I'm thenightsibling on AO3 🦇

Chapter One: Paprika

Chapter Two: Supper

Chapter Three: Toast

Chapter Four: Feast

Chapter Five: Oats

Chapter Six: Salt

Chapter Seven: Lamb

Chapter Eight: Veal

Chapter Nine: Fowl

Chapter Ten: Rabbit

Chapter Eleven: Buffet

Chapter Twelve: Fruit

Chapter Thirteen: Tea

Chapter Fourteen: Tripe

Chapter Fifteen: Fast

Chapter Sixteen: Champagne

Chapter Seventeen: Fish

Chapter Eighteen: Sausage

Chapter Nineteen: Duck

Chapter Twenty: Pumpkin Soup

Chapter Twenty-One: Apple

Chapter Twenty-Two: Hare

Chapter Twenty-Three: Gum

Chapter Twenty-Four: Gateau

Chapter Twenty-Five: Steak

Chapter Twenty-Six: Ice Cream

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Pancakes

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Spice

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pig's Heart

Chapter Thirty: Salt Water

Chapter Thirty-One: Omelette

Chapter Thirty-Two: Monkfish

Chapter Thirty-Three: Almond

Chapter Thirty-Four: Lasagna

Chapter Thirty-Five: Beignet

Chapter Thirty-Six: Chianti

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Bâtard-Montrachet

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Figs

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Turtle Soup

Chapter Forty: Mince Pies

Chapter Forty-One: Salad

Chapter Forty-Two: Reindeer Meat

Chapter Forty-Three: Carrots

Chapter Forty-Four: Pastry

Chapter Forty-Five: Oxtail

Chapter Forty-Six: Spanakopita

Drabbles- Non canon

Chapter Forty-Seven: Rognoncini Trifolati

Chapter Forty-Eight: Candy

Conquest is dead; Cecil had told you so, but still you don’t believe it. It has something to do with the quality of his eyes when he’d said it. Something artificial in their expression. Something rehearsed.

You cannot prove that Cecil has lied, of course, and certainly he denies it when you press him in the following days. Nor does he concede when, in paranoia of the Viltrumite’s return, you beg Cecil to modify your abilities, to enhance them, make you stronger than you are. Enough to face down the monster again.

“They say that’s what happened to Powerplex,” you announce in a kind of fever. “Someone fixed him. You experiment on people in the Pentagon. You can make superheroes better—”

“Powerplex did that to himself,” says Cecil, knuckling the bridge of his nose. “And whatever gossip goes on around what we do here—well, it’s a lot more complicated than you’ve been told. If we could just boost everybody’s powers don’t you think we’d be doing that already?”

You keep your arms crossed, unimpressed.

“Synaptic,” says Cecil. “Listen to me. If we had the knowledge and the resources to give you what you’re asking for I’d offer them to you purely out of goodwill. As it stands all I can do is suggest somebody to help you train your abilities naturally. But I can see that it’s not enough.”

His attempts to soothe seem disingenuous, are in some fashion part performance. Cecil has been in this role for so long by now that he has little human feeling left that is not twisted by duty into a generalised empathy, corporate and impersonal.

You want to seize him by the collar and shake the life back into him, and almost do.

“You’re damn right it’s not enough,” you bark at him. ‘I’m never going to get over what that freak did. Everyone saw what happened, Cecil. People filmed it.”

“And I’ve done my best to remove every single recording from the Internet,” he says, “and I’ll keep doing it as many times as I have to.”

Your upper lip curls.

“It doesn’t matter. It still happened. You can’t take that away for me.”

Cecil accepts the anger in your voice without criticism or complaint.

“No. I can’t. Nothing’s going to change what Conquest did to you. But you can rest easy knowing it’s not going to happen again.”

Rest—you have scarcely slept since the attack, waking at random intervals in the night palsied with the fearful expectation of Conquest over you, his robotic hand pinching your throat, the other tucking himself into your defenceless form.

You toss your head in disgust. Sleep will never be your solace again.

“So many lies,” you say. “So many mistakes. You’ve given me no reason to trust anything that leaves your mouth, Cecil. I’m going home.”

Cecil reaches out as you stride for the door, careful not to physically touch the arm that swings an aggressive rope of power in rebuff. You do not think he cares to console you as much as keep you as his ally rather than another of the dangerous vigilantes that have broken away from his side to work alone.

“Wait a second,” says Cecil. “Take some time off. Don’t do anything risky.”

You throw him a filthy look over one shoulder.

“Like what? What could I do, Cecil? What can I possibly fucking do?”

If he answers you do not hear him, having slammed the office door so hard behind you that the hinges pop loose, toppling the entire thing free of the frame.

*

Almost out of spite against Cecil you continue taking on missions around the city, as many as you can handle, pushing your capabilities to the edge. You train constantly, finding yourself continually frustrated with your limits, and how easily you tire.

Still you grind on, ignoring the strain on you, not wanting a moment idle to think and remember what had been done to you. The public nature of that crime makes this impossible, however; wherever you go you endure the pity of others, their glances and whispers, their hands on your shoulders, patting you like a sick dog due to be put down.

You smile grimly, and then entrench yourself in the graft until you live to work, and work to forget.

This, too, fails you in the end.

There is a day you’re rebuilding a bombed out playground, quietly putting together ironwork and chain-link strands, that you feel what you had the last time you’d been assaulted.

A heaviness across you in the air like a ghost ship come to ground.

“Did you miss me while I was gone?”

You press back against a wall that is not there and tip back on your knees in the dirt.

Conquest floats above your head, naked from the uppermost inch of his pate to the soles of his feet, the masculine core of him angled upright like the nose of some hunting beast. Liquid twinkles on its flushed round tip.

How ready he is to rend you asunder, to return to the same evil that has torn you down from the person you were to a hollow.

“You,” you say softly. “I knew that you weren’t dead. Cecil lied to me.”

Conquest’s posture squares in arrogant dismissal.

“Viltrumites are nearly indestructible. Your people tried to hold me prisoner. Probably kept me alive hoping to get something out of me. They should have known better.”

You fly off a foot, holding both arms aloft in case you should have to propel him back with a concentrated weapon of power.

“So now what are you going to do?” you ask guardedly. “Like it or not, you lost against Invincible and Atom Eve. Doesn’t exactly bode well for your takeover.”

In Conquest’s working eye there is a flash of dismay, even shame, a capsule miracle.

“I will report back to our leader,” he says. “My mission was a failure. I’ll accept whatever punishment Grand Regent Thragg deems necessary. But, before I confess, I have something left here to do.”

The vile grin that has turned through your nightmares like a broken wheel makes his awful face come alive again.

“Are you going to kill me?” you ask, and Conquest’s grin extends ever further.

“No, honey. Once Earth has been taken over you’re going to be mine. I want another taste of what that’s going to be like.”

He begins his approach, gliding in a sort of airborne prowl. Again you retreat, the many eyes in the city beneath you making your skin prick.

The people know what to expect, this time, recognising you from the news, the most infamous of Conquest’s many victims.

“I was too weak to stop you, last time,” you say. “Don’t your people only value strength or something? Why would you want me back?”

“Because I won you fair and square,” says Conquest. “Means I own you. Besides, I like you, squirt. It felt good to hurt you. You fit the hole in my heart.”

He touches his bare chest, and you are forced to acknowledge the thick lodes of muscle wrapped around every bone, hawsers of scar bound tight across chest and limb.

"I won't let you do that to me again,” you tell him.

The muscle above Conquest's right eyebrow twitches.

"Oh? And what are you going to do to hold me back?"

You launch a wild spray of power towards him, doing no more than tossing him on the air. In truth you intend for him to kill you before he can enter you again, or else end yourself, if you must. Whatever the case, you will fight and fight him off until one or the other position takes over.

Drifting about you in a lazy circle Conquest sizes you up, taking in the determined fix of your jaw, the twitching of hands that hold no more power than a flea in the face of his.

“I see your game,” says Conquest. “You must think I’m stupid.”

You bat at him again, clenching his groin with a force that makes the vulnerable flesh strain in an invisible fist. Conquest rips aside out of range of your power, licking his lips as though the pain and threat of castration only excites him. From the hardening of his cock as you let it go you suppose it must.

“I’ve lived long enough to learn just about every move you could pull on me,” Conquest tells you. “On long dead planets I watched grown men slit their own throats when they saw me coming. Women drowned their children rather than let me get hold of them. A few of them drank poison. Such a waste.”

Conquest casts himself across the air, amused as you slap him back with a telekinetic palm. A wisp of blood lifts up on the wind like a poppy head. You smell him in your nostrils, male flesh and the savoury reek of his injury.

You wonder if Cecil is already watching, but do not expect him to save you, if so.

“There was a girl in some city I dominated,” says Conquest in loving recollection. “She cut her wrists when I came along, only she wasn’t dead yet by the time I got to her. I was inside her body as she died. So if you want to kill yourself, sure. I don’t mind. I just want to feel it as it happens.”

Again Conquest grabs at you, holding onto you only long enough to lick a teasing stripe up your cheek before you blast yourself away through the face of a nearby clock tower. Glass and bits of brick rain down through the building as you soar through it to the other side, wincing at the screams of civilians below.

Conquest tails you like a hunter after a fresh scent, rubbing himself in tender motions with his one good hand.

“You’re fucking nuts,” you spit, shaking glass off you into the air. “Invincible must have turned your brains inside out.”

The old man’s nostrils flare briefly, then the smile is back on his face again, seeming to dismiss the slight.

“You’re chatty,” he says. “That’s a good thing. I want to get to know you.”

Then he is at you like a great white ape, wrestling you in his mechanical grip so that your head is down at his bruised sexual organ, the protesting mouth already over the tip.

“Maybe I can start here,” says Conquest, and he pierces your throat with the oozing meat of him, the head of his erection stripping a bit of skin from your inner throat.

He imprisons you like this, his ordinary hand joining the other atop your head, forcing your body to dance like a suicide, watching blood cloud the air as he rapes your mouth as nastily as he had the other hole.

You do not take it easily.

Two limbs of power you aim at his legs, working at the bone with want to break them through; another loans strength to your brittle human teeth, forcing them through the skin of Conquest’s throbbing width until you feel the vibration of his grunt in a volcanic rumble.

His grip on your temples deepens, and agony like a giant’s migraine overcomes you. Tears fall from both of your eyes, and even without being able to see you know that they’re filled with blood.

“Try that again if you feel like having half a head,” says Conquest. “Looked good on Eve. Hers grew back. I figure yours probably won’t.”

He attacks your face like this on and on, the slime of his arousal hot in your throat, the thrilled knocking of the pulse in his wrist a war rally at your ear. Your neck is on fire with the stretch of him through it.

Wanting death over more of this you eagerly rip at Conquest with your power, going for his intestines behind the firm oblong belly, reaching up to wrap a telekinetic strand close around his heart.

Sighing, Conquest removes himself from your mouth and hits you hard in the middle, standing on a platform of open air to watch as you roll a mile to the applause of horrified screams far below.

Panting, you struggle upright, battling for enough breath to speak.

“I hope your leader fucking kills you for losing against Invincible. I hope he tears you in half.”

“The only one that’s going to happen to is you,” says Conquest, sneering. “I’m going to make your eyes roll back like I did the last time I mated with you. Did you like the world watching you come, sweet pea?”

Then he’s like a knife thrower’s blade through the sky after you, taking you in a vicious hug against the hard curves of his body. He kisses your ear, nibbling it with his rough teeth.

“Kill me,” you tell him. “Kill me. I don’t want them to see you do that to me again. All those people. Please, not where they can see—”

Conquest stabs a hand between your thighs and begins to pull off the suit, thread by thread, taking his time with the performance of it, even lifting one of your legs with his knee to enhance the view from below.

“You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” he says. “You can’t bargain with me. There’s only one thing I want, and you’re it. You mean everything to me.”

You begin to create a wound in your own throat, then, but Conquest slaps a hand to it, squeezing down so tight upon it that you begin to hack and choke.

“You want to die on me?” he asks. “Let me show you what I’ll do if that happens.”

While you’re still star brained with airlessness he pulls you along with him to the ground, dragging your writhing body through a crowd of petrified onlookers.

You feel the pop and snap of bone, warm flesh pouring over you like some stew.

What scream you’re able to make through the pain of this is muffled by the mess. Only a halo of your abilities shields you from being equally shorn down by the dead.

After some minutes of this Conquest lifts you out of it again, driving the stone of his lusting cock into a hole that had never quite healed from him.

He is like some nuclear construction within you, his every organ as deadly as the brain that would devise such slaughter. The thump of him against your inner muscle sickens with the spread of pain, and seeing that he'll give you no reprieve you sink your hands into the muscle of his shoulders, holding him the way you'd bite a belt against like agony.

"That's it," Conquest murmurs. "Hold me. Nobody's ever done this for me before."

His thrusts quicken, delighted by this perceived amour, and even across the shriek of wind and the yells of the dying you hear the sopping noises of this thing he calls sex, no better than stirring of a finger in a wound.

You let go of him and turn to bite your arm instead, inducing a new pain to outdo the other. But this, like your fighting, fails you; all you experience is him, the loving glaze of that golden brown eye, the corpse blindness of the other, and the cock that like a burrowing worm seems to find greater depths of you with every minute he's inside you.

He carries you low over the city, pulls out of you only to put you on your belly against a fire escape, your bloody cheek cut up by one of the steps.

"You're starting to learn what Mark couldn't," Conquest tells you as he strips your suit from you as he might gut a carp. "You have a place in this world. Either you keep to it, or people die. You want more blood on your hands, angel?"

Conquest pauses, admiring the blood and organ matter soaking your shaking body.

"I don't mind if you do," he says. "It looks good on you."

"Don't," you say, your voice made flat and desperate with pain. "Don't kill anybody else."

"Then you better let me love you."

Conquest lowers his face to your buttocks and licks you from the hole up to your back, the white scruff of facial hair burning the flesh with its savage bristle.

"Best thing I ever tasted,” he says.

As he encloses himself against you again you grind your teeth into the stairwell, using your power to bite through the metal, anything but allow yourself to scream. You don't dare fight Conquest now, don't even dare die in the dread of him using your body to swipe through the city like a Morning Star.

Metal squeals under the impossible force of Conquest ravaging your flesh, peeling the fire escape away from the wall. He kisses your neck and back, forces your jaw away from the stair to attack your mouth with the mollusc of his tongue.

"Die," you whisper as he lets you draw breath. "Die. Die. Die."

"No," says Conquest. "Not when I've got you to love."

You shiver, repulsed by his delusion.

“You don’t—fucking—love me,” you spit at him. “You don’t love anything.”

With a savage grunt Conquest launches into the sky, punching at a great altitude, using you like some device made for sensual play.

“Once,” Conquest says, “all I had in my life was the work my empire put me to. But I see now how much more there is. I’ve always wanted someone to come home to. To hold in my arms. I’m going to cherish every moment with you.”

Air whistles over you both, and a cloud breaks across your head like a white bomb. You’re twisted and turned again, your bare chest together with Conquest’s, legs forcefully entwined.

“I just can’t wait to come home to you every night,” he says. “Tell you my war stories. Take you to bed with me.”

You flutter violently against him like paper in a breeze.

“You’ll be dead,” you say. “If your Regent doesn’t kill you Mark will.”

Conquest leers.

“You think he has it in him? You’re not too smart, then, are you? Mark’s weak. He couldn’t take me down alone.”

Conquest’s thrusting slows into harsh knocks. His hands grope at your body, raising welts and the most hideous bruising wherever they go.

“He will,” you say, hysterical. “He'll kill you. He will.”

Conquest’s mouth turns downwards at its edges.

“Sounds like you’ve got a crush.”

Is he jealous? You think he might be. He flies you higher and higher, nauseating you with the altitude. The cold is so severe that you can only shake helplessly in his grip.

Suddenly you’re hit with the absolute terror that Conquest will kill you by accident through the passion of his possessive envy. He will not mean to, but he will, regardless, carrying a rigid corpse back to his own world.

“Stop,” you cry out. “Let me go. You can come back for me. I’ll wait for you.”

You don’t mean a word of it, but you make yourself believe it, for the moment, make yourself cling tighter to Conquest even as his motions increase to a vicious fervour.

“Will you, now?” he asks.

You nod frantically, opening your mouth in desperate submission to his kiss.

“Sure,” says Conquest. “If you’re not there when I return you know what I’ll do.”

He sinks his teeth into your neck and sucks, placing a love bite upon your throat where anyone who sees it will know what has been done to you, that you are claimed. His hardness drums you at a nauseating depth, and then there is moisture flooding your entrance, freezing upon your leg in the cold.

Conquest groans, and then with a quick grin he opens his arms, allowing you to fly away from him, alone. You look away from the blood and intimate fluid on his phallus, the remains of the day that he wears like a suit over his nudity.

“Go on home,” Conquest says. “I’ll find you, angel.”

Then like a falling star in reverse he vanishes into space, his exit leaving an ice rush of air as his train.

*

He never does come back for you, though you wait for him, convalescing in your home in bitter isolation.

The second time Cecil tells you that Conquest is dead you neither believe nor disbelieve it, only stand, letting him talk at you, a sound like electric interference in one eardrum. The way Conquest had hit you had broken something in the delicate building of the skull, and even the doctors within the Pentagon hadn't quite managed to repair it.

"Synaptic," says Cecil. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Yes," you say dully. "Should I be thanking you or something?"

"You don't have to. Invincible is on Earth. I've asked if he'd be willing to talk to you. I didn't expect you to trust me after the last time, and I knew I had to make it up to you for how badly I let you down. Apologies won't cut it. Besides, hearing what happened from the man that killed Conquest is the nearest thing to closure you're likely to get."

Cecil looks at you warily, perhaps expecting a verbal or even physical attack, yet he is not without pity for you even now you have all the reason in the world to see him dead.

"Invincible."

You repeat the name with a kind of detached wonder. You have never met Mark in person, only seen him on television screens and magazine covers. Across the sky, once or twice, he has passed you, the clashing colours of his chosen suit like a beetle shell over the sun.

"I don't know if I'd be comfortable talking to Mark about what happened," you admit. "He's a stranger, and what Conquest did was just so personal. Maybe someday I can talk about it, but for now I can't. I just can't."

Cecil nods.

"That's alright. He said you can meet whenever you're ready to. There are no time limits or conditions to this. You can go see him whenever it feels right."

You intend to prolong that conversation indefinitely, find your solace in Conquest's emission from existence instead. But then there are mutters of another great war amongst the other heroes, looks of concern directed at you that imply they think of you as a victim of it before it's even begun.

The retirement Cecil had suggested you claim after Conquest's first attack is no longer possible; if you may be of use to your planet then you must serve or see it bred and become a slave land, knowing you had not lifted a finger in its protection.

You band together with a small, independent group, those suspicious of Cecil, and in charge of their own dispatch. On the way back from a minor mission you encounter Invincible by accident, sitting on a roof with his legs dangling, eyes unreadable behind dark ovular lenses.

Still, you interpret from his posture an unhappiness that you can understand, and so you cautiously sit down on the roof with him, leaving a respectful distance between you.

"Thank you," you say, "for killing Conquest."

Mark nods, then glances sideways at you, taking you in.

"It took a long time for me to get to the point that I could take a life. So many people got hurt because I didn't feel like I could do it. This time I didn't hold back. I'm glad I did it, but now I'm afraid that I've let something out I can't put back."

One of Mark’s hands clenches, but not as Conquest's did; he is only afraid, not chasing violence like a cosmic dog after a meteor’s tail.

"It must have taken a lot of strength," you say. "I owe you a lot. I couldn't do it. Don't know if I could even if I had enough power to do people like him any damage. So I'm grateful to you. More than I can say."

Invincible smiles, but it's only a movement of the muscle, no joy in it, no peace. He means to comfort you, nothing more.

"I'm going to keep fighting," you say. "Even if it's just something to do. So that I'm not a bystander."

"Are you sure?" asks Mark. "You're still hurt. No one would blame you for staying behind."

"I'd blame myself."

You're silent, then, both of you, looking at the quiet road beneath the house, an idyll of suburbia.