his breathing, words stuck inside a carcass with no way to escape. 

He settles for something else instead, turning his hand around where it sat in yours, now palm to palm. His fingertips press into your knuckles. He squeezes. 

Yes. 

You can feel the force seep into the gesture, a testament to the power he has just under the skin, a promise that he won’t use it on you. 

He squeezes again. 

I do.

The illness maintained a sentience you were unprepared for. 

Your curiosity was immense walking away from him, burning the edges of the picture you’d painted. It was a refusal of obedience, a deviation from all you’d seen portrayed. 

Simon responded to you. He showed proof of neurological processes you were certain he shouldn’t have access to. He showed food preference and emotional bandwidth. He made it clear to you, explicitly and undoubtedly, that he was alive under all the decay. That the man you’d known kept his wits about him while his body was whisked away.  

He knew what you were to him, and evidently held recognition for those he once loved. And, as a scientist, the urge you struggled with most of all was pushing. 

You wanted to trace every boundary this prospect held. You wanted to know if the registration stopped at some point, if there was an amount he had to have known you in order to know your face when it counted. 

He’d told you, only once, about a man he hated. 

Pre-outbreak, back in the 141, he’d been a part of a mission that sent someone to confinement instead of to the grave. It’s the most worked up you’d ever seen him, vagrantly going on about the atrocities he’d seen that man do, about how he’d asked for the clearance to kill him and been denied. How much it had gutted him to surrender him to higher power. To not have the assurance that execution brings. 

The apocalypse escorted that man out of his classified status and straight into the livestock pen of the common criminal. There was no hierarchy in the end, just puzzles and those who solved them. Just you and him. 

With some specific inquiry, you found the facility he’d been herded into. It took two minutes for his name to be searched, and with a rush order placed on his arrival, it took only a single night for him to be shipped. 

Kyle pulled his leash straight into your open arms once again. He didn’t give you any inclination that he remembered who he was leading, but the subtleties gave him away. He hadn’t been so harsh with inmate number one, he hadn’t wailed him about like he contained no value. This was a personal kind of disrespect, an intimate one. 

He looked almost disappointed when you dismissed him. He’d been so hellbent on avoiding the carnage before, but now resembled a child being denied dessert. It was almost comical, and it could have stayed that way, had he not pressed into your avoidance. 

He said it wouldn’t be safe to leave the job in your hands alone. You weren’t armed, you weren’t trained, you weren’t ready to take out an enhanced soldier who’s mind was muddied with unstoppable rage. 

You told him you knew what you were doing. He told you that didn’t bridge the gap. 

You only got him off your back when you exposed that a different plan was being followed through. That this wasn’t a routine feeding, that this was an experiment and he wasn’t needed for it. 

And, in that regard, it was your job. It was your job and it wasn’t his, meaning you held authority and could express it to the fullest degree. 

You swore you’d be careful, and that if you got ripped to bits it was on you and not him. He left very begrudgingly, letting the door swing shut instead of closing it himself. You didn’t make a move until the sound of his footsteps were no longer audible. 

The hostage was dressed as the last had been; blind, gagged, bound. All signs of power stripped away and stapled back on like a grievance personified. Power was nothing but proof of guilt around here. Power was nothing but restraint. 

And, in his case, it was nothing but a vow of hostility. A place to reap what he’d once sewed. 

He didn’t squirm as you walked him into quarantine. You’re sure if his mouth had been uncovered, some volatile exclaims would have flung their way out. In the moment, you felt only gratitude that you wouldn’t have to listen to the kind of words that come from a man like him. 

Simon, sturdy and in wait, clenched his jaw when the man finally looked at him. At the creature he’d grown into. 

He’d done the motion so abruptly that a small click sound echoed out into the dull air. A punishing threat and a humid promise that whatever storm was rolling in was guaranteed to be excruciating. 

For the first time since your brief introduction, you heard the man make a noise. A wet, petulant sob soaked through the wad of stitched cotton that’d been shoved into his mouth. You’d never seen someone realize they’re doomed. Not like this, not at the hands of another. 

The stink of fear was prominent, floating in bloated pulses off the sentenced criminal you currently held upright. There was such little distance from human to animal. The outbreak emphasized this heavily, how moronic it was to live as though you’re an elevated version of something. As though you share no commonality with a bear, with a rabbit. 

He was face to face with a predator, and he felt it just as the mouse did when squared against a cat, unavoidable and non negotiable.

You mused on that his arrogance put him here, that he could have ended up anywhere else had he kept his nose clean. But, deeper down, you would have given Simon anything. Anyone. 

This ruse was believable, a mask you didn’t mind wearing to keep up appearances, but it wasn’t authentic. You possessed a desire to explore the virus, yes. More than that, though, you wanted to know every detail of how it affected him. 

You weren’t doing this for generalization, to help the others. Not entirely. 

You just wanted to bring him back. You would have wrangled in any being, any object, that could aid that goal. 

It wasn’t right, you don’t think. It wasn’t moral. It wasn’t ethical. 

Looking at the man being glared at by the person you cared the most about, you found yourself void of care. Something prodded at your ribs from inside, an insidious declaration that you were just as much a monster. That this wasn’t instinct, or necessary. 

This was obsession. This was devotion. 

With that tidbit fully established, you shoved him forward past the four foot perimeter, much like Kyle had done days ago. 

You wondered if this was what true allyship felt like. If this feeling rivaled that of wartime destruction on the behalf of a government agreement. You didn’t know if this was something all friends would do for each other. Maybe Simon had never been a friend at all. Maybe he’d always been something more. 

This was far less mindless than it’d been previously. The second that man was in his reach, he was eviscerated. Simon tore limb from sternum, four times over just to watch the muscle stretch and break. Organs were torn out with his teeth, skin shredded with blunt nails and a fiery will. Above all else, agony was prioritized. He did as much as he could with the man still alive, grinding down sanity until he was hollowed out. Less substance than a zombie. Just a murderer begging to die. 

Not a single speck was swallowed. Simon wanted nothing to do with him. This was all justice, all anger. 

You watched, once more, as he lost himself in the elegance of a brutalist pursuit. This had been years in the making, and he was every bit as primed as he said he’d be. 

It was heated in the places it shouldn’t be. A lesson in eroticism and the thin line it walked between homicide and holistic vulnerability. Teeth met the thin veil of a neck for many reasons, all overlapping and interconnected. 

There shouldn’t be any joy in seeing such a thing, yet you were completely fixated on how easily he dismantled a being that was supposed to be superior. There shouldn’t be excitement in it, shouldn’t be arousal, yet that was no deterrence for the feelings that persisted anyway. 

He stood in the middle of it all, bloodied and heaving like a body put to work. Pieces of the enemy were scattered like snow around the spacious room. 

You stood just opposite him, right outside the reach of his arms. 

“You didn’t eat him.” 

It was a rather insignificant thing to commentate on. Though, that was valuable data, all things considered. His hunger wasn’t domineering, it couldn’t hijack his rage or his drive for penance. Death was death, and fuel was fuel. He was unwilling to cross those two wires. 

He agreed in a sound you were growing familiar with. He didn’t eat him. This you both were able to settle on. 

Your vision drifted toward the man’s head on Simon’s side of the room, sitting still in a viscous, honeyed puddle that you had no business gawking at. He’d been alive not minutes ago. Life was fickle like that. 

You jolted your gaze to where it’d previously been at the loud clash of chains. The shock forced you back a bit, laying in wait as he attempted to break his tether, attempted to get closer to you. You hadn’t even realized he’d wanted it. 

“Simon - hey -” 

It was continuous, longing tugs filled to the brim with every bit of supernatural strength he carried. The cuffs had been designed for someone with immense physical power, but even the designers hadn’t accounted for the variability of the virus. He’d been strong even as a man, let alone as something much more.   

Your breathing labored, your certainty balancing on the thinnest of tightropes. He wasn’t listening to your words, wasn’t listening to your warnings. He had a mission, and you’d never seen him disregard an order. 

You still held true to the belief he wouldn’t hurt you. He’d had many chances to do it up to this point and he hadn’t. He’d seemed saddened at the fear you embodied the first time you’d been in quarantine. He knew who you were. He didn’t want to kill you. He’d never tried to bite you. 

And, just when you were beginning to buy the snake oil you were peddling yourself, a snap ricocheted anywhere it could reach. It bounced off the door, off the blood, off the porcelain floors. It claimed every square inch it could reach, submerging you in a deadly concoction of terror and tantalization, blurring every line you’d ever let yourself have faith in. 

You made the mistake of staring him down, of meeting his eyes. It was a reflex, more than anything. A hindbrain plunder of assessing the threat you might be at risk of.

He took it, fondly, as an invitation. 

“Wait -” 

You couldn’t even see the end of your sentence before he was shoving you against the wall. Commands meant nothing, constraint meant even less. The sense of death just for the sake of it was intoxicating, and he was higher than he’d ever gotten while alive. 

You could feel the dig of his fingers into the fat of your hips, the blood that was saturating your clothes from how covered in it he was. Your upper back was flush against the cold, but he was tugging your lower half forward to slot against his. It was such a minor bend, but the distance felt lethal. 

You said his name again, the repetition sour on your tongue but your mind at a loss of what else to do. He was close enough that you could smell the metal and dirt that clung to his clothes, could feel the focal point of ruin and debauchery. It frayed like a cut cable, spitting out sparks hot enough to melt steel and yet palatable enough to fan your internal flame. 

You put your hands on his shoulders, intending to get him away from you, intending to do something that you’d be able to stomach in an hour. He only seemed to delight in the contact. 

He pushed against you, clothes failing to save you from the grind of his cock against the unbearable sensitivity that’d built up from seeing him in action. Your grip dropped, palms falling flat on his chest with no force behind them. It was new, touching him there. Damp with that keen scarlet and the steady beat of his heart. 

He fussed with the hem of your pants for nearly no time at all, gentlemanly remains no doubt peeking through the haze before being squandered by the fact Simon was nothing of the sort. The fabric came apart at the seams, sides ripping away from each other and landing as meaningless scraps on the ground. More shriveled rags to lap up the mess you’d made. 

It was an awfully loud thing to happen, your slight gasp burdening the space when it did. You hadn’t been expecting it. You hadn’t been expecting any of this.

It was occurring too fast to think about. He repeated the motion with your underwear, leaving you bare and him scrambling to catch up. His haste was a marvel, getting his pants down to mid thigh before losing care for the rest. 

He finally, finally had you. Months of unrest and weeks spent undead.

His love, his need, had been the only thing that stayed centered through everything. Stuff shifted around it, orbiting like the earth around the sun. But the sun had remained the same, had stayed whole despite the things that depended on it. You had remained as the same crushing totality, the same person he couldn’t help but indulge in. 

He wrapped his fingers around the back of your neck, stepping into the role of puppeteer, an escape from being the one on strings. 

He held your forehead to his and pressed into you, force and desperation stopping him from being the kind of lover he’d have rather been. Your nails dug into his chest from the stretch, a curse fleeing your mouth in a strangled whimper that he drinks up like he’s dying for it. He doesn’t let you hide from him, doesn’t let you run from the feeling. The tips of your noses are touching, and he’s hellbent on keeping your eyes locked with his. 

He’s close enough to kiss you, to delve into just how disgusting you’d let things get under the guise of loyalty, but he doesn’t. The blood smeared across his face has made it’s way to yours, and that feels more obscene than anything he could do on his own. A large, evident stamp of the levels you’d stoop to, of the way you could be owned by someone else. By him. 

Then, he moves, and you wonder how you’d ever avoided doing this with all the months you’d spent in his company. It’s torturous, fast and deep and all consuming in a way you hadn’t thought existed. 

The revolting things that the virus had done to him combined with the delicious sweep of him against that rough spot inside had you clenching hard enough to make the both of you cry out. The grey of his skin was even starker against the jet black of infection, and the reminder that this was the corpse of your best friend rained down on the last little bit of consciousness you had. 

“Mm - shit -” 

His teeth nipped along your jaw, the liquid bits of the man still on the floor smudging onto the skin there. It wasn’t enough to break it, wasn’t enough to make you one of him; it was just enough to remind you he could. That there was so much power and so much danger housed behind his six feet of bone and muscle. That he could make you miserable if he wanted, and all he desired was to make you feel good. 

That, you think, was what tipped you over the edge. The fullness and the heat and his unyielding reverence even in the face of dystopian challenges. 

It wasn’t a graceful fall by any means, months of stress and care and want all bubbling to the surface, begging to burst each time he thrusted back inside you. Letting go was euphoric, something you didn’t see a point in warning him about and something that spread through you quicker than sickness could ever strive for. 

He worked you through it, continuing the rhythm and inadvertently sending you quietly into slight overstimulation. You needed to feel closer, to feel Simon and not just the decomposing image of him. 

You reached up to the hand cradling your neck, stroking your fingers over the indents of his bite mark. A cotton-soft moment that added meaning to every moment you’d manufactured throughout the last week. 

He whimpered like it hurt, pace stuttering before halting entirely when his pelvis was fully nestled against yours. You felt warmth coat the new parts of you he’d touched tonight, the end and the beginning to something without set limits. 

You shifted, and he held tighter onto you, territorial to a fault in that unchanging way he’d always been. You kept your fingertips tracing over each divot of each mark where a tooth had once sunk, lazily basking in the afterglow like you were two normal friends in a normal situation. 

You didn’t know what kind of person this made you, but whatever kind it was, you’d be it for him. 

There was a monster in your village.

It’d been countless nights now of going to sleep and waking up to one more empty bed. One more father lost to the predatory tendrils that crept around the dusk, that populated what should have been a safe space. Nobody had the same story, but everybody had the same result. Another funeral for someone’s husband, someone’s father, someone’s son. 

It was clockwork. Always on time and always messy. 

Some patron, or preacher, or diligent civilian would find a horrid, crimson congregation of what could only be the last trace of a losing man. They’d find fear incarnate smudged across the tattered face of the dark’s latest victim. A body torn to shreds. A neck gaped wide for the world to look down upon. 

The town was collectively holding a breath, getting children home and tucked in before the sun even dared kiss the horizon. Nobody was patrolling. Nobody was looking for whatever was doing this. Everyone was focused on only one thing. 

Survival.

What was once a near given, something almost insured, was now constantly in jeopardy. The men lived in consistent contradiction, being scared for their lives while simultaneously being the protectors. Any one of them could be on the chopping block, could be the next family to lose it’s heart. And none of them knew how to deal with it. 

Your father chose to hoard your mother and you inside. The windows remained covered even in the day. The doors stayed locked. Every venture out of your four walls was necessity-driven and carried out begrudgingly. The risk was too grand, the loss too irreparable. It made sense. It was by far the most rational thing to be done. 

But it was hard to sleep once the outside grew cloaked. 

With nowhere to go during the day, the small room that had been designated to you became just about the only sight you saw. It blurred the different times into one barely comprehensible mush of dampening light. You laid down to surrender yourself to sleep, and the static tingles of restlessness would envelop you like a wave. Like it would kill you if it wasn’t listened to. 

You grew more concerned by the day that you’d simply die waiting for life to let you back into it. Or that, in the nonsensical approach of cowering over combating, the assailant would get to everyone. Only men were targeted now, but this nightmareish force would surely return to it’s hunger after the last one had been consumed. Would surely start taking the women. The children. 

The church was spouting warnings of the devil, of a rapture, of Hell itself making it’s way to the land of the living. It would have explained it, if you let it. Who but the devil could do something so inhumane, so ghastly? 

They didn’t know.

But you did.

Not the face, nor the body. You’d seen his eyes. Bright as a candle after lights-out, red as the blood he spilled. 

He walked the perimeter of your house like a sentient premonition, like a preceding calm before the catastrophe. He never got close enough to be deciphered, only to be perceived. He was like a ghost. Like something only there if you didn’t stare head-on. 

Tonight was no different. 

Your body was covered by a too-long nightgown and the unshakeable perspiration that came with Mississippi summers. You could see the scarlet glare way out in the tallgrass away from your home, scorching and unabashed, like the sun itself had split in two and crashed down at your doorstep. 

You felt marked by his presence whenever he visited you, engaging in odd staring contests and wondering if this was what the end felt like. If it was drawn out and premeditated. If he was only waiting for you to slip up, to give him an in. 

You wondered if you were simply wearing the shoes of all the people he’d killed. If he’d hunted them like he does you. If this was part of it. 

Normally, he’d stand so still that your mind began convincing you there was nothing there at all. He would just watch you, and you him. The most conniving bit of voyeurism in exchange for your labored breathing. In exchange for whatever he got out of this. 

Normally he would. Now he was moving.

It was so devoid of anything luminary that he stayed almost invisible even as his strides brought him closer to your window. The only indication you had were those two pin-pricks of illuminated evil growing larger, growing brighter. The impending doom was not impending any longer, it was here. He’d gotten tired of waiting, of stalking. The danger approaching was so Earth-shattering that it seemed to bend time. One moment a demon was shuffling through your front yard, the next brought a man just beyond the glass.

The dull light from your porch emphasized the shadows on his face. Even in the pitch black of a star-less sky, even with nothing but poor lamp light, he was beautiful. Unlike anything you had ever seen. His eyes weren’t even red when you could see him properly, they were more mirror-like. The glossy depth reflected that dim shine right back at you, like it was coming from inside. Like it was hiding just behind his irises. 

It felt like the oxygen solidified in your lungs, like all you’d ever cared for was a rug that he’d just yanked from beneath your feet.

He was smiling at you. As though he were a neighbor. As though this was commonplace. 

You watched his hand raise like you were watching yourself be sentenced to death. His fingers found the perch of the window, pushing it up. Your father had been promising to put a lock on it for months, never making it far down enough on his to-do list to actually manage it. 

So, it opened. The thing slid up without hesitation, like it belonged to him first and foremost. It offered your house to his venomous reputation, to his malevolence. 

You expected him to step inside. Your place was quaint. A chipped one-story that had enough scars and bruises to display the tale of your family. You and him were practically level. It would have been easy to enter, easy to kill you. He could get to your parents without breaking a sweat. 

But he didn’t move. He just stared, small grin draped across his lips at the frightened look you were wearing. 

“Bit irresponsible not havin’ a lock on this.” He patted the middle of the pane, emphasizing the item he was speaking of. “Anyone could just walk up n’ open it.” 

His accent was without a trace, something you couldn’t identify. He spoke like it was made to suit his words, his voice. It sounded old, an ancient and unprecedented sweetness completely saturating the cadence. He didn’t look old. It made you question how a creature of reckoning could have the face of a boy barely past his blooming. It made you question how he was a creature at all. 

“I don’t mean to scare ya’, miss. I’m just -” 

“You the thing killing our men?”

You didn’t have the slightest clue where the nerve to interrupt came from. Even so, you’d barely managed it. Your voice was hoarse as you forced it out, gritty and crisped at the edges. You hadn’t exchanged many words with the opposite sex when they were regular, just as your father requested. This was something different entirely. Having a guy at your window would be punishable enough without you entertaining the devil. You should have screamed, should have run out of the room.

You just couldn’t. 

There was something impossibly captivating about him, down to the most minute detail. His clothes were baggy and slightly mussed, like he wasn’t coming from somewhere defined. Like he didn’t have a home to go back to. Hell, maybe he didn’t. He’d probably be tucked away in it instead of terrorizing your town if he did.

He gawked for a moment, a quiet laugh of undiluted amusement following the expression. 

“Mighty big accusation to be throwin’ around.” 

You could feel the petrification seeping out to your stiff limbs, the sweat forming on your palms.

“I’ve seen you. Your eyes out in the bushes.” 

His face didn’t morph into one of agitation, or the retreat of somebody who just got caught. It stayed exactly as it was, full of some sort of omnipotent enjoyment. Like this was cute. Like this was part of it. 

“My daddy says the devil’s come for us.”

His head cocks to the side almost unknowingly, a scoff riding the coattails of his breath and dispersing once it hit the air. 

“Well, he says a lot. Don’t mean it’s true.” 

The sound of recognition momentarily drew your attention away from your fright, from the tremoured beats of your heart just below your pulsepoint. He spoke like the two were acquainted, like he knew the habits of your scuffed and weathered father. 

“He tell you the history of your village? The real one?” 

There was a tale passed around often about the early days of your tucked-away, little place. It spilled like wine tinted with poison, like something forged in agony too grand to speak of. Too wretched, too ungodly. 

Your father was mayor, way back when. Your home was barely older than he was, and he’d been king of it for a time. Under his rule, raiders and poorly-veiled conquistadors paid many visits, killed the animals, decimated the crops. Decimated the women worst of all. 

It’d been hell, clawing up and out of that muck. But your father had managed it. 

It was a story of nobility, of perseverance. It was usually dipped in sugar and shared with the young ones as a reason to remain hopeful, as a reason to remain strong. It was odd this stranger would know of your traditions, let alone know something you didn’t. 

He took your silence as an invitation to continue, to muddy the waters further. 

“Big man, your daddy. Likes to take credit where it ain’t due.” 

The easiness of his expression didn’t falter, but his eyes grew sharp. It wasn’t obvious, but the minor light made the rising sincerity all the more prominent. 

“He didn’t fix anythin’ back then, I did. I saw what those people were doin’ to the land, to the women, and I made ‘em go away. For a price.” 

His words were potent with impossibility. All of that happened over 40 years ago. He looked like he’d hardly scratched the surface of 29. He read the disbelief you clearly wore, and he continued despite it. 

“Your father was a rotten man. I won’t spoil your image of him, but he ain’t who he seems. I told him, before I did anythin’, no kids. No passin’ on the lineage. I wanted that blood o’ his to die with him.” 

This recounting of events was ludicrous, complete insanity. That truth didn’t stop it from frightening you. Evidently, he was a product of something otherworldly, something beyond the gripes of humanity. If he had made such a deal, you were the only thing out of place. 

You were the disobedience. 

“I warned him, told him I’d come back. ‘n he can blame whatever devil he wants. He knows it’s me, knows why it’s happenin’.”  

It made you wonder why he wasn’t trailing your father, why he seemed so determined to get to you instead of the man who’d yet to reap what he’d sown. It brought you to a nauseating conclusion, one you posed as a question in hopes of getting denial. 

“Are you gonna’ kill me, then? Is that why you’ve been out there?” 

The tremor in your voice made him laugh. When his lips split into a smile, you saw the pin-like tips of his canines. They were closer to a dog’s, or a blade. It was striking, and so startling that you felt the muscles in your abdomen tighten like he was already attacking you. 

“I was plannin’ on it, at first. Knew he’d hate to see his little girl become one o’ me.”

The notion of being changed - in whatever way he was talking about - was strangely dizzying. The thought of letting him turn you into something else, something ghastly. Something wicked. 

It pulsed with a warmth you’d never beared before. An accumulating wet feeling between your legs, a need for pressure. He stared like he knew, like he could sense it. 

“Then, I saw you. ‘n I figured there’s one thing he’d hate more.”

You weren’t really attuned to what he was referring to, just that the way he said it put you through the ringer. There was a slight rasp to his voice, something heady and burnt at the edges. Something lived, something manly. Your breath came in shorter bursts, the tips of your fingers tingling at the feel of the breeze that blew in. 

“What’s that?” 

You caught a peak of his tongue as it wet his lips, a short preface to whatever sin-soaked proposal was sure to spill out. 

“Why don’t you let me in, and I’ll show ya’?” 

The sentiment was odd. He’d opened your window, he was practically already inside with how scarcely it was lifted off the ground. It wouldn’t be hard to step in at all. If he’d done the things he’d claimed to, breaking into your home would be nothing. There was no reason he should be seeking permission, yet here he was. 

You were going to ask why, felt the inquiry sting the tip of your tongue with how eager it was to come out, but he beat you to it. 

“I wanna’ hear you say it.” 

It felt like you’d swallowed one of the big rocks that lined the poorly dug roads. You were betraying your dad. Betraying anyone who’d ever taught you anything, really. This was against every moral that’d been instilled in you, every speck of common sense swept right under the rug.

But it was mind-numbing. It silenced those rabid elder voices that cried for purity, for love. 

This was need. Something so innate it was nearly animalistic. It felt so mortal that you wondered if he could feel it too from so far above you, so far from anything earthly. 

“Um-” The acceptance got caught in your throat, paralyzed by the way he was gazing at you. Ravenous and morbid. Determined like a victor would be, like someone who’d already won. “Yeah, ok. You can come in.” 

It was meek, like your voice was atrophied. Whispered in spite of the buzzes of lighting jolting up your spine. You’d invited the devil in. You’d practically spit in the face of God. In the face of your father. 

You said a prayer to him in the racing crevices of your mind, regardless of your denouncement. It could very well be your final chance to do so.

His boots were caked in the remnants of mother nature, small twigs protruding from the mud crammed into the soles. It was staining the floor from where he now stood, fully in your space. Your hands shook at the sight of his full stature. He wasn’t all that tall, wasn’t all that big. He was just eerie, foreboding. What he didn’t have physically he made up for in energy, the sense of some lovecraftian foreclosure sitting on him more naturally than his clothes did. Like it was just a part of him. Like it was all of him. 

“In all my years, there’s one thing that never changes. You know what that is?” 

As he inched closer, the muscles inside your stagnant legs spasmed with the urge to flee, to get you away from here. Away from him. But you didn’t move.

“I’ve watched death roll off the backs o’ men like him, invincible as they are. But they ain’t fond of losing pretty things. Innocent things.” 

You didn’t clock it immediately, not with the waltz he was leading you through. He didn’t speak directly, didn’t say what he was thinking. It didn’t seem like an attempt to leave you unstartled, to keep you calm. It seemed like he simply knew he didn’t have to, like he knew you were already in. 

It scared you, how unshakable he was. How he spoke like he had your fate pooling in the creases of his palms. The town’s preacher often told the masses to look out for the devil in the little things, the simple pleasures. Surely, this being in your bedroom was far too complex to be pure evil. Surely there were layers to these things. 

“You said you weren’t gonna’ kill me.” You winced at the wobbling of your voice, the fragility of it. If you’d talked any quieter, the wind would have dissolved the words before he could hear them. 

“‘n I meant it.”

He was so close now. You could properly see the freckled spots of his face, places where the sun had bitten down or his skin sunk in. He looked human, for all that was worth. He’d had to have been something close to it at one point. 

The width of his hand lifted to cradle the side of your head. His fingertips were significantly cloud-like. Soft in a way you’d never felt before, even on yourself. He was dressed like a working man, like someone who earned his keep. His touch was ill-fitting, like the barely-sewn flesh of a newborn. Like something that’d been bleached and scrubbed over. Reborn. 

“There are other ways to go about takin’ innocence.” 

The intention behind the statement slammed into you mercilessly. It was enough to knock you clean off your feet had the sentiment been a tangible force. 

It was one thing to extend an invitation. It was endearing, almost. Like a tea party you’d have in your youth, something to be executed and consequently cleaned up.

Letting him in, into your home, into yourself. That wasn’t ladylike. That was something they’d take your head for. 

“Well, I’ve…” It was some hopeless last-ditch effort of warding him off. The brothels a town or so over housed women who knew what they were doing. Who’d discarded the need for marital binding, who’d be a better fit for whatever he was after. “I’ve never been with a man.”

His head shook as you finished, sure but short. A barely-there gesture that carried all his certainty in it. 

His eyes draped below your jaw, smoothing his thumb over your neck from where his hand sat. The prickly edge of something razor-sharp dragged along it. Something quick enough to end you where you stood if he so chose. 

“I’m no man, darlin’. Not for a long time.” 

You felt your lips part at the admission of guilt. You’d known, and he knew that you’d known, but something still shifted at the lack of care. At the lack of coverup. 

Something fizzed in the still pools of his irises, that same radioactive red making the slightest of appearances. It was like his entire form embodied, mostly human with a lick of evil tainting the color. 

“What are you, then?”

It almost hurt to speak with how piercingly tranquil the room was. It felt like you were interrupting something, like you were wiping away the salt circle that’d been poured to protect you. 

“Ain’t important right now. Technicalities and such.” You wanted to disagree, to shake your head, to voice your disapproval; but he was so gentle. His voice was like silk dragged across the tiniest fibers within your ears, reaching the depths of your brain. Reaching places no one ever had. “‘m just someone who can make you feel good.” 

Then, the final choice between Heaven and Hell, 

“You gonna’ let me?” 

You wanted to fool yourself into thinking it was a hard decision, but it wasn’t. Your destiny was predetermined. Had been since the first time you saw him lurking beyond the treeline. 

You gave a petulant nod, feeling that point dig just a little deeper, practically begging to break your most vulnerable skin. It made something deep within you churn rapidly, like a trapdoor swung open underneath your soul. If you focused on it hard enough, you could almost feel the blood that would drip, the life that would drain. 

And when he leaned in, you swore you could taste it, too. An herbal freshness coated the tastebuds on your tongue, as though he’d been chewing mint leaves to mask something metallic. It was strangely pleasant. It was soft, even. Warm in a way you hadn’t been expecting. 

That flavor pallet expanded tenfold when his tongue breached the seam of your joined lips. It was torturously slow, like he wanted you to feel it. Like he was savouring it. 

He moved the two of you as one unit, first sideways, then backwards, aiding your back in the feather-soft descent onto your bed. The house wasn’t empty. The risk you were taking was grand, the punishment of getting caught even grander. But he’d stirred something impulsive, something undeniable. You couldn’t stop it, couldn’t stop him. Not even if you wanted to. 

His weight on top of you was like a gut punch, like a jigsaw piece locking into it’s place in the puzzle. There was a slight sound when his mouth left yours, the slick thrill of eager bodies not quite there yet. It added to the novelty, and you felt it ricochet down the rest of you. 

He left a sizzling trail down, stopping where that magnetic pressure had been earlier. Where you expected another slack-jawed kiss to be placed, you instead felt his head straighten slightly. His lips were a ghostly sensation now, hardly touching you but still making their presence known. You felt the tip of his nose, too. He’d aligned his face to fit in the crook of your neck, breathing in until his lungs hit capacity. 

It made you stiffen, partly with confusion, partly with a gross sense of submission. 

“God, darlin’.” The noise he made sounded like a wound, like it was tearing him open. “Can smell the blood pumpin’ through those pretty veins. Bet you taste just as fuckin’ sweet.” 

A rather pathetic sound of your own obedience slipped from your panting chest before you could stop it. You found yourself nodding a little, mind blank and hands grasping his shirt. 

He chuckled a bit seeing you answer something that had not been a question in any sense of the word. 

“Yeah?” He addressed you in the same cadence as the townsfolk addressed the communal dogs. The ones that were friendly enough if you had something to offer. “Yeah, sweetheart. I know ya’ do.” 

The tone of his voice was so low that it seemed to bypass any remaining defences you had, simply walking in and ripping all the warning signs off the wall. His hand was simultaneously pushing the hem of your nightgown up the expanse of your body. He let it rest on the pudge of your lower tummy, stopping right where the top of your underwear began. 

They were plain, old cotton - stretched thin by harsh washboards and years of wear - and utterly soaked. The gusset was stained multiple hues darker, a testimony to the alien effect he was having on your body. On you. 

You half-expected his voice to fill up with that superior tone again, to pin you down straight as the subservient mess he’d made you into, but it didn’t come. He just stared, eyebrows curving inward with a look that was pure famine. 

There was something else, too. Like pity, or remorse. Like he felt bad for all the people who never got to see such a marvelous thing. 

“Little sinner, you are. Imagine your daddy seein’ what you let a monster make of ya’.” 

The thought makes you whimper, both in pain and in some kind of degrading eroticism. You could practically feel the scalding judgement of all those who raised you, of God himself. But it was hard to think about them when you had him in front of you. You’d never understood temptation before, how people could be led so far astray.  

You saw it crystal clear now. 

His finger traced the sopping material from the outside, pushing that cooling stickiness back onto where it’d leaked out of. It would have been unbearably uncomfortable if not for the principle of it, if not for what it represented. 

Finally, after agonizing moments of snail-like movement, he hooked his finger under it and pulled down. Your underwear slid off bear legs without objection, revealing the part of you that was meant to be sacred to the humid night air. 

His index finger swiped through the puddle of your arousal that was reaching the point of overflow, a tiny gasp clawing it’s way out of your throat at the contact. You’d never even touched yourself there. Too thoroughly tangled in the words of God and the mess of men’s standards for wives that you’d never allowed yourself the chance. 

The first purposefully tentative circle he left on your clit brought your hands back to him, had your knuckles clenched so tight that they began to ache. 

“Mm-”

Your instinct had told you to say something - his name, most logically - but you didn’t have it; and your breath was stuttering each time it attempted to shake itself from your chest. So much so that it couldn’t come out coherently, just quiet starts of different pleas that never found their end. 

He slotted his face back in that crook, huffing the scent of your thrumming blood like you were a drug. At the same time, he slid his finger down, pressing into you so slowly it felt cruel. 

“Theeere ya’ go. Open up for me, darlin’.” 

Then, he was pumping. In and out, over and over. The rhythm raised every hair you had, frying away the ends of all your neurons one by one like there was no limit to this, like the two of you could exist here forever. 

His thumb kept the previously abandoned pace on your clit, the muscles in your abdomen feeling tight enough to burst. Something unfamiliar and unfathomably strong was coming quickly to what felt like a peak. 

He could feel you clenching on his fingers, constricting further in a way that must have defied what was physically possible somehow. He could see the slightly baffled tilt of your blissed-out face. But he didn’t want to encourage you. He wanted to force it, to see what it took to get you over. 

“Think I’m gonna’ have to kill him.” He’d said it so remarkably silent, walking the eggshells of the threat like speaking it too loud would wake you right up. “Wanna’ keep you. Can’t do that if he’s around, can I?” 

The edge you were on rattled like marbles beneath your feet, painting a film over the rational parts of your head that were screaming at you to fling yourself away from the demented arms of this stranger. 

You didn’t, though. Didn’t want to, in all honesty. Not when it felt this good. Not when it was so much easier to just nod, to just let him keep touching you. 

“How do you think he’d feel, hm?” You were so close. Enough to taste it, enough that it hurt. “Last thing he sees is his little angel choosin’ the thing he hates. Lettin’ him steal her away.” 

You’d never heard this level of debauchery, of shamelessness. 

“Lettin’ him fuck her knowin’ damn well he killed half her town.” 

That did you in. It was the most euphoric guilt you’d ever felt, such a horrific inquiry into what kind of person you were. 

He’d killed half of your town, and you’d gotten off to it. 

The arch of your back wasn’t high enough to hide all his past victims from your gaze, so you opted to squeeze your eyes shut, to ignore what was so blatantly in front of you. He was a monster, a murderer, and probably the devil himself come to wreak havoc on the Delta. He could have lied to you about your father, about the past, about all of it. In fact, he probably did. You were truly no different than those dogs wandering the grassy fields and scrounging for scraps. 

He had something to offer, so you were as friendly as could be. 

He’d killed half of your town, and you’re fairly certain you’d follow him anywhere.