I just finished It Runs in the Blood, and this fic has had me in an absolute chokehold ever since.
I’m completely obsessed with it so i made a fanvideo edit for @metalomagnetic because words are not enough to express how much this story and Metalo’s writing have owned my soul 💖🥹 thank you for creating such a beautiful story, Metalo! 🤍
P.S.: special thank you for @lost1009 for recommending me to read this beautiful story 🤍
Some prints for @metalomagnetic 's most recent work "Eternal Hunger".
The prints are inspired by 80's steamy vampire novels (the concept of them, I haven't read any...yet?), "Dante and Virgilio en el Infierno"; Stephen King's book covers + roses as a symbol of blood.
You can read Metalo's brilliant shot here:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
One of the most interesting fics I have read in 2024 & my very first snack!
I have been dying to bind this fic since I read it last year, so when the opportunity showed: I RAN.
This bind was actually part of an April Fools exchange so the design for the front cover is actually my friend's @moonbound.books on Instagram and I tweaked it a little to match these endpages I wanted to use.
All the little details drove me instane while weeding, but I am so happy with the final result!
So @metalomagnetic wrote Lesser Evil, which I love and already wrote a fic of, and said that it could have been an omegaverse story. I'm an omegaverse fan so of course I agree and after the last chapter I had to write my own take on it even if it's rushed and bad (I usually write 300~500 words a day but I wrote 2000 in two days because the last chapter made me a bit insane. Anyway). This is also for @kazuza-art whose art makes feral for Dumbledore.
Nonsensical, unbeta'd omegaverse feat. Omega Albus, Alpha Gellert and Alpha Tom under the cut:
It’s sudden: Tom bends, burying his face between Albus’ shoulder and neck, holding him by the waist with the familiar, possessive motion Albus has come to associate with the Alpha’s need for sex. His expression is sharp and his eyes are dark when he raises them. Half child, half untamed thing of unspekable hungers. Unreadable for now – Albus doesn’t like him like this. Blank, out of his reach, as he was during those first days of torture.
“You are an omega.” Tom says. He tilts his head a little. Dumbledore’s hand immediately covers the space, the gland against which Tom’s nose was burrowing just now. He thought he was done with the troublesome particularities of this body. Age, starvation and torture should have rid him of this one thing. But it’s there – fainter to him than it is to Tom, the honey of his own scent. He speaks aloud before he can’t stop himself, surprised, too:
“Gellert didn’t tell you.”
Tom’s expression hardens and so do his hands – around Albus’ wrist, around his waist.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I thought it wouldn’t be relevant. My heats had been sparse even before our meeting. I always used suppressors and the ordeal my body went through during our first months together made them unnecessary. I thought I’d come out almost a beta.”
“Almost a beta.” Tom mocks. “That’s not why you didn’t tell me.”
Albus licks his lips. Rarely he attempts to omit. He thought, perhaps, Tom would allow him this one grace. But he’s a greedy, cruel boy and Albus shouldn’t have expected differently.
“It’s not a favoured aspect of my life, Tom.”
How could it be? He always hid it, as many other omegas do, because he knew what it meant. There would be pressure for him to use his womb rather than his brain in service of the magical community. His secondary gender is rare and coveted because the wizarding elites are perpetually desirous of magical babies. He made a life for himself as an unremarkable standard man – a beta, as some still say. The only one alive who knows the truth is Gellert.
Well. Tom now, too.
It unsettles something in him to know that, for all he’s done, Gellert didn’t betray this one secret. Not even to his precious Schatz.
He kisses Tom’s forehead, his murmuring soft, maternal, pacifying:
“It doesn’t matter. I’m old. It will go away.”
-//-
It doesn’t.
The weeks pile on and so does Albus’ scent. How could Tom have missed this? He follows the curve of Albus’ hips, of his belly while he sleeps, it’s such a subtle thing, there’s so little in him that’s mellow, he’s wiry and bony, it’s so hard to imagine this as a body meant for harboring life – but what would Tom know? He, whose sexual experience before Albus amounted to bending over for another Alpha?
But he feels. The coil at a lower and ancient core within.
“Can you get pregnant?” He asks Albus one day. Sees, enjoys it perhaps, Albus wincing at the question. Serves him right for not telling him. Nothing of Albus should be barred from him. No secrets. No thoughts.
“It’s very unlikely,” the Omega answers softly. “I’m over sixty, Tom. Even for powerful wizards, that’s not young.”
Is he relieved? He doesn’t like the idea of sharing Albus with some runny brat, even if the brat looks like him. If Albus was to be tender with anyone else – god forbid, if he was to love anyone more than he loves Tom. He thinks he’d take the bairn and crash his head against a wall. Perhaps. He pictures it and it does scares him, which is good, isn’t it? He’s not all teeth. When he thinks of killing a baby, one he sired, there’s something in him that recoils. Wouldn’t Albus be proud? But still, Albus is his. He’d crawl inside his womb himself if he could. Odd thinking, but his head hasn’t been right for years now. And Albus’ scent is making him madder.
There’s too, in him, what rejoices at the thought. Get him pregnant. Change him. Watch him swell in a way Gellert never managed to do. He’s stirred and he can’t keep his hands off Albus and when they part there’s blood on the Omega’s lips and between his thighs.
Three weeks pass. It’s undeniable now, no matter how much Albus appeals to his age. He will go into heat and soon. And though it’s Albus who suffers it, moaning, whimpering, running a fever that rises as the night approaches, Tom feels the rawness of it in his own bones. Like an ache behind his teeth. His cock stays half hard throughout the day and his knot is a painful weight at its base. He never felt like this before.
Two days earlier he asked:
“Did he fuck you while you were in heat?”
Albus looked away. It was all the answer he needed. When the Omega asked him to bring suppressants Tom pretended not to hear. Gellert doesn’t get to taste something from which Tom doesn’t partake as well.
Albus cries, begs. Tom missed his tears and his pain. Is he a child wearing his Father’s clothes? When he covers Albus’ body with his own and licks the slick on his thigh, he’s half mad with rut himself. He doesn’t carry any unwanted name and he knows nothing of the world but his own right to claim that which lays open for him. His power so vast it’s a thrill in itself. Please, Albus calls, finally humbled, finally unmade, inside, inside, please! He mounts Albus and pulls his hair until he screams in pain and that scream he swallows with a bloody kiss. All of his body used to punish Albus and to mark him, too. He feels hale. This is what Gellert robbed him off, this is a testament of his might – he pulls Albus’ hips up and drives into him, again and again, as the Omega cries and begs him to go slower, to be gentler, even as he spills his barren seed across his belly. His cock doesn’t bother Tom as much now that he knows how nonthreatening it is. Tom’s mind only clears a little as the knot forms and Albus’ hole milks him, wanton, greedy. Bite marks all over Albus’ chest and shoulders and neck. Tom licks the blood and begins again.
It goes on for three days. He fucks Albus two dozen times in that period, stopping only to drink water, to eat something that isn’t Albus blood. Albus faints a few times but that doesn’t deter him. He grows warmer still, having him so prone.
When it ends he bathes Albus, cleans the blood from his body, washes away the sweat, the slick, the semen. Untangles and brushes his hair. The Omega hums, his head against Tom’s chest, submissive, half-awake.
-//-
A frown between those red eyebrows. It’s the fourth day, Albus’ blues eyes unclouded, Tom’s rut gone. He wants to tell Albus to cease whatever guilt is brewing – they’ll do this again. He can’t have Albus taking suppressants anymore. This is something he’s learned that belongs to him, untainted by Gellert. He knows, truly knows, what is like to be an Alpha now. It feels like an armour and a new name.
“I’m sorry,” Albus says again. Like after Tom first fucked him.
“Don’t be.” Tom presses the pad of his finger against the frown, eases it away. “I liked it. You did too.”
Albus closes his eyes. The tears there, once more. Now Tom is the one frowning.
“Say it.”
Albus bites his lip.
“I liked it.” He whispers.
--//--
How it shifts, unused, this axis in him. It doesn’t take the retching that morning, or the following one; forty years he’s spent trying to be mind alone but flesh takes its toll. He’s attuned to it now, and knows.
A fitting punishment for being weak, for desiring Tom, for allowing himself to be desired back. I liked it. In the mirror after the washes his mouth he sees, for the first time in ages, that beauty Tom alluded to: his skin is healthier, rosy even, his hair shinier. He remembers his mother looking prettier than ever when she carried Ariana. Perverted old man, he thinks, whore.
He doesn’t tell Tom, though his window of opportunity to do so is closing fast. Wonders (hopes?) his body, aged, thin, battered, will make the choice for him. But the days pass and it continues to germinate – it, because he can’t bring himself to call it anything else. Not yet.
--//--
After saying his piece, Gellert examines him. Snow has started to fall and it melts, tiny drops of it, on Albus’ hair. Albus wants, for a moment, to find the same relief Gellert did in confessing, in accusing, in sharing the grief of the years. They always understood each other perfectly, though coming from different mother tongues, as if they made their own, that summer. And it evolved to become a sharp, bitter dialect. Still, one that is familiar, one they speak fluently. They’re two old lions of the same pride, they have seen the same killing, they tasted the same meat. They were once cubs together, as it were.
Gellert’s eyes widen and he laughs.
“Oh, Albus. I’d pity you if I had it in me to pity.”
“I’ll take your scorn instead, old friend. Pity won’t do much good for either of us.”
“Not scorn. Bewilderment. Amusement. And curiosity too. How will you talk your way out of that one, I wonder.” he pauses, and his expression is almost clean of resentment. “How far along?”
“Nine weeks, give or take.”
“And yet you came expecting to duel me. Did you hope the strain of fighting would solve that growing problem of yours?”
“I considered it, to be honest. But no, I don’t think I would’ve let you make that decision for me, in the end. I was never one to shy away from my responsibilities.”
“When we were young, you used to drink that horrid potion every morning after I left your bed. Do you remember? I was glad for it, back then. I was sixteen, of course I didn’t want to be saddled with a child, being a child myself.” he looks away, his voice a tad softer now. “But over the years I did wonder. What would have happened if you hadn’t taken it so religiously. If you had forgotten, one day.”
Now they’re both imagining it. Useless experiment.
“Gellert I--” Albus approaches him. Kisses him, on the cheek. “You never told Tom. You never told anyone. Thank you for keeping my secret. And I’m sorry.”
The Alpha smiles and for a moment Albus thinks he’ll say he’s sorry too. But he only touches Albus’ cheek, gazes at his belly.
“You’re fucked, old friend. That viper in your bed won’t share, even with his own blood. You know that, don’t you? The way adolescent lions sometimes kill their own baby brothers.” he takes his hand away. His words have no bite left. “Pregnancy suits you, Albus. You look beautiful. I’m sure the child will be beautiful, too.”
--//--
Tom wakes up, still weak from the Horcrux. Albus dozes next to him but opens his eyes slowly, feeling the shift in the bed. They rearrange their bodies until Tom can lay his head against Albus’ navel. Tense flesh underneath. Fecund silence. Tom tries to discern movement under Albus’ skin. Some proof of life besides the change in his scent. But it’s still too early. If he pulls it out it will be a handful of blood, not even formed. He’d be doing it a favour too, sparing it from this world. But Albus would be sad. And if he was a baby he’d like to be born to be reared by Albus. To meet him and inherit his power.
He doesn’t know what he feels. With the Horcrux he’s rooted in life like he wasn’t before, where life could be taken from him like a stolen trinket. Is this a form of rooting, too? The poor man’s immortality. Any man can fuck a bitch and leave a trace of himself for posterity.
He closes his eyes. Albus gently caresses his hair. Maybe if the brat has Albus’ red hair he won’t hate it too much. Maybe if Albus is right and there’s in him that with which to make a father. He doubts it, but compared to the ones he knew he might not be so bad. Maybe.
Albus’ body makes him warm at last. All he knows is the hand caressing his hair, lulling him back to sleep.
