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Scarlet Solarium: When the Sun Kneels Chapter 2 — Causal Chain
A/n: (Y/n) Zatara. Son of Giovanni Zatara, brother to Zatanna Zatara, beloved friend of the Justice League. Also the axis on which reality turns, the balance by which creation weighs itself. (Y/n) Zatara, the Scarlet Witch, a being of unfathomable power, condensed into human shape.
Warnings: A/B/O dynamics (male reader is an omega, Clark Kent is an alpha), Graphic violence, Gore, Body Horror, Character Death, Memory Erasure, Body Manipulation
Credits: banners/dividers are made by @/cafekitsune
Alpha Superman (David Corenswet) x Omega Scarlet Witch Male Reader Part 2
Zatanna opens a portal from the estate, straight into the batcave.
“(Y/n), you are not to leave our sides.” Giovanni reiterates.
“We’re going there on business, the last thing we need is a random magician in Gotham getting turned inside out because they tried messing with you.” Zatanna chortles.
“Okaaaay.” You groan loudly.
“Good.” Giovanni utters as you all walk through the portal.
In an instant you’re all by the Batcomputer.
It towers and surrounds all three of you, large and imposing like a cybernetic god, humming like it’s alive.
“Zatanna, Giovanni, (Y/n).” Bruce greets.
“Hi Bruce.” You yawn as you greet.
“(Y/n).” Giovanni shakes his head.
“We said code names only.” Zatanna reminds you.
“Oh oops.” You wince. “Hi Batman.”
“It’s fine. We have more urgent matters.” Bruce states walking over and handing them a scroll.
“Eugh. The magic coming off of that thing’s disgusting.” You gag.
“Yeah.” Zatanna says concerned.
“I’ll show you where Tim found it.” Bruce says getting into the Batmobile.
“Oh my god we get to ride in the Batmobile!” You fanboy out to Zatanna, bouncing on your heels.
“Is this your first time?” Zatanna asks.
“Yeah?” You answer confused. “Is this what you were doing when you were a part of Young Justice?!”
“(Y/n).” Bruce says clipped.
“Sorry.” You whisper getting into the back of his car.
You shoot daggers at Zatanna as she laughs quietly.
You ‘ooo’ and ‘aaah’ at Gotham City nightlife, you can spot hundreds of clubs, and feel the pulse of music through the air.
“Don’t even think about it, (Y/n).” Bruce says. “You’re here on business, not fun.”
“I know.” You sulk crossing your arms and leaning back.
“You’re not even old enough to get in.” Zatanna snorts.
“I could be!” You snap. “For a few hours at least.”
“Anyway—“ Your voice drops as you feel the hum of radiation.
It makes your skin crawl.
You can almost hear, feel the warmth of the screams of the damned on your neck.
“What is that?” You ask softly. “It’s…invasive…it’s wrong…”
“It’s a Lazarus Pit.” Bruce answers plainly.
“People don’t use them do they?” You ask horrified.
Bruce’s jaw tightens.
His hands turn into vices around the steering wheel.
“Not by choice.” He says sternly.
Bruce accelerates driving faster until he reaches the center of the magical anomaly.
“It’s a graveyard.” You mutter unimpressed as Bruce parks.
“It’s not the setting, it’s what’s going on in the graveyard.” Bruce utters as he gets out.
He walks deeper into the cemetery, with you all following until he stops just short of a barrier.
“None of us can breach it. Only Jason has so far and his report mentioned zombies. I thought it best if you three went in to see it.” He adds.
“Woah.” You whisper walking over and touching the magical boundary.
“(Y/n).” Giovanni utters.
“I know, I’m making a hole in it so we can all go in.” You whisper.
You close your eyes.
You stretch your hand out, making contact with the boundary.
In an instant, a red line traces from the ground up in a rectangular shape, before meeting the ground again.
The whole cemetery shakes as a doorway stretches open.
“Well…”, You turn to them, “last one in owes the rest of us dinner.” You chortle running in.
“God help us.” Bruce mutters.
He lets Zatanna and Giovanni run through before he follows, stopping just short of the threshold.
He clenches his hands into fists, he sets his jaw before walking through.
“Yuck.” You pinch your nose shut, before your other hand covers your mouth, suppressing a gag.
“Is he okay, Giovanni?” Bruce asks, eyeing your reaction.
“He’s fine.” Giovanni assures. “Yfirup ria.”
Your nose twitches as that disgusting scent is exorcised from the atmosphere.
Giovanni smiles softly.
“Thanks dad.” You beam.
“He’s more sensitive to magic.” Giovanni reveals.
“Mm.” Bruce grunts.
“Huh.” Zatanna says, levitating and flying overhead. “No zombies…but the magic is there.”
You hold your hand out, magic already glowing and condensing.
“Yeah. Let me amp it—“
”No.” Giovanni states, cutting you off. “We’re far from home. No wards to nullify your magic signature. Zatanna and I can handle this.”
“Then why did I even come along?” You whine.
The scarlet hue fades as you cross your arms.
“The last time we left you home alone, you and Klarion turned the inside into a shifting labyrinth.” Zatanna reminds. “It took days to undo the spell.”
“Fine.” You murmur, sitting down on a headstone. “I’ll just be here then…watching.”
“Thank you, (Y/n).” Giovanni smiles warmly before turning his focus back to the matter at hand.
You watch them work spouting magical theory you’ve learned countless times over.
Rolling your eyes as Bruce talks about magic being dangerous, wildly unpredictable.
Before you respond the words die on your tongue as you feel someone pulling on plant life, halfway across the city.
“That’s not magic…that’s something else.” You think, smirking to yourself.
You look at Zatanna, Bruce, and your dad all distracted with the task at hand.
“They won’t notice if I just…slip away for a few minutes.” You giggle to yourself.
Your lips move slowly, carefully, your hand briefly glows red as you set up a projection of yourself, still sitting.
You bury your magic signature under that disgusting Lazarus hum you still feel, while you slip away unnoticed.
“Now where did I feel it from…” You murmur to yourself from the roof of a skyscraper.
You close your eyes, a thin scarlet sheet blankets over the city, riding just underneath that Lazarus noise floor.
You can feel every minute movement.
Every breath taken and exhaled.
Every footstep.
Every heartbeat.
You zero in, narrowing down your focus until you feel two heartbeats side by side.
You tilt your head unsure, until one of the heartbeats is encased by the silent hum of foliage and greenery.
“Bingo.” You smirk, your hand draws a line downward in the space in front of you.
As though the fabric of space and time were an elevator, another portal slides open in front of you.
You walk through landing behind a redhead clad in green, and a blonde with pigtails, holding a giant mallet.
The blonde’s sentence dies on her tongue.
She tenses, spinning around, and swinging her mallet at you.
Your hand catches it, a buffer of red magic between it and your palm.
“Oh you’re strong.” You compliment.
You can feel her pushing harder and harder, despite your hand not moving even a centimeter.
“Ivy! We got company.” She says straining against your hand and magic.
“On it, Harley.” Ivy says, kneeling down, hand flat against the ground.
It’s near instantaneous.
You can feel the sudden spike in primordial energy.
The ground barely shakes for half a second before giant vines rip from the ground and tangle around you.
They lift you up in the air, Harley approaches mallet resting on her shoulder.
“Look Red, we caught ourselves a lil’ magician.” She laughs looking you up and down.
“Or a witch.” Ivy adds coming closer. “Newbie vigilante?” She asks.
“Well…kinda? Not really a newbie though…and not here to stop…” You look around finally taking in the scene, “animal liberation?” You say confused.
The animals don’t seem particularly in distress anymore.
Not with the broken cages littering the ground.
“You two look more heroic than I do.” You snort.
“Look witch boy run back to wherever you—“
“That’s Klarion’s moniker.” You interject.
”Ivy, protect the kid!” Harley yells as she dives behind a crate.
“Open fire!” A man’s voice cuts through the silence.
They all draw their weapons.
Aiming for center mass, vital organs, and heads.
Another torrent of vines shoot out of the ground encasing you fully.
Ivy gets into a defensive position, a wall of thick foliage between her, Harley, you, and the armed men.
In a split second the muzzles flash, before bullet casings hit the ground in quick succession.
“Hold your fire! Penguin’s money is tied up in those animals.” The same man’s voice cuts through halting the fire immediately.
Ivy’s vines shoot out of the ground, whipping wildly.
They smack guns out of hands and men into walls.
She doesn’t notice one of them taking aim in her blind spot.
“Ivy!” Harley shouts as she backflips, and brings her mallet down on his head.
Ivy’s expression goes blank.
She turns around feeling the vines she put around you be wrestled—
Not wrestled.
Gently taken, pried from her control.
They slowly recede into the ground.
“Ooooh… so that’s how you do it?” You say excitedly.
“Kid?” Ivy says confused, anxious as Penguin’s men recover.
“Oh! I’ve got this.” You smirk as they take aim.
Ivy lifts a hand, constructing a barrier of plant life.
She doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t even blink. In the span of a few seconds another wall erupts from the ground.
Then another.
And another.
Overlaid one in front of the other, expecting the bullets to come clean through, and making sure they never reach their target.
Harley gets ready, putting herself between you and the gunfire.
Her fingers trill and tap in place along the handle of her mallet, seemingly hyping herself up for when the fire ends.
Penguin’s goons’ fingers pull the trigger.
They all fire without rest, only stopping when their clips are empty.
Ivy slowly opens a hole in her defense to see what’s happening.
Harley approaches right behind her, coming cheek to cheek.
Their eyes widen as they see the innumerable bullets just hovering in the air around you all, held in place by your scarlet magic.
“Wanna handle clean up?” You giggle looking to them.
Ivy’s eyes go to your hand, as you drop it, the bullets follow suit and fall to the ground.
Her eyes widen as she sees the red wisps of your magic coil and curl around her vines.
They seem to breathe new life into them.
Make them strong.
Stronger.
The plant life, perhaps even the Green itself, seems to react to you.
To the magic you hold.
To the magic that seems older and more primordial than even creation itself.
“Look alive Ivy!” Harley giggles as she starts her offensive response.
She twirls around swinging her mallet indiscriminately, nailing goon after goon.
Ivy shakes her head, a smirk tugging at her lips.
“You’re not half-bad kid.” She says under her breath.
In an instant more vines shoot out of the concrete, stringing up the knocked-out men, and hanging them upside down.
You sit on a crate, legs kicking, watching as Harley and Ivy move animal after animal out of the warehouse and onto Harley’s truck.
“Kid, we gotta get outta here.” Harley says tugging your arm.
“Just a sec’.” You say, rising to your feet.
You take a breath, red magic starts diffusing off of you, curling and coiling before slowly enveloping the area.
Your lips twitch quickly as you cast a spell.
In an instant the scarlet smoke enters the head of every single man present.
Still through the act you stay aware of hiding your magic signature.
All of their eyes snap open in unison, they all glow red, before slowly fluttering shut.
“Whaddya do ta’ ‘em?” Harley asks.
“Just erased their memory.” You shrug your shoulder.
Harley snorts. “I like you kid.” She puts a hand on your shoulder, as she leads you to the getaway car.
“So what are you guys doing next?” You ask excitedly, getting into the back.
“Guess we oughta tuck ya in, squirt…” Harley says aloud. “We already hit Penguin’s animal trade, left them at a sanctuary, s’not much left for tonight, unless yer willin’ tah help us rob a bank?”
“Harley.” Ivy warns.
She looks at you with mistrust, but you don’t seem to notice. The red magic and aura about you unsettle her.
She can almost trace the way it seems to pulse and thrum just under your skin…by the same blade, the scarlet magic also puts her at ease.
“I mean…”, your hand goes to the back of your head, “I was bored earlier…a bank robbery…”
The hesitation reminds Ivy you’re still just a kid, not exactly— or entirely— someone untrustworthy.
“Don’t think of it as a bank robbery kid.” Ivy interjects. “We’re going to take the cash Penguin got selling these animals and put it into the environment. Give it to an animal reserve.”
“Yeah squirt, it’s more about the rush than anything.” Harley laughs.
“Yeah…I guess so…it’s for a good cause right?” You say rationalizing it.
“Exactly, it’s for a good cause.” Ivy reiterates.
“So kid, you got a name?” Harley asks as the engine roars to life.
“(Y/n). (Y/n) Zatara.” You answer leaning back.
“Harley Quinn.” She answers.
“Poison Ivy.” The redhead adds.
“Let’s hit it!” Harley beams, as the tires squeal.
She hits a few trash cans, and more of the Penguin’s men as she peels out of the docks and deep into the city.
It started simple really.
In and out.
With you tagging along, they didn’t have to break in.
The doors were already unlocked.
The security system deactivated for the night.
Ivy and Harley put the guards you left over to sleep.
“Alright squirt, outta the way. I got a safe to crack.” Harley laughs, getting close to the metal knob.
She twists the dial a few times, ear pressed against the door.
“Open sesame!” She tries pulling it open, sighing dramatically when it doesn’t.
“Well, I gave it my best shot.” She shrugs, before pulling out a pipe bomb colored in red and black diamonds.
She attaches it to the locking mechanism, before running behind you and Ivy for cover.
You snicker lifting a hand.
Red magic envelops the door and bomb, isolating it from everything else.
“God I love ya already kid.” She sighs, as the bomb detonates but makes no sound, and leaves no lasting damage to anything other the safe’s lock.
“I’ll wait out here.” You say softly. “Let me know if you need help carrying bags.”
“Well toots’, we do need a hand.” Harley says pulling you into the safe.
“Okay.” You snicker, your hand glows red as a portal opens up underneath the money.
It all gets siphoned through, like water down a drain, right into Harley’s car, before you jump in after it.
“Come on Red.” Harley giggles following you.
Ivy wordlessly travels through trying to take some of your magic.
It feels warm to the touch as it dissipates on her palm.
“Let’s go!” Harley shouts, laughing as she hits the gas.
You laugh, leaning out the window as she does.
Your joy dies in your throat as you see innumerable red and blue flashes rushing up behind you all.
“Ah shit.” Harley sucks her teeth. “Buckle up kid.”
Harley tugs your seat belt tighter before she puts both hands on the wheel.
“Ivy.” Harley calls out.
She doesn’t respond, but instantly, giant vines pop out of the ground giving Harley’s truck a new escape route.
“Ugh, they’re still on us?” Harley whispers adjusting her mirror. “Ivy, bury the car, let’s move this on foot.”
Vines reach into her truck, pulling her, Ivy, and you out, placing you on the nearest roof, while the car is pulled under, covered by countless vines.
“What now?” You ask, looking down, hand glowing as you fix the concrete.
“Well now—“ the sound of a helicopter cuts off Harley.
“We run!” She shouts with a laugh, taking off.
You smirk to yourself chasing after her.
You can barely keep up.
Your face flashes as an idea crosses your mind.
Portals start to blink in and out of existence.
You jump through each, putting you at pace with them.
“Geez kid you’re playing with some serious firepower.” Harley laughs watching as you jump in and out of the holes in reality.
“There they are!” Another voice rips through.
“Penguin’s men found us.” Ivy remarks, using her vines to keep pace. “We need to move faster.”
She grabs Harley, but before she can grab you, you flicker out of existence before appearing again even further in front of her.
“Don’t gotta tell me twice!” You laugh, outrunning them.
“Don’t be greedy (Y/n)!” Harley laughs. “Share some of that with us!”
“Huh? Sure.” You say, you aim at them with your hand.
They see your scarlet magic flowing towards them.
Their breathing hitches as their energy swells.
Your scarlet magic burrows in, sinking into muscle and bone.
Making them stronger, faster.
Their earlier fatigue gone.
Harley’s eyes seem clearer, while Ivy can feel the thrum of even the smallest plant life all around her.
“Oh my god.” Ivy whispers.
“I know, Red.” Harley answers just as quiet.
They’re both finally keeping up with you.
Harley has a clarity she hasn’t had in ages.
Ivy can feel and sense even the tiniest, deepest root.
It’s intoxicating.
And yet they don’t lust for your power.
“They’re still on us.” Harley says looking over her shoulder.
“I think I can fix that.” You say.
You stop short, before turning towards the helicopter.
Your lips move in tandem with your hands.
“Don’t move!” The PA system on the helicopter booms.
Scarlet sigils move with purpose, slithering through the air and arranging themselves in an intricate lattice around the helicopter.
“Huh?” The sound system goes off again.
The floodlight sweeps across the rooftop in wide arcs.
“We’ve lost sight of them!”
The helicopter tilts left, before turning around and searching in a different area of Gotham.
“See that wasn’t—“ You gasp sharply.
A gunshot echoes as you hit the ground.
“Kid!” Harley yells, kneeling beside you.
In a fraction of a second Ivy’s vines rip apart the gun and pin the shooter to the wall.
“Ow…” you groan. “That hurt…”
Your hand hovers over your wound.
Red wisps drift down, gently reaching into the wound.
When the wisps pull taut, they snap back.
“Fuck!” You shout turning over, as the bullet clatters across the ground.
“Lemme see it, (Y/n).” Harley says turning you back to her, but all she manages to catch is red wisps sealing the wound.
Her eyes snap to Ivy’s before back down to you.
“So…a witch huh?” Harley laughs softly.
“Yeah…” You groan softly, stretching your arm before you stand up.
“Something like that…don’t know exactly myself either.” You laugh nervously.
“You’re still you, ya know.” Harley says punching the shoulder you just got shot in.
Ivy’s hands twitch, she could just…poke you.
Some thorns catching on your skin, some blood her plants could absorb and hold before it vaporizes.
She shakes her head, she can only imagine the amount of control it takes.
The amount of restraint you must be exercising.
“Yeah. You’re still you, (Y/n). Crazy powers or not.” Ivy says patting your back.
“Thanks Ivy.” You smile warmly.
“We should go.” You say looking over your shoulder. “They’re coming.”
Before either of them can respond, you’re already flickering to the next rooftop.
“What do you think Harley?” Ivy asks as they try to keep up.
“Kid’s got spunk, I tell ya.” Harley laughs, before she makes a face, deep in thought.
“You’ve been spacing out a lot Harley.” Ivy says softly.
“With how much chaos (Y/n) brings with him I thought you’d be having a ball.” She laughs.
“Yeah, Red…just thinkin’…” Harley responds.
“What about?” Ivy presses, but before Harley can respond, you all freeze hearing that god awful, blood curdling laugh.
“Him.” Harley snarls. “The kid’s magic is doin’ something to my brain…it doesn’t feel as fuzzy.”
“And it’s tellin’ me I need to get even with Mistah J’ for all he’s done tah me.” She adds.
“I’ve been waiting for an excuse.” Ivy says stretching. “Let’s do it?”
Harley looks over the roof’s edge to spot the Joker.
He seems to be in his element, terrorizing the public with no discernible goal in mind.
Chaos for the sake of chaos.
Wanton destruction for the hell of it, no larger motive or purpose, other than pissing off Batman, and ruining the lives of the general public.
The air shifts as you pop back to them.
“You guys know him?” You ask peering over the edge.
“Not really.” Ivy says disgusted.
“Not for much longer.” Harley laughs, gripping her mallet tighter. “Let’s give them a show.”
“Alright, I’ll make sure you two can keep up.” You laugh, funneling more magic into buffing them.
“Last one down there’s a rotten Bat!” Harley laughs, as she dives downward, mallet raised, already primed to smash someone’s head into the ground.
Her mallet lands with a sickening thud. “One down.” She singsongs.
“Let’s?” You giggle jumping down after her.
Ivy’s smile is harder to hide as she follows suit.
“Hmm guns are hardly fair, it’s a shame they’re all jammed.” You declare, both hands glowing red as you get ready to provide cover.
“Fire, you nitwits!” Joker demands, every gun clicks but no rounds go off.
“I needed fertilizer.” Ivy states pragmatically as her vines turn sharper.
They slice in wide arcs, cutting through barrels and firing chambers.
She twists around each vine independently whipping a goon into the wall.
“He’s mine.” Harley reminds you both.
“I don’t want him.” You laugh, hands glowing as you fight off and puppeteer some of his henchmen.
“I wouldn’t take this from you.” Ivy assures, as she makes sure the Joker’s goons don’t get up again.
“H-Harley!” Joker stammers, falling on his ass as he backs up.
“Mistah J’.” She icily responds.
“Come to beg for me to take you back?” Joker taunts.
“Hand that overgrown weed and street kid over, and I just might—“
The words don’t get to leave his mouth as her mallet crashes against the side of his head.
“I never did pay ya’ back fer everything, did I Puddin’?” She asks coldly.
The voice in her head that wanted his approval, his attention, his love, fades even deeper into the scarlet patchwork that’s enhancing her.
Gone.
Silenced forever.
All that remains is her voice.
The one he buried.
The one that was telling her to get even.
To make The Joker pay.
“H-Harley— I know we haven’t seen eye to eye lately.” Joker says through a crazed laugh.
“And we never will again puddin’.” Harley states with finality, as she brings her mallet down on the crown of his head.
Your throat works.
The Joker’s head makes a sickening crunch as it meets the pavement.
The Joker’s body twitches, once, twice, before seizing as Harley brings her mallet down.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The Joker’s blood pools across the streets of Gotham.
“Is he….?” You ask softly.
“Yeah. He is. Sorry kid.” Harley says broken up.
“Had to. He was never going to make Bats laugh.” She adds with a forced laugh.
You take a look around.
The mental math is easy.
The Joker’s goons opened fire, ready to kill.
Harley and Ivy obviously had a score to settle with him.
The Joker is a nuisance— to put it gently.
His death means hundreds, if not thousands of other people do not die.
“Well…” You wince.
“No use crying over spilled seltzer?” You laugh awkwardly.
Harley’s eyes meet yours.
She sputters, she nearly doubles over from the laughter that rips through her.
“Oh yer funny kid.” She puts an arm around your shoulder. “Why don’t we go get some milkshakes? On me.”
“Or on the house really…people usually give me free things when I walk in to places.” She chortles. “I don’t even hav’ ta’ hold my mallet too high!”
“What about them?” You ask looking back up to the rooftop where Penguin’s men watch.
All of them slack jawed at what they witnessed, before screaming and running away when Ivy and Harley look up at them.
“They’re not gonna touch us after this.” Ivy assures you. “Harley just killed the Joker, and I helped.”
“Ivy and I get to hold court the next few days around ‘ere.” Harley laughs.
“Well I—“
“Watched.” Harley interrupts you. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Alright, then.” You giggle, following their lead.
"Go ahead.” Bruce says hand to his ear. “What?”
“Let Nightwing handle it. No one else.” He stresses. “Hold him off until I get there.”
“How much longer?” He approaches the Zataras.
“Well…kind of?” Zatanna says trying to pin down the original magic signature.
“Why?” Giovanni asks.
“The Joker is attacking downtown Gotham. I sent Nightwing to take care of it for now.” He says pacing back and forth.
“Go handle it, we’ve got this covered. Not much we can do to speed this up, and dad is refusing to get (Y/n) to help us.” Zatanna rolls her eyes.
“He’s made good progress but bringing him wasn’t for an extra set of hands. It’s so he gets experience out in the field.” Giovanni reiterates.
“Hm.” Bruce grunts, looking over to you.
You seem relaxed.
Too relaxed.
Far too casual for someone who gagged earlier when they caught a whiff of the Lazarus Pit.
Bruce shakes his head, he knows what you’re capable of and yet it doesn’t make him feel any better.
Bruce feels like he’s aged 10 years in the time it’s taking Giovanni and Zatanna to find the source.
“Go for me.” Bruce says hand on his ear again, pacing back and forth with more fervor.
“What’s the Joker doing? How many hostages? How many—“ Bruce stops in his tracks, ice in his veins, throat too dry to speak. “What?”
“Confirm it, Oracle.” He grits out. “Yes, Nightwing. Transport the body. Find out what you can.”
“I can handle it too, B. I’m close by.” Jason’s voice cuts in.
Bruce’s jaw tightens. “Join Nightwing. Don’t force yourself. You have nothing to prove.”
He stares at the ground, hands clenching into fists.
“What’s going on Batman?” Zatanna asks.
“The Joker is dead.” He says lowly. “Someone got to him before Nightwing did.”
“Are you sure it’s a smart idea to cut through alleyways?” You say looking around.
The air feels weird.
Granted… it is Gotham.
And you’ve never been in an alleyway.
It just feels… off.
“Yeah, squirt. You’re bein’ a worrywart.” Harley waves you off.
As you all continue to walk, you notice it first.
A Batman logo, encircled in red, a red line diagonally across.
It hasn’t changed.
You kept track of your steps.
Every two hundred and forty nine steps it appears again.
Always on your left side.
Always in the same position.
Always the same size.
The more you think about it the more things you notice.
You all keep stepping in the same puddles.
The air smells acrid.
You suppress your gag this time, but it’s familiar.
It’s humming through the air, that same energy you felt earlier.
The static, the siren call of the Lazarus Pit.
You’re all looping and someone is causing it.
“Perceptive, child. Unusually so.” A woman’s voice cuts through the thickened air.
Ivy and Harley tense, both ready for what’s coming.
“Yeah, I am.” You put a red wall in front of you all. “Seems like you are too.”
“You’re the cause of the zombies in the cemetery…aren’t you?” You directly accuse.
Footsteps echo in the alley, as a woman’s silhouette comes into view.
“A little experiment, really.” The woman shrugs like it’s nothing.
Your eyes drag over every inch of her.
“That’s why it’s hard to pin down the source.” You think to yourself.
Her magic signature is near identical to the hum of the Lazarus Pit.
The alleyway seems to narrow, the walls feel like they’re closing in.
“You have a magic older than time itself.” She speaks already approaching.
“Kid, run!” Harley shouts as she tries to strike the woman with her mallet.
It bounces off of a wall that shines green briefly, before a shock wave knocks Harley and Ivy out cold.
“I am Mother Soul.” She states. “(Y/n) Zatara, you will make a fine gift and addition to the Lazarus Pit.”
She stares you down, eyes briefly glowing with that same ominous verdant color.
“With your essence I could unmake death itself.” She says with regality, as if it’s an honor for you.
“No thanks.” Your hands coat themselves in your magic, you take a breath.
“Let’s begin.” She fires a concentrated blast of magic towards you.
On instinct your hand draws a wide arc in front of you, breaking the magic she cast.
“Llaf.” Your voice echoes and bounces around the alleyway.
Mother Soul bends, dropping to one knee, before a wave of green erupts and she stands tall once more.
“Enough parlor tricks.” She says derisively, launching another blast at you.
You open a portal in front of you and another behind her.
The blast hits her but scatters across the air in front of her like she’s absorbing it.
“Alright then.” You mutter to yourself.
You fling charged magic blasts at her without stopping, she moves and weaves through them, only some singeing her clothes before melting into the walls.
She throws another green blast right at you.
You plant your feet, that scarlet hue dies down.
Instead of dodging, or redirecting, you let it hit.
You gag immediately, nearly doubling over as it sinks into your marrow.
The lichen-colored magic travels across your skin ripping into your flesh reminiscent of cracks across porcelain.
Your scarlet magic erupts in waves out of you.
Taking the shape of fire as if to burn and purge out the invasive force.
You fall to your knees, breathing heavily, face slick a sheen of sweat.
“I anticipated more of a fight. It would seem Zatara’s teachings are wasted on you.” Mother Soul says disappointed. “Very well then, I’ll just take what I came for.”
She approaches hand outstretched, but before she can touch the crown of your head, she freezes.
Her body trembles.
She clutches her abdomen, before random sections of her body swell.
First her right arm, she wills it away.
The mass shifts to her left leg.
She tries to expel the excess energy but it makes her body swell further.
Your breathing evens out, as you stand up again.
“Y-You keep siphoning energy from that horrible pit.” You say, stuttering.
Her eyes widen as your words register, you’ve seen through her.
“You’re leaving yourself unguarded.” You say mockingly.
She purses her lips.
It’s refined but it feels like a snarl.
As though she’s bearing her teeth.
“Child, you’re full of yourself.” She says calmly. “I need only expend the excess, and what better way than burying you with it.”
She takes aim at you, trying to condense and give shape to her next strike, but only sparks fly.
She tries again but this time nothing springs from her hand.
She makes the attempt again and again, stuttering with her incantations.
When she does manage to get through a single phrase the spell fails.
She’s losing magic— hemorrhaging really.
She can extrapolate from her body deflating, but she isn’t— can’t cast anything.
“What have you done to me?!” She snarls, the mask finally falling.
She can feel her body aging rapidly.
“Rewriting reality is kinda my thing.” You laugh. “You’re siphoning inward, so I just shifted it outwards.”
“But it doesn’t matter anymore.” You shake your head.
Mother Soul’s head whips around, looking at the space, she can see the faint red runes.
They’re not burned onto the walls.
They couldn’t be, she knew you were a Zatara.
She knew Giovanni or Zatanna would’ve taught them to you.
It was the simplest thing she thought to counter.
She knew you would try something like that.
And yet they still warble with live magic.
She eyes them closer, seeing the edges of reality fray around each rune and ward.
She can only see the mere edges of the vast white void that sits under creation.
You’ve burned them into existence.
“Runes.” She snaps.
“Yeah.” You say smugly. “Try erasing them, you’ll just burn through your limited magic.”
Mother Soul’s nails drag against the concrete as she stews.
You watch and wait.
Half expecting her to have something else up her sleeve.
But she doesn’t.
You can hear it.
The thing that lives in the Pit.
It’s whispering.
Your eyes widen.
It’s whispering to you.
“This is getting boring Ruh Al Ghul.” You yawn. “And that thing isn’t nearly as loyal as you think it is.”
Her eyes widen, she can feel the being in the Pits measure her worth.
She can feel her soul resting in the palm of your hands.
Your fingers twitch and crack as red chains rip through the fabric of reality, locking around each of her wrists and ankles.
You spread your fingers, she groans as she’s strung up, arms and legs nearly pulled clean from her body.
She’s only saved by her Lazarus Pit enhancements.
“I could just undo your spell and put those people back to rest…” you drag out the last word.
“Or I could just take your head.” You say nonchalantly.
“It’s all the same really.” You shrug your shoulders.
A saw blade made of your scarlet magic, manifests in front of you.
You twist your hand forward.
The blade spins and spins, until it seems to cut the air itself.
“(Y/n) Zatara—!” She shouts as the blade flies at her.
Her eyes slowly shut as she accepts her fate, but the blade never digs into her flesh.
She opens her eyes, watching as strands of her hair fall.
The saw keeps spinning, fast enough each serrated edge blurs into one continuous blade.
“Undo your spell, and retreat to wherever you’re from. ‘Cause I only forgive once.” You state, as your magic dissipates.
The chains that strung her up release her immediately as they dissipate.
She falls to the ground taking deep heaving breaths.
She speaks in a language you don’t bother translating, or memorizing. She spouts on about purification, or consecrated blood, or rather how the boundary between life and death is arbitrary.
You take it with a grain of salt.
The alleyway enchantment breaks. A second later her projected form follows.
Her form glitches, like a computer encountering a bug.
“No fucking way…” You scoff. “…I was struggling against a fucking projection?”
Her form cracks and falls in pieces turning into gangrenous ashes.
Before her projection can fully dissolve you catch the faintest thread.
Your eyes narrow, as you turn to face Gotham Harbor.
Your consciousness pushes far beyond the harbor, further beyond the black water, landing upon an island.
You almost retch. The island is even more contaminated than the Lazarus Pit here in Gotham.
You push through, fighting through the Lazarus hum, until your awareness homes in on Mother Soul’s physical body.
You watch as she jerks forward, one hand clutching her chest while ragged breaths tear through her.
“Well… as long as she stays on that fuck-ass island… we shouldn’t have a problem.” You say annoyed.
“(Y/n)…” Ivy whispers as she stands, offering Harley a shoulder.
“Did you say Al Ghul?” Harley asks tired, wincing as her hand tentatively goes to her ribs.
“Maybe.” You shrug, hand glowing as your magic diffuses into Harley’s body. “This might hurt. Sorry Harley.”
“What might-“ Harley’s voice erupts into a scream.
Her skin seems to pulse and stretch as her ribs snap back into place and her arm sets itself.
“Geez kid, give me a heads up next time…” She whines softly, stretching to ease her muscles.
“Sorry. I kinda forget it hurts normally.” You say offhandedly.
“I feel like I owe ya more than a milkshake now.” Harley laughs.
“Add a burger and we’re even.” You snort.
“A deal’s a deal! No take backs.” Harley laughs.
Ivy looks to the half-melted ground, before looking back to you.
The thorn prick comes back to the forefront of her mind.
She shakes her head, before catching up, laughing with the two of you.
Bruce watches as Zatanna and Giovanni pore over magical theory again, trying to find a solution.
“But dad—“ Zatanna’s voice stops abruptly.
“Zatanna, Zatara, report.” Bruce states approaching.
“It’s…gone…” Zatanna whispers.
“What is?” Bruce asks pointedly.
“The spell. The magic…it just..it just vanished.” She adds.
“I can already feel the dead returning to their graves.” Giovanni utters.
“Good work.” Bruce says watching as the barrier falls on its own.
“No Bruce we didn’t do that.” Zatanna says shaken.
“We need—“ Giovanni’s head snaps to where you’re sitting.
“He didn’t.” Zatanna whispers.
Giovanni walks over to you.
“Hi dad.” You say sweetly.
“Lepsid Tnemtnahcne.” Giovanni utters.
You seem to glitch once, twice, before you fade from view.
“Heavens above.” Giovanni utters.
Giovanni’s fingers rub at his temples.
“How long has he been gone?” Bruce asks pragmatically.
“Knowing him…probably from the moment he sat down.” Zatanna pinches the bridge of her nose.
Her head jerks up, she stares off into the city.
“Found him.” She utters.
Giovanni sighs exhaustedly. “That burst of magic is probably why this was easy to dispel.”
Giovanni shakes his head as Zatanna opens a portal.
Bruce joins them as they walk through.
They all squint, as their eyes adjust to the light of a burger joint.
“Today was so much fun (Y/n)!” Harley squeals.
“Right! I haven’t had this much fun in ages!” You giggle, taking a huge bite out of your burger.
You don’t seem to notice how badly the workers are shaking.
“You were right, by the way.” You say in between bites.
“Don’t chew with yer mouth open squirt.” Harley chides. “What about?”
“It was on the house they really did just give you the burgers.” You snort.
“See, kid? That’s my typa magic.” Harley laughs.
“(Y/n) Zatara.” Giovanni says clipped.
You squeak, the burger falls from your hand.
“Uh— uhm— hi, Dad.” You sheepishly say.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?!” He snarls.
You bear your neck, bristling under your alpha father’s anger.
“I stopped the source.” You say meekly.
“Yeah, yer little magician’s got spunk.” Harley says candidly, kicking her legs up.
“Harley. Ivy.” Bruce says annoyed.
“Hey Bats!” Harley beams.
“Batman.” Ivy says measured.
“(Y/n) you are so grounded.” Zatanna crosses her arms.
“Let’s go.” Giovanni says icily.
“But—“
”No buts!” He snaps.
“Aww geez go easy on him, he was just havin’ fun.” Harley whines.
“Stay out of it, clown.” Giovanni demeans.
“Dad.” You say sternly. “Be nice to her.”
“God (Y/n) what is it with you and befriending villains? ” Zatanna whispers.
“Excuse me?” Bruce says.
“Nothing Batman.” Giovanni interjects. “The magical anomaly seems to be handled, so we’re taking our leave.”
Giovanni puts a hand on your shoulder and pushes you through a portal home.
“Bye Ivy! Bye Harley!” You manage to get out before you’re in the Zatara estate library.
“Pamela, Harleen.” Bruce says clipped. “Any explanation for how (Y/n) Zatara ended up in your presence?”
“None we wanna give you, Bats.” Harley tosses a smoke bomb.
By the time Bruce confirms the workers are unharmed, Harley and Ivy are gone.
Bruce stands in the burger joint.
He looks towards the staff who seem to be breathing easier.
He takes a deep breath before calling the Batmobile to his location, and speeding off to the Batcave.
“Oracle, report.” Bruce demands as he sits down.
“I’m sending the video over. I think it’s easier to see than it is to hear.” Barbara says uneasy.
“Very well.” Bruce says.
Bruce watches with wide eyes as you empower two of the most dangerous villains in his town.
His mouth drops open watching Harley Quinn decorate the streets with the Joker’s brains.
“He caused this.” Bruce snaps. “I let him into my city and—“
The leather of his gloves screeches as he tightens his hands into fists.
He doesn’t wait, he moves first.
With the guest token Giovanni provided Bruce, he enters the estate with ease.
“Giovanni.” He says startling the magician.
“God—! Bruce.” He says exhaling.
“We need to talk.” Bruce says angrily. “Your son killed the Joker.”
“What…?” Giovanni whispers. “No. (Y/n) wouldn’t.”
Bruce doesn’t answer, simply pulling his phone out and showing the video.
“That is Harley Quinn, killing the Joker, Bruce.” Giovanni waves him off. “I will not allow you to blame my son for the actions of two of your headaches.”
“Something she’d never have done if (Y/n) didn’t boost her.” Bruce says through gritted teeth.
Giovanni’s jaw tightens.
He pings you telepathically.
Bruce waits, fists still clenched.
“Hi Bruce.” You and Zatanna greet both walking past him. “Yeah dad?”
“Son, do you have anything you want to confess to?” Giovanni prompts you.
“No…? I haven’t done anything… I think” You say confused.
“The Joker, (Y/n).” Bruce cuts in.
“Oh.” You wring your hands together. “I mean…is that really something to apologize for?”
“I’m sure Gotham breathes easier.” You say pragmatically, eyes darting to the side. “Besides that wasn’t me Harley Quinn did that.”
“(Y/n), you caused that.” Bruce starts. “I am certain, you, with your powers, understand causality.”
You make a face at his assumption.
“Well if you miss him that much…” you hold out your hand, fingers curling like you’re holding something.
A few seconds pass as tufts of green hair spill out between your fingers.
A man’s head begins to form.
That same shade of sickly white face paint drips down.
That sickening laugh echoing in the library as the shadows themselves retreat from you.
“(Y/n).” Giovanni says sternly.
“Sorry— I’m sorry.” You whisper, letting the Joker’s half formed head fade into red wisps.
“(Y/n) your actions have consequences.” Bruce starts again.
“I really don’t understand why you’re so upset.” You cross your arms making a face. “Didn’t he kill one of your sons? Jason Todd?”
You can hear a pin drop in the library.
Bruce stands straighter, spine made of steel.
“Right?”
Zatanna’s face pales as she starts to understand the land mine you’ve stepped on.
“Why aren’t you happy he’s dead?” You ask with genuine curiosity.
Bruce’s eyes widen, his jaw drops before he closes his mouth, his teeth grinding against each other. “What?”
“Bruce he doesn’t understand what he’s saying!” Zatanna stands in front of you.
Giovanni pulls Bruce back by his arm.
“(Y/n) is young, please forgive him Bruce.” He whispers. “I’ll make sure there are consequences for this.”
“He is never to set foot in Gotham again. Never.” Bruce snarls.
“Of course Bruce—“
“He should be sealed, or banished.” Bruce spits.
Giovanni’s face hardens.
His pheromones sharpen, his magic seems to spark and dance across his hands.
“Say that again, and I’ll show you what banishment feels like.” Giovanni icily says. “He stopped the next few hundred funerals.”
Bruce scoffs.
“How many Robins have you buried, Bruce?” Giovanni snaps.
“Watch your mouth, Giovanni.” Bruce seethes taking a step close.
“Reirrab.” Zatanna utters bringing down a wall between the two alphas.
“Keep him out of Gotham. Or else.” Bruce reiterates, he turns around abruptly, shadows clinging to him and his cowl as he leaves.
“You don’t get to ban my brother from a city he saved!” Zatanna shouts out behind him.
“I still don’t get why he’s upset.” You murmur.
“Bruce, think about this—” Barbara’s voice comes through Bruce’s earpiece.
“I’m terminating comms for now, Oracle.” Bruce says getting into his jet.
The moment the doors close behind him he backhands the nearest wall, denting it.
“He nearly brought the Joker back to life, Bruce?” Clark asks, mouth agape.
“He did. He was flippant, as most teens are.” Bruce says candidly.
“He didn’t plan to fully resurrect the Joker.” Bruce murmurs. “I may not know what point he was making, but that much, I know.”
“He was a teen with unfathomable power at his fingertips.” He sighs.
“Even when he brought up Jason…” Bruce’s hands tighten, before relaxing, “that wasn’t malice. That wasn’t cruelty. That was blunt naïveté.”
“He’s grown since then.” Bruce smiles softly.
“This story doesn’t make me feel better, Bruce.” Clark says defeated.
“It’s not supposed to.” Bruce answers, meeting Clark’s gaze.
“It’s supposed to establish that (Y/n) is not exempt from morality.” Bruce reveals. “He is operating under responsibilities our laws were never written to comprehend.”
“So, what?” Clark scoffs. “You allow the little red terrorist free rein as though the universe is his sandbox?”
Bruce raises an eyebrow.
Clark sighs. “I didn’t mean that. I’m just— I am frustrated. Why does the League allow the multiversal custodian such liberties?”
“No.” Bruce says sternly. “It means we judge him by his scale. By the responsibility creation placed in his hands when it made him capable of unilaterally enacting his will upon it.”
Clark turns to look out the viewport. His hands clench into fists at his sides. “(Y/n) is not a god.”
“He isn’t.” Bruce immediately agrees. “Nor does he want to be. The strain is already enormous. Put yourself in his shoes. If you could see every single branch, every Lex Luthor, those who choose redemption, and those who choose destruction, what choice would you make?”
Clark turns back to face Bruce again. “I would—“
Clark’s face pales. His jaw sets.
“I would… not erase him. He could’ve grown and learned.” He manages to get out.
“And thus you’ve potentially condemned countless universes.” Bruce states. “(Y/n) saw every Lex Luthor—the good, the heroes, even the evil ones who never crossed that boundary. He left them untouched. He erased only the versions whose choices had already endangered creation, or whose branches had converged on that outcome.”
Bruce steps closer. “I admire this quality about you, Clark, don’t misunderstand. You simply can’t imagine the scope. In our universe, Lex Luthor died and trillions of others live. Multiply that by the infinite expanse of creation. The number of Lex Luthors erased is beyond calculation. The number of lives saved is greater still.”
Clark shakes his head. “I still wouldn’t have erased them. They were alive. They were people. They could’ve changed.”
⫘⫘ˎˊ˗ your next patient is the son of jj maybank, a single father who causes so much chaos in the small time he's in your office.
"please send in the next patient, then. thanks!" as soon as the nurse closed the door, you slumped dead against your office chair. five seconds of peace was apparently too much of an ask for a first year resident.
you thought i'd be easier being in a small coastal hospital, but it was still more demanding than your surgical clinics during med school. turns out the word "doctor" and "overworked" together was just a universal truth—
you jolted straight up when the door slammed against the wall, rattling an animated chart of human anatomy. a stroller rolled onto the clean tiles of the office, housing a one year old toddler dressed in denim overalls. gripping the handles was a sand-blond haired man sporting a cheeky grin. "sorry, i don't know how to fold a stroller. and i thought the doors here were as tough as the ones in the lobby."
"it's okay. it happens." you smiled at him. you didn't expect the man to smile back. it woke several butterflies in your stomach that have gone dormant for so long. you picked up the clipboard to distract yourself. "wilson maybank, right?"
"the one and only. the GOAT." the man— presumably the father, considering they were both wearing overalls— placed the cheerful toddler on the clinic seat. his rich voice spoke with so much pride that warmed your stomach for a moment.
"so what brings your son here, mr. maybank?" there wasn't much written on the form he filled out.
"you could call me jj, doc." you thought you have seen jj's smile, but it turned out it could go so much wider. it radiated so much warmth that it could've placed the sunshine through the window out of commission. "and there ain't any issues, really. i just got a big bonus, and thought i'd take lil' w here for a checkup. last i bought him here was for his vaccines. that okay?"
"routine checkups are done all the time. it's recommended, actually." you made your way to wilson, silently thanking the beach gods that it wasn't another jellyfish sting or sea urchin being in places it shouldn't be in. the little toddler giggled and held your gloved finger while you listened to his heartbeat and airflow. all normal.
"maybe you could check out sometime then, doc." you heard jj as you took off the earpieces. "you like the doctor too, don't ya little guy?" jj scrunched his face at his son, who cooed in response.
"technically, i can't. im a pediatrician. but i could set you up with our general department." you gently laid wilson on his back. you only realized that jj may have meant something else when his cocky grin faltered for a split second. but you tried not to read into it too much. "so tell me, how are things at home? is he speaking yet?"
"a lot. you don't know how hard it is to be outranked by dinosaur, ball, unicorn, bird, and the babysitter's full name before he ever said dada." jj faked clutched his heart like he had a heart attack. a genuine laugh escaped your tired throat, taking note of the ease he leaned with against the counters. "him running around's the worst part, though. i didn't know just how many places he could bump his head in until he bumped into all of them."
"ouchie. but it's good that he's walking and running. wilson seems to be advanced for his age." you felt around his neck for bumps you hoped you won't find. when he was in the clear, you lifted a finger and held it in front of wilson who laughed and immediately followed with his irises. "i'm guessing everything is baby proofed in your home now?"
"absolutely. even the toilet is sealed shut. had to crap in the bathtub a few more times than i thought i would have to." jj laughed out loud. you would've asked him to keep it down, but the slight rasp in his assuring voice gave the same comforts as sleep and food you missed. it was getting harder to focus looking into wilson's ears and nose when your body urged you to look at jj again.
"it's actually a lot harder than i thought it would be." there was a slight drop in jj's voice. you gazed at him, but his sights were fixed on the glimmer of light on the tiled flooring. you decided you should focus on your job and went to feeling his abdomen for any abnormalities. every touch earned you a sweet laugh from wilson.
"i gotta work in the mornings and take care of him at night. im happy for all the things i do for him, times i have with him. i'm sure it'll get easier when he's old enough for daycare, too. but i shouldn't be doing this on my own, ya know? ion even know how to collapse the damn stroller. i don't know what i'm doing most of the time." despite the chuckle jj followed with, you felt the uncertainty and bitterness he had in your skin. feelings you wished you could take away from a man who looked like he harnessed the waves.
"what happened to his mom?" the question stumbled out your mouth before you could think it through. and before you could apologize, jj answered.
"had a terrible accident. tripped and fell onto her co-workers dick. she's still stuck there." jj laughed with his bittersweet honey voice. but when you didn't laugh, he sheepishly reached for the back of his neck. "guess you haven't seen that video yet. but that's what actually happened. i shot for the sky, and now im stuck on the ground."
"sorry i asked." you faced jj for what you said next. you hadn't realized how much he towered over you. or how he bought sea salt and strong leather into the scents of the office. "for what it's worth, you're doing very well. wilson is extremely healthy. i would usually check his limbs too, but with how much he's kicking and waving he's doing it for me. i don't see any problems going forward."
"thanks." it was a foreign sight having a man's attention all to yourself. you craned your neck up to see him, but his eyes dropped down onto your lips before looking into yours again. "you look awfully young for a doctor."
"o—oh?" your cheeks burnt up. your mind raced to think if you were just imagining it or if his eyes actually went placed. "i qualified for a program that allowed me to do my bachelor's and med school together. i'm actually just 24 so i get that a lot."
"cool, only four years younger than me, eh?" jj squeezed your shoulder before walking over to wilson, who has crawled all over the couch now. you squinted your eyes for a moment, reeling the threads that jj has undone. you shouldn't read too much into it. you weren't even allowed to date a patient's parent unless you transferred them.
"ya single, doc?" jj asked, finishing the last seatbelt around wilson's waist. he shook the milk bottle in front of wilson before handing it to his eager hands.
"yeah uh, i'll write you a prescription for vitamins. it's not necessary but it'll be good if you look into it." you scrambled for your prescription pad. all that filled the silence was jj tapping his foot against the bed before he spoke again.
"when are ya free?" jj asked as soon as you handed the piece of paper. he looked down and scoffed. "i can't read cursive."
"oh, the store will know. and i'm a resident. we don't have free time." you laughed gingerly to yourself. jj's smile faded slowly, so you immediately followed. "that was a joke. that was me making a joke. im not used to it— i'm free this friday evening."
"i'll pick ya up, boy." jj winked. you said goodbye to wilson shakily, still wrapping your head around the fact that jj was taking you out this friday and it all seemed to move so fast. burn too bright. and all you could really do was go along for the ride.
"and hey, i told ya i felt stuck, right?" jj stopped halfway out the door, drowning you in his ocean blue gaze. "i don't feel that much anymore. and i think if ya gave me a chance, i'd feel less of that."
for the rest of the day bleeding into the night, through paperwork and patients and assists for attendings, jj maybank filled your thoughts. how for the longest time you wished for one moment to breathe. and how he seemed to come at just the right time.
Author: OK this was actually so cute so if yall want a part two let me know 🫣
Toxic ex! Magneto who refuses to let up on you because you two were meant to be in his eyes.
He's so messy!! You guys broke up because he went back to the xmen,but that didn't mean he wanted to be without you. Keeps eyes on you through his followers in hopes of "keeping you safe". He couldn't let you have another boyfriend after him, he ended up running all of them off with threats. You were just as clueless because it's not like you two talked. It doesn't matter how long you guys are broken up because you are forever his. So what if he randomly shows up at your house all bruised and busted up. You're not going to turn him away right? He didn't think so. He spends the entire night sweet talking you, trying to get you to remember all of the good times you guys share with one another. He loves you and needs you in his life.
Fratboy! Sukuna who keeps you by his side at any parties he goes to.
He's usually the type to sit and just lean against the wall, drink in his hand while the music is bumping. He's known for having guys and girls alike by his side trying to get his attention all night. Who wouldn't want to be with him? Over six foot, known around the school, big as hell, covered in tattoos and piercings, everything about him just gave off sex appeal. The problem was he wanted you, you and no one else. It wasn't even a hidden fact either because at every frat party he was all up on you. Either standing behind you while you danced or holding you drink for you so you could talk with your friend. You made him your little personal errand boy.
Once he got with you, he never let you stray too far from him while at these parties. Dark heavy gaze followed wherever you went because he was obsessed with you. Now he lurked in the corner with his boys but kept you on his lap to talk to. You wanted to dance? That's fine, just make it in eyesight. You wanna go off with your friends? Cool, he'll be checking on y'all though because he knows how these parties can be. When it was just you two on the couch, he was clingy as fuck. Touching on your thighs, kissing your neck while telling you how good you looked, rubbing his thumb against your temple to soothe any relief or keep any chance of a migraine from the music and alcohol coming. Sukuna was obsessed with you.
ℌ𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔶𝔪𝔬𝔬𝔫 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔪𝔬𝔩𝔡𝔶 𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔡
Ethan Winters x male reader
Summary: the night and morning after the new union between you and Lord Winters, you learn new things about your husband that further cement his complete devotion for you.
Tags: Male Reader. No Use of Y/N. Lord Ethan Winters AU. Canon Divergence. Dark Ethan Winters. Possessive Ethan Winters. Obsessive behavior. Protective Ethan Winters. Corruption. Infected Reader. Mold Infection. Touch-Starved Ethan Winters. Emotional Dependency. Unhealthy Attachment. Fluff. Forced marriage. Highly suggestive moments. Moldy dilf alert.
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 12000
To say you were exhausted was, honestly, the understatement of the entire evening, said with the kind of dry sarcasm your brain could only just barely muster while the rest of you was melting into the mattress. Between your thighs there was a warm trickle sliding down the crease of your ass and pooling on the sheet beneath you, physical remaining of your Lord husband that came from your gaping hole, sore in a very specific way, twitching now and then around emptiness and pushing out another sluggish dribble of him that painted the inside of your thigh sticky.
Somehow, though, none of that mattered, especially with the way Ethan had tucked you up against his bare chest and slung one heavy arm across your back, palm splayed wide to cover almost the whole span between your shoulder blades.
The faint blue veins that ran under it pulsed at a slow, sleepy pace now, calmed down from the frantic gaslamp throb they had reached while he was buried inside you.
Every question and worry you had been carrying around in your ribcage for the past weeks dissolved.
Your eyelids felt weighted with lead and Ethan was raining down kiss after kiss on the crown of your head that stayed a full second before he pulled his mouth back to place another one an inch to the left.
Murmuring into your scalp between kisses, low and slurred with the same exhaustion that was dragging you under, "you okay, sweetheart? Hurt anywhere?" His hand at your back drifted lower, splaying over the curve of your side, thumb making a soft dragging circle over your ribs. "Doing alright? Want me to get you water?"
You hummed a little noise back at him wordless that meant ‘I'm alright, don't move, don't you dare go anywhere,’ and shifted your head a fraction so that your cheek pressed more comfortably against the shelf of his pectoral.
His skin was faintly damp with sweat and it had a mineral undertone the mold always carried, heartbeat thudding heavy against your ear that did more to soothe you than any drug ever could.
Fingers of his had migrated up into your hair and spread wide, calloused pads dragging over your scalp in slow strokes that made your whole spine go liquid.
When his nails scraped lightly behind your ear a small involuntary sound came out of your throat and you felt his chest vibrate under your cheek with a satisfied little rumble.
If it had just been him and you, you would have been unconscious inside of ninety seconds.
But the toys on the floor kept snagging at the last ragged corner of your consciousness. Every time your eyes drifted half-open they were still there, arrayed on the herringbone floor near the foot of the bed
It felt like someone still played in here.
Your throat worked around a swallow very quietly, cringing at how frayed and hoarse your own voice came out, cracked in three separate places by how thoroughly he had wrung you out, you said, "Ethan… can I ask you somethin'?"
He hummed, sound vibrating up through the whole plate of his pectoral into your cheekbone and you felt him tilt his chin down against the top of your head.
You lifted your face off his chest with effort and when you finally propped your chin on his sternum to look up at him and his eyes were on yours already, barely glowing right now.
In this dim yellow lamplight they looked almost ordinary human blue, tired-husband blue and you could see the small creases at the outside corners where he had been smiling too much.
Wetting your lower lip it stung a little, split in one spot from where you had been biting it earlier.
"Is there… someone else living here?" you asked very carefully.
His face did not change. "No, sweetheart. It's just you and me." Voice calm and warm.
You hummed back at him an acknowledgement that didn't commit to belief or disbelief and you let your head sink back down onto his chest, gaze sideways toward the wall opposite the bed where mold was present.
Ropy black tendrils, thick as your wrist in places, thinning out to hair-fine filaments at their tips, ran down the wall in branching patterns from a knot near the ceiling.
Every couple of seconds a slow pulse of paler light moved down their bodies from the ceiling toward the floor in a soft peristaltic wave.
Were those the same ones that had slid up between your legs and inside you?
You watched the slow pulse of them for a long time while Ethan's fingers kept combing.
"You know… you can share anything with me if you want." A slow breath, feeling the way his lungs rose and fell under your cheek. "It's a good feeling sharing things. It gets lighter." Another breath and your fingers twitched idly against his ribs. "Besides. I'm your husband now, aren't I? That's kinda the… bare minimum I gotta do for you."
Something happened in his chest under your ear. A short low laugh that rippled up through the muscle right beneath your cheekbone and you felt the vibration of it in your own teeth.
Lifting your head off his chest again.
He was not looking at you, jaw tight with tension along the hinge and his lips were pressed too firmly together, upper lip pale where the pressure of the lower was pushing the blood out.
His eyes had left your face and moved, very deliberately, past your shoulder, all the way to the open doorway of the bedroom and whatever he was thinking, his throat worked around it once, a small soft bob of Adam's apple and did not swallow it down all the way.
You watched him for a long moment and there was grief in his face.
Curiosity, or maybe something older and stupider than curiosity, tugged your head to follow his eyes at the same dark doorway.
Right at the edge of your ears at the very threshold of what you could actually detect, there was a buzz that got louder the more you focused towards it.
You blinked hard and focused, exhaustion making every act of focus weight heavily and you had to physically screw your eyes half-shut and hold your breath to force your ears to work through the growing noise.
Under or through it, only for the barest instant you heard a baby crying very far away, somewhere down in the belly of the house.
Then the buzz surged and swelled up over your ears, drowning the sound out entirely, tension bleeding out of your neck and shoulders as the effort of your concentration collapsed.
You were too tired to push against it and your cheek dropped back down against his chest but Ethan moved, sliding out from under your weight with a careful roll of his hips, tucking a pillow under your head in the place his shoulder had been so that you did not go flat onto the mattress.
"I'll be back in a minute, sweetheart," he mumbled, voice threaded with something apologetic.
"mm-kay." You were exhausted, but not to the point that a piece of your brain did not track the sight of him rising off the mattress.
His back to you, broad and lean, muscle terracing down the length of his spine in long clean planes, dip of his lower back and the swell of his ass, high and firm as the muscles flexed when he stepped down off the bed.
When he bent, one knee dropping to plant on the floorboards while he fished around for his discarded boxers, the whole of him rounded down in a way that made your dry mouth go drier. The stitched-up scarring around his left wrist caught the lamplight, ugly ropey scar tissue with a faint black ooze at the seams.
He raked a hand through his sweat-damp hair to get it out of his eyes and glanced over his shoulder at you.
"Right back," he mouthed before he was through the doorway and gone.
The buzz in your ears was already beginning to slacken now that he was moving away from you, strange sedating pressure of his presence draining out of the air.
Curiosity was suddenly a much bigger animal in your chest than it had been a minute ago. As you pushed yourself up.
Oh, God.
That was a mistake because the instant you shifted your weight onto your palms and tried to sit upright, a hot spike of pain drove itself right up through your lower half from the base of your spine into your gut.
Your ass throbbed, hole clenching hard around nothing and the muscles in the small of your back had knotted up into hot little ropes while you had been lying there, now they burned and twanged in protest, breath hissing through your teeth with one small adjustment at a time until you were finally propped upright against the headboard with the coverlet pooled around your hips.
Freaky, intense activities with your Lord husband, who had a cock like something the mold itself had designed just to break you open in the exact right way.
Yeah, there was going to be a limp involved tomorrow.
From this new vantage point you could actually see the room properly for the first time.
The toys were pulsing very faint.
All of them were made of mold.
Why children's toys.
You couldn't come up with an answer that didn't hurt. Your tired brain kept starting sentences and refusing to finish them.
He said no one else lived here.
Your eyes slid sideways, drawn by nothing but the same low pull of curiosity that had gotten cats killed for a great many years.
The nightstand on his side of the bed with a drawer in it that was not quite closed.
Open by maybe half an inch, just enough of a gap that when you leaned slightly, wincing at the fresh bark of pain through your lower back, you could see down through the shadow of the crack into the shape of what lay inside.
There was a simple book, grey cloth cover with no title stamped on the spine that you could see, flat on the bottom of the drawer like it had been slid in there and shut away in a hurry.
You glanced at the open bedroom door and then at the drawer before closing your eyes and thinking about the book.
Shape of it in your mind, grey cloth and plain cover along with how it sat flat in the drawer.
Something bloomed cool along the floorboards.
A single tendril was rising up out of the wood beside the nightstand, Pearl-white and exactly the color of the new arm you had made for Mold, same faint mineral-fungal sheen to it that rose in a slow spiral, unspooling upward out of the herringbone with no sound at all, not even a rustle.
It bent at its tip the way a stem bends toward the sun and it turned its blind head toward the drawer, sliding up along the front of the nightstand to ease through the half-inch gap of the opening and disappeared inside.
Behind your eyes you saw it circling the book and wound around it in layers until you could no longer see the grey underneath at all, just a bright cocoon.
Very gently, the tendril lifted the book up out of the drawer and carried it onto your lap.
All these white tendrils began to dissolve into the floor right after, pale substance fraying into fine mist that sank in slow motes toward the floorboards and vanished before it reached them.
Within perhaps four seconds there was no evidence anything had happened at all.
Your hands were shaking slightly from the strange soft warm afterglow of having done that while you looked at the grey cover before placing one fingertip to the latest bookmark that had a small word marked on the outside side of it titled ‘him’.
Feb. 9th / Evening / The Rock
The date was close.
Your hand froze on the corner of the page while pulling the journal in your lap, spine cracking open easily as you began on that recent page.
Feb. 9th / Evening / The Rock
I decided to go today towards that rock to hopefully not find another one, or at the very least not dead. This should be the time of the month for these stupid rituals.
I told Miranda again to make them stop and she told me again she’ll have a look. Same conversation, third time. If I want the rituals stopped I have to find another solution perhaps.
I was late.
The two of them had already injured him badly, sloppy work to interrupt any possible attempt the poor kid might have done. He was still breathing when I got there and there was so much blood on that damn moss.
I killed the two men. I didn’t mean to, exactly, I guess the more I get taken by emotions the more it starts acting on it’s own.
God why can’t it just listen to me.
My hand was on the kid’s wound to stop the bleeding and the mold immediately went in him.
I felt the way the mold sealed the liver clean and closed the vessels. Somehow it settled in like it belonged to him and I felt no hostility like it did with the many others I tried.
It wanted the same thing I wanted.
I‘ve been trying to do this for a year and a half. Every other one turned.
Duke came up the path with the cart right after, thank God I asked him for a lift. I told him to bring me his linen and his brandy.
It felt nice holding him in my arms.
They deserved it.
Feb. 10th / Very Early / after meeting
I didn’t like the way she was looking at him but you don't say no to her.
At least I can keep him with me and not let the other… siblings of mine (God I still don’t like this way of referring to them) do things to him.
He fell asleep on my shoulder on the way home or rather, I made him do that.
I could feel him fighting it, he didn’t trust me yet and I get that, he’s smart. I put a little more of me into the string between us and I lowered the volume of him from the inside, so it worked. Head went down on my shoulder inside of a minute.
There was, below the notes of the day, a drawing done fast, hatching for the shadows. Your face, eyes closed and mouth just slightly parted.
There was a soft careful line under your lower lip where he had gone back over the pencil three or four times, trying to get the shape of the wet at the corner of your mouth exactly right.
Feb. 10th / Night at Home
I made him go to bed early, he was still tired from the cart, made sure of that.
We had a really nice long talk on the couch with some wine and, apparently, the villagers believe that I feed on peoples soul…
That at least got a good laugh out of me.
It was nice seeing him comfortable near me and, thankfully, didn’t seem to mind all those things of mold in my place.
I couldn’t help but think of how she would have loved him.
A thought of her in his arms and this stupid ‘gift’ I have replicated her crying somewhere inside the house.
It forced me to stop that noise for him and send some molded thing to search the tendril reproducing it.
I opened the string between us and I let a picture through.
Deep down I don’t know why I did that, I guess I was curious of how much I could do with this new bond I had.
After that I had some… problems of my own to attend in my room.
I want to be a good man about this. I’m going to try.
A drawing of you lying on the bed of the guest’s room laid right below his notes.
Your face was hot, feeling the pulse of it in the tips of your ears and low, unforgivably, in the front of your pants where your body had started to answer the words on the page before your head had caught up.
Feb. 11th / Morning / House
He came down for breakfast in the clothes I bought him.
I put more pictures in his head. Cheap, I know.
I couldn’t help it.
He sat at the table and he went very quiet. I watched him try to hide the fact that he was hard under the table.
Yeah, I didn’t regret this at all, really wished I could have him on the butcher block with his legs open around my hips as we kiss together.
I miss her a lot but his company is helping.
Mot— Miranda (by dint of always saying it to satisfy her I’m falling in this as well) wants us up at Alcina's tonight.
She wrote back that she’ll call off the rituals for good. Two years I’ve been asking and today she says yes.
Deep down I really hope she thought of my proposal from the letter I sent her, the wedding idea was something I typed down at the very end of the various proposal just to show my… desperation perhaps?
Finding out that people were getting killed because of me wasn’t a nice feeling at all.
I hope he’ll say yes if things go as I pray.
This house had been so empty and hollow for more than an year.
You closed your thumb over the edge of the page and went way behind in pages to look for the beginning.
The next entry was dated eight months prior and the ink was darker, handwriting a lot less steady and shacking.
June 3rd / Night / Home
I dreamt of her again.
She was in the crib and reaching up for me and I reached down for her and my hand went all black in so many tentacles that passed through the wood to take hold of her fingers and she felt so real. I woke up with mold on the sheets in the shape of a small hand curled around my index finger.
I don't know what else to do.
Your eyes tracked down the page and the letters were beginning to soften at their edges. You blinked and rubbed the heel of your hand into your eye and when you looked again the word crib had lost the shape of its ‘C’ and become a smear that curled at one end.
You lifted your gaze to see the room was perfectly clear, every knot in the wood visible, the small brass key in the drawer's lock catching a point of light from the flame.
Looking back down and the page was fog, ghost-shapes of letters that would not resolve into words no matter how long you held them in your focus.
Rapidly you flipped the page to gather as much as possible going back to around 2 years.
April 17th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] Mia [illegible] the BSAA [illegible] again. The third [illegible] this year [illegible] black stuff every [illegible] hours [illegible] hands wouldn't stop [illegible]
[illegible] said the levels were [illegible] than after Louisiana [illegible] her they were [illegible]. She knew I was [illegible] but said nothing to me till this moment.
Rose [illegible]
Your throat closed.
Only the name was clear as every other word on the page had gone soft and unreachable.
In that moment you understood, with a slow cold clarity, that something was being done to prevent you from reading any further.
You turned the page rapidly.
May 10th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] hit her. I didn't [illegible] I would never [illegible] but the mold [illegible] and she flew [illegible] into the wall and she [illegible] up at me from the [illegible] and I saw [illegible] in her eyes [illegible].
I would never do what Eveline [illegible] to her
Rose was [illegible] the next room [illegible] crying and I couldn't [illegible] go to her because [illegible] afraid if I picked her up [illegible]
I sat on the [illegible] outside her door [illegible] hours with my hands shaking. [illegible] on my own THOUGHT [illegible]
That was the [illegible] I knew I had to [illegible]
Stop.
The word came to your head in his voice.
Please, honey, put it down.
November 8th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] fourteen this year. [illegible] I've killed [illegible] this year without even wanting to.
[illegible] Mia would not [illegible] room with me anymore. [illegible] would not hold Rose [illegible] I was in the house, she would [illegible] her closer and turn [illegible] shoulder toward me [illegible] her from me [illegible] her own husband [illegible]
I don't blame her. [illegible] wouldn't have held [illegible] near me either.
Baby. Please.
The voice in your head was not steady anymore.
I swear to God I was going to tell you, I've been trying for a week to figure out how to tell you, please put it down, please please put it down—
Even as your hand turned the page, the words on this one you could not read at all. The whole page was fog and only the drawing at the bottom was clear.
Done fast from memory many times over from the way the paper under it was thinned from the pressure of the pencil going over and over the same lines.
A baby asleep, one small fist curled against her cheek and very short soft hair.
Under the drawing, in a hand that had shook so badly the letters had almost torn the paper, one word.
Rosemary.
Your vision doubled, tongue felt very heavy and behind it your throat was warm, eyelids coming down with a pull that you tried to fight for perhaps two seconds and then stopped because you could not remember why you had been fighting them.
The diary lifted out of your lap carefully, followed by the soft sound of a page being smoothed flat.
A hand at the back of your neck, palm broad and dry settling under your hair where the small hot pulse was still jumping.
There you go, I've got you.
The hand slid under your arm and tipped you sideways, laying you along the length of the mattress as your cheek came to rest against the pillow.
He lifted your legs up and tucked a blanket over you before the mattress creaked just as it dipped. His chest came up against your side and his arm came over your ribs as the string between you thickened.
Consciousness came back slowly in warm surges one behind the other, each one soaking a little further into the cracked earth of your thoughts before the next arrived, a soft steady headache tapping at the inside of your temples as you dragged your eyelids open.
They stuck back down when pale slanting light that filters through drawn curtains hit them, but even that little was too much and you had to squeeze your eyes back down, count to ten before you could try again.
Second try worked better and your gaze focused on his bed, same bed you had been carried across the threshold into where your husband had fucked you stupid in.
It was still your first time seeing it in daylight, or the poor watered-down excuse for daylight the curtains were letting through.
Late afternoon, judging by the angle and the low tired gold at the edges.
You had slept through most of it.
Shoving the coverlet off, you sat up on the edge of the bed with your bare feet on the cold wood and your elbows planted heavy on top of your thighs.
Head sinking down into your palms, you pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes and rubbed hard, small red galaxies blooming in the dark behind your lids and when you pulled your palms away, the headache had shifted from a knock to a low even drone.
Memories were coming back in an order you did not choose between his mouth on yours, blue in his veins pulsing bright enough to light the underside of his fingers.
All those tendrils at your wrists and the way he had folded you in half and slid inside you inch by inch.
Underneath that, was the grey cloth cover of a book and all the stuff you read.
You sat on the edge of his bed with your feet cold on the wood and your fists in the mattress as you tried, hard, to decide whether you were going to be furious or terrified.
What your brain settled on instead was a kind of tired ache in the middle of your chest, small warm bruise that lived behind your sternum right where the string from him came in and it hurts to find out that someone you have started to love has been telling you the truth in every way except the one that matters.
You did not know how much of what you felt just now was yours and how much of it was his.
Pushing up off the bed your legs held. That was good, balance was there as you took two steps toward where the pile of your clothes had been thrown in last night but were now missing.
"Great," you muttered under your breath, voice that came out crackly at the low end from disuse.
Casting around the room by looking under the bed, at the dresser and pulling open the top drawer with the vague idea that maybe he had put your things there while you slept, but the drawer was full of neatly folded shirts of his, plain white t-shirts and a couple of plain grey henleys.
Standing there in the middle of the room with your arms crossed loose over your bare chest, one hand cupped low and dropped over your junk because standing naked in a room that was not, technically, warm was not the position you wanted to be in for another minute and you swore very quietly under your breath one more time for good measure.
Both the floor and air in the room was cold to the point where goosebumps prickled in a wave up your arms and down along your ribs.
Your room, or whatever the ex-room across the hall counted as now, would have your other clothes in it.
Crossing to the bedroom door with your hand still cupped low and your other arm tight across your chest, you eased it open and stuck your head out into the hall.
It was empty and you could hear, faint and far, water running somewhere downstairs, a faucet or a pipe.
You stepped out, floorboards of the hallway colder than his room's had been as every board sent a small hiss of chill up through the soles of your bare feet as you moved in, making it maybe six steps toward the corner where the hall bent toward your ex-room and then, right as you rounded the turn, Ethan came around it the other way.
Whole freezing body of yours colliding with his chest.
Not hard though, he had time to plant his feet a half-step before you got to him and his hands came up to catch both shoulders to steady you as your bare chest bumped once against the soft cotton of a blue hoodie over the harder shelf of him.
He looked good.
That was the deeply unhelpful first thought your brain served up, golden canvas jacket open at the front and the collar of it was turned up a fraction on one side and not on the other, under the jacket the dark blue zip-up wool pullover was zipped only three-quarters of the way up and the plain grey t-shirt underneath was visible in a small triangle at the throat, stubble had grown in over the course of the day into a shade denser than last night.
His eyes went over you top to bottom quite rapidly but you saw the exact moment the fastness lost the argument, gaze snagging on the line of your throat first, then on the small pucker of one nipple that had gone hard from the cold, followed on the crease at your hip where your hand was hiding your dick, then on the light bruises his hands left last night.
His mouth had gone a shade slack, pupils in his blue eyes were slowly widening even as you watched.
Corners of his mouth lifting one at a time, boyishly appreciative that did nothing to hide the fact that his eyes had not stopped darkening yet.
"Well, hi." His voice came out an octave under where it usually sat, dragged there by whatever was going on behind his ribcage. It had a small husk on it, rasp along the underside of the word. "What a beautiful damn sight to walk into. Best I've seen in a long time."
Heat came into your face in a slow rush from the throat up. You mumbled something meant to be a ‘hi’ back at him and he leaned in, mouth pressing quickly against the side of your cheekbone, right at the top of the cheek where the stubble stung, breath warm over your ear.
"Ethan," you managed while clearing your throat. "Where are my clothes?"
"Oh," he said and stepped back a fraction so he could look at you properly again, grin still on him. "Yeah, about that. So…" He hooked one thumb into the front pocket of his jeans and drew his shoulders up in a small helpless shrug. "I threw 'em in the laundry."
He was trying not to laugh, lower lip pinned between his teeth. "In my defense, when I put 'em out there this morning, sweetheart, there was sun. And then, uh." He gestured vaguely toward the ceiling with his free hand. "Weather did what weather does. So now they're… damp and still hanging up. I'm waiting for them."
"Ethan."
"I know." He was actively laughing now, quietly, chest bouncing under the wool of the pullover. "I'm sorry."
"I'm currently freezing, you know that?"
He lifted both hands in surrender before you could smack him. "Okay, turn around."
You did not entirely trust him but turned around anyway, one arm across your chest, hand still hiding the front of you while behind came a soft rustle of him shrugging off the canvas jacket.
A beat later, the whole soft heavy weight of his jacket dropped over your shoulders from behind.
It was warm from him, still holding the heat of his body along the inside of the lining. It smelled like him too, cedar and a note of cold outdoor air.
His hands came around from behind and he zipped the jacket up over your chest in one steady practiced motion, all the way up to the notch of your throat as the jacket hit you at mid-thigh, hands settling a moment at your waist and he ducked his head down to your ear.
"There we go." His voice had a low satisfied quality to it that was not quite decent. "Yeah. That's… okay, honestly, I like it a lot better. You in my jacket and nothing else? I might have to keep hiding your clothes."
He kissed the shell of your ear and stepped back around you and took your hand in his so much bigger than yours, warmer too.
Thumb running a small stroke across the knob of your wrist and then he was tugging you down the hall gently toward the stairs, walking in front of you, glancing back over his shoulder every few steps as you went with him.
Along the wall on your left there was a thin rope of black mold following you down that pulsed as you passed, a slow soft peristaltic wave of paler light traveling along its inside before it went still again.
You noticed, as he was tugging you across the rug toward the couch, that the ache was gone and you hadn’t registered it at first because there had not been a single sensation.
Your lower back did not twinge with each step and, while settling that little revelation in the back of your mouth as you turned to him, he sat manspread down on the couch, one arm slung along the back cushions and the other resting on his thigh, knees fallen open wide enough to leave the whole space between them warm and available while he looked up at you standing over him with that same slow grin still on his mouth, waiting.
You did not really make a conscious decision about it, lowering yourself down onto the couch beside him closer than you had planned, hip pressing up along the outside of his thigh and your legs, without asking your permission, hooked across his with one of your calves slotting over the top of his thigh, other tucking under his knee so that your bare legs were braided through his denim-clad ones.
The pull went through you, warm gravitational pull that lived in the middle of your chest and lengthened when he was near you, wanted him closer and your face in the side of his throat,
Not all of that pull was yours, you knew the string he had written about was there and how he used them last night to make you sleep.
Whatever answer your body was giving him just now was not one hundred percent yours anymore but it felt very good being this close to him and his hand had come to rest, without you needing to ask, on the top of your bare knee where the jacket left off, palm warm and possessive.
"Feelin' okay, sweetheart?" His voice was quiet against your hair. "You hungry? I can heat you up something."
"Not hungry," you said. "I feel fine, actually. I thought I was gonna be limping all day, honestly, and I—" you shifted your hip experimentally and nothing barked "—nothing hurts."
"Yeah?" His voice had a lilt in it and you felt him smile against the top of your head.
You lifted your head off his shoulder enough to look at him.
His eyes were glowing, blue irises that had lit up bright at the very centers.
"There," he said mildly. "How about that?"
Pain hit you in exactly the low dull throbbing ache you should have had, from the base of your spine, down through both cheeks. Your mouth fell open and you hissed through your teeth as you bent forward involuntarily around your own middle, bare knee coming up off his thigh and for two long seconds you sat there gaping like a fish.
The glow bled out of his eyes just like the ache that bled out of you along with it.
"Aw," he said, low and teasing, "there we go, everything back to normal, huh. Just wanted to make sure my sweet husband was feeling like himself. Good to know you're feeling alright."
“you are such an asshole, oh my God." You were breathless still while speaking.
"Yeah." He was pleased with himself while leaning back into the couch cushions with a smirk on his mouth and his eyes back to ordinary blue, hand on your knee dragging a slow warm circle over the cap of it with his thumb. "I know. C'mere, sorry.“
He tugged you back down by the knee and you went as his arm came off the back of the couch and settled heavy across your shoulders, pulling you snug into his side and your head found the shelf of his shoulder.
Staying there and you letting your eyes half-close.
He had just demonstrated, casually, that he could put or take pain out of you at his own preference.
"Sweetheart," he said after a long while.
"Hm."
"I wanted to say sorry about last night." His thumb was drawing slow patterns on the top of your knee. "I might have gone a little… further than I should have right off the bat. That was your first time with me and I got a bit… you know." He laughed softly, small huff of air into your hair "I hope it wasn't too much."
He did not mention the diary, letting the whole conversation slide right on past that dark shape and you understood, with a soft cold clarity, that this was either his way of saying he did not want it brought back up ever, or his way of hoping you did not remember.
Wondering, briefly, whether he had tried at some point in the night, while you had been under, to lift the memory of the pages out of your head with his abilities.
If he had, it had not worked since you remembered every word he had let you read but apparently he did not know that since he was sitting here apologizing to you about the sex you two had.
Maybe this new thing inside you was not as bad as you had been braced for.
"It wasn't too much," you murmured against his throat, which was a lie in some directions and a truth in others. "I'm okay, Ethan. It was good, I liked all of it."
He made a small sound at the back of his throat close to a whimper and his arm tightened around your shoulders in a fierce quick squeeze.
Then his hands were under you, one at your waist with his thumb hooking under the edge of the jacket where it had ridden up while the other under the crook of your knee and he lifted you across himself in one smooth pull. You went with a small startled sound and the world swung as you settled on his lap, bare thighs bracketing his denim-clad ones, palms landing flat on the wool of his chest to catch yourself.
Big and broad hands settled on your thighs, palms curling around the fronts of your bare thighs just above the knee and sliding up in one proprietary drag, thumbs on the insides where the skin was softest and pulse-warm, stopping high enough that his fingers were tucked all the way up under the hem of the jacket.
He was looking up at you, eyes gone soft at the outer corners, stubble on his jaw catching the low warm light from outside before he kissed the corner of your mouth first, then the pad of your cheek till he mapped every corner of your face.
Every kiss he pressed left behind a small burn where the stubble had dragged and your eyelids sank to half-mast.
His hands slid a fraction higher on your thighs, fingertips ghosting up under the jacket and along the tops of your legs to the curve of your ass.
Impossible not to feel the way he was hard already, now sitting up thick and unmistakable in the front of his jeans right in the crease of you where your ass met the tops of your thighs, bulge pressed up against you through the denim, heavy shape of him along the whole length and every small rocking motion he made with his hips dragged the seam of his jeans.
Warmth in your elevated too fast, hands on your thighs producing more sensation in your skin than his hands on your thighs ought to be producing. Every place his mouth touched your cheek was lighting up with an intensity that was not quite ordinary.
His hand at the back of your ass moved up along your spine under the jacket and settled in the hollow at the base of your neck, other hand sliding all the way up your thigh and cupping your hip through the canvas and he tipped his mouth up to yours, opening for you at the same instant your mouth came down to his.
Tongue coming in lush, curling against yours with an easy expertise and tasted like coffee along that green mineral undertone that lived in everything about him.
It was addictive.
You tried to keep up but lost immediately and gladly, hand at the back of your neck cradling you into a better angle as he tilted his head and his tongue slid deeper along yours while you rocked forward on his lap without meaning to, ridge of his cock dragging up along the seam of your ass under the jacket and both of you made a broken sound into each other's mouths at the same time.
He kept kissing you.
His fingers pressed into your hip through the canvas hard enough to bruise while the other hand slid up under the collar at the back of your neck and gripped a handful of your hair at the nape, holding you there so he could kiss you deeper.
All until your lungs were burning and small black spots were blooming at the edge of your vision before you finally, with a ragged gasp, had to break the seal.
You pulled back an inch, breath tearing in and out of him against your mouth in short hot gusts and yours was doing the same thing back.
His stubble had left a hot red scrape all around your lips that you could feel throbbing.
Ducking his face down and pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the pad of your cheek before dragging his lips down along your jaw with his teeth catching lightly on the underside of it, then along the tendon of your neck and into the soft warm dip of your collarbone where the zip of the jacket ended.
You dropped your forehead onto the top of his shirt and blonde hair while in a state between drowsing and thinking, cheek warm against the wool of his shoulder and the fire making its small pop-and-hiss noises across the room when his chest rumbled under you again.
"Sweetheart." The word came up through his sternum before out of his mouth. "You really, really not gonna eat anything? Truly? 'Cause I can just throw something together real quick, whatever you want."
"Ethan, I'm fine, I promise."
"When'd you eat last."
"…yesterday at breakfast."
"Yeah, see." He shifted a fraction under you, tilting his head down so he could look at your face where it was tucked against his throat,. stubble scraping the top of your ear. "Nope. That's not gonna fly. I'm makin' you something and you can't stop me, don't even try."
He said it firm and then bent his neck to press a chaste closed-mouth kiss right in the middle of your lips before he was sliding you off his lap with both broad hands under your ribs and setting you gently down onto the couch cushion beside him.
His jeans had a very obvious situation going on down the front of them that he did not bother trying to hide and one of his big hands came down to adjust himself matter-of-factly as he rose, thumb hooking briefly under his belt to shift the whole business into a less painful arrangement before he was jogging around the low table and off toward the kitchen.
You sat there in his jacket alone on the couch with your bare knees tucked under and it occurred to you that he was extremely adorable… when he was not standing over a corpse in the woods or controlling endless ropes of black mold.
Unfolding off the couch, bare feet finding the cold rug.
"I'm gonna grab clothes!" you called out toward the kitchen doorway.
"Sure!" His voice came back cheerful, distant, muffled by a pot lid banging down. "There's clean stuff in the second drawer, take whatever!"
Jogging up the stairs on the balls of your feet to spare them the cold of the wood, mold tendril running along the wall pulsing once again as you passed it.
In the bedroom (you had already stopped calling it his room) you crossed to the dresser and pulled the second drawer open, a pair of boxers, some joggers and one folded pair of grey sweats. Top drawer where you had looked earlier, one of his plain white shirts that you put on before zipping his jacket over it.
As you walked downstairs, the front door was in the corner of your eye and your hand was already on the knob.
The door swung on its hinges without a whisper and cold air came in over the threshold in a smooth wave to hit you full in the face as you stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind you with the softest click you could manage.
World outside white and grey but also quiet, snow had come down again while you were sleeping and it sat unbroken in a soft blanket along the porch boards, along the two shallow steps down into the yard and on the whole slope of the ground that ran away from the house toward the dead treeline.
Snow crunched under your boots while observing the houses all around, some with three walls now since both the fourth wall and the roof had gone, whole shell wrapped in thick ropes of mold. Thick ropes of it ran up the corners of the standing walls, and thicker ones bulged along the ground at the base, and where the wood had cracked open the mold had grown out through the cracks in slow black cauliflower-heads that pulsed faintly, in and out, in and out, in a slow synchronized breath.
There had been a house next to that one in a worse state with only the front doorframe still standing in a pile of collapsed timbers.
Only Ethan's house was whole while all those others were standing rather badly on their walls.
Behind, wet steps get detected by your ears.
Mold was standing four paces behind you in the snow since he had followed you out, his right arm was still the blade you had accidentally sharpened for him yesterday.
But the rest of him had changed since a lot more white was on him.
Last night he had been almost all black with just the blade white and clean, now you noticed that the white had spread in a thin milky wash across the top of his shoulders and down the front of his chest, white micelia that laid over the black underneath like frost. It even ran down his forelegs about halfway to the knee and stopped in a soft ragged line, blade arm white the whole length now and up into the shoulder joint.
The black was still most of him but white was gaining.
He tilted his head the other way with a soft chittering sound at the back of what would have been a throat.
"Hey, buddy," you said quietly, voice pitched low. "You following me?"
He tilted his head again.
"Well, you can tell your Lord I'm not going anywhere, alright?" You sighed, steam coming out of your mouth in a little cloud before dissolving.
Mold, as far as you could tell, could not reply but two things happened in your head at once. The first was that the pull in the middle of your chest tightened and the second was that his voice was in your head.
I know, honey.
Warm and very close.
I just want you safe, that's all. I just don't like the idea of you out there in the snow by yourself in bare feet. Lycans hardly ever come this far up but they do come, and I would really, really appreciate it if you'd come back to me.
You made a small face at Mold and Mold tilted his head.
You turned slow in place and started to answer him “yeah, alright, in a minute” and your eye caught something at the edge of the yard.
The treeline blurred.
Every trunk in that section had a soft fuzz around its edge and the shadows between the trunks was too even. Snow didn’t settle onto the branches and you blinked hard, the blur got a fraction sharper.
There was an open path, a break in the treeline where a road ran off into the woods.
He had hidden something right now from you using his abilities to smear a patch of forest into a wall and you could, if you concentrated, see through it.
A small cold thrill went up along the inside of both your arms.
You looked back over your shoulder at the house as you started walking and Mold trotted after you.
Aiming your thought at the string in your chest to talk with him.
"Hey, Ethan, sorry, quick question," you said out loud because you did not, actually, know if just thinking would do it. "What happened up here to the houses? They look like they got hit with a truck."
A pause on his end as you felt him hesitate.
Yeah. His voice was quieter than a second ago, not warm now but tired, a small clean rasp of guilt along the underside of the word.
Yeah, that was me, sweetheart. When I got here I wasn't controlling any of this stuff in me real well yet. First few months I could barely leave the house without something coming out of me sideways and the neighbors… they weren't so lucky.
You had stepped past the corner of Ethan's yard now, out into the dead road toward the blur, snow crunched under your bare feet while Mold followed. On your right the collapsed neighbor's house yawned open.
"Were they—" you kept your voice soft and casual, "—were they threatening you, or something?"
A longer pause as you felt him sigh in your chest.
No, honey. They weren't doing anything.
You could hear, at the edge of the audio-half of your brain, the distant sound of a pot lid being set down carefully on a burner. He had stopped cooking. He was leaning on the kitchen counter now, both palms flat on the tile and head down, talking into the string.
I came in here in a real bad state, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to me before I got up here and by the time I made it into the village I was not okay and this stuff in me, takes what's in your head and it puts it out into the world.
He trailed off.
I never meant to. If I could I would take it back but I can't. That's why nobody lives up here anymore.
"I'm really sorry, Ethan" you said softly into the cold air and you meant it.
Thank you. Very quiet.
Sweetheart, could you come sit with me on the couch? I don't mean anything, I just— I mean, I'd love, obviously, but I just mean sit and talk. I could listen to you talk about literally anything. That's a pathetic thing to say out loud, ignore that last part. I just—
He was rambling shyly in his kitchen a hundred yards behind you leaning on his counter about wanting to sit on a couch with you and you had, in the last thirty seconds, walked yourself right up to the fuzz at the edge of the woods and had put your hand out as it had passed through empty air.
There was no wall of trees where your eye said there was one, but there was a road.
And I know I said this already but I really do love your company and spending time with you and I—
"You're not pathetic," you said out loud into the mouth of the road. "Yeah, of course I'll sit with you. That sounds nice, I want to."
You kept walking while Mold, ambling along at your heels, had passed through the same wall without breaking stride. You turned once and glanced back at him to see his head tilted the other way now.
Raising one finger up in front of your mouth and putting on the most pleading face you could put on.
"Buddy, please do not tell your Lord I'm out here, okay? Please, please. I'll—" you cast around for something to bribe him with and did not find anything and said, weakly, "I'll let you out more time, I promise."
Mold tilted his head the other way before he just… started walking again, blade-arm ticking a soft dry rhythm against the crust of the snow. He came up alongside you and fell in at your left, three paces off.
You could have kissed him if he had had a face without sharp fangs.
Branches hung low overhead as you moved further in, mold started showing up in the trees to either side of the wood, thin at first and by fifty paces in the trees on either side had gone from ordinary winter woods to something braided together with pulsing rope.
The tendrils grew thicker the further you went while Ethan, in your chest, kept talking.
If we're being honest I've been rehearsing what I want to say to you for a couple of days now and I just haven't been able to make the words work out loud, but with you in here, in my head… God, that sounds crazy to say. Look I know how this sounds and I know a lot of people would not want their husband inside their skull like this and if that's how you feel, sweetheart, you tell me and I'll pull it back.
"I don't mind." Which was true and untrue in ways he did not need to know all of yet. "I like hearing you."
Yeah?
Small hopeful lift.
"Yup."
Okay, alright. You had come around a slow curve in the road and the trees had thinned in front of you, mold along the trunks gone from ropes to thick pulsing sheets and beyond the last of the birches you saw a car at the base of a large fir.
The front end of it had folded itself in a soft crumpled U into the trunk, hood pushed halfway back into the passenger compartment while the windshield had been fully swallowed on the passenger side by a black mat of mold that had grown in through the crack.
It had the shape of a Dodge Challenger 1970, something you’ve seen through magazines back some years when you still lived in that place.
The driver's seat was gone under a black cauliflower head of mold the size of a curled dog and back door on the driver's side was missing entirely, hinges bent outward as mold ran up out of the wheel wells and along the sides of the body in ropes that pulsed once every few seconds.
Mold, beside you, stopped down on his haunches in the drift and tilted his head.
Ethan had stopped talking but you hadn’t realized that while observing the remainder of the car as you went around the front bumper, palm brushing the crumpled fender and coming away dusted powder-white with old paint.
You went along the passenger side where mold hung off the door handle in a soft dripping curtain to then turning the back corner and coming up to the missing back door on the driver's side and you leaned down to look in.
The back seat was in better shape than the front since mold had not made it back here yet, leather cracked and grey but it was, more or less, still leather.
You almost missed a small brown plush monkey with how hidden it was, palm-sized with circular dangling arms and legs, two little black-plastic eyes and a stitched-on smile.
Something in the middle of your chest went cold at the realization that this might belong to his daughter but soon black tendrils came up out of the snow all around you.
Four of them, thick as your wrist, dripping heavy with black wet substance that hit the snow around your feet.
What are you doing out here? His voice was cold and close, every warm inflection had drained out of it.
Sweetheart. I asked you a question. What are you doing out here and how did you get past the tree line?
"Ethan, please—"
The nearest tendril at your right hip stirred and wrapped itself gently around your right forearm from wrist to elbow.
Another one came around your right thigh in the same deliberate wrap and you felt one lift the hair at the back of your neck and settle across the tops of your shoulders.
The last of the four looped down and around your left ankle before every one of them tightened.
Sleepiness poured into you and your knees, without permission, softened.
Plush monkey in your hand suddenly had the same weight of a stone.
"Ethan, please don't, I'm sorry!" You heard him right in front of you because he had crossed the yard and the road in the amount of time it had taken the tendrils to close around you and then he was there, hair that had gotten a bit disheveled coming through the woods and his eyes were glowing, cold clean electric blue at both irises that lit the underside of his cheekbones a fraction.
"Honey." His voice came out of his mouth this time, not through the string. It was still cold. "How did you find this?"
"I…” your tongue was thickening at the root.
Something in his own face changed a fraction.
"You can't see them, can you." Quieter and in a different tone entirely, a small clean note of interest threading into it, the kind of interest a scientist might show a slide.
The blue in his eyes flickered while he came the rest of the way to you, big warm hand coming up and cradling the side of your face, palm along your cheek, thumb stroking your cheekbone.
It was so warm compared to the tendrils that it burned a little and so gentle as he cradled your face.
"Shh," he murmured and your eyes half-closed against your will. “I'm not gonna hurt you, sweetheart, I would never, I promise. It's just gonna feel like a nice long nap like last night and when you wake up I'll—"
His eyes moved past your face to the small brown shape hanging from your loosening fingers.
The blue in them went brighter, pupils fattening out inside the blue and the whole iris lit.
Immediately all the sleepiness in your body slowed to a stop and, in the next second, began to peel back off you.
He was not looking at you anymore but at that monkey, blue in his eyes so bright now while his mouth had come the rest of the way open and one small breath was going in and out through it very fast.
He shut his eyes hard and pulled a long slow breath in through his nose and held it for some seconds before letting it out and repeating the process.
The glow died back when he opened his eyes again.
They were not glowing anymore but only glassy.
You held the little monkey out to him and slowly, both hands cupped under it as he looked at it for a long moment.
"I didn't know this was in there," he said very quietly. "She must have been so sad in these two years, this was her best friend."
He turned the monkey over in his palm carefully and looked at the split seam with the red rubber band around it, touching the rubber band with his thumb and his mouth twitched once at the corner in a small helpless upward jerk.
"Ethan," you said.
He looked up and his eyes were red at the edges but the blue in them was ordinary human blue.
"Rose," you said, carefully. "Your daughter?"
He looked at you for a long moment and you watched the tired man behind his eyes resurface.
"Yeah," he exhaled a tired huff. "Yeah, honey. My daughter Rose. She's three now. She was one when I —" he swallowed "—when I left."
"Ethan, listen, you don't have to—"
"No." He shook his head and rubbed the back of his free hand across his cheek as it came away wet. "I owe you this after everything I…” he gestured vaguely at the tendrils' scorched puddles in the snow around your feet, "You've been so patient, c'mere and sit with me."
He turned and nodded his chin to an old fallen fir that had made itself a bench, one end tipped up onto a boulder and mold had grown along the underside of it in a thick soft padding.
He walked toward it, monkey cradled his chest while you went after him until he sat down on the mossed trunk and shifted over to leave the room, patting the mold beside him and you sat.
After a second Ethan lifted his arm and settled it around your shoulders to pull you into his side.
He looked at the monkey in his hand before he started to talk.
“My wife Mia, thought now ex-wife, went missing for three years and the last thing I knew at the time was that she was babysitting."
He rubbed his thumb over the little brown head.
"In reality she was transporting a little girl name was Eveline. She was a bioweapon grown in a lab and made of mold. The truth is Mia was a handler and something went wrong on the shipment, Eveline got out and Mia crash-landed with her in Louisiana…" he took a slow breath "She took a family of kind people—maybe excluding one of them— the Bakers. They had been forced to do awful things for three years and Mia was kept prisoner."
"Jesus," you whispered.
"Yeah." He shifted the monkey to his lap and his hand found yours, closing around it under the sleeve of the jacket and holding it.
"I went in there because I got a message from Mia under Eveline’s influence got her."
His mouth twisted.
"That house did every conceivable thing to me that night. I lost momentarily my left hand at one point, I got Mia out and killed Eveline. Some men came in at the end Chris Redfield was running the op and he pulled me and Mia out of that house alive… later through testing I found out I was infected."
“They helped you?"
"They tried." Small tired huff. "Chris is a good man, sweetheart. He said, ‘listen, you're gonna live with us for a while. We'll set you up in Romania near one of our bases, you'll do a bit of training and come in for tests.’ That was the deal, weekly tests and monitoring."
“After about a year of that Mia got pregnant." The corner of his mouth twitched again.
"That was the best year of my life," he said. "Rose was born on a Tuesday. She had this this soft little head, almost no hair with this little cap of soft fuzz. When they first put her on Mia's chest I leaned in over the two of them she opened her eyes and she looked at me and I… I have never in my life been looked at like that before or since."
He stopped and was quiet a long time.
"That was when it started."
"When what started?"
"The powers from the mold." Very quietly. "It had been in me for two years by then, all the tests came back saying it wasn't doing anything. I had killed so many people without even wanting to. Mia was scared of me. She'd get up and take Rose away or turn her shoulder toward me and Rose away, and I couldn't blame her."
He stopped and set his free hand flat on top of the monkey in his lap, breathing through his mouth for a second.
"The worst part was I would think things about my own daughter like— God, I hope she sleeps through the night tonight, I hope she doesn't cry, I need her to just sleep, and she would sleep for eleven hours… for so long that Mia would have to go in and check on her. I would look at Mia coming out of the nursery with Rose in her arms and I would see the look on her face."
He turned the monkey over in his lap.
"I could not trust myself in a house with my child, that's what it came down to. I loved her so much I could not describe it to you if you gave me the rest of my life to try. So I left."
He nodded down at the wrecked car.
"I got in that car that Mia bought for me for our second anniversary because I said one time that I liked them. It was in the middle of the night and I went away"
You did not say anything for a long moment, his arm around your shoulders had gone loose and you slid your free hand up onto his knee.
"I drove for hours," he said. "I don't know how many. I got over the mountains and into these hills and it was maybe three in the morning when I saw a shape in the road… I don't know if it was an animal or a person but I swerved and I came off the road through the trees… then I hit that fir."
He nodded at the trunk-wrapped-around-tree behind you.
"Of course I did not die, the front end of that car is a wad of tinfoil and I walked out of it. That’s how I got into the village and another Miranda said that this was a place for me."
You sat there for a long moment with your head on his shoulder and did not, at first, know how to answer him. There was no thing you could say that would take any of what he had just told you and make it lighter to carry.
You lifted your hand off his knee and slid it up along his forearm to the back of his hand, lacing your fingers between his and squeezing as warm as you could.
"Ethan." He did not look up but was still looking down at the monkey.
"Ethan, look at me. Please."
He looked at you and his eyes were the plain sad blue they had been at the end of the last sentence, red at the rim, a little wet.
"You are not the monster everybody in that village thinks you are. What you did was the best thing a man could do. You loved her too much to stay. That is exactly the thing the wholeliest father in the world does, do you understand? I don't know what it's like, I've never had a daughter or lost one. But I can tell you, Ethan, from the outside of it, what you did was for her. You left because you loved them so much you couldn't stand to be the thing that broke them.“
His face did something in the middle of the sentence.
First the corners of his mouth pulled up a fraction, then they pulled down and his chin dimpled hard as he pressed his lips together.
One clean fat tear detached itself from his left lash line and rolled straight down the line of the old dried track as a pained crooked smile came in his face.
"Sweetheart—" His voice cracked in the middle of the word and he laughed. "I… I don't know what to say now."
His hand squeezed yours so hard that for a second you thought he was going to bruise you but then he seemed to remember he was much stronger than a person and he loosened his grip before squeezing instead in a series of small careful pulses.
"You are the best thing I have found in this village. You know that, sweetheart?"
"Not even the coffee," you laughed breathlessly with how close you two had gotten.
"Not even that," he said and huffed, rubbing his cheek up on his shoulder to smear the wet off and looked at you.
"You wanna go home?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." He nodded once and squared his shoulders, standing up off the mossed trunk in one smooth motion and he did not let go of your hand.
He kept your hand the whole way while Mold ambled along behind you.
Then, halfway back up the path, curiosity you had felt in the clearing but had not yet had time to ask about came back up to the surface and you spoke.
"Hey."
"Mm?"
"How did you find me? Out there, I mean."
He looked at you and had a small crease going up between his brows.
"Sweetheart," he said, slowly. "You really don't know?"
"I mean… you were in my head, right, the whole time? I figured maybe—"
"No." He shook his head once. "No, honey, that wouldn't have told me where you were, that's a different thing."
He stopped walking and turned to face you on the path.
"You can't see them?" He said.
"See what?"
"Oh." A small breath went out of him. "Wait, hang on, look right here.”
He turned his hand palm-up in the air beside your shoulder and pursed his mouth a fraction, soon one thick black tendril slid up out of the snow between you and unrolled itself into the air about the height of your face to hang there.
"Look at it," he said softly. "Just look at it and let your eyes settle."
Looking at the black slick that occasionally pulsed, at first there was nothing else to see before you saw little bright motes.
All around your head and in front of your face mostly, a soft constant drift of them with some coming up and some down, tumbling slow through the air.
Each mote was pale gold and every one of them glowed faintly from within.
"Oh," you said small.
"Yeah," Ethan replied back softly.
He looked, actually, surprised while watching your cloud with an expression that was somewhere between fascinated and hunger.
"You've been putting those out since that night after I saved you. I've never seen a person do that before and I don't know what that is."
"Ethan, are they dangerous?” you swallowed.
"No." Immediate and firm. "They're not dangerous. You're making them and they're coming off of you."
"From how far?"
He gave you a small crooked apologetic smile.
"About as far as I need to."
You made a face at him and he laughed, first real one he had made since the wreck and it came out of him warm and a little shy.
"I gotta be honest with you. Since you started, uh… producing these spores… I mean, look at me, honey. I'm normally not like this."
He gestured, vaguely, at himself.
"Not like what?"
"Handsy." He shrugged embarrassed. "Not… all this. I have tried to keep my hands to myself and I have failed at it every single time you have gotten within reach of me. I breathe them and something in the mold in me… I don't know what it does exactly, but I kinda lose my mind.”
His pupils had gotten a fraction wide even in the evening light and you had a very acute sense, standing there on the packed snow of the woods-path in his jacket, that your face went hot and were suddenly and horribly aware of the fact that he was standing three inches from you.
The little cloud of gold around your face got brighter.
Like the mold with him, they altered based on your emotions.
He leaned in and the tip of his nose brushed the shell of your ear, cheek against yours for half a second before his mouth was in the crook of your neck, warm mouth against the top of the tendon at the side of your throat and his warm nose against the underside of your jaw.
"I have a… suggestion. Feel free to say no."
"Okay."
"Maybe a shower."
That made you laugh, startled sound that came out of you weak and warm.
"Maybe if we— if I got you under some hot water, it'd rinse off. That's an untested theory but I figured we could try… together."
"Is this your gentle way of saying I stink?"
He laughed straight into the crook of your neck and it vibrated up through your jaw, making you laugh breathlessly back and his hand came up around the back of your neck.
"What I am smelling right now is the best thing on the planet that’s making my dick very hard.”
Those words made your cock twitch inside your pants.
"…alright."
He pulled his mouth off your neck and his eyes came up to yours, pupils fat as he took your hand again and laced his fingers through yours.
You went when he tugged up the path and it took no time at all to get back home.
The good smell of whatever he had been cooking on the stove drifting warm out into the entryway and the way he steered you, without letting go of your hand, right past the kitchen and up the stairs, along the upstairs hall to the master bath at the end of it.
He shut the bath door behind you both with his heel, the rest was noise.
Much later you found out that the spores did not, in fact, come off in an hour of shower; nor did they not come off after Ethan got you clean from hours of you wedged up between the wall of the shower and his chest with his cock splitting you open and his forearm braced across the tile above your head because he simply could not stop.
Ethan had to carry you down the stairs right after wrapping you up in the cream towel and dried your hair with another one before putting his own jacket back around your shoulders.
No pain was involved to your muscles but he simply wanted to do everything for you for the rest of the night and, the second you would try to even move a muscle, his eyes would glow and the atrocious pain of the recent activities would stop any action you had in mind to do.
For the rest of that day, he didn’t look hurt at all.
Summary: he has so many new things to share with you now that he is your husband… and so many things to share and try out together with you.
Tags: Male Reader. No Use of Y/N. Lord Ethan Winters AU. Canon Divergence. Dark Ethan Winters. Possessive Ethan Winters. Obsessive behavior. Protective Ethan Winters. Corruption. Infected Reader. Mold Infection. Touch-Starved Ethan Winters. Emotional Dependency. Unhealthy Attachment. Fluff. Forced marriage. Smut. Top Ethan Winters. Bottom male reader. Monster fucking. Tentacle sex. Size kink (very mold-enhanced size). Anal sex. Overstimulation. Cum inflation. Gentle dom Ethan Winters.
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉 - 𝒩ℯ𝓍𝓉 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 8500
Applauses cracked through the vaulted living room of Castle Dimitrescu, ricocheting off the crimson drapes and the gilt sconces that flickered with beeswax flame.
A family of monsters clapping for a union that had been decided way before asking your opinion.
Lady Alcina Dimitrescu was the first to lift her gloved hands and even her clapping was theatrical. She half-turned toward the black-cloaked figure of Mother Miranda, long dark cigarette held between two of her tallest fingers, smoke curling up past the brim of her wide sunhat.
"Mother," Alcina purred, voice honeyed and slick, "what a truly beautiful union you have brought to fruition beneath my roof. I am honored beyond measure that you would grace my humble castle with a ceremony so delicate." Her yellow eyes flicked to you and Ethan before back again to her Mother figure, the barb hidden in the compliment was so soft it barely showed its point. "It is my absolute pleasure to host it."
Standing there with Ethan's warm arm curled possessively over your hip, you knew that every syllable Alcina spoke was for Miranda's ears alone.
The tall Lady's crimson lips smiled at the crow-woman but her golden gaze slid toward Ethan.
Beside the far column, hunched almost double, Salvatore Moreau was clapping too. His two mismatched, deformed hands slapped together and a thin string of greenish bile crept out of the corner of his mouth and he caught it with the back of his wrist, swallowing hard, blinking those pale runny eyes. He was trying so terribly hard not to embarrass himself in front of his tall sister as you saw his throat bob three times in succession, forcing the vomit back down for the sake of the occasion.
Deep in the shadow of the tall bookcase, cradled on Donna Beneviento's lap, Angie was howling with glee, mouth clacking open and closing while her tiny wooden hands slapped together at manic speed.
"More kisses, more kisses, more kisses!" the doll shrieked, kicking her stiff legs. "Kiss him again, do it wet!"
Donna herself said nothing, face hidden behind that heavy black veil and her long lace-gloved hands only tightened just slightly around Angie's midsection to still her.
The remaining sibling of your new husband, Heisenberg, stood leaning heavy against the frame of the door that led into the dining room, weight pressing into the wood so hard the old timber creaked under him.
His round sunglasses caught the candlelight in two little copper coins and you couldn't see his eyes, but you felt them.
Broad hand resting on the head of that great steel hammer and his gloved fingers drummed on the metal. He tilted his head back enough that the light caught the smirk on his mouth.
Miranda finally lifted a slender hand and the room fell silent.
"Alcina, my dear," Miranda said, her voice cool and reverent-sounding, though nothing about it felt maternal. "Once again, my thanks. Your hospitality is, as always, exquisite." She turned that beaked mask toward you and Ethan. "Congratulations, my children. Ethan and you, little one. Do enjoy your—" her voice curled around the word with the barest, driest twist "—matrimony."
There was something almost mocking in the way she said it and Ethan's arm tightened at your waist, fingers spreading over your back, thumb rubbing circles through your shirt.
"Now, if you will forgive me, my work calls." Miranda spread her arms and her form began to fracture apart into black feathers and beating wings. In the space of two heartbeats she was gone and a small murder of crows launched themselves upward through the tall window arch, shrieking and dissolving into the darkening sky beyond.
A single black feather drifted down, landing on the marble at your feet.
The moment she was gone, the whole room seemed to exhale.
Heisenberg was first to leave, shoving himself off the doorframe with his shoulder and dragging his great hammer along, head of it scraping the polished stone floor with a shrill metallic screech that made you flinch.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
"Congraaaats," he drawled over his shoulder, giving a lazy two-fingered salute without turning. "Best fuckin' wishes. May your union be long and… fertile." He laughed once but loudly. "Try not to break him too fast, Winters."
Ethan's jaw locked and arm at your waist did not move, but you felt the muscles in his forearm cord up, hard as rope under your ribs.
Moreau limped after his brother with that lurching, sidelong gait but he stopped in front of you, short frame from his state barely reaching Ethan's chest. His fishy pale eyes flicked from Ethan to you and back, watering. He tried to smile, lower lip trembling and when his mouth opened, there was a small wet click as something in his palate resettled.
"C-congratulations, brother," Moreau stammered up at Ethan, his voice thin and slippery like something dragged from underwater. "And to you, t-too. You're—you're very lucky. It's… very special." His head bobbed as he swallowed hard again. "I'm so happy for you."
Before you could answer, his slimy palm reached out and settled on your thigh over your jeans. It was cold and damp and even through the denim you felt the moisture soaking through in a small dark patch. Something like fish oil that made your stomach lurch. You clamped down hard on the instinct to recoil, feeling so sorry for even thinking he was ugly and the disgust trying to twist your mouth, but the sensation of that hand was almost more than you could bear.
Ethan reacted instantly.
"Thank you, Salvatore," he said, warm and civil on the surface, but under the warmth there was a low bass hum of something else as he pulled you flush against him with the arm at your waist, hard enough that Moreau's damp hand slid off your jeans with a soft wet peel. Ethan tipped his head down and pressed his lips to your cheek, chaste but firm, marking you.
Then he looked down at his hunched brother and his tone gentled into almost pitying.
"I'm sure it won't be long," Ethan told him. "Mother Miranda will bring somebody home for you, too. You just have to be patient, brother. You'll have someone of your own."
Moreau's whole misshapen face lit up. His lopsided eyes went round and shining as he nodded and a bubble of drool broke at the corner of his mouth. "Th-thank you, Ethan. Thank you. That's— th-that's so kind of you to say.”
He lurched away toward the great doors, casting a damp wave over his shoulder to Alcina and she did not even acknowledge his existence, her yellow gaze had not left you and Ethan for a single second.
"So," Alcina said, taking a long, slow drag from her cigarette and letting the smoke drift down at you two in a thin gray curtain. "How very curious it is all very much attention Mother has been paying you lately, Ethan."
There was tension threaded through her every syllable, she was smiling in her own oblique, aristocratic way, telling him she was watching.
Ethan shrugged one shoulder. "I haven't asked for anything in all these years, Alcina. I think this was overdue."
"Mm." Her red mouth quirked. "How well you put things."
From the shadows, the tall Lady's three daughters all lifted small hands and waved to you with sinuous fingers and flirty actions before the three of them dissolved into whirring clouds of shining blowflies and were gone.
Ethan cleared his throat. "Alcina. The stones I asked, you have them?"
Alcina turned her sly gaze on him and held it, smile deepening while making him wait.
"Bela." She yelled loud enough for the eldest daughter to re-materialize only from the waist up, her lower body still a hovering churn of black insects. She held out one small palm and let two glimmering gems fall into her mother's huge, gloved hand. Then, without a word, Bela dissolved again into buzzing motes and streamed away.
Alcina let the gems roll around her palm a moment, admiring the way they caught the light. Then, with a lazy carelessness that was almost insulting, she flicked her wrist and tossed both of them at Ethan.
Before they had even reached the halfway point through the air, black mold erupted from the flagstones beneath his feet. A single sinuous vine, glossy and dark, uncurled upward and caught both stones on its blunt tip with unerring precision. It retracted, gliding back to Ethan's hand and he plucked the two rubies off it with two fingers. The vine sank silently back into the floor without so much as a scuff mark.
"Thank you, Alcina," Ethan said. "We'll take our leave now."
"Do enjoy your honeymoon, darlings.” Alcina nodded and gestured airily with her cigarette. “And take that hideous thing with you." Her eyes flicked, the trail of her smoke pointing as well in the direction you followed.
In the far corner stood Mold, hulking in a hunched-forward silhouette, all sinewy black musculature slick with a permanent oily sheen, taller shoulder cresting above the other.
Pinkish serum still oozed sluggishly from the torn stump, running in slow rivulets down the ridged flank of his body and dripping in fat drops on the marble.
He had been staring at the floor the whole time.
Ethan glanced at him, then nodded and turned toward the exit, keeping you tucked hard against his side and, in turn, you went with him while behind you, with a soft slurping shuffle of ichor-wet feet, Mold followed, single remaining arm hanging heavy at his side.
The great front doors of Castle Dimitrescu groaned outward and the freezing dusk-air of the mountain slammed into your face, snapping you awake.
Taking the same path of this afternoon now in reverse, snow crunched hard under your boots as Ethan's boots left deep, deliberate prints beside yours.
Overhead the sky had turned a bruised-gray, thickened with clouds and somewhere behind those clouds the sun was sinking.
Halfway down the switchback path, Ethan finally let go of your waist and you immediately felt the absence of him, a cold seam of air along your left side. He was digging in the pocket of that navy hoodie he wore under his golden heavy coat and pulled out two small silver bands, each had a small circular cavity set into its top face.
He held out one palm with both rings on it and with the other he took the two rubies to press them gently into its bezel. His thumbs worked around the edges, firming the settings, sealing the stones down snug. He held one ring up to the last of the light.
The crystal was deep red, pigeon-blood and unshadowed even in the failing evening, it seemed to glow from within.
He turned to you, blue eyes coming up under his brows almost shyly.
"Can I…?" he asked and lifted the ring between his fingers. "Would you let me put it on you?"
His voice was so soft that it was the thing undoing you every time. This gentle, hesitant Ethan, someone who could summon black tendrils out of the earth and turn anyone in awful monsters, asking you for permission to slide a ring onto your finger.
"Yes," you breathed and he took your left hand in his palm so warm, veins along the back of his hand faintly luminous, threads of pale blue moving under the skin as he lifted your knuckles to his mouth and pressed his lips to them.
A closed-mouth kiss, warm and dry, breath ghosting across your fingers.
When he lowered your hand slightly, his eyes glowed enough to be frightening, blue of his irises phosphorescent and you could see the reflection of your own face in them, small and pale, half hidden by your own knuckles.
Something warm and buoyant bloomed inside your ribcage that filled the whole cavity of your chest until your breath came shorter.
He slid the ring onto your ring finger and it fit perfectly as if he had measured you in your sleep.
Maybe he had.
The crystal caught the last strained shred of sunlight through the low clouds and threw a tiny red dot of light onto his cheek.
He put the other ring on his own finger and lifted your hand again to let both rings touch, tapping the stones together with a clear little tink.
"There," he murmured. "Now everybody knows."
You couldn't speak.
He tipped his head down the mountain and let his arm reclaim your waist. "Let's walk it, not that far if we cut through the trees. Duke's cart takes the long road but I know a shortcut."
Your stomach dropped a full inch at hearing his proposal.
"Wait. You want to walk through the woods?"
He turned his head sideways, corners of his eyes crinkling and his mouth pulled up into a small crooked grin. "You scared, sweetheart?"
"There are lycans in there, Ethan."
"Mm." That grin got wider. "I know."
"Nobody goes in there, since I was a kid, they've said—"
"You afraid to go in with me?" His arm at your waist pulled you into his side and the words were teasing before his voice dropped a shade. "A marriage means I protect what's mine now. You understand? That's what this is." He lifted your left hand, kissed the ring on your ring finger. "From now on, anything with teeth that comes near you goes through me first. That's a promise."
You couldn't argue with that, not with the way his glowing blue veins throbbed once at the base of his throat as he said it.
He led you off the switchback path and into the treeline, forest swallowing everything the instant you crossed under the first branches. Even without leaves, the trees were so thick and knotted that daylight didn't get through.
Every step crunched on a carpet of frozen needles and bracken and branch creaked overhead at every step, making your shoulders climb toward your ears, hair on your forearms wouldn't lie flat.
A shrill little screech came from behind and you spun your head sideways.
Mold had followed you in while walking with the same lumbering hunched gait, one arm hanging low, stump of the other still weeping pink.
"Ethan," you said, chest aching at the sight. "Can you help him?"
Ethan stopped mid-stride and turned to look at your same direction, then at you and his mouth quirked at the corner.
"How about you do it?"
"…What?"
He laughed at your face and the laugh puffed out in a small cloud of steam in the cold air. He fully turned to stand in front of you, boots crunching on frozen leaves and he tipped his chin toward Mold.
"Go on. Fix him."
"Ethan, I have no idea how to."
He stepped so close that his nose brushed the side of your face, mouth grazing your cheekbone and his breath was moist against your ear.
"Focus, sweetheart," he murmured. His voice had gone lower and private. "Focus on what you want, picture exactly every detail and close your eyes if it helps. Then… push it out of you."
You closed your eyes and held the shape of Mold's ruined side in your mind, remembering how his arm looked, all sinew and glossy black skin.
Something respond somewhere behind your ribcage, a warm little pull, like a thread being drawn out of you the more seconda passed by.
You opened your eyes just in time to see Mold's stump had erupted, this time there were fine white filaments braiding themselves out of the missing arm wound, millions of them spinning together like weaving thread, thickening and gathering density. The threads twisted around one another and hardened as, in seconds, a whole arm had reconstituted itself but where the old arm had been slick tar-black, this new one was pearl-white.
A very sharp sort of blade at its tip long and hooked but also ivory-pale. The whole arm gave off a mineral, mycelial smell.
Mold lifted his new arm slowly and turned the blade this way and that.
He didn’t had a face to read but the way he held that arm out and stared at it felt, unmistakably, like awe.
Ethan turned to you and his lips parted a fraction, glowing blue eyes going wide as they caught the last of the dusk.
"Sweetheart." His American accent was reverent, hand coming up and taking your waist, drawing you around to face him fully, chest to chest in the freezing dim of the forest. "I've never seen that white mold before. You’re really a special one."
His hand rose to your jaw and cupped it, the glowing blue veins in the back of his hand were pulsing faster now.
"How the hell was I even able to?" You started and your voice was shaking. "Ethan, I thought you were the only one able to—"
"Oh?" he said, teasing while leaning in, forehead touching yours. "Only me? Am I the only one allowed to do the freaky stuff? Because I'm the Lord? Because—" a soft laugh "—what was it? I'm the one who drives people crazy and… feeds on their energies? Isn't that what my sweet husband told me?"
You scoffed and lifted your free hand to smack him lightly on the chest, feeling the shape of his pectoral through the soft fabric of the hoodie, solid and dense, causing your hand to pause a second too long there before you remembered to pull it away.
"I never said any of that, you ass. That's what the crazy people in the village say."
"Mm-hm." His mouth was so close now. "So what do you say about me, then? How would you correct these legends?" His nose brushed yours and he tilted his head just slightly, lips nearly on yours. "What am I to you?"
Your gaze fell to his mouth and you couldn't help it. His lower lip was slightly chapped from the cold, upper one dipping in a soft cupid's bow and his stubble ran right up to the edge.
His pupils had dilated so wide that the blue of them was only a thin ring around the black now and even that thin ring was glowing.
There was a humming pressure in the air between you that you felt settle behind your sternum and thrum there. It made your breath come short and knees soften.
You had felt this before since he had come into your life, this warm, coaxing gravity around him drawing you into orbit.
He didn't have to try or force anything, his presence just reached into you and something in your chest opened toward him.
It was becoming harder to tell apart from your own will.
"You're someone I'm grateful for every day. You’ve saved my life and gave me a chance at something new and happier. Than I ever thought I could have." your voice cracked, softer now, hesitant.
His breath caught in his throat, fingers on your jaw moving to your cheek and then his whole palm settled there, cradling your face, thumb sweeping under your eye. The blue veins in the back of his hand were pulsing very fast now, bright as gaslamps, feeding light up into his fingertips and in the reflection of his glowing eyes, so close to your own, you saw yourself.
Your own eyes were glowing too and there were faint threads of that same light glowing under your skin, running down the sides of your neck and along the tendons of your arms.
His mold had taken hold in you or something newer the two of you had made together and it was answering him now, calling to him from inside your own flesh.
God, you were so breathtaking now under his eyes, still you yet remade entirely by him and for him.
His thumb traced the corner of your mouth possessively as he pulled back just enough to look around the darkening wood, hand sliding down and fingers threading through yours, ring clinking softly against his own.
"C'mere, I want to show you something."
He stepped further into the trees and Mold did not follow him this time but slid up to your side instead, walking on your right silently.
The white blade caught what little light there was and gleamed pale, almost bioluminescent. That clean cold mineral smell drifted off of it.
Ethan stopped in a small clearing where the trees opened slightly and he looked around, mouth pulling into something between a smile and a sad expression.
"A lot of people died here, sweetheart. All victims of experiments or attack from the results of said experiments. This whole slope is nothing but bones under the soil." He toed the frozen earth with the tip of his boot. "But you know what that means? I have material."
Soon the earth shuddered and you felt it up through the soles of your boots.
In a circle around the clearing, the ground broke open by clawed hands of the usual black fungal color, glossy with slime and fingers tipped in dagger-like nails, followed by the bodies of the molded creatures.
They pulled themselves up out of the earth. Some of them stood on two legs, hunched forward like Mold, teeth in their mouths in uneven rows and chins running with black liquid.
Others came out on four legs, low to the ground, quadrupedal, horribly agile and thin.
They rose and circled, a dozen of them or even more that oriented themselves on Ethan.
Some of them turned their eyeless faces toward you and inclined their heads.
Ethan turned back to you, face so calm and eyes still glowing while his hand extended towards you, waiting.
Placing your hand in his, the circle of monsters shifted and they took a step closer.
"I can teach you this," Ethan said softly. He raised your joined hands to his mouth and kissed your knuckles again, and even in the freezing air his lips were warm. "All I've figured out since I left everything behind." His thumb rubbed gentle circles over the back of your hand. "You have it in you, I felt it the first night and you could stand higher than anyone else, with me."
The monsters swayed and of them, a lean quadruped, took a slow step forward and lowered its head almost to the ground in front of you.
"And I promise you," Ethan whispered, so low you barely heard, "if you stay with me, I will make you happy.“
The wind moved through the black branches overhead and somewhere very far away a single lycan howled.
You looked up at the strange gentle terrible man Mother Miranda had given you, looking at the ruby on your finger, glowing faintly of its own accord in the gloom, warmed by the light under your skin.
Mold was at your right, standing patient and proud, new white blade held slightly lifted, catching the last thread of dusk.
You squeezed Ethan's hand.
"Alright," you said and a smile broke wide across his face.
"We're gonna have so much fun." He breathed and the black ring of monsters around you shivered as one at the sound of his voice.
The rest of the walk down through the wood felt more like a procession.
Ethan kept you tucked snug against his side, arm heavy and warm across your lower back. Every so often his thumb would rub a small slow circle into the denim just above the jut of the bone while the molded creatures were following in silence, or as close to silence as a horde of half-decayed fungal things could manage.
Their bare wet feet made no sound on the frozen needles as the bipedal ones lumbered in a loose wedge, long arms swinging heavy and their heads dipped side to side to smell the air.
The quadrupeds fanned out farther, ranging into the underbrush while occasionally one of them would pause, lift its faceless head and let out a small wet chuff of steam before it would keep moving. All of them oriented on Ethan but every few paces one or two would tilt their heads toward you very attentively.
Mold walked at your right, respectfully close with his new white blade that caught what little moonlight had begun to filter through the bare canopy, flashing ghost-luminous in the dark.
You had walked maybe another quarter mile when the first howl came but Ethan didn't even slow his pace, he glanced once toward the source and his glowing blue eyes narrowed.
The molded around you did not need to be told. Two of the quadrupeds peeled off from the flank and streaked away into the dark, black bodies vanishing between trunks in the space of two heartbeats.
A lycan had bursted out of the brush and Mold was already at your side with his new white blade already raised.
The lycan had slammed into him and tried to claw at his chest with both paws and the wounds were closing rapidly, white filaments spinning themselves back together, hair-fine, glittering and the ragged edges of Mold's flesh knit shut in front of your eyes.
While the lycan was rearing back for another blow, Mold turned his shoulder and drove the ivory blade forward as it went through the lycan's chest so cleanly and its whole body sagged onto the shaft up to the point where Mold's arm met its ribs.
Mold had let it slide off the blade and it hit the frozen ground before he had lowered his hunched black head and began to feed.
The wet ripping sounds each led inside your head still.
By the time you cleared the last of the trees, the sky over the mountain had gone full night, thick with clouds and the roof of Ethan's house was visible ahead.
The moment your boots touched the packed dirt of the yard, the molded creatures behind you stopped, both you and Ethan turned and he was smiling faintly.
All of them sank into the ground as their body dissolved and waited for their master to summon them again.
Mold had not gone with the others. He was standing at the edge of the yard, big hunched silhouette half-lit by moonlight while he was looking at you. Or, well, he did not have eyes, but his head was tilted in your direction, angled just slightly and the tilt was unmistakably at you.
Very slowly, Mold lowered his head and you found yourself, without meaning to, dipping your own head in return. When you raised your eyes again, he too was already melting into the earth.
"He likes you," Ethan said, low and amused, close to your ear.
Your throat was tight for reasons you didn't understand while Ethan led you up the porch, boots thudding on the wooden boards and he pushed open the front door.
He had a look on his face that was a mix between embarrassed and determination as he bent.
His right arm hooked under the crook of your knees, calloused pads of his fingers dragging warm across the denim of your thigh while his left arm slid behind your shoulder blades and settled hot into your back, broad palm splayed wide against you and he grunted low in his chest to lift you up.
Your center of gravity swung out and up and settled against him and there was one dizzying second of weightlessness where your stomach dropped, legs kicking out in surprise before your arms went, entirely on instinct, up around his neck.
Both hands locked behind his nape, face ending up tucked against the warm side of his throat right where his jaw met the tendon.
A breathless, boyish laugh left his mouth that cracked in the middle, half a wheeze. "God, you're heavier than you look, sweetheart."
"Hey!"
"Joking, I got you don’t worry." He was grinning against your temple. He hitched you slightly higher in his arms with a small bounce that made you gasp and clutch at his neck.
The door hadn't fully opened and he wasn't going to fumble with it while holding you.
As he approached the porch step, a whole cascade of thin black vines slithered up out of the boards at the base of the doorframe, moving with the smooth muscular grace of eels and they wound up the door itself, pushing it wide open in front of him.
He walked through the opening with you cradled tight against his chest, ducking his head slightly so your temple wouldn't catch the frame and the vines pulled the door softly shut behind him, withdrawing down into the floorboards, gone.
While carrying you through the foyer he was still grinning like an idiot, crooked flush-cheeked grin and every few steps he'd hitch you higher and mutter, "don't wiggle—" and you'd laugh helplessly into his neck.
At the foot of the stairs he paused to make a show of it and he looked down at you with those blue eyes, one eyebrow cocked.
"Ethan, put me down, I can walk."
"Nope." The banister creaked under his hand as he passed and halfway up you tried, very quietly, to peek at his face and see if he was struggling and he caught you looking, immediately making an exaggerated ‘hyuh!’ sound like he was going to drop you and you clutched at his neck, making him laugh so hard he actually did wobble one step.
"Ethan!"
"Sorry, sorry. Couldn't help it." He made it to the top landing and breathing harder now from laughing.
His cheeks were flushed pink under the stubble and his hair had gotten a bit messier.
The door to his room was already opening for him from a slender black vine that had unspooled from the wall to twist the handle down and press the door inward, it stayed there, curled around the doorknob.
He carried you through and the vine drew the door shut behind him with a soft click.
The bedroom was warmer than the rest of the house and he crossed to the bed to set you down on the coverlet with care before standing over you and just looking.
Looking around because you’ve actually never been in his bedroom before.
The floor was a warm herringbone of dark polished wood and there was a heavy dresser against the wall with a small oil lamp on it. A big bed you were currently lying on that had a chevron-patterned quilt in dark green and cream, mounded pillows.
On the floor at the foot of the bed, a soft green plush turtle with a pink shell, a set of wooden blocks in primary colors and a little painted wooden car, small pale yellow rubber ball and a baby's play arch with dangling animals stitched to it.
Your gaze moved slowly across the questionable toys in his room, up to Ethan's face that had gone briefly, terribly still. He was looking at the toys too before his eyes came back to yours and there was something in them, some unspeakable old grief, wrapped over so many years that it had gone smooth. His mouth did not curve down, jaw not clenching but only looking and then he let out a very small breath.
Neither of you said a thing and some part of you understood, without having to be told, that whatever those toys meant, they were very heavy in meaning and not to be touched with words.
His large calloused hand rose and cradled your cheek, thumb sweeping under your eye. His skin was warm and the veins in the back of his hand pulsed faint blue. M
"Hey, look at me. Your heart's going a mile a minute," he murmured, corner of his lips curling upward as his thumb traced the line of your cheekbone. "I can feel it right in here." His other hand had come to rest, flat and heavy, right over your sternum. "You don't have to do anything you don’t want, sweetheart." His eyes flicked around the room, back to you. “This doesn't have to happen, I'd be happy just to hold you."
His hand at your chest pressed lightly, reassuring.
You looked up at him and heart was, indeed, beating rather fast but the warmth radiating off his palm through the thin fabric of your shirt was working its steady way into the inside of your ribs and the humming pressure in the air around him had softened into something coaxing that reached into the base of your skull.
No clue honestly how much of what you felt now was yours and how much of it was his, but you weren't sure you cared.
"I want this with you," you said, voice coming out lower than you meant it to.
His pupils dilated, blue of his eyes narrowing into a thin ring around wide black.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah," you whispered.
He was on you before you could take another breath, coming down over you slowly, planting one knee up on the mattress and easing his weight down with one big hand behind the back of your head cradling you flat, laying you back into the pillows. He propped himself over you on his forearms, hips braced above yours while lowering his mouth to yours.
The first kiss was just a press in greeting before his lips molded to yours and his mouth parted, wet warmth of him opening against you, followed by the slow soft slide of his tongue.
It traced the seam of your lips first, testing and when you opened for him with a small helpless breath, he came in slowly, tongue sliding against yours with heat that made a shiver run all the way down to your knees.
He rolled his tongue against yours and drew it back, every time he retreated a fraction and lured yours after him, drawing you in.
Your hands buried themselves in his hair, slightly damp from the woods as you fisted a handful of it at the crown of his skull and he made a low pleased sound against your mouth, vibrating through your lips into your teeth.
He tilted his head the other way and came back deeper as you felt your whole body warming, top of your head first, then your throat and after that, treacherously, further down.
His broad shoulders blotted out the lamplight and framed the whole room down to just him.
When he finally pulled back, he was breathing hard, mouth pinker than it had been and very wet, cheeks flushed and the ring around his blue irises had gone almost fully luminous, throbbing gently in time with the veins in his neck and the backs of his hands.
Something brushed your side.
You looked down, breath held as you saw black fungal tendrils, glossy while moving.
Two of them had risen from the sides of the mattress and were drifting just above your ribs, one of them lowered itself and grazed the exposed strip of skin above your hipbone where your shirt had ridden up.
Another traced the line of your bicep through the fabric of your sleeve, almost curious in their behavior
You made a soft sound in your throat.
Ethan smiled down at you, breathless, his mouth slick. "Sorry, sorry. I got a bit excited and it’s… kinda hard controlling everything every time. I can make 'em stop."
"No," you heard yourself say. "No. Don't."
His pupils blew out again, breath dragging in through his teeth.
"Sweetheart," he breathed and lowered his forehead to yours, breath ghosting hot across your mouth. "In those dreams you've been having…" his voice was so low and private that you felt the words vibrate on your own lips "we did a couple of things together, you remember?"
God, you did. As if waking up from those dreams flushed and shaking, unsure whether they had been sent to you or whether you had wanted them all along.
This was the confirm he had been the pioneer of those all along.
"I remember," you whispered.
"I was hoping if tonight we might try something a little… different." He smiled while those tendrils carassed all possible piece of skin exposed and it was a dangerous, tender smile.
He kissed the corner of your mouth. "But only if you want."
The pressure in the air around you thickened and the low warm hum that always spun out of him settled deep into the pit of your abdomen and pulled, feeling yourself opening toward him.
"Please, Ethan. Please. I want it… whatever you want." Your voice came out even smaller than before, rough at the bottom.
His eyes closed for a moment and he shuddered all the way down through his shoulders and into his hips where they braced above yours.
"Good," he breathed. "That's my good boy."
The tendrils moved and they came from every direction at once.
Two of them snaked up along your arms as your fingers, still buried deep in his dirty-blond hair, spasmed. They curled up your forearms in wet spirals and they so gently pried your hands free of Ethan's hair. They looped around your wrists and drew your arms up over your head to pin them into the pillows.
Then the two tendrils fused right at the point above your wrists, joining wetly into a single thicker cord, twice the strength and twice the grip so that both your wrists were bound together and held high. Your shoulders stretched and ribs lifted, back arching up off the mattress.
Another set of tendrils came up from below the bed and coiled around your ankles to spread you insistently, sliding your knees wide apart and settling your bare feet flat against the mattress with your legs bent at the knee.
Then they slithered further up under the hems of your jeans, over the tops of your socks and started their long slow travel up along the inside of your calves.
Goosebumps sparked wherever they touched, sharp constellations of them running up along your shins and up over your knees.
The instant they crossed your knees you gasped and they kept going.
Under your jeans, snugging against the skin of your inner thighs as they slid up until they reached the crease of your groin.
Together, they turned inward and they found your boxers, worm up under the waistband, and settled. One of them slid its cool wet length up along the underside of your cock, curling gently around the shaft from base to tip and the other spooled up under your sack, curling and stroking.
A soft high sound broke out of you before both tendrils withdrew backward, sliding along the crack and settling themselves.
One at each side of your hole, pressing in gently from both sides and framing the entrance without breaching it.
Two smooth cool weights right against your rim, pressure of them squeezing your entrance from either side, kneading softly.
This made you actually whine and Ethan was watching your face the whole time, blue eyes glowing and lips parting, worship and hunger all at once.
Your back arched as far as it could with your wrists pinned overhead and you bit your bottom lip until you tasted iron, cock throbbing hot inside your boxers, held snug in the coil of one of the tendrils, which had begun very lightly, to squeeze along its length in rippling pulses.
"Do you want—" Ethan asked and his voice was rough as gravel now, all boyishness burnt off it, "—this?"
The two tendrils at your entrance moved, one of them slid up as its tip pressed gently at your hole and you tensed on reflex, but it was so patient and you were already so slick (you hadn't even understood how you were slick, thought all your veins were currently phosphorescent so that could definitely had a contribution) while these tendrils themselves were coating you in some warm oil-thick fluid as they moved. The tip that went in first was small, not much thicker than a finger but it pressed deeper and sank while, surprisingly, beginning to swell.
You felt it thicken inside your walls as it went from finger-thick to two-fingers, then three till it got even wider and your mouth fell open, a punched-out sound came out from your throat and your hips lifted off the mattress on their own.
Another tendril drifted up beside your face and stroked slowly down your cheek, wiping the tear that had spilled out of the corner of your eye.
"—or…" Ethan breathed above you and his voice had gone hoarse, "this?"
The swelling tendril shrank back to its original size in one smooth pulse and then, before you could process the loss, a second tendril, matched in girth to the first, pressing itself alongside its twin at your entrance and began to ease in beside it.
Both at once, slow and patient, widening you out around them.
Your toes curled hard into the coverlet and both of your feet pointed, back arching so high that a second tear slid down your temple.
Ethan let out a husky, breathless laugh that got caught in his chest.
"Yeah," he murmured and there was a wolf-grin at the edges of his mouth. "I thought so. This one, then. Look at you." He lowered his forehead to yours and kissed the tip of your nose before rising up onto his knees.
The one maddening part was that he was still fully clothed while those things he summoned and controlled were stretching you open around, one of them curling around your cock inside your boxers, another stroking softly along your bound wrists and he was still in his blue hoodie and jeans.
He grinned down at you and reached over his shoulder with one hand to grab the hoodie by the back of the neck and hauling it up over his head in one long drag. The hem caught briefly on his stubble, hair mussing itself further as he tossed the hoodie somewhere behind him.
Underneath he wore a plain white t-shirt and that came off next in one quick motion that made the muscles across his shoulders roll.
Pale under the shirt, lean and corded, different scars. His left hand had awful stitches all around it at wrist level and some glossy black mold dripped from them occasionally, there were also blue veins pulsing beneath his sternum, radiating a bit everywhere just like your own body.
He unbuckled his belt, shoved the jeans down his hips and off, taking his boxers with them and he was hard, dick standing up thick and heavy against his lower abdomen along a subtle sheen at its base.
As if the mold's craftsmanship had extended even here, adding girth, length and a hot flushed weight that made your throat close.
He crawled back up over you.
"Not yet," he murmured, seeing where you were looking, running his knuckles down your cheek.
He hooked two fingers into the collar of your shirt and worked it off, lowering his mouth and pressing warm kisses to your collarbone, dip of your throat and valley between your pecs, stubble scraping soft against you and leaving behind an addictive burning sensation.
His tongue was hot as it flicked around your hard nipple right over the peak and you cried out involuntarily, hips bucking up off the mattress and driving the two tendrils deeper in and your bound wrists yanked hard against the tendril at your head as you sobbed.
Ethan hummed against your chest and his tongue circled you, every time making your cock throb harder inside the coil that held it.
He switched to your other nipple, tongue flattening and dragging before it peaked and flicked, dragging again right after as you writhed and shook your trembling bound arms.
All along your chest and your abdomen faint threads of light were pulsing under the skin, tracing the paths of veins, following the ladder of your ribs and gathering into a soft nimbus at the center of your sternum.
Every time your cock throbbed, the light did the same with it, running down the insides of your thighs, spreading up along your throat.
Ethan lowered his head to a rib and kissed one of the glowing lines.
"So handsome," he breathed.
He shifted to prop himself up on one elbow and his free hand went, unmistakably from what you could assume from the limited vision you had, down to his own cock.
Wrapping his fingers around it and began to stroke himself with his gaze fixed on your face and occasionally dropping the the work his mold powers had were up to, letting you know the sight of you like this was doing things to him.
The two tendrils inside you began to move, pumping in and out together, then alternating. When one withdrew, the other pushed deeper and they swelled by half a shade whenever they were fully seated inside before slimming to slide back out.
One of them had learned, already, exactly the angle that made you sob as it found your prostate ad hammered it, throbbing, while its twin fucked deep against it from the other side.
Those around your cock squeezed in matching pulses, slow up-strokes and slow down-strokes as its tip flicked cruelly along the slit at the head of you, gathering up the slick pre-come that dribbled out of you and smearing it back down along your shaft.
Ethan's fist worked his own cock in time with the tendrils.
"That's it," he was breathing and his abdomen muscles were flexing hard now, shadows between them deep and beautiful, "that's it, sweetheart, look at you, made for me."
You came without warning, the tendrils inside you pushed deep at exactly the wrong moment and the one around your cock squeezed tight, whole body of yours arching up off the mattress and into one long white line as your cock jerked hard inside the tendril's coil and hot spurts of come pumped out of you in thick pulses, hitting the underside of Ethan's abs and your own belly in many splashes.
The come landed white and hot on the glowing filaments under your skin and it lit up brighter where it fell, you could feel yourself glowing brighter through the release, mouth opening around a sound you didn't recognize as yours.
Ethan grabbed the base of his own cock hard and squeezed to stop himself.
"Fffff—" he hissed through his teeth, eyes squeezed shut, jaw clenched. "Christ, sweetheart."
You lay there panting while the tendrils inside you had slowed to a gentle rocking, keeping you stretched and warm. Your bound wrists tremble overhead, come cooling on your belly and your cock, still hard and trapped in its coil, twitches softly.
Ethan opened his eyes and looked down at the breath taking mess he had below.
"You want me?" he asked, hoarse. "You want me, sweetheart?"
The pressure in the room had gone thick, low humming behind your sternum climbing into your skull and it was pulling every good soft word you had ever thought about him up out of your throat, setting them on your tongue.
"Please," you whispered. "Please, Ethan. Please… in me. Please. I love—" your breath hitched and he made a broken sound that cracked out of his throat.
The two tendrils inside you slid out slowly both at once in one long retreat that left you gaping empty and gasping at the loss. The one at your cock loosened and slid down your thigh and unspooled while those at your ankles kept your legs spread, even the combined two at your wrists stayed.
He wanted you held as be crawled up over you on hands and knees, cock heavy between his hips, blue veins glowing in a slow throbbing tracery down his forearms. He hooked one of your knees up over his elbow and folded you nearly in half.
The veins of your body were glowing so bright than you could see the shadow of his cock against your inner thigh as lined himself up.
He was so much bigger than the tendrils, blunt hot pressure of him alone at your entrance making you hiss through clenched teeth and he leaned down, pressing his forehead to yours and his glowing blue eyes bored into yours.
"Breathe," he whispered. "Breathe, sweetheart. I got you. I'll go slow, promise."
Following his instructions as he breathed with you, in and out.
In and out.
He pushed, head of him breaching you and the world went white at the edges. Your hands fisted uselessly in the coil above your head, back arching as he pressed his mouth to yours in the same instant and swallowed the sound.
He sank in so slowly it felt like it took the whole night, every inch demanding a new adjustment that made you gasp and stretch, he was so hot and so thick inside you.
Thank God those molded tendrils helped out otherwise you wouldn’t imagine how unpleasant and challenging this would have been.
He bottomed out with a soft, deep grunt, hips flush against the backs of your thighs and he held there for a full ten seconds while both of you shook.
"Fuck," he breathed, eyes watering. "Christ, sweetheart."
You could only pant at this point and the situation got worse in the best way possible when he started to move.
He drew back only a few inches and pushed back in and even that was almost too much while he watched your face for any wince and adjusted every time. Slowly he let himself take more range, half of him and then most of him, the whole length going in long, deep drags that made the head of his cock hammer across your prostate.
It made a hoarse whimper break out of your throat.
His mouth was everywhere, kissing the glowing lines under your skin and murmuring into your ear a steady low stream of ‘you feel so good, look at you, my sweet boy, my sweetheart,‘
He picked up his pace.
Deeper and faster but never brutal, hips snapping into yours with a wet slap of skin on skin that echoed off the wood-paneled walls. The bed creaked under you rhythmically and the tendril at your wrists tightened its coil in time with his thrusts.
Those at your ankles held you wide open for him and every time he bottomed out they hitched a fraction wider, opening you further and giving him more.
His left hand came down to your cock, which was leaking and hard again, glowing so brightly that his fist around it lit up in a mixture of your colors as he stroked you in time with his thrusts.
"Ethan! Ohhhh God—"
"I know, sweetheart. Come for me, come on. Let me feel it."
You came harder this time, so hard you thought you might have broken something in yourself but even if that was the case you’d have healed in no time.
Your whole body clenched around him, tight and the light under your skin pulsed so bright that for a moment you couldn't see, cock spurting hot into his stroking fist in long ropes that landed on both of your abdomens as you sobbed his name.
He fucked you through it without slowing down while you spasmed around him, riding it out and drawing every last shudder out of you until you were boneless and shaking, whimpering with each stroke.
Then his rhythm broke and he drove in hard, broad chest crushing down against yours and his forehead ground into the pillow beside your head as he groaned deep in his chest.
Even through the shaking you felt the hot heavy pulse of him deep inside filling every inch of you and there was so much of it that just kept coming, his whole body shuddered against yours in long ragged waves and his fingers dug into the meat of your thigh where he was still holding your leg up, groaning your name into the pillow muffled and adoring.
He collapsed onto you but even then he caught himself on his elbows at the last second, caging your body without crushing you. His sweat-damp forehead pressed against your temple and warm breath tore out of him in ragged gulps.
His cock, still buried deep, twitched more times inside you and each motion pumped another slow warm pulse that made you moan softly against his neck.
The tendrils at your wrists uncurled slowly, your arms came down around him without your telling hold to and wrapped around his back to held him there against your chest.
Those at your ankles eased free too and your legs fell open around his hips while he just breathed against your throat.
"…hi," he mumbled after a long moment and it was so dreamy and wrecked that a broken laugh spilled out of you.
"Hi," you whispered back.
His hand found yours in the pillow above your head and his fingers tangled with yours, two rings clicking softly together as he turned his head and kissed the shell of your ear.
⤷ ゛Taking care of him after the trial of seven . ˎˊ˗ Smutttt
By the time Aerion was patched up, you were just walking into his room. He lied on his bed with his hands at his sides; too in pain to move or be in any other position. No words were said as you shut the door and made your way to him. He didn’t even bother to look at you or even acknowledged your presence.
He was angry at everything and everyone. Himself, you (for some odd reason), and even the people who cared for his wounds. You could tell he was upset, hence why you were here in his room in the first place.
Aerion was visibly pouting and you fought back a laugh at his current situation. He caught a glimpse of your small smile and to your surprise, didn’t cuss you out. Only mumbling something under his breath and turning his head the other way. Once again, visibly pouting. You sat at the edge of the bed and set your hand on his thigh, your thumb starting to rub small circles to try and soothe him. “You did what you could.” You reassured. Your tone was calm and relaxed, almost as if speaking to a wounded animal. Not that there was much of a difference.
Aerion swallowed and turned his head back toward you. You winced at the sight of his eye and looked down to collect yourself for a moment before looking back up. “Touch me.” That took a turn.
“Hm?” You hummed, obviously in a bit of shock.
“You heard me,” he huffed and once again turned his head back the other way, closing his eye and relaxing into the pillows. You decided to give him what he wanted, making the decision that he deserved it since he had a poor loss almost an hour ago.
Spoiled, you thought while shaking your head and removing the blanket from his lower half. He was already half-hard which wasn’t surprising. You spit in your hand before wrapping it around his cock and when you slowly started in a pumping motion, you could hear a small gasp come from Aerion. “Faster.”
“You are in no place to give orders, Aerion.”
He didn’t like your reply but couldn’t help but let out a small moan. The feel of your hand against him felt so good he couldn’t help himself. You loved the sound you heard a few seconds ago—loved making him more vocal with every passing minute. So you moved more quick, changing up your pace and applying more pressure till he let out another pretty sound. In which he delivered perfectly, another desperate noise fell past his lips before he could stop it. Aerion cursed under his breath and started to squirm a little.
His hands gripped the sheets under him as he tried to thrust into your hand. Unfortunately he was more sore and in even more pain than he thought he was. So his attempt to push his dick into your hands any further only resulted in him wincing and slowly lowering his hips back down onto the bed. You noticed, shaking your head slightly. “Relax.” You leaned in closer toward him before completely switching your position to in between his legs. Seeing Aerion like this, completely vulnerable and not being the asshole prince that he is, turns you on a lot more than you thought it would. Not that you were complaining.
On your left, there was a long, nasty cut along his inner thigh. You almost got distracted by a long whine that Aerion let out, which you come to realize was because you seemingly slowed down your hand. Quickly, you went back at his preferred pace so that you could turn your attention back to his wound. You pressed small, gentle kisses a good distance away from it. Though you realized that someone must’ve forgot to bandage his injury, seeing how all of his other ones have bandages over them. Aerion was getting impatient and he made it known. Practically growling at you and starting to squirm again. You rolled your eyes, attention now fully on his cock. An idea popped in your head so you followed through with it. You wrapped your left arm around the outside of his thigh, so that your hand could grip him properly.
Now, your fingers were uncomfortably close to the large gash. You got his mind off of it by removing your aching hand from his cock, and replacing it with your mouth. The next thing you know, a loud moan bounced off of the walls and hopefully wasn’t heard by anyone near. You then began to slowly bob your head up and down; being careful to not gag. Back to the hand wrapped around his thigh, you slightly pressed around the area near the wound. The small amount of pain mixed with the pleasure you were giving him got him much closer to cumming.
The room was then filled with the wet sounds of you on his cock, and the desperate, needy noises that Aerion let out. A hand came up and was placed on your shoulder, weakly squeezing. You weren’t sure what that was for. Grounding himself maybe? Your confusion didn’t last long because then you felt the quick shoot of his cum to the back of your throat. Swallowing what you could, you pulled off coughing.
When you got yourself together you sat up fully and watched as he grinned. You rolled your eyes then stood up to find some bandages for him, and find and yell at whoever forgot to wrap his wound.
Shitty ending yes ik but I’m finally getting motivation to write again sooo I have to get back into the groove of things 🥹🤞🏼
