Prisoner mark could be fun for the proposals. Maybe he asked Robin to marry him before getting taken and then post rescue he assumes he's too ugly for her now. He's wrong though. The viltrumites took his engagement ring so Robin gets him a new one. It's her turn to ask him.
Probably no pre-imprisonment proposal just in this scenario (if going a mostly in line with mainline season 1/EP just minus Robin-powers being active/a steep drop finale) and ouch this one went angsty. Prisoner is messed up bad.
It’s dark.
It’s never dark in the cell, why the hell is it dark?
Are they trying something new? Some other way to break him? Haven’t they done enough, he can’t be what they want, he won’t-
He needs to get home, she needs him, he promised he’d always be there for her-
He can’t abandon her he can’t he loves her he needs to get home he promised-
“Mark,” is a whisper, and Mark sucks in a lungful of air, and realises where he is.
He’s sat up in bed at home. It’s the middle of the night - that’s why it’s dark. The room is dark, not the cell, and he must’ve shoved the sheets off him. They’re only thin - he can’t have anything heavier. He can’t sleep in pyjamas, so he’s naked, and he’s hunched over his knees and his fingers are digging into his scalp.
Not his hair. That’s gone, it went early. It came back a few times, in patchy clumps, until-
He cringes back, tries not to think about it. There’s a lot he tries not to think about. He wasn’t even there all that long, really - not for a Viltrumite lifespan - but it’s…it’s so fucking much. It won’t go away. It broke him, and all he could do was crawl back home like this. To Robin.
Robin.
Her voice was the only thing that kept him sane, and when she says his name now, Mark tries to talk. Words catch his throat, clog on scar tissue, and it emerges as a high whine. Please, please touch me, please Robbie, God, I need you, please-
Her hand slides up his arm, and Mark shudders.
He feels sick. He feels like he’s the- this fucking disease, and he’ll infect her if she isn’t careful, and she isn’t. She’s never careful.
Never has been, too reckless and never giving a shit about her own life, and she touches him as if he’s still the Mark she knew. The one who asked her out in high school, and put mushy notes in her textbooks, and took her flying like they had all the time in the world, and sent her goodnight and good morning texts every single day.
Her lips press to his shoulder, to ugly, twisted skin, and he wants to yell at her to stop. Get away from him. Stop touching such a fucking freak, and he’s disgusting, and she shouldn’t have to see him. She shouldn’t ever be forced to touch him when she’s so perfect, so beautiful and she hadn’t changed much at all.
He wasn’t gone for long. It felt like forever.
“Mark,” she says beside his ear, her fingers cupping the back of his neck. Secure, safe, loving. She loves him. She loves him, even after he became…this.
It hurts to touch everything except her. His scars, they just- fucking burn, and twitch, and ache, and it sends rolling waves of nausea through him - except when it’s Robin.
She makes it bearable to exist in his own skin. She’s the reason he can sleep at all, why he’s sat on the bed instead of hovering over it, why he isn’t ripping himself apart in a desperate search for any form of relief.
She’s his relief. She’s his everything.
The tension is torn from his body, from every clenched muscle, and he slumps into her.
His sigh is wet and pathetic and he can still cry. They managed to get the lenses off once he was home, so Robin has to be able to feel him crying when he hides against the side of her neck. She should push him off when he grabs onto her hip, wraps his arm around her back and god, god, he needs her, he needs her to love him forever, he needs her to decide he’s worth it. He’s still the same. For her, he’s the same, please.
“You’re home,” she says, still holding the back of his neck, thumb rubbing soothingly over his skin. She doesn’t recoil when she has to feel the shredded attempts at healing.
She can feel too much of him; she doesn’t wear anything to bed now, either, and her thigh is bare when she slips her leg over his. Knee against his hip, patiently guiding him back down with her and letting him rest more of his body on her instead of the bed. He’s smothering her, he’s a fucking mess. She deserves better.
“You’re with me.”
No hesitation to the palm pressed against his back, finding one of the worst scars - low on his left shoulder blade, the bone contorted beneath the deep, layered burns, and he’s tried to break it, make it set right, but he kept failing and Robin said to stop. She helped him stop. He doesn’t dig his fingers under his skin and try to peel it off (get his real skin back) as much now.
“You made it out. You came back to me.” Soft, simple confirmations, and he trembles as she kisses the side of his head, just above his ear. No shying away or disgust, and- she never did. Not yet. Not ever, maybe.
He kept waiting for her to slip up, for it all to be an act and- it would’ve been okay. Who wouldn’t flinch back from him? He’s a monster. He’d fit right in with some old shitty horror movie, with really bad makeup effects, but gross enough to get a reaction. It isn’t just his face, or his arms or legs - it’s his entire body. She can’t focus on one part of him and ignore the rest.
There’s his eyes, he guesses. They aren’t so horrible. The lenses they fitted on him helped, because they didn’t want him going blind from too much damage, but…The right one, the colour’s gone- bad. His vision’s worse there and there’s a milky film over it, and they’re both bloodshot all the time.
He hates that the most - his eyes. Robin loved his eyes. Mark ruined that for her.
Nothing about him is the same. He needs to be the same. It’s all he has to give, because Robin doesn’t care if he’s the strongest. It doesn’t matter to her that he’s way more powerful than he was when she first started dating him. He learnt- he had to learn that showing weakness was the worst thing he could do, and it earned him whatever punishment followed.
But he’s here, crying, soft and weak and pathetic, and she pulls him tighter to her. Says “I love you,” and he whimpers like a fucking animal, and she strokes the back of his neck. “I love you, Mark Grayson. In fact…I love you so much, I’m gonna marry you.”
He stops breathing.
His heart is pounding, and his head goes silent.
Until-
“Sorry, this isn’t a yes or no question.” She hums, her fingers tapping lightly against his shoulder blade. “And I forgot the ring. I’ll get one tomorrow. I thought about it a lot, see, and I don’t really buy into marriage…At least, I didn’t. You changed my mind. So, unless you have a secret spouse out there with a stronger claim to you, your ass is mine until death do us part. Got it?”
He remembers how to pull air into his lungs.
How to speak, even if it’s nothing more than a sobbed, “Yes,” against her neck, her jaw, her cheek-
Her lips, and she tastes the same. She kisses him the same way she did before, and she’s gonna marry him.
(In the morning, in the light of day with no shadows to hide behind, he checks if she meant it. Just in case. It was late, and she’d just woken up - he doesn’t want her to regret what she said. It’s okay if she does.
She takes it as a challenge.
Pulls him back to bed, make him lay there without a shred of clothing on and…and hold still as she touches him. Kisses him fucking everywhere, drives him insane with her hands, her tongue, the low tease of her voice, and she said not to move, so he doesn’t. For as long as he can.
She calls him good. Calls him perfect, and hers, and gorgeous, and handsome, and it should sound like lies. It doesn’t. He feels the shape of her sighed pretty boy against his thigh, and maybe he is, to her, for her.
He’d be anything for her. If she wants him to be her husband-
Even as broken as he is, Mark can be that.)