Warnings: Stalking, implied kidnapping/confinement, possessive behaviour, emotional abuse, murder (TL; DR: general yandere things)
note: I was totally surprised by the amount of love pt1 got (ig there's a bit of a gap in yandere invincible content) so i decided to write a pt2! (also, im really into thragg lately so if anyone would like some yandere thragg lmk!)
The burner phone buzzed against your palm before you could even set it down. That was fast. You stared at the screen, thumb still hovering over the cracked plastic, the message brief with no name or signature, just coordinates and a time.
Eleven forty-five. Ninth Street Diner. Back booth. Come alone.
You exhaled slowly because Cecil had a way of making even a simple response feel like a trap. You pocketed the burner, shoved the drawer closed, and sat back on the edge of the bed where the room felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. The walls seemed to press in, the silence thickening until it hummed against your ears, your window facing the fire escape with the city sprawling beyond in a mess of neon and shadow where somewhere out there Mark was probably flying, watching, waiting.
She was the one who found the burner phone in the first place, that weird little thing in a weird little thrift store downtown, and she had tossed it at you like a joke and called it your secret spy boyfriend phone, but you had kept it because you had a feeling, a bad one, the kind that sits in your chest and doesn't go away.
You didn't know Cecils number when you first saved it, it just showed up one day with a single text and no explanation 'In case you ever need to reach us. Dont abuse it.'
You knew it the way you knew your own name, deep in your bones in the hollow space behind your ribs where dread had taken up permanent residence. A week of silence and a week of no calls and no texts and no signs of life while the police had filed a missing person's report and searched her room and asked you questions you could not answer. They did not find the blood, but you did, three drops under the edge of her bed frame wiped clean but not clean enough, and you had scrubbed them yourself before the cops came because you knew what would happen if they tested it.
You knew what Mark could do and you knew what he had already done.
Your apartment had felt wrong ever since with the walls seeming closer and the air thicker. You had stopped sleeping in your own bed and started curling up on the couch with the lights on facing the door with a kitchen knife tucked between the cushions while every creak of the building made you flinch and every gust of wind against the windows made your heart stutter.
You had not left the apartment in four days, not since you found the blood and not since you scrubbed it away and told yourself it was nothing, but it was not nothing because it was Kay and you knew who had put it there.
The Ninth Street Diner was almost empty when you walked in at eleven forty two. Early. You slid into the back booth with your back to the wall the same way you had been sleeping for the past week, facing the door with your heart racing at every creak and whisper while the vinyl seat was cracked beneath your thighs with the stuffing poking through in yellowed tufts and the tabletop sticky with decades of spilled coffee and syrup scarred with initials carved into the laminate.
The waitress brought you coffee. She was older with her hair pulled back in a gray ponytail and her hands gnarled with arthritis, and she set the mug down without a word and shuffled back to the counter while you wrapped your hands around the cup and tried to stop shaking.
The ceramic was warm against your palms, the coffee dark and bitter, but you did not drink it. You just held it and watched the door.
At eleven forty seven Cecil Stedman sat down across from you. He looked older than you remembered with the scar through his eyebrow seeming deeper in the diner's fluorescent light, a pale trench through flesh that never quite healed right, his skin sallow and stretched tight over sharp cheekbones while his suit was pressed but his eyes were tired with dark circles bruising the hollows beneath them. He carried a briefcase and the weight of too many secrets.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"You said it was urgent."
Cecil set the briefcase on the table without opening it, just resting his hands on top and studying you with that unnerving stillness like he was reading your pulse in the way your throat moved, like he could see the fear coiled in your chest like a snake. "You called me," he said, "not the other way around, so let's start with why."
You swallowed because your throat was dry and the coffee did nothing to help. "Kay's dead."
Cecil's expression did not change. If he was surprised he did not show it, his face a mask of calm professionalism, the kind of calm that came from decades of hearing terrible things. "Tell me what you know."
The last time you saw Kay and the night she left to grab takeout and never came back, the texts that stopped mid conversation, the blood under her bed that you scrubbed with bleach and a prayer, the way Mark started showing up more after she disappeared not less like he was making sure you were still there and still his.
You told him about the window, how Mark appeared at midnight hovering outside your fourth floor apartment with his suit streaked with something dark, how he smiled at you through the glass like everything was normal and asked if you were okay in that gentle voice that made your skin crawl. You told him about the texts that came at all hours, the ones that asked where you were and who you were with and why you had not responded, the ones that shifted from concerned to pleading to something else entirely.
"Did he do it?" you asked with your voice cracking on the last word.
Cecil was quiet for a long moment while the fluorescent light buzzed overhead and a car honked somewhere outside and the waitress refilled a cup at the counter. "Mark Grayson is a complicated young man," he said carefully. "His father's shadow is long. His mother's grief is heavy. And the pressure of being Invincible, of never failing, never breaking, never losing, it changes people."
"No," Cecil agreed. "It's not."
He opened the briefcase and inside was a photograph. Grainy. Taken from a security camera across the street. The timestamp read three weeks ago, one week before Kay disappeared. In the photo Kay was standing outside a coffee shop wearing that oversized sweater with the hole in the sleeve, the one she refused to throw away, her hair pulled back in a messy bun while she smiled at something, laughing with her head tilted back. And standing across from her, close enough to touch, was Mark.
Your blood went cold. You could feel it in your fingertips, in the tips of your ears, in the hollow of your chest. Cecil closed the briefcase with a soft click, the sound final and heavy.
The diner door chimed. You did not turn because you did not need to. Cecil's eyes flicked past you, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly as he leaned back in the booth with his hands sliding off the briefcase and into his lap, his shoulders squaring and his breathing changing to something shallow and controlled.
"He's here," Cecil said quietly.
You turned. Mark stood in the doorway of the Ninth Street Diner. No hoodie this time and no attempt to look human, he was wearing the suit, that blue and yellow monstrosity that made him a symbol to the rest of the world with the goggles pushed up on his forehead tangled in his dark hair. His face was pale and drawn with dark circles carved deep beneath his eyes like bruises. He looked exhausted. He looked dangerous. He looked at you like you were the only thing in the room.
"Hey," he said softly, and his voice was wrong. Too gentle. Too careful. Like he was talking to a frightened animal, like he was approaching something that might bolt. He walked toward the booth with his footsteps quiet on the linoleum while the old men at the counter stopped talking and the waitress froze mid pour and the entire diner held its breath.
Cecil's hand moved and you caught the glint of a small device in his palm, a failsafe, something that could probably level the entire block if he pressed it, his thumb hovering over the single button.
Mark slid into the booth beside you. Close. Too close. His knee pressed against yours under the table, his thigh warm against your leg, and he smelled like ozone and something metallic. Blood. You could smell the blood.
"You didn't come home last night," he said. Your heart stopped. "I was worried." His hand found yours, his fingers intertwining with yours warm and familiar while his thumb traced slow circles on your knuckles, the calluses rough against your skin. "You have been so distant lately; ever.......ever since Kay."
He trailed off and then he smiled. It was soft. Sad. Understanding. But you saw it, the same smile from the photograph. Too wide. Too sharp. Like a mask that did not quite fit.
Cecil's hand tightened on the device. "Mark," Cecil said calmly, "do you mind telling us where you were three weeks ago? Around the time this photo was taken?"
Mark's smile did not waver. "I don't remember," he said. "I have been so busy lately. Saving the city. Saving the world. You know how it is." His grip on your hand tightened and you could feel the bones in your fingers pressing together.
"But I remember you," he murmured, turning to look at you with his brown eyes warm and full of something that made your stomach turn. "I remember every single text you never sent. Every call you did not answer. Every time you looked at me like I was a stranger."
His other hand came up slowly and gently and cupped your cheek, his palm warm against your skin and his thumb brushing the corner of your mouth. "I remember everything about you." His thumb traced your jaw, down to your chin, tilting your face toward his. "I remember what Kay said about me."
Your breath caught. "What did she say?"
Mark's smile softened and his eyes went distant, hazy, almost dreamy. "She said I was too much. That I was suffocating you. That you were scared of me." His thumb traced your jaw again, slower this time. "I did not like that. I did not like her."
The world went still. The fluorescent light buzzed. The coffee in front of you had gone completely cold. Cecil's voice cut through like a blade. "Where is she, Mark?"
Mark blinked and looked at Cecil like he had forgotten he was there. "She's gone," Mark said simply. "She's not coming back."
Mark turned back to you with his eyes wide and innocent and devastatingly sincere. "She was going to take you away from me," he whispered. "I could not let that happen. You are mine. You have always been mine, when you first looked at me t-that time I saved you, when you looked into my soul rather than all this " He gestured vaguely at himself, at the suit, at the blood that was still crusted under his fingernails. "you don't look at me like you used to.......you know I-I thought if I could just show you, if I could just prove that I loved you more than anything, more than anyone, you would stop being afraid."
His hand tightened on your cheek. "But you're still afraid, are not you?"
You could not speak. Could not breathe. The air was thick and hot and your lungs would not expand.
"That's okay," he murmured. "I can fix that. I can fix everything. I just need you to trust me." He leaned in and his lips brushed your ear, the stubble on his jaw scraping against your skin. "Kay wanted me to stay away from you. She said I was dangerous. She said you would never love someone like me." His breath was hot against your neck. "So I showed her what dangerous really looks like."
Cecil was on his feet with the device aimed at Mark's head while the diner had gone silent, the waitress frozen in the corner and the cook peeking through the kitchen window and every patron staring in abject terror. "Let her go," Cecil said. "Now."
Mark did not move. He just held you tighter, his arms wrapping around you like a cage and his fa168ce buried in your hair while you could feel his heartbeat against your back, fast and steady and excited. "I will never let her go," he whispered. "She's mine." His voice was soft and sweet; a lullaby wrapped in thorns.
"And if anyone tries to take her from me," he looked up at Cecil with his eyes black and hollow and empty of everything except hunger, but his smile was so bright. "I will show them what I showed Kay."
