He comes to see you alone.

No managers. 

No cameras. 

Just the whisper of the door easing open and the sound of his shoes on concrete, too light, too clean for a place that smells like blood and rotting flesh and disinfectant. 

This is what your world has been reduced to, when the spotlights dim and the cheering fades away.

A small holding room under the stage, dark and dank and cramped, tucked out of existence.

And you — what’s left of you — strapped tight to a metal table. Wrists, ankles, chest. Blindfold pulled tight over the empty sockets of your eyes.

They took them last week for the auction block. 

Your nostrils flare.

Catching the scent of him, of the faint chemical sweetness of his stage makeup under the burning, scorching antiseptic. 

Then you thrash.

The restraints scream under how hard your hips jerk up, hard enough to bruise. A long, high-keening sound rips out of your throat — Lu . . . Luh — wet and bloodied and ruined, syllables collapsing into moans, because the infection has robbed you of just about everything. Your fingers claw helplessly at nothing. Your body twisting and contorting towards the sound of his voice like a plant turning towards sunlight.

Luka stops just inside the door. He doesn’t flinch at the smell of rot and decay, the blood dripping from your body, how you twist and jerk helplessly against the restraints trying to get to him. He tilts his head in the same way he does on camera when he’s deciding how much of himself to give the fans. Princely. Bored. Interested under the surface in a way that never quite reaches pity.

Nnn . . . Lu . . . Aaaa . . .

He moves closer. 

Stops at the edge of the table.

“. . . You still know me.”

The words sound soft. Pleased, almost, in his mouth. That little tilt in his tone, the one he uses when something finally behaves the way he wants.

He doesn’t take the blindfold off. He likes seeing you like this — straining, desperate, mouth agape and wet with saliva and blood, your body desperately trying to crawl out of its own skin to get to him. And when he trails two fingers down your jaw, fingers brushing through the wet mess of blood and saliva trickling down the corners of your mouth, you surge up so hard the table creaks, until your skin splits and fresh blood pours. A long, broken moan. A please lost somewhere in the wetly desperate mess of sound.

“Shhh,” He croons, and his voice is poison encased in velvet. The smile on his face doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’m here.”

He leans in.

The kiss isn’t gentle. 

He doesn’t know how to be gentle; he never learned softness and tenderness after he was broken and rebuilt by that hellish place he was born and raised in. 

He kisses you with the same precise cruelty he brings to his performances: he seals his mouth over yours and takes and takes until there is nothing left of you to give. Tongue pushing past your teeth, swallowing down iron and infection and the sound you make when you finally get what you’ve been thrashing for. You kiss him back like you’re starving. Like some buried piece of you is still in love and screaming through all the rot and decay.

He can feel the infection, surging through his cells and rewriting him from the inside out. The fever-sweet wrongness coating his tongue, sliding down his throat. He doesn’t flinch. Luka swallows all of it, and when he pulls back, a thread of saliva hangs still, connecting the two of you. His lips are shiny, and his eyes are dark in a way the cameras never get to see. The veins on the inside of his wrist are already darkening with poison, standing out in stark contrast to the milky paleness of his skin, and still, Luka looks at himself like he’s checking his newest costume.

“That's the transfer,” he murmurs, sweet, almost fond. “But it won’t be enough if I'm careful. And I'm never careful with you.”

He undresses you next.

Slow. Methodical. The paper-thin hospital shift pushed up, restraints loosened just enough to bare what he wants. The sensation of cool air on your fevered skin. His palms map you like he’s memorising a new choreography — waist, thighs, the soft flesh of your breast, the place between your legs already slick from nothing but his voice and the kiss. 

Another wrecked moan leaves your lips while you writhe and arch so hard that the chest restraints creak, trying to say something that might be please, more but comes out sounding like p-hh… ahh— Luk-aa — nonsense words broken into pieces. 

“Still mine,” he says quietly. Not a question. Just a fact.

When he gets your clothes off, your body decaying and ruined and beautiful, he doesn’t bother undressing himself — just enough for what he means to do. Belt, fly, expensive fabric shoved aside so he can line up and sink into you.

You break.

A raw cry tears out of your throat — high, shattered, half his name and half nothing at all. Your body clamps down around him like it’s trying to keep him inside you forever. He groans low against your throat, forehead pressed to yours over the blindfold, breathing through the strongest wave of infection yet that’s rewriting him from the inside, and through the hotter, simpler fact that he’s inside you and you’re his again.

He treats it like a private performance, the idol and a private, captivated audience of one. Driving into you with deep, measured thrusts at first — perfect control, hips rolling like he’s still on beat. As every roll of his hips drives the infection further into him — unnatural heat blooming under his skin, pulse stuttering, that beautiful composure breaking apart at the edges as the pleasure and virus are entwined together. 

He fucks you like a vow. Like possession. While he fucks the sickness into himself and the last clean pieces of you into him. You can’t form sentences, just moans, sobs, broken gibberish — Luh — ah — ah — and he kisses it out of your mouth. Wet. Open. Filthy. Messy. Licking the garbled syllables off your tongue and giving them back as a low laugh against your teeth.

“Still in there,” he pants, almost wondering, almost cruel. “Still mine.” 

He comes inside you, with a quiet, wrecked sound. His mouth sealing over yours again, kissing you through it, hips stuttering, the infection lighting up his bloodstream like stage lights. You follow on the feeling of him pulsing inside you and the taste of his breath going wrong-sweet. His name, ruined, leaving your lips over and over, nothing but heat and vowels and want.

He doesn’t pull out right away. He stays buried inside you still, forehead to yours, thumb stroking the rotted corner of your cheek and lips where you’re still trying to speak. Purple already creeping under his own nails. He looks wrecked and radiant and beautiful.

“There,” he whispers, almost tender, in the way that only Luka can make tender sound like a claim. His skin is already unnaturally warm, his eyes fever-bright. His pulse stutters, his heart beating wrong in his chest. “Now you don’t get to leave me, and I don’t get to leave you.” A soft, ruined little laugh. “Perfect, isn’t it?”

Later, when the alarms finally blare, and the handlers finally come flooding into the room, they find the famous idol half-dressed and already turning into a monster, his body still twined like a vine around the zombie on the metal table who won’t stop making soft, broken sounds into his throat.

And Luka, smiles that stage-perfect smile with blood on his teeth, a terrible, beautiful thing and says: