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harbingerscry · 1 year ago

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I am in love with this piece, I feel like I could read it 3x over.

down to the marrow | Ghoap x f!Reader

Every year, someone from your village is picked as an offering to appease the insatiable hunger of the gods. This year, that sacrifice is you. Or: Ghoap is some abomination masquerading as a god for the convenience of free food. Until they meet you. They have a hunger of a different kind.

SMUT 18+ | implied/referenced cannibalism (not reader); human/ritualistic sacrifice; dubcon; dom!Ghost, switch!Johnny/dom!Johnny; slight overtures of pet play; praise kink; size kink; implied innocence kink/virginity kink; rough sex, spitting, spit kink; possessive Ghoap; obsessive Ghoap; implied kidnapping but is it kidnapping if it's an eldritch horror?? getting fucked so good by eldritch horrors/fake gods/cannibal husbands that it reconfigures the chemistry in your brain, basically.

additional tags: vaginal fingering, anal fingering, rimming, anal sex, p-in-v, double penetration, heavy implications/discussions of double anal and double vaginal penetration.

AO3 MIRROR

Surrounding the dense thicket is a deep riparian zone with a vicious undercurrent. It acts as a moat, almost, separating the woodlands from the glade that makes up the town.

The serene surface belies a nebula of underground caves, eroded by the harsh runoff of a waterfall deeper into the forest. It runs in an almost perfect circle along the exterior of the town, serving as both a defence from outside attacks, and—

As a cage.

With the dangerous waters that cut a circle around your town, it leaves little entry points to escape from.

But, you suppose that doesn't matter because leaving is not an option. It never was.

You sometimes wonder if your ancestors knew this before cultivating the barren lands, learning through trial and error just how deadly the seemingly protective waters were. Or if the land was purposefully terraformed to lure would-be settlers into its maw, forever entombing them with a dangerous fosse and an unforgiving forest. One with an insatiable appetite.

The only means of escape—if it could be called that—is a grove in the treeline where a giant taiga fell several decades ago. It sits across the river, covered in a bed of lichen and moss, and makes up a bridge—of sorts. Crossing it is precarious. The tree is old—archaic. It wears its age in the softness of its waterlogged wood, bloated from the runoff of the river passing below it every day.

Any day now, they say, it'll break into pieces and drift down the river. Stuck in an endless circle, an inescapable ouroboros, unless it can squeeze through the canal that opens up to a confluence on the opposite side of the forest.

But it holds—just very prejudicially.

Those who try to cross it without propitiation from the gods find themselves lost to the undercurrent before they can place the other foot on the lichen-covered log.

It seems almost mythological. A story told in the dark about haunting beings, gods, who keep humans locked inside of a barren landscape like cattle, only allowing those deemed worthy enough to be a yearly sacrifice to cross.

But it's the reality. Your reality.

The truth is very much that your own home is a slaughterhouse for rapacious beings lurking in the forest. Ones who demand a sacrifice. Meat.

You know this, of course, because you've seen what happens to those deemed worthy.

They leave, dressed in silk, adorned in gems, and return as a pile of bones. Ones stripped, picked clean. Hollowed out. The milky surface bears the marks of scars in the shape of teeth. False starts, gnaw marks—the gods feast on your people, they satiate their hunger on the townsfolk, and in exchange the land blooms.

This facet is the most important—especially when you spend most of the year on the verge of succumbing to starvation.

It’s said that the garish tradition started after a devastating wildfire tore through the forest. A given, since boreals are wont to burn. Thrive, even, on the raging fires that crackle through the thicket. It burned for seven days, and decimated the local wildlife to half a fraction of what it once was. The accumulation of charred wood and ash left behind a thick, desolate stratum of podzol that suffocated the once fecund land—irrevocably changing things for the worst.

Without any fertility in the soil to grow crops—an already arduous task with the floor of the coppice being covered in a thick layer of dead leaves, pine needles, lichen, and moss to begin with—the primary source of food was dwindling. The wildlife had either perished in the vicious fires, or fled to higher ground near the base of the mountains, leaving behind an insubstantial river with a low population of fish, and whatever happened to linger—mainly small, burrowing prey.

It wasn’t enough. Isn’t. Not in these subarctic temperatures.

And in their most desperate hour, their prayerful sobs were answered the next morning.

(how benevolent of the gods—)

After the bones are returned, deers stand, placid and docile, in the open field, as if waiting to be taken, eaten. The charred husks of the berry trees sprout, blossoming year-round. Highbush cranberry, cloudberries, bearberries, bog blueberries. Foraging lush bushels of chokecherry, and wild mushrooms—great swaths of fairy rings, birch milkcap, musutake, black moreal. The peatland becomes mineral-rich. Harvests of hearty vegetables—potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots and other hardy vegetables.

You quench your hunger on the bountiful offering, ignoring that it was grown in blood. It's easy to ignore the empty house, the space where someone you grew up with once occupied when your stomach is full.

But it never lasts.

Everything dies eventually. The gossamer falls. The deer meat hung on the drying rack rots. The hares flee, and the berry bushes perish. The potatoes rot. Turn toxic. Anything jarred or stored makes you sick.

You're at the whim of the gods.

And then—

Another bone appears beneath the spruce tree. Another body snatched from their bed in the dead of night.

—rinse, repeat.

It’s an honour, they say with rotten meat between their teeth, and a gaping hole in their bellies. You should be honoured that the gods picked you. Deemed you worthy.

You can't bring yourself to see it that way. It always felt like living inside of a cage. Being fattened up, prime for the picking. But it doesn’t matter much what you think—there's no escape. Not even for those lucky enough to be chosen.

They're revered, canonised, and utterly unenviable because the reality is that no one wants to die. At least not without the freedom of choice. And this doesn't just strip it away—it flays it. Carves it from bone.

(but oh, what little choice you have, anyway—death by hunger, starvation; death by drowning; or—

Sustenance for the gods.)

And as they lay wreaths of gold and emerald on their head, you can't help but picture a shackle instead.

But you don't dwell on it much. You raise hens for a living, and sell their eggs in the market. What good would a chicken farmer be to a god?

It'll never be you.

Until it is.

They come for you at dusk, and it's every bit of the wild tales you've heard as a child, right down to the small details. Men in black, billowing cloaks lead you to a temple made of sandstone and iron. A monk chanting about the sorry state of your poor soul.

(maybe the gods have mercy on us all—

and may they choke to death on your ribcage.)

You're pushed into a chamber, stripped of your rags, and thrown into a large basin filled with scented oils of jasmine, waterlily, and amber. They scour every inch of your skin, and tut about the dirt under your nails as if you all weren't in the same sorry state as each other.

It's decidedly clinical for something that is supposed to be such a great honour. Detached. You feel less like a sacred offering as the evening passes and more like a descaled fish, ready for the fryer. It eats at you. This fear pulses wetly in your throat.

The horror might come later—at midnight, when you try, and fail, to sleep. Thoughts plagued with all the unknowns lurking just out of sight. A paltry few hours spent being primed and plucked and decorated—not unlike your chickens that end up on a spit being roasted over an open fire. Trussed up with butter, garlic, thyme and rosemary. You wonder if they, too, felt sacred when you'd snatched them up after spending a whole season getting them perfectly plump on lettuce, chard, and fresh grains.

The parallels feel almost ironic, and you wither in the glare regret casts as you sit in front of a large vanity, staring at your clean cheeks—not yet painted on with the dizzying assortment of blushes and crushed pigments the woman said they'll use tomorrow when you're ready for it (as if you ever could be)—and trying not to fall into abject despair.

Death this time tomorrow.

You suppose it's only your fault for thinking yourself differently from the rest. Unpickable. A joke in hindsight.

You spend your last night on earth staring outside your window, gazing at the pale moon, and trying to avoid the shadows in the forest. The ones that drool, and bark—singing for your blood.

Something is out there. You can feel it in the air like a burgeoning storm. Feel it's eyes on you from the sprawling treeline. Waiting, hiding in the shadows; some rapacious beast on the prowl.

You're just not entirely certain it could be likened to a god.

The guards, your escorts, are led by a man who introduces himself as Graves, as if he hadn't met you before.

Under the watchful eyes of the elders, he's a near-perfect gentleman. Careful in the way he regards you, considerate to a fault. Friendly. Open. He bows his head when he speaks to you, and it's always hushed. Softened. Respectful.

It's only when they turn back toward the village that the hand on your forearm tightens.

“Now,” he drawls, tugging you toward him. His tongue pokes against the inner skin of his cheek. “We got, ah, some ground rules to go over, sweetheart. Despite what they might have told you, tonight is a very special night for us.”

You've heard it all before. Offer a nod in response.

He steamrolls through it. “Truth be told, I don't know what's going to happen when you wander through those trees, but what I know isn't going to go down is you trying to make a break for it. See, we're pretty, uh, experienced with this. We've got men all over the place. Dogs ready to hunt you down.”

His hand snakes around your wrist, squeezing tight. You feel the grind of your bones, and try not to wince. To show fear. It's too early for that yet. Not when you haven't seen what lures within the thicket.

“Don't make us have to hurt you, sweetheart,” he croons. “They don't like damaged goods.”

It's with that warning that they bring you to the rotted remains of the old spruce tree. Water froths around the log, spraying icy mist over the vibrant green moss.

One slip, you think—

Three years ago, a teenager decided to test the currents for himself. He waded into the water until it was chest deep, laughing with his friends back on shore. It's fine, he hollered. It's barely pulled me at all—

And then, as if a hand from below grappled his ankle and yanked him down, he was gone. No flailing. No screams. He didn't buoy and bob the water, struggling against the unseen current, he was just gone. Taken.

His body was never found. None of them are.

(a little part of you is convinced an equally malevolent being, god, lives in those depths, devouring the hapless fools who try to test what happens when you battle against a starving river.

this, though, has never been proven. and most just think you're a little mad for it in the end.)

You think about him as you feel the cold water spit against your bare ankle—

Bare, because the gods have little need for clothing on their dinner, and they dressed you in nothing but a thin, silk robe. No footwear. Maybe because that, too, isn't needed on a meal or because they're worried that once you scramble across the log, you'll try and run through broken pine needles and stinging furze.

How silly of them, though.

Trying to survive a subarctic forest that thrives on setting itself on fire this time of the year is not something you planned on.

You think of that boy who drowned, and—

“And I'm supposed to go through here—? Just walk across this log?”

One of the guards brushes his fingers over your nape, muttering prayers under his breath. It shudders across your skin.

Graves nods, looking contrite, but he can't quite hide the fervid excitement in his withering gaze. “Yep,” he drawls, popping the p. “Straight on through, and if you're good enough, the rest of us will have a nice year.”

Acid pools on your tongue. If you're good enough. You swallow it down. “And if I'm not?”

“I'll, uh, have to hunt you down. And you won't like what happens when I find you.”

“Can't be much worse than what's going to happen to her soon,” someone jeers. It lands like a punch to your gut.

“What's going to happen to me?” Your voice shakes.

Graves shrugs. His smile is all teeth. “You'll meet the gods, of course.”

“An honour.”

You baulk. “Right.”

His eyes roll, listing toward the midnight sky. The moon is large. The ring around it looks red.

“It's time,” he decides and places his hands on your shoulders. “Now, get moving, little girl. And you better be on your best behaviour, now.”

The or else is unsaid. You hear it like a gunshot through the unnatural silence of the forest, anyway.

“And if I fall in?”

“You best pray you don't. I'll come in there myself to get you.”

“Accidents happen—”

There's a howl. It cuts through the air like a knife.

“What was that?”

“You're pissin’ them off—” Graves’ fingers tighten around your wrist once more. “You aren't the first to try it. Won't be the last. But let me tell you one thing: it never works. Ever. They'll drag out, and I promise, it'll be so much worse for you when they do.”

The howling grows louder. Closer. You tremble.

Something blooms in your hindbrain, a once dormant piece of yourself coming to life under the pale moonlight. Roll over, it whispers. Submit.

You swallow down acid on your tongue, and fight the urge to dry heave into the bushes.

You don't want to roll over. You want to run—

Graves lets go of your arm, and gives you a shove. “Get to it. Don't got all night.”

Shakily, you step onto the log. The soles of your feet sink into the lichen. It's soft, porous. Damp. The air around you is electrified, smelling strongly of ozone. Something heavy, atmospheric. The air before a lightning strike. It congeals in your throat, thickening on your tongue.

Had you not caught the fresh scent of death clinging to the air beneath it, you might have found it enticing. An ambrosial cocktail that tickled along your synapses, curled, protectively, over you.

But rot is heavy in your nose. The smell makes you nauseous.

“Go on,” Graves goades, sounding irritated. “Before I drag you there myself.”

They murmur prayers as you place one foot in front of the other, crossing the narrow log. Maybe their hymnals reach some higher power because you find yourself stepping onto a soft bed of upturned soil and moss on the other side, the raging river a distant memory.

Too bad, you think, feeling dazed, overwhelmed, as you gaze into the unfathomable black forest that yawns out beyond you. You wish they choked on their prayers. You wish you fell in.

“Keep going straight,” Graves calls, his voice a mere echo against the howling winds and the roaring river. “And if you try to run, I'll hunt you down, little lamb.”

The forest carries an almost unnatural silence as you trudge through the thicket, weaving around towering white spruce and gnarled Jack pine. Fireweed and lupine nips at your heels.

Its absence of sound is jarring. No birds, insects, animals—not even your footfalls make any noise, covered by the lichen blanketing the forest floor. All you can hear is your haggard breath as you traverse through bushels of dense cloudberry, and ferns.

This feels purposeful—the world falling silent in the face of a deadly predator—and you wish there was more light streaming through the sparse treefall gaps in the canopy where threads of thin moonlight spill in. It barely grazes the most eaten floor, and you rely most on a trail of rowans and willows to serve as your guide.

Unease is a malevolent friend digging talons into your neck.

It warns you, in clandestine whispers, of the unimaginable horror that lay before you. Urges you to run, to escape. The highlands, the mountains, can offer sanctuary. The white death might take you first, sure, but is that worse than becoming dinner for gods?

Gods. Beasts. Monsters. Some abomination that lures in the shadows between the towering white spruce, in the weeping willows that droop in sorrow as you pass.

You can see them, it hisses. Feel them in the underbrush. In the dip of the aspens. The lurch of the oaks. They're waiting, hungry—

You should run.

You want to.

Succumbing to hypothermia over being roasted on a poke—if they even bother to cook their meat before they eat it. This line of thinking, this thread, makes you wonder what will happen if they just eat you alive. Like the grizzlies that used to hide in the forest.

Your heart thunders. Something in the unfathomable dark growls.

Run. Run—

As if privy to your skittish thoughts, the forest itself seems to bend, opening up. A treefall gap illuminates a small grove in the thicket. You hear something outside of your own breath and the unnatural, guttural snarls for the first time since you entered: running water. A waterfall.

You step into the clearing, heart pounding in your chest. The heavy tenebrous of the forest yields to the harsh moonlight spilling, intrusively almost, into the coppice. In the sudden visibility, your eyes adjust, minutely, to the ethereal divide of nature.

Despite the garish nightmare you're about to experience, this small patch of land is breathtaking. Even through the horror, the fear, its beauty is inescapable, and incredibly out of place.

A secluded basin is nestled between a dense forest with a winding stream cutting through the middle. A boulder juts up from the lip, large and imposing, and it's there where things begin to shift. Tilting your world sharply on its axis.

At first, you think there must be a mistake.

Instead of a monstrous being, an unfathomable god, there are just two men in a clearing.

Two normal men.

The first is sitting, relaxed and spread out, on the boulder. One hand is wrapped around his knee pulled up loose to his chest while his left dangles off the face of the rock. His other hand is pressed flat to the rock behind him, holding him aloft as he reclines.

The dangling heel kicks off the rock, sending his leg into a lazy swing. He repeats it. Mindless. The picture of languor.

And that's what he gives off—

An airy sense of impish ease.

It's reflected in his mien as well. From his hair—wild and untamed, coiffed into a messy mohawk with the sides shorn down—to the small grin he wears, lips crooked up into half a grin as he, too, takes you in. Playful, you think. Puckish.

He's big, you note. Broad shouldered. A tapered waist. His biceps bulge. Thighs flex. And you know, then, that he could crush you with his bare hands.

He leans forward when you appear, eyes latched on to you, wide and unblinking. An eerie sense of foreboding begins to permeate your guts as his unrelenting stare continues.

“What is this—?” You start, but the words are stolen from your mouth when you glance to the side, suddenly aware of the behemoth leaning in the shadow of the boulder.

You thought you knew what fear was before. Eyes in the dark, whispers in empty rooms. Shadows tucked into corners, moving silkily along the walls. Footsteps echoing yours. Your name hissed through the weeping leaves of the draping willows. The clock ticking down the final minutes to your death. Graves and his warnings—run, little rabbit, and we'll hunt you down. Fingers twisting on your arm, bruising bone.

None of that compares to this.

The majority of his body was hidden behind the boulder, angled perfectly to downplay the sheer, unimaginable size of him. He’s cut from obsidian, bathed in black. The tight trousers he wears do little to hide the way his thick thighs, wider than the trunks of the firs behind him, bulge when he walks.

Seeing him walk out without making a single noise, deadly and silent, has your heart rabbiting in your chest. Something primal rears. A fear that curdles inside your chest.

He wears the shape of a man—a pastiche, a masquerade—but the fit is uncanny. It's a farrago, a mosaic, of what a man should look like, but where the imitation ends is in his eyes. Black holes. Pits.

You think of the Sheol. Purgatory. These awful, wretched places folded, condensed, and forced into devastating, abyssal blue. He says nothing, just stays silent. Looks almost bored as he takes you in. Impassive.

The impish man introduces them after a beat—Johnny and Ghost (fitting, you think, for a man who looks like a wraith)—and says nothing else about what this is, what they are.

Not human. Not in the slightest. You can see tendrils of smoke curling off their skin, wisps of something diaphanous that coils in the air around them. Silken, black strands. It's mesmerising. Hypnotic.

It's in this strange dissonance between their preternatural appearance and the shadows that congeal around them, ephemeral, static, that your unease takes root. Something is off about this. Something is wrong.

The wires in your head fire. The electrical jolt bellows at you to run—

As if he hears these thoughts, the man cut from Everest shakes his head, agitating the wisps of curdled smoke pouring out from around him.

Fear gnarls over you. Keeps your feet from moving.

A good thing, too, because the other man—impish, dogish—grins at you, all daggered teeth, deadly canines, and takes a step toward you. The way he watches you is keen. Sharp. Hungry.

There's no escape.

Cheekily, he calls you hen, and doesn't seem particularly bothered to learn your real name. But you suppose no one ever stops to know the name of the pig they're going to eat—they just enjoy the roast.

(The thought makes you shiver.)

He holds his hand out after a beat, eyes drilling into yours, and waits for you to slip your palm into his. Maybe you're meant to. The way he holds his gaze on you is expectant. Eager.

No one bothered teaching you the proper way this was supposed to go, but you've seen the aftermath. Cleaned, picked bones. Teethmarks digging deep into the surface. Insides hollow with the marrow sucked out.

They were gnawed on—something everyone seemed quite eager to ignore.

(it's an honour to be chosen—

you fill in the blanks. colour in the lines with the sharp edges of his teeth as they gleam, deadly, in the jaundiced light.

—and eaten.)

It fits. The way they look at you is famished. Starved. As if they hadn't a meal in aeons, and you—a sweet, tender lamb—stumbled upon these rapacious wolves in the dead of night, all vulnerable and soft. Easy prey.

In the middle of the clearing, his hand wavers. His brows pinch.

You've done something wrong. Broken an unspoken rule.

Roll over, roll over, roll over—

But you can't bring yourself to touch him.

There's a chasm between the threshold of his open palm and yours, a gaping maw. Step over the line, and doom yourself to the whims of this Cimmerian beast and his Stygian king.

You'll go back as bones. Ones buried with all the others as the people in your village plug their ears and cover their eyes, pretending they can't hear the growling through the forest. The screams. They'll parade you around for a little while, just long enough for the fervour of your massacre to wane, and the promise of luxury tomorrow to settle in.

They'll have a feast in your honour, and eat the things you no longer can. Telling lies over cherry pie to fill in the blanks when they realise they have no idea who you were until your name chiselled into bone became the most important thing about you.

It angers you.

Fuck them. You take a step back. You'll run if you have to. Shake off them and the dogs. And if you don't, if you can't—

Well. Either way, you'll be eaten alive.

Johnny's brows crease further. A gorge splitting between them. You think he might be disappointed by your choice. Hurt, even, when you flinch back from his reach. The human emotion he wears looks real enough that you could easily trick yourself into pretending not to see the sharp flush of anger on his cheeks when you, a mere mortal, refute him, a god.

Almost.

But it's there—hidden behind hazel parapets.

Though, he hides it much better than Ghost.

There's a crackle. Ghost huffs, his broad chest expanding with his exhale. It's a reminder of how massive he is. How imposing.

He lifts his hands and you know that he could crush your skull without any effort at all. Like pinching an insect between his thumb and forefinger.

You shudder.

“Tryin’ to run, pet?” He drawls, crossing his arms over his chest, and the low timber of his voice curls around your hindbrain like smoke.

It's not quite anger that permeates the air around him despite the ice in his tone. No, this is muted. Rougher. Saturated with mirth.

You suck in his breath. He finds this amusing.

“Need to be brought to heel, I reckon,” he's saying as if you were an untamed animal instead of a person. Housebreak the feral cat before it pisses all over the place.

You glare at him, bearing your teeth.

“I'm not a dog—”

“Nah, dogs ain't half as lippy as you.” He volleys, rolling his thick shoulder back like he was readying himself to take a swing. “But you'll learn soon enough that this cheek isn't going to get you any rewards.”

You don't want any of his rewards. Angrily, you swipe at your stinging cheeks, as if to wipe the humiliation from your skin. It's on the tip of your tongue to snap back, vitriolic words curdled milk in the back of your throat, but he doesn't allow you to spit it out.

“What's this?”

His tone is peculiar. Flinty. He stares at your wrist, stone-still.

And it's this, the unnatural silence that permeates around him as he glares holes into your skin, at the burst blood vessels underneath your flesh, pooling thickly in the form of a handprint that decidedly is not theirs, that it all seems to hit you.

This whole time, you've been battling with this sense of cosmic dread, trying to fight yourself on whether or not you have the mental resilience to fully give in and believe the things that flaunt itself in front of you.

The curls of smoke drift off their bodies as if their actual size is much too vast to fit in the skin they picked, and it leaks from their pores.

Seeing him go eerily still reminds you that despite the same tongue they speak in, they're still monsters beneath the façade. Something archaic and unknowable.

Johnny leans over, and before you can move, his hand lashes out, taking hold of your wrist. His fingers trail over the damage buried beneath your skin, and something shifts, fractures, across his face. His grip tightens. Fingers shackle around you.

He looks very much like a snarling dog when he feels the contusion under your skin—fangs bared, canines sharpened to find points. You stumble, but his iron grip doesn't leave much room to fall.

“Who did this?” it's mangled in his throat. Rasped out between clenched teeth.

You don't understand their concern, their anger. “What does it matter? You're going to eat me, anyway—”

“Gonnae eat somethin’, hen, but it won’t be you.”

“For now,” Ghost's tone is still measured, firm, but the way he looks you up and down, like the centrefold of a feast, makes you shiver. Has heat licking across your skin. It feels like condemnation. A basin of sin.

They're meant to be gods, you think, distant and unsure. And yet, you'd quicker liken them to something demonic, Mephistophelian, than to anything holy.

“They didn't leave us much choice, hen,” is what Johnny says when screams erupt through the dense forest, rattling the treeline. You startle, jumping back. Johnny grips you tighter.

“Don't worry—” be not afraid, you think, a touch hysterically, hand flying to the hollow of your throat when you meet the mirth-saturated eyes of Ghost. “We won't hurt them,” Johnny snorts behind him. He shifts. “Much.”

It's added as an afterthought. The skewed afterbirth of their mordant humour.

You don't have much time to dwell on it. Through the mouth of the clearing, a face emerges, gaunt and ashen. One by one, they march. Driven by an instinctual tug you can't begin to fathom until the treeline is filled in with the faces of the men who brought you here. They stare back at you—terrified, uncertain, angry, accusatory, as if this is your fault, and you shiver harshly in the arms of the men who paraded them here because you know, deep down, it is.

You're not sure why they're here, but the contemptuous looks thrown your way make you think they don't, either.

Graves steps forward first, his brown eyes sweeping across the clearing, calculative, assessing, before landing on you. Something ugly twists across his expression, hidden by the shadows that drape over his brow. It's fleeting. Brief. And then it's gone, tucked away. His pallid demeanour is a mask hiding that viciousness below—something the bruises on your arm know all too well.

“What's this?” He says, and you commend him on the unaffected lilt in his tone as he stares Ghost right in the eyes. “Finished with your dinner already?”

Beside you, Johnny shifts. His body coils. Tenses. An angered cobra rattling out its warning trill. He moves closer to you, shielding you with the bulk of his body as if these men—mortals—were more of a threat to you than himself.

On the opposite side of you, Ghost just watches. Frigid, unmoving—eerily so. A predatory tiger low in the grass, stalking its unassuming prey.

“Didn't, ah, like our offering this year?” He's asking, hand sweeping out toward you. “We have more. Prettier ones with less bite to them. If that's what you prefer.”

They talk about you as if this whole affair is transactional—cattle sold on the side of the road. You think you've given away hens with more dignity and respect than these men seem to have for you.

“You've hurt her,” Johnny's tone has gone soft. Low. “We told you, didn't we? Untouched.”

He looks nervous. “She's a wily little thing, you know. Tried to make a break for it. We had to get her here, didn't we?”

It's a lie. The echo of it rents the air.

"Wrong thing to say."

Someone moves. You'd have thought it was Johnny who struck first, with how tense he it, but when you glance back, he's beside you still. Holding your arm, eyes widened. Wild. Feverish.

When you turn around, Ghost's massive frame seems to have doubled in size. The shadows you'd seen curling around him congeal, turning corporeal.

The men run, scattering through the clearing.

They don't get very far. You can hear the crunch of bone when Ghost disappears behind them. The screams—

“Stay here,” Johnny whispers, hazel eyes blazing with an archaic hunger you can’t begin to unravel. “We’ll get him. I'll skin him alive for hurtin’ what's ours.”

You crouch behind the boulder with your hands over your ears, childish and terrified, and try not to think about the sounds you can hear echoing through the clearing. Ripping, tearing. The crunch of bone. Something falls by your feet. You squeeze your eyes tight.

Monsters. They're monsters. No god could ever do the things they do.

You bow your head, as if in prayer, and try to ignore the way some wires in your head begin to misfire. Because the thing is: you should be afraid—are afraid—but a broken part of you can't help marvelling at the majesty in the way they move.

There's something to be said about the way a man eats, you think. And they're absolutely foul about it, feral.

You shiver. Something slinks out, oozing tendrils wrapping around your head, digging talons in your mind. Poisoning you from the inside out—

Or maybe just waking up.

“Good. You didn't run. Y’don’t have to be afraid, hen.”

Johnny's wiping his bloody mouth with the back of his hand when he walks around the boulder to get you. He holds a gore-drenched hand out for you to take, the same one you refused earlier. You slink back, and stand on your own. It throws him. You can see the brief frown beneath the viscera covering his mouth.

Ignore it, you think, curling your hands into fists. His disappointment doesn't make you ache.

“We're not gonnae hurt you—”

“Would hav’ been stupid to try. I'd have hunted you down,” he eyes the tremble in your hands, a nasty smirk pulling at the corners of his bare mouth. “But maybe that's just what you needed, eh, sweetheart? A good chase and hard shag in the dirt? Fuck the disobedience right outta you. Maybe I ought to.”

“He's a softie on the inside,” Johnny drawls, and it's fond. Fond. As if he hasn't heard the horrific things that slipped, oily and corrosive, out of Ghost's mouth. “Just gotta be good, hen, and we'll be good t’ya, too.”

They speak to you as if you were a wayward child in need of corporal punishment, and not an adult whose life was irrevocably changed in a matter of hours. Who just watched men turn into monsters and devour someone whole while they tried, futilely, to run away.

It angers you, but you don't let it take hold because deep down, you know it's hollow. Graves is no one to you but a face in a sea of people.

The thought sticks, tarry-slick, to the walls of your chest.

They let it pass, speaking to each other in low tones. The chase, the slaughter, seems to have some effect on their moods. Johnny is restless, and agitated. He skirts around Ghost, taking swipes with his words; their idle banter filling the clearing as they regal the thrill of the hunt.

Ghost, too, seems filled with frenetic energy, but it's mild compared to Johnny. He stands with his arms crossed over his chest, jaw gnashing under the skull mask stained with blood.

You're not sure what their relationship is, but it feels ancient. Unknowable. The way they look at each other holds so much weight that you feel the pill of it even several paces away from them. As if they're the only two in the world, and everyone else is just getting caught up in their gravity.

Why, then, they chose you is a mystery. One you will doubtless get any answers to.

But the conversation loops back to you before you can ask (what are you, why me, who are you—)—to your bared teeth and tense shoulders; your disobedience—and you fight back the urge to flee as it leaps up to the surface. Get away, get away—

“But she was good,” Johnny is saying, and there's a strange lilt to his tone. Softer than when he spoke about the damage to your wrist, than when he told you to stay put. It's featherlight. The echo of it is a comfort. “So good for us, eh, Lt? Good girls deserve rewards.”

“Good, huh?” Ghost drawls. “Then why don't you give her some pats on the head, Johnny?”

It makes you bristle. Flinch. “Don't you dare—”

“There it is again. That bite.” Something sparks in his dark eyes; a fire on the edge of an alluvial fan. “Gonna have to do somethin’ about it, aren't we, pet?”

There's madness in the arsenic white of his eyes. A fever. The heat spreads, the blaze catching everything in its path. Johnny stands beside him. You watch as that field of hazel and elm begins to burn.

“We'll be good t’ya,” he's saying, and something inside of you—old, archaic; an ancestral toll—starts to ring once more.

Stay still, it says. Bare your neck, your belly. If you're good, if you're quiet, the predator won't eat you whole—

Reluctantly, you submit.

“Good,” he purrs. The satisfaction in his tone is a dagger cutting through the fraying strands of your crumbling resolve. “Don’t worry, love; we'll cut them out of your chest and fill the hole with ourselves.”

It's Johnny who touches you first.

His hand presses softly to your cheek, fingertips brushing the curve of your cheekbone. Reverent. Delicate. There's blood on his hands. He doesn't seem bothered. Doesn't seem to care at all that it's leaving broken smears on your face, fingerprints from the men he—

Ate. Consumed. Butchered.

(but your home was always an abattoir, wasn't it?)

It's tacky. Cold. You can feel it drying, rotting, on your flesh, and you want to be sick—are nauseous from it, even—but Johnny's leaning down, as if he knows, and steals your mouth in a bloody kiss before you can move. Run, flee.

(you wonder how far you'd get before they caught you. or if you'd even get very far at all—)

Is it Graves you taste when his tongue snakes past your lips, running across yours? Playful. Coy. Or perhaps the officer who brushed his fingers along your nape, murmuring words of prayer as they led you here.

Maybe it's all of them. All of them.

Oh, god—

Johnny pulls away.

“Don't worry about them, hen,” he breathes across your numb lips. “Just focus on us—”

As if to reinforce his words, you feel Ghost move behind you, bracketing your body in. Caged between their mass. Imprisoned under their attention.

His hands settle on you, one falling on your waist, pinching your flesh to the bone. Tight. Unyielding. You know, at that moment, he wants it to hurt. An admonishment, perhaps, for thinking of the people they threatened to carve out of your chest. The other curls around your neck and the broad expanse of it swallows you whole.

“Easy,” he mocks when he feels your pulse hammering against his palm. Skittish. “Do as Johnny says, pet. I promise you'll like it more that way.”

The underlying command is ever present in his tone. A constant. Brassbound. Or else. Or else—

You shiver when he leans down, masked chin nuzzling against your crown. His hand squeezes once. Good job.

The silent praise thrills you. It shouldn't. You're too aware of what they are, what they do and what they've done, for it to fill the barren hole in your chest, the one they threatened to stuff full of themselves, but, oh, does it leak. Seeps down the split edges, pooling at the bottom. A small, serous layer filming over. Congealing.

No, no—

You don't want this. God, you do. Damn you, you do—

“Thas’it,” Johnny is slurring, wet and messy, across your chin, tongue snaking out to catch the spittle that dribbles down the corners of your slackened jaw. “Let us in, hen. We'll be so good’t ya. So fuckin’ good—”

“Johnny.”

Simon utters the word and it sounds like a warning. A threat. But maybe much of everything he says has that quality to you because Johnny doesn't whimper, or answer the command. He doesn't stop—

He groans, low and throaty, and then he's kissing you again, drowning you. Stealing the air from your chest. Sucking it straight out of your lungs. His tongue presses into yours, playful licks turning demanding, harsh. He's devouring you. Feasting.

You'd seen this man—beast monster creature demon—eat people. Break open skulls and slurp on grey matter. Rip off limbs and eat the tissue, the muscle, like it was a delicacy. Gouge out eyeballs, and swallow them whole. Fingers, toes. Tongues. He'd sucked out the marrow and then threw the hollowed bones of Graves at your feet.

(Ghost tossed the hand that touched you after, completely skeletal as he'd chewed on the cartilage like it was grizzle—)

They're horrifying.

And yet—

You kiss back. Are kissing him back. Chasing the softened band around the tip of his tongue with yours, brushing the flat of it over his taste buds, curling over his teeth. It's strange, odd, you're not sure what is happening to you, just that he tastes divine. That the blood between his teeth is ambrosial on your tongue. Heady. The texture is thin, watery, and you whine low in your throat, wanting more of it, more of him—

But there's screaming in your head. You don't want this. Shouldn't.

His tongue glides over your bottom lip, and then he's sucking it into his mouth, biting down into your soft flesh with blunt teeth. Moments earlier, you'd seen those teeth crush bone. There's fear, but it's far away. Muted. It feels like it's hidden underwater, trapped beneath the flood of endorphins that lash through your veins, white-hot.

It's good. You like kissing him—

His hand slides up your waist, coming to rest on your heaving breast. The roughness of his palm gliding over your nipple has your toes curling. There's an ache inside of you, desperate to be filled, and you feel it pulsing in need when he traps your hardened nipple between his thumb and forefinger through the silk of your robe, pinching, tugging. You want his mouth on you. Want this wicked, sinful tongue all over your body. You need it—

Need him, need him, them—

Johnny grunts, the noise vibrating across your lips. The itching tingle under your skin is a shock. It jars you. You come back to your senses with the taste of warm blood on your tongue. Of Johnny rutting his hips into yours, his erection pressing hard, heavy, against you. It's them. It's him—

He's making you lose yourself. Pulling at the splintered pieces of your resolve, your control until it comes loose, breaking away from the fractured wall that is your sense of self. Your agency. Your autonomy.

You're struggling to catch up to the thinning threads of anger, disgust, fear, but they dance out of your reach. All you're left with is this emptiness that screams at you to satiate it.

Johnny's hands drop to the sash around your waist. “Wrapped ye up, nice and pretty fer us.”

He leans in close, and you catch the scent of ichor. Of iron. It churns your stomach, and sours through you. You want to be sick. Want to turn away from him, but something keeps you in place. Something soft, warm.

A sun-scorched cornfield after a rain shower. Coumarin. Something earthy, mild. Warm. You bask in it, leaning in close. Wanting more, more—

Ghost's massive frame moulds to your back, and the heat of his body is an inferno nearly as oppressive as his presence. It jars through you, shaking the reverie that fell, soft as snow, around you.

If Johnny smells of life, of fresh bloom, then Ghost, by contrast, smells of death. Rotting leaves. Damp soil.

Their smells are sharp. You breathe them in, letting their scent stain your lungs.

He slides his bearish hand over your cheek, and the way it spans the entire length of your face has soft shudders rippling through your body. He's a mountain. A behemoth. You feel the power in his body as he rests it against yours, fragile. Vulnerable. The contrast makes you sick.

The way he touches you, too, makes you feel nauseous. The way they both do, like they're owed the privilege. It's possessive, familiar. Reverent, in small shades. It makes that oily thing that slinked out in the wounds trauma wrought preen. Purring under the attention. Under their anchoring gaze.

The part still feebly clinging to the old way of your life, when you'd play by the hungry shores and pretend you could not hear the rapacious growls from within the forest, rallies against it, knocking battered fists on the walls of its gilded prison. You shouldn't feel special in their arms.

You're not the first, after all.

The thought is a knife to your gut. A twisted, rotten feeling wells in the brutal aftermath.

You wonder if this is what they do to everyone they pick. Stripping them bare, ridiculing them—making a mockery of something that’s meant to be sacred, pure. It tugs at your chest, needling inside the empty space they promised they’d fill.

“Do you always play with your food like this?”

You didn't mean for it to slip out—especially not so fragile. Made of thin glass.

They go still before you.

Johnny's brows furrow. Ghost drills holes in the back of your head.

“Our food?” Johnny's asking, as if your town wasn't built as a banquet hall for them to feast on. “What are you on about, hen?”

“Jealous, are we?” His voice is a rasp. Gravel. “Guess we'll have to show you your place then, pet.”

Your place. You want to ask if that's by his foot, kneeling before him, or if it's on a platter, but he doesn't give you the chance.

Your head is turned sharply to the side, fingers digging, harsh and unforgiving, into your jaw until it drops open to alleviate the ache.

As Johnny works on taking your robe off, growling at the welts that line your skin, Ghost dips his fingers into your mouth, petting your tongue, nearly making you gag. Choke.

“Stick it out,” he growls, and you're quick, mindless, to obey his command. “Good.”

He tastes of leather and gun oil. Briny from the blood under his nails. The dirt.

It's the furthest thing from godly.

The searing aftertaste of something ozonic, calcined, seeps down your throat. Sinful, wicked. You think of brimstone, ichor; ashes from psalms, and try not to gag.

He takes a moment to stare at the soft, pink flesh held in his massive, scarred fingers, gaze darkening with something that looks like it might burn if you get too close.

And then, satisfied with whatever he finds, he leans in, and spits on your tongue.

You flinch, body jerking in their hold, but you're stopped from going too far by their hands keeping you in place. Shackled.

It's hot. Wet. You feel it land in a thick glob in the middle, right above the blackened nail of his thumb. It begins to slide down the side when your lip wobbles under the weight of your shame, your embarrassment.

It's degrading. It's awful. Gross. Your eyes flood with searing, angry tears. A watery, black distortion of yourself, drenched in lachrymose, glares at you from the domed surface of his ink-black eyes.

“Swallow it,” he warns, letting go of your tongue. “And you better not waste a drop.”

There's char in those eyes. Something inside of you rears, the lingering remnants of an atavistic fear of the things that might burn you. It begs you to obey, to roll over and show him your soft, vulnerable belly.

Something about this man makes you want to bare your neck in submission.

You swallow. It burns going down.

Your place, you think, tasting something vile on your tongue.

“You're disgusting,” you spit, glaring at him. Both of them.

“Mouthy little thing, aren't you?”

“You spiton my tongue—!”

“Ungrateful, too.”

Johnny's fingers drag up your inner thigh, catching the slickness that drips from your core. He brings it up, letting Ghost see the glistening slick that coats his fingers. He spreads them, cheeks flushing at the strands that pull apart.

You bristle, hot and full of shame, but the evidence of your arousal staining his fingers is damning.

“Think she liked that, Ghost,” he whispers, reverent. His fingers twitch, body buzzing with a strange, kinetic energy.

He hums. It's guttural. Low. “All bark, and no bite.”

Johnny reaches for your robes, nodding along to Ghost's words. “Gotta tame the little hen,” he murmurs, but it's distant. Absent. His gaze turns molten when he looks at you.

Tame. Like an animal. Like you're some untrained beast. More of that shame wells up inside of you at the sheer degradation of it all. You're rendered into nothing but a pet for them to toy with and then devour.

Sickeningly, desire pools alongside the loathing. Uncontested by the slick dribbling down your thighs, the bare ache of your cunt clenching down around nothing.

It's them, of course. Rewiring your head. Hewning you into a shape that fits their interest. A little pet for them to play with.

You shudder. Wish it was only because of the chill on your skin as a drape of midnight silk falls over the forest around you, and the horrible shadows these monsters cast in the pale moonlight. But there's an eagerness in your pulse. A sense of anticipation that can't be blamed on fear alone.

Deft, bloodstained fingers strip your robe off your shoulders, letting it fall to the lush grass below. His eyes are burning amber when they run the length of you, now bared to them both.

“Gonnae fuck you now,” he's rumbling, desperate and hushed, and for a moment, you could almost trick yourself into thinking it's a plea. That he is begging for this, pleading to have a taste, but you know when Ghost pulls you back, letting Johnny drop to his knees on the forest floor, eyes fixed on the apex of your thighs, that the idea of asking never once crossed their minds.

You should be honoured.

The wicked gleam in Ghost's flinty gaze seems to reinforce this notion, cementing its place as a brassbound truism, a gospel for you to bend and pray at.

Johnny unzips his trousers, and the sound of it cutting through the unnatural stillness of the forest makes you antsy for something you can't begin to let yourself think about. His clothes are left in a messy pile as he lays down on the grass, beckoning you closer. His gaze skirts away from you, to Ghost looming impossibly large over your shoulder, a silent conversation you don't understand—don’t think you ever could—and then Ghost moves.

The heat of his body tattoos itself along the length of your back, searing and firm. You bump into him, and there's no give at all. It's solid. Unyielding. His chest rumbles. He drops his arm, looping his massive bicep around you, fixing it snug beneath your breasts, and pulls you flush against him.

This close, you catch the scent of the woods lingering in the obsidian shadows that blanket him like a cloak. Cedar, pine. But there's something heavier beneath it all. Wet. Humus. Loam. Moss-covered rocks. Freshly dug dirt. He smells of the forest after heavy rains snuffed out a scorching wildfire. Calcine. Char.

His hands are soft when he holds you. Gentle. Or, rather, as gentle as a man like him could be. He drags you down, perched above Johnny's cock—long, fat, and veiny—and the sudden deluge of trepidation that edges so softly into fear rears, makes you whine.

“Stop—!” You gasp when your knees hit the soft grass, one teetering an inch off the ground by the breadth of his hips. “I've not—I’ve never—”

You can't bring yourself to say it.

Ghost begins to purr. “Sweetest little thing, ain't you?”

Johnny whines. “Gonnae make it good fer ya. Fer waitin’ for us.”

You want to lash out at that. Bite back. You didn't wait for them.

But he's not listening. His eyes are buried in the place between your thighs.

“Bring her here.”

Ghost complies with a rough noise spilling from his chest. “Gonna get yourself a taste, Johnny?”

“It's gonna be heavenly, Lt.”

They're not listening to you anymore, and really—they haven't been at all. Ghost pushes you further up the length of Johnny's chest until your thighs are being pried apart by the width of his face. Hovering over him like, bare, fills you with a keen sense of embarrassment.

You sound shier than you'd like when you tremble, asking: “What if I hurt you?”

Ghost chuckles. “Death by drowning? I think he'd thank you for it, pet.”

“S’okay,” Johnny's slurring, humid breath ghosting over your slit. “Won't hurt me, hen. Just—fuck—just sit on my face, pretty thing. Need t’taste you.”

It's the only warning he gives before he's pulling you down, letting your cunt rub against the stubble on his cheek. When his mouth is flush to your slit, he breathes in deep, and moans. It's filthy. And then he opens his mouth and his tongue presses between your folds, licking a long, rasping stripe up to your aching clit. The feeling ignites a heat unlike anything you'd ever felt before. An electric shock. A soft, wet heat.

Johnny licks at your cunt like a man starved, grunting and groaning into you as if it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. His hands keep you anchored in place, unable to wiggle away from the scorching kisses he peppers over your clit—a little tease, he murmurs, for being so good.

It's too much—this pleasure, unknown to you, is endless. Overwhelming. You gasp wetly, choking on your spittle as it leaks from the corner of your mouth. Everything is notched up, heightened, and then condensed to just the feeling of Johnny's mouth on your bare cunt, feasting.

He devours you with a ferocity that leaves you breathless, punches a hole straight through your lungs until all the air you feebly gulp down slips out with a whine, a wheeze.

You think you might fall. Might drop off the steep precipice, and shatter at the bottom. Broken. Unfixable. They'll take you apart—

And then you’re falling forward from a shove against your back. The only thing that saves you from hitting your face off the ground is Johnny's firm hands on your hips. You catch yourself on your palms, bracing them against the grass. Gasping at the suddenness of the assault, and the way it exposes you further, pressing your cunt harder into Johnny's face.

“Ain't that a sight?” Ghost’s voice is pure sin as it washes over you, leaving goosebumps in its wake.

Johnny takes the new position in stride, adjusting himself as he sickles on your clit. Your hand lifts, and settles on the length of his mohawk, fisting it tightly in a white-knuckled grip.

Something is knotting inside of you, being pulled tight. Ripped asunder.

Ghost's fingers are long, and thick. He circles them around your rim, softly. Teasingly. And then he's pushing one inside, stretching you.

“Tight,” he rasps, and it sounds like praise. “Gotta loosen you up, don't we?”

A single finger feels like more than you can handle, and you flinch, tightening around him. His breath rushes out on a groan.

“Ease up, pet.”

Easier said than done, you think, whining when he curls his finger, stroking your aching, sensitive walls. This, Ghost knuckle-deep and Johnny circling your clit cruelly with the tip of his tongue, is too much. It edges sharply into pain, into too much, too intense. A tug-of-war on your body, pulling you in the direction of sinful pain and unrepentant pleasure.

You whine with it, hips squirming. You're not sure if you want to get closer, to take his fingers deeper, or to get away. And then adds another, pressing it in along side his index. The stretch is different, new. You mewl, fisting the blades of grass between your fingers.

Johnny licks down, the tip of his tongue slicking Ghost's fingers as he scissors them deep inside of you. All the way to the last knuckle. He pisons his hand against your sopping, aching cunt, and the wet, lewd squelch has the tips of your ears burning.

You're wrapped tight around his digits, and he coos mockingly at you.

“Takin’ two for me, pet. Good girl. Now take another—”

His ring finger circles your taut, raw rim. You flinch, keening. Johnny soothes the ache with his tongue, dipping it sloppily inside your aching hole.

“C’mon,” he husks, pressing, pushing. It's tight. You feel the ache of the stretch deep in your belly. “Take it—” something gives. You gush around him, yowling in that heady mix of pleasure-pain. His knuckles knock against something inside of you that has your toes curling, your back arching. “That's it. That's my good girl—”

His voice is pinched, strained. The sound travels down your spine, liquid and white-hot, leaving you quivering in the aftermath.

Below you, Johnny groans into your drenched pussy; the sound is wrecked, ruined. You tremble when the vibrations roll through your clit, nudging into that coil that spools, tightening inside of your belly.

“Gonna come for me?”

He quickens his pace, fucking his fingers into you with a raw aggression that makes your spine feel liquid, pooling with bliss.

It knocks the air from your lungs, and makes you quiver. A plucked bow pulled taut—

Johnny's lips close around your clit, bullying it mercilessly with his tongue. It brings you to the brink, belly knotting. Twisting. Something coils, spools—

Then Ghost is leaning down, the mask pushed up to the bridge of his nose, and he sinks his teeth into your nape as he brutally fucks his fingers against a spot inside of you that makes your vision turn to static.

It's the singeing pain and the blistering pleasure that makes you clench down tight on his fingers as he rides you through the high of your climax, howling some amalgamation of their names into the blood-scented night.

“That's it.” The words are mangled in his throat. Bitter, charred. “So pretty when you come around my fingers like that.”

The taste of your blood is thick on his breath when he pressed his bared mouth to your sweat-slicked temple. The humid breaths ghosting across your damp skin has you shivering, body still buzzing with the heavy release of endorphins. It makes you feel heavy. Laden. You go slack in his arms, worn to the bone mentally and physically. Everything seems to catch up to you at once.

It's almost as if they were expecting it, waiting for the crash.

They pull you back, and you go easily in their arms. All soft and malleable, perfect for them to mould how they like. Ghost holds you aloft over Johnny's hips, fingers biting into your flesh. It burns. You press against it, embracing the ache.

Johnny lines up, the weeping head of his cock pressed taut to your slit, sliding across your slick folds until he finds the place you burn hot, wet. He notches against it, the mushroomed tip dipping inside of your drenched hole, opening you up.

The hands on your hip twitch, tightening. It's almost too much, and you whine into Ghost’s mouth, muffled slightly from the hard crank in your neck as he turns your head sharply, smothering you in those too intense kisses, the ones that feel like you're being slowly boiled alive. Cold, icy to molten in a steady incline that leaves you feeling so far away from yourself, lost amid the unrelenting simmer of his heat.

He presses down on your hips. Johnny breathes out heavily when you take more of him in, your wet cunt stretching over his glands.

Your eye cracks open, vision hazy, blurred from unshed tears that pebble along your lash line. It burns. It feels like you're being split in two.

Johnny's head is angled off the soft mossy floor of the forest, chin pressed tight to his sternum as his eyes glued to the sight of you above him, narrowing in—unblinkingly, wide-eyed, and wild—at the place where he disappears inside of you.

His eyes flash, liquid gold, when you're pulled down, flush against his pelvis. Swallowing him whole. Johnny twitches inside of you, cockhead pressing taut to your walls. You wail at the feeling of him pressed in deep.

“Fuck, hen,” he's whispering, reverent. “You look s’fucking good like this, don't’ye? Simon, oh fuck, Simon, have a look at’er.”

You feel Ghost shift behind you, hooking his chin on your shoulder to stare, openly, at the place where you take Johnny into the root. He rumbles at the sight. You feel the reverberations rattle your bones. Dislodging cobwebs that weave over your common sense.

“Look’it that,” he coos, all false warmth and softened edges. It brews a storm inside of your cunt—crackling heat, searing electricity. You clench, needily, on Johnny, and sob at the white-hot heat simmering in your core. “Stretched so pretty around your cock, Johnny.”

“Fuck, yeah,” he slurs the words out, drooling slightly. It makes Ghost snort, mocking. Cruel. His hands tighten around you.

“The nights barely started and you're already panting like a dog in heat.”

Johnny bucks his hips with a groan, setting a sloppy rhythm of grinding his cockhead against an untouched place inside of you that fractures your vision into pieces and makes you throb.

He's every bit of the dog in heat Ghost mentioned, pistoning into you like a man starved for it. Selfish, greedy, but there's a softness to his pace that belies the eagerness of his rut.

With the sting of the stretch dulling to a sensation of fullness, pleasure licks across your skin. A damning feeling in the pit of your stomach, all liquid heat that threatens to drown you if you're not careful.

The noise of him fucking into you from below is lewd and shameful, and sounds like it could fill the whole forest. The loud smack each time your hips meet; the wet squelch when slams his cock inside of you, balls slapping against your ass—the happy noise of a purring cunt, Ghost rasps, mouthing over your nape.

But it's nothing, of course, to the litany of moans that are forced out of your mouth, high-pitched and desperate.

“Thas’it,” Johnny's slurring, laid out beneath you like sin incarnate. Your hands scramble along the firm length of his chest, struggling to find purchase as he ruins you. “Feels good, aye, hen? Like it when I fuck you like this, don't ye?”

That part of yourself that's still hurriedly looking for exits, for an escape route, wants to protest his claims, but there's a fire in your belly. The smoke billowing up your esophagus is choking it.

Emotions whiplashing between fear, loathing, and something soft, something affectionate—a paradox you can't begin to unravel considering you barely know them. But it sits there, gleaming amongst the pleasure-pain that ripples down your spine.

You want their approval, even though their attention sits in your stomach like a stone. Weighing you down. Anchoring you. The duality of it all crosses wires in your head, and makes you yearn for something. For them.

You think hate it. Know, deep down, you should hate it more.

Ghost cups his hand over your mons, fingers brushing over the flushed, tight seal of your rim. Having the bearish palm of his hand cup you like this, rough fingers stroking, petting, is too much, and you sob from it. From the intense heat, the searing pleasure, the biting pain, of it all. Pleads get tangled in your throat, caught on the warring sensations wracking your body.

You flinch back, and he coos, mocking and mean. You hate him, you think, hate this (hate, even more, that you don’t), but your silent curses go unheeded. Ghost curls around you like a boa constrictor, a noose—tight and unyielding—and makes a pleased noise in his throat when he spans the width of his hand over your pelvis and finds that the length of it swallows you whole.

His size is immeasurable in a way that scratches at your hindbrain, almost as if he's changing his shape, flexing limbs and mass hidden from your mortal eyes. It makes you feel impossibly small in his arms, and there's fear—to be expected—but something prickles in the back of your throat when you see just massive, how ungodly, the sheer dearth between your sizes truly is.

He's huge. A mountain.

The fire is only fuelled further when his thumb gentles a rhythm over your clit, as if to distract you from the steady pressure he puts on Johnny's cock, forcing the stiff length into your back wall. The sudden stretch makes your knees tremble. Has a new, dizzying heat licking up your spine.

“Ghost—”

The ache has you whining. Has Johnny's hands scrambling up, holding tight against the sides of your ribcage. He grunts, back arching when it makes you go impossibly tight around him.

“Oh, fuck, hen—! Feels so fucking good—” he's slurring, cheeks flushed. Eyes hazy. He looks so devastatingly beautiful, laid out for you like this. A feast.

It's easier to pretend with him, you find.

Unlike Ghost, Johnny has an uncanny ability to seem human enough for you to blind yourself to the tendrils wisping, gossamer-thin, off his skin. Nearly translucent. A soft, satin cream to Ghost’s heavy, moody charcoal.

You could almost make yourself believe that the smudge under his eye is just discolouration instead of the rotting blood of someone you used to know. His nails, his fingers, are all stained with the juice from strawberries you'd enjoyed during dinner.

That the shadows in his eyes, the ones that coil and roll like a caged serpent, is just a trick of the light.

Could, you think. But can't.

Can't because he burns much too hot for a human man. Feels like chiselled stone between your thighs.

And the hunger.

It paints his expression a deep, forest green—rapacious, greedy—and brims from something that feels older than the earth itself. That ground you sit on a mere infant to the primordial being beneath you. And it might be.

Neither of them has said what they are, but they've shown you enough. Ripping through a group of people in seconds until all that remained was discarded limbs, and torn appendages. Broken bones. A horrific bloodbath, over by the time it took you to whisper their names in a fractured plea.

Ghost bit through muscle like it was tissue paper. Ripped apart guns and knives as if they were flimsy, plastic toys.

It terrifies you.

“You're so wet,” Ghost chides, as if he knows the trail your thoughts turned down, and wants to rub your disobedient nose in it. “Just a messy little cunt, aren't you?”

The airy baritone of his voice has heat pooling in your lower belly.

“No—” you try to refute him, try to fight back, but his thumb just presses harder into your clit in torturous punishment. “Ah, don't—”

And then he's pushing in, worming his finger in beside Johnny.

The shock of it is electric. It buzzes through your nerves until they're charred, singed, with the thought of it alone. The burn in your cunt, the harsh, too-much stretch, the pressure, is dizzyingly sharp, and unshakeable. It aches. Makes your pussy throb—

“Makin’ room fer y’erself, Si?”

Ghost grunts, the sound thick and raspy from the bend in his neck as he leers over your shoulder, watching the slick run down the back of his hand as he works his forefinger into your cunt, sliding it along Johnny's cock. It's neither a confirmation nor a denial, and the uncertainty has your head spinning. There's no way—

“Like that idea, pet?”

“You won't fit, you won't—”

Humid breath curls across your cheek when he huffs, the airy chuckle bursting with unrestrained mirth. Ghost chides you with an abrading tut; a gentle admonishment for a cheeky child. The embarrassment of it all, the humiliation of being reprimanded like this, makes shame turns supernovae when he rubs his thumb, approvingly, over your clit when your protests fall silent. You can feel your muscles relax just a bit more, letting him worm the tip of his middle finger in with a searching stretch that makes you keen, whining at the white-hot burn of it all. It's too much—

You throb, shivering, at the wet, sinful squelch your drooling cunt makes when Ghost manages to push both fingers in together.

“Good girl,” he drawls, and it's poison. “Won't fit, eh? I don't dunno about that, pet. Your little cunt seems eager for it, don't you think?”

“Oh, fuck, Si—” Johnny's hand comes up, cupping the back of Ghost's hand where your slick runs down to his wrist. “She's got ye all wet—”

You can't refute it. Not when you can see the slickness drenching his back hand, spilling all over Johnny's quivering stomach.

Ghost chuckles again. “Could drown in it, Johnny.”

“Ah, fuck, dinnae tease me like that—”

He bucks into you slowly, and the sensation nearly makes you weep. With his cock rubbing against you, filling you so deep, and Ghost maliciously toying with a spot inside of your cunt that has you seeing stars, has molten heat pooling in your belly, you teeter on the brink of overstimulation, body pushed past the very edges of your mettle.

Something has to give, has to break. You're glass in their overeager hands, fragile sides pressed upon by rotten, greedy fingers. The pressure has cracks forming, splinters. You feel raw, fractured; there's a pressure inside of you that grows laden with each jerk of Johnny's hips, each cruel swipe of Ghost’s thumb, tightening. Tightening.

And then it pops. Breaks. You're coming around them, cunt throbbing like a heartbeat, drooling mindlessly at the rapturous pleasure buzzing through your marrow.

They shatter you into basal parts, broken fragments.

Neither seems particularly bothered to put you back together again.

You come to—unaware, even, that you had passed out—with your head resting on a firm chest, ass pitched in the air, hips held in place by strong hands. There's pressure against you, inside of you, but it's different from before.

Johnny groans into the spread cheek of your ass when you whimper, answering your feeble call. It's all so animalistic, primal. You tense.

Beneath you, the chest you're splayed on top of rumbles. “Careful, pet. Johnny's gone through such trouble to stretch your little ass. Be a waste if you tensed up now, wouldn't it?”

He rubs his bearish paws up and down your arms for a moment, in some twisted pantomime of comfort, before making his intentions known when he continues further down on the last stroke until he has one hand sliding around your hips, resting on the cleft of your ass, and the other curling beneath you, cupping your tender, messy cunt in his palm. The fit of them around you, in such intimate places you'd only ever dreamed of giving away to the person you love brings out a strange, sickly feeling in your gut. It's not a perfect fit. The hand he shoves between your thighs digs painfully into the bones of your inner legs. His fingers fold over themselves just to squeeze in.

But the rough, scorching hand on you is possessive. His dark eyes burn with it.

Mine, mine, ours.

The hand on your ass slips lower, to where Johnny has your rim stretched taut around three fingers. Circling the stinging skin with the tip of his index.

Johnny makes a low noise in his throat, and leans forward, his warm breath whispering across your sensitive flesh. Ghost's finger lifts. Johnny's chin rests on his knuckles.

There's a wet, sucking noise. A gag. A muffled groan. A pop, then—

“Fuck, Si. Can still taste her on you—”

“Yeah? Go on, then. Lick her off me, Johnny. Clean me up.”

He does. You feel the whisper of his tongue as he licks Ghost's finger, sucking on it with a particularly lewd moan.

Johnny pulls off with a pop. “Got you nice and wet."

Ghost presses his slick finger to your stuffed hole, petting around Johnny's knuckles, and maybe it's muscle memory from the last time he had his finger against you, but your body relaxes. Knows, immediately, what his intentions are. There's no sense fighting it. Not when you know what the pinch feels like when you do.

He feels the way you slacken in his hold, and he purrs.

“Quick study, huh? Good girl.”

He growls the last part out, a mangled tease in the thick of his throat. Rasping, pitched low. It licks across your hindbrain, coy and sensual, and pressing into that place inside of your head that aches at the mere notion of approval—especially from men like him, like them—and you can't help it. Can't stop yourself.

You whine, arching back into it. Folding your body against the lines of praise skirting across your spine. A cerebral pleasure unlike anything they're doing to your body now. Being praised by someone who cuts his body into the mocking shape of a man, but leaks madness and apathy into the air like a poisonous gas should not bludgeon into that stupid little place inside your head that quivers at any semblance of approval, and yet—

Damn you, it does.

Beneath you, Ghost’s eyes darken, sharpening with intrigue. Wet with his hunger. A starving beast on the prowl. You can see his mind whirring, locking in on this piece of vulnerability you dangle in front of his muzzle like a scrap of meat.

He hums, chest rumbling with the low decibels. Content, for now, with this weapon you hand him, sharpened to a fine point to better flay your skin. It's a nasty look in his eyes. Full of something you can't name—something far too animalistic, primal, for your domesticated senses to hone in on, to interpret.

That alone—this unnameable thing that flickers across blue scar tissue, dark and damning—makes you shudder, and you hate yourself for it.

(but hate, even more, that you stopped being able to tell the difference between desire and fear with them; the two opposing sensations merging into a Frankensteinian beast with dangerous claws dipped in fresh poison.)

His reward is the tip of his finger pushing into your hole, cooing the whole time about how good you are, how good you take them, so pretty like this, ain't you? all loose and fucked stupid—

The stretch is sharp. Stinging. You wish it would ground you in some way. Shake loose the cobwebs that seemed to have knit over your dormant sense of self (agency, autonomy, propriety, respect—) until you come back to yourself, back to the fire you felt all your life. The one that burns like a wildfire in your veins.

Maybe that anger might be enough to get you out of this, away from the jowls of the beasts who look at you sometimes like they want nothing more than to tear into your flesh, and gnaw on your bones. To ruin you. Gnash your atoms between their teeth, and snuff out the embers crackling in your misfiring synapses until you're a husk, a shell.

Perfectly hollow so that they can stuff themselves in the empty space.

You won't, won't—

But Ghost leans up, the veins in his neck bulging under the strain of keeping his head aloft, and he starts to nuzzle his masked lips over your nipples. The heat from his mouth bleeds through the cloth, and the contrast of warmth and the starchy scratch of his balaclava grazing your sensitive flesh has you mewling out, thrashing to get loose.

He grunts, tightens his hand on your hip to keep you from moving, and bites your nipple, hard, through the fabric. A reprimand, you know, for daring to try and pull away.

Johnny huffs behind you. “Cannae do that, hen. Might hurt you with all that squirming, so sit still.”

He pats the hand—not currently three fingers deep inside of your ass—on your cheek as he says the last words. It's sharp, and stings. You blanche.

You've grown accustomed to Ghost’s prickliness. The way he edges between being mocking, mean, and slightly cruel, to offering small morsels of praise and softness when you bend so prettily to his whims. He's had a firm hand in most of this. Commanding, leading, directing. Content to push you around into the shapes he likes best, ones that you've grown to like, too. And when you don't comply—he’s rather adept at showing you his displeasure (in almost equal measure to his rewards).

Having Johnny scold you, however, is worlds apart from the brutish dominance, the flat apathy, you've come to expect from the man who leers at you, smirking and mean and nasty, while calling you their good girl, their pretty pet.

Where Ghost is the firm hand, Johnny has been the comforting embrace.

This little tap to your ass is somehow worse. You bow to the shame that rips through you. Dragooned into obedience by their hands, this disappointment from Johnny is painful. You whimper, hating how easily they make you bend.

Johnny makes you want to be good.

“Sorry,” you whisper, voice paper-thin. “I'm—I’m—”

“S’alright, hen,” he's cooing instantly, rough palm stroking the stinging skin gently. Forgivingly. “Jus’ worried about ye.”

They play you like a marionette. Pulling on all the right strings to make you dance. Johnny whispers words of adoration against your flesh, the soft embrace to Ghost’s firm hand. It makes your head spin.

They fuck your hole with their fingers, cooing nonsense at you, at each other—promises made to fuck this hole together, too, in the future (“very, very near future, pet, you can bet on that—”), to take turns tonight to fill you to the brim, until all of your holes are drenched in them—and the rhythmic motions start to drag you down to that place again, the one that turns you docile and stupid. That has your logic, your common sense, dribbling out of your ears until all that remains is white noise, static.

Ghost fits his whole finger inside, and Johnny teases your rim with his tongue. The sensation of pleasure and pressure is almost too much for you to bear.

It's then, when you wobble on the brink of passing out again, that Johnny pulls back from your ass, panting. Decisive. “Think she's good to go, Lt.”

“Yeah? Get her nice and loose, Johnny?”

As if to prove it, Johnny slowly pulls his fingers out, moaning low in his throat when your hole gapes slightly around Ghost's finger, stretched out and ready for him.

You burn, burying your face further into Ghost's chest to avoid the white-hot shame of it all. It's dirty. Awful.

You feel empty without Johnny's fingers inside of you, too.

Ghost laughs like he knows, and it sounds just like a tree breaking apart in a forest fire. Consumed by ash, charred beyond salvation. It glues inside your head, sticking to that Frankensteinian place that lights up, nuclear, whenever you can't tell whether or not you're terrified or aroused.

(The unbearable ache in your empty cunt calls you a liar.)

Johnny's cock isn't small by any standard—a truism your aching cunt can easily attest to—but when Ghost tugs harshly on his trousers, and his cock springs free, you're hit with a dizzying sense of fear at the sight of it.

Ghost is thick, uncut. The tip is flushed a deep red, leaking prespend. It arches up toward you, brushing the soft skin of your stomach as Johnny, mindless to your sudden nerves, shuffles you into position.

Despite the tendrils of fear coiling over you, when it droops under the heavy weight of itself, coming to rest along his broad abdomen, a rush of saliva fills your mouth.

It feels a bit like a betrayal when your cunt throbs, achingly empty. Desperate.

“Like what you see, pet?” He scrapes the words out of his throat, and the smell of smoke is heavy in air when you breathe them in, brimming with dark promises.

Your lashes flutter when he reaches down, gripping his cock in his hand. Jerking it toward you. A tease. You whimper, wanting it so viscerally that your hips begin to wiggle, arching back. Desperate to be filled again. To be taken part all over.

He huffs when your slackened jaw grows slick with drool.

“Greedy thing, ain't you?”

“I’m–I’m not—” It's hard to protest with the evidence running down your chin.

There's a nasty crinkle in his eyes. He taps the fat head of his cock against your inner thigh. “Don't worry. I'll let you get a taste later—plan on fucking that cheek right out of your mouth.”

“Don't be too rough on her, now. You know I like it when she begs.”

“Oh, she'll beg—” he punctuates it by pushing you lower on his lap, until your pussy sits right above his dribbling cock. “Just might not make much sense when I'm gaggin’ her on it.”

“You're a bad man.”

Ghost growls. “The worst, Johnny.”

The head of his cock presses against your throbbing clit, and hysterically—stupidly—you can't help but to think of a chaste kiss with the way the weeping tip nudges into your flesh. But the flash of pleasure spiking down your spine when Ghost slides his hand over his length, pushing it harder against you, dashes the garish, misplaced innocence of the act from your mind.

It leaves a wet smear of prespend when he notches it lower, finding your messy, wet hole, and pushing inside.

Ghost seems to savour the way your rim clenches around him—starving for it, he snarls—content to just tease you by popping the head in until it's swallowed up by your eager cunt, only to pull out barely a second later. It's torture, this.

“Please,” you're babbling, begging. It's unbecoming, and had your sense of awareness not leaked out of your ears, you might have felt something like shame over it. For pleading with this brutish man—this monster—to stick his cock inside of you, splitting you open, and pressing up tight to the place you ache the most.

“So pretty when you beg,” someone is slurring, and you think it might be Johnny, but there's a slurry in your head again. That awful static.

Ghost digs his heel into the soft ground under his feet and hefts his hips up at the same time he pulls you down, roughly meeting you in the middle. The impact is brutal. The angle has him battering into a spot inside that nearly makes you pass out from the blistering pleasure rocketing through your core. It's a whiplash—pure euphoria ghosting along your veins that is chased, in a terrible pursuit, by the pinching sting, the intense pressure, of Ghost's cock forcing its way inside of your cunt, stretching you to the very brink of what you think you can handle.

He lets your hips rest flush against his, balls pressed tight to your perineum, a momentary respite, but it doesn't last long. Ghost is impatient for you in a way that feels undeserved. Mean. He waits until you're breathing in before rolling his hips, eyes crinkling at the corners when you choke on your gasp.

“What? Thought this is what you were begging me for, pet,” he's chiding, but the liquid desire in his voice sullies his mocking words. “I'm jus’ givin’ you what you asked for.”

Johnny snorts.

You want to refute his words if only because he sounds so satisfied with himself, but he doesn't give you the chance to bite back. He lifts you up, and snaps his hips into you again. Harsh, demanding. He gives you no time to rest before he's setting a terrible pace that leaves you clawing at his chest, scrambling to find purchase amid the unrelenting torrent of this horrific pleasure-pain that burns through you.

Ghost slows his pace as Johnny's hands settle on your waist.

“Ready for me, hen?” He's asking, soft enough that it melts some of the trepidation choking you when you remember what all the preparation was for. “I'll be gentle. You'd like that, won't yeh? All stuffed full of us.”

Ghost hums when you're pulled flush against his pelvis. “Pretty stuffed already, I reckon.”

“Bet she is, sir,” he drawls, mouthing wetly over your bruised nape.

The honorific is new. You hadn't known monsters had hierarchies.

“C’mon, then,” Ghost teases, moving his hands to settle on the curve of your cheeks.

You feel like little more than a toy when he spreads them apart, showing Johnny your slick hole, ready for him, and the taut stretch of your cunt swallowing Ghost’s cock, his balls resting, heavy and hot, against your holds. It's obscene. Lewd.

He whines like a wounded animal.

“Steamin’ Jesus, Lt,” he breathes, panting. “Give a damn warnin’—ah, fuck, hen, look’it yeh—”

You can imagine the sight you make, and burn, blistering under the weight of his gaze and the deep ache in your guts, the want. There's embarrassment, a touch of anger, but—

The absence of shame prickles against you.

They don't give you a moment to unravel that thought. Johnny braces his hand on your hip, and feeds his cock into your slick hole.

It's a blunt pressure, unlike their fingers, his tongue: it spears you open, wrenching your rim apart to fit. The head pops in, slipping inside, and you think you might break, might shatter once more into tiny fragments, broken by the devastating stretch of their cocks before your body gives in, yielding. It's almost as if he was waiting for it, for this soft submission. The moment your body relaxes around him, he pushes forward, and doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He ploughs through you until your cheeks are flush with his hips.

You're so full, indescribably so. Stuffed to the brim by their cocks, seated so deep that it almost feels like they're reaching all the way up to your throat, and you swallow reflectively, tasting the brininess of your spit from the lingering blood in Johnny's kiss.

“Fucked nice and sloppy,” Ghost rasps, twitching inside of you. His cock jerking against your walls makes you keen.

You feel them move together, separated only by a thin wall of tissue, and it has your toes curling, your body coiling. Too much, too intense—you can't tell where Johnny begins and Ghost ends. The slow simmer in your belly is notched up, all rationale and thought turning into a slurry in your head, leaking out through your ears. You teeter on the precipice, unable to do anything at all except take.

They match paces with each other, slowly taking you apart. Unmaking you. You catch stars in Ghost's eyes when his gaze jumps from you to Johnny, and back again; the ethereal glow of an event horizon, too far past the brink to escape it. It snares around both of you, trapping you in its inescapable pull, and you know, then, that this feeling inside of your chest is rotting hope.

There's no escape.

Bullied between them, stuffed to the brim, and used for their pleasure—it breaks you, shatters the tenuous grip you had on your resolve until it's wisps of smoke slipping through your fingers.

The hushed reverence from before is gone. Snuffed out between claws that sink into your flesh, digging through tissue and tendon to swipe at your bones. False starts laid out in their namesakes. They fuck you like an animal, docile and trapped between them, and wholly at their mercy. There's no give, no inch—they take; ripping into your feeble body with frenzied teeth and bestial growls, trying desperately to quench their insatiable appetite.

It's messy, primal. They fuck you the same way they feasted—with animalistic brutality until you're bloodied scraps at the altar of their desire. A second sacrifice gifted by beasts with barbed wire claws and poisoned tongues.

In a way, it's almost punishing. As if they're going out of their way to bruise your walls and batter your cervix, bullying your insides until you're raw and tender, pulsing with the fill of them. An ache you'll feel for aeons.

And maybe that's their goal. To galvanise you into a fine powder, to split your atoms between their teeth. Crushing the part of you that draws divisional lines between yourself and them, them and you. To cave it all in until the delineation isn't just blurred but destroyed.

With the last vestiges of cognisance being fucked out of you by Johnny's sloppy, short thrusts, and Ghost's merciless pace, it already begins to blur when you think about it. About separation. Their quest to batter you into submission, to soften your edges enough so they can reshape you into their likeness, their image, is working. Damn them—

It doesn't take much to send you reeling back to primalism, to shred the scar tissue sealed over your hindbrain, and leak over your atavistic fear of those dormant instincts churning inside of you. The urge to run, and hunt, and eat—gorging yourself on prey animals crushed under your heel, torn apart by your teeth.

The clandestine whispers in your ear, hissing to you about how you were made for them, born to be laid out between their bodies, and fucked stupid by their cocks, to be filled by them over and over again drown out the part of you that wants to rebel. That wants to flee.

Johnny runs his hands over the plains of your stomach, palm pressing against the bulge of Ghost's cock outlined on your stomach. The shock of it, of his fat cock showing through your skin, gives way to a nebulous pleasure. A want you didn't know was ever there. Filling you so deeply that your body changes with his shape.

“Gonna fill you up,” it's uttered as gospel. Ironclad. Apodictic. “Gonnae make a mess out of ye, hen. Gonnae make ye swell wit’ it.”

He paints a future for you with the air itself as his canvas. Something hot thickens in the base of your throat. You choke on it.

“Gonna come, Johnny?” His hands are searing when they drop to the back of your thighs, spreading you open. It forces Johnny deeper inside of you. “Go on, then. Come for me.”

It's all it takes for him to rut into you, groaning low in his throat as he takes, takes. Grinding his cock into you with a near maddening desperation.

His feverish pace pushes you down the precipice, fingers scrambling through the colluvium that breaks under your touch. It's intense, blisteringly so. Your body is a tinderbox. Between their intense heat, you burst into flame..

Your release rockets through you like a shockwave, and you gush around Ghost's cock, clenching down around them like a vice.

“Oh, fuck, hen—gonnae—!”

Johnny spills, molten, inside of you, grunting, whining, wetly into your nape. He holds your hips tight against his pelvis as he fills you, thighs trembling with the force of his release.

Your body throbs, aching in a way you've never felt before, and you mewl when Ghost begins to fuck into you harder, chasing his own end. It's too much—

You babble nonsense against his chest, drool leaking from the corners of your mouth. Johnny runs his hands over your quivering belly, murmuring into your nape. Take it. Go on, take it, hen. You can do it, you can be good for us—

You want to. Badly. Ache the need to be so, so good. It sews itself into your hindbrain, the feverish need to be perfect for the two of them. In the slurried mush that remains of your head, you remember two words only. Please, Ghost. Please—

Johnny fills in the rest. “Come inside her, Simon. Fill her up. She's gaggin’ for it—”

He grunts at that, jaw clenched tight. The veins in his neck bulge through his skin, pulsing with his heartbeat. You feel his cock twitching deep inside of you, nudging against a spot that makes something deep in your belly ache.

He hones in on it, pushes deeper, presses into it mercilessly. It's a jolt of pleasure, of pain; the two seamlessly intertwined together. It's overwhelming. Too much—

Johnny's hand drops between your messy thighs, bullying his thumb over your clit, fingers stroking along Ghost’s cock as it pistons in and out you. And then there's static—white noise.

You think you come again.

His arm tightens around your waist when you gush around him, and he hisses through clenched teeth, calling you greedy.

Comin’ again? What a greedy little cunt. So desperate for my cum, are you?

He bullies his cock inside of you, desperate and sloppy, once, thrice, and then he's groaning into your bared throat, nails digging harshly into the skin of your hips. He presses his cock tight against your cervix, pulling on your waist to make you take him as deep as possible, not relent until his balls are flush against your ass. He comes like this, cock jerking, pulsing with his release, painting your insides with his virile spend.

With you boneless between them, barely clinging to sanity, Johnny catches Ghost’s mouth in what might be a kiss, but it's full of growls, snarls, and too much teeth. A punch with his bloodied lips. It's aggressive, bestial. You shudder under Johnny's body, burrow your cheek into the damp fabric of Ghost's cloak.

Seeing them aim to maim each other with teeth, tongue, and claws digging into their vulnerable, thick necks, fills you with a potent heat. Unshakeable. Unquenchable. You want more. More of this, of them—

“Fuckin’ hell, Johnny,” comes a wet rasp, drought on the taste of him. “Haven't had enough?”

“What?” It's full of breathless mischief. “Cannae keep up, ye old bastard?” His hands fall, hot and heavy, against your back, fingers dipping soothingly into the knobs of your sweat-slicked spine. “Gonnae have to. She's rarin’ t’go again.”

Ghost levels you both with a flat look, but the pools of liquid obsidian give way to a fresh heat. Something ugly curls inside the basin. Possessive. Damning.

“Insatiable, aren't you?”

His softening cock gives a feeble twitch inside of you, belying the implacable lilt to his tone. You mewl with it, walls too battered and bruised for anything more.

Ghost’s gaze drops to you. A pendulum swings through the ink. Something shifts. Breaks. That madness you'd seen earlier rears, snakes out from the rivers of blood cutting deep rivulets through the whites of his eyes. The confluence is shattering.

His hand lifts from your hip, and disappears over your shoulder. You hear the rustle of fabric, the heavy breath that spills from his wide chest as he breathes in deep. The sound is different this time. Unencumbered by the cloth around his mouth—

The pieces are put together for you when a searing mouth with razor-like teeth bites down on the meat of your neck.

Pain—sharp, poignant, and vicious—rips through your body, making you yowl into the empty, dark forest with your misery.

This doesn't feel like the bites given by Johnny earlier—ones that, now, feel almost playful, gentle, by comparison—and you think of Graves, of the ashen faces of the soldiers as they ripped into them, and you tremble, body thrown into a paroxysm of sudden, unadulterated fear.

He'll eat you—

“Ah, c’mon,” Johnny's voice cuts through the terror clotting in your pounding head, and you cling to the sound of his voice like a comfort. Sick, wrong—you mewl desperately, hands twitching for the safety of his arms. He coos sweetly at you, but doesn't steal you from Ghost’s grasp. “Said we weren't gonna do that now.”

Ghost's jaw unhinged from your flesh, tongue rasping over the fresh wounds, drinking your blood up with a horrible slurp. His fattening cock jerks inside of you, swelling along with his hunger.

It dawns on you, then, as the pain dulls into an achy throb that this wasn't him consuming you—it was much, much worse.

This is him claiming you.

It's a bloodied brand on your throat, a perfect ring around your pulse, for the whole world to see, to know, that you've been laid claim to. Collared.

He makes a noise, a pleased hum, as if he can hear your thoughts before pulling away with a suckling pop.

“You said, Johnny boy,” he drawls wetly, bare mouth smearing against the deep wound in your throat. He sounds drunk, words slurring out in a loose tease. The bite seems to unravel something inside of him, and he buries his face in your neck, scarred lips and teeth tugging at your bruised, sore flesh. “Best start now, I reckon. Before this pretty head of hers gets any stupid ideas.”

You're panting from the pain, dizzy with it and nearly nauseous, before Ghost purrs against your pulse, tongue laving over the deep tattoo of his teeth forever embedded in your skin.

It feels a bit like betrayal when Johnny tilts your chin, exposing the untouched side of your neck, and presses a gentle kiss to your pulse before sinking his teeth into the spot opposite of Ghost's.

“Ours,” he growls, and for the first time since you've met him, he sounds everybit of the inhuman monster you've easily likened to Ghost. “Gonnae take such good care’a ye, hen. Gonna take you from this place, keep’ye with us.”

Madness loops in Ghost's gaze when he raises his head, eyes cresting in a deep, satiated pleasure as he takes in the possessive arm Johnny keeps around your waist, his head buried in your neck, whispering terrible things in your ear (“ours, ours, ours—forever, hen; never gonnae leave ye. never gonnae let ye go—”). Whatever he finds in this awful embrace makes him relax beneath you. Has him stretched out and purring, content to just take in Johnny's promises, and the way you feel (trapped) in his arms.

The jowls of a double-headed beast close in around you, keeping you caged in the wet, fleshy maw of a monster that thinks it's saving you this way.

And maybe it is. There's nothing left of the place you called home. They bring you to their haven—an impossibly large cave at the base of the mountain—and tuck you into a bed of furs, humming over your laden form at the way you fit so perfectly into their home (“just where you belong—”) before leaving to make good on their promises.

Everything inside of the cave is silent, but, oh, how the ghosts in your head scream.

home, you’re home—

get out. get out. getoutgetout—

But there's no escape.

The madness that leaked from their pores, that poisoned miasma, must be contagious. Or maybe they're remaking you. Shaping you into their likeness.

Your gums ache. There's a gnawing in your guts. An emptiness that bellows into the dark, begging to be filled.

As if hearing the call, they return to you reeking of blood, death, misery. It stains their skin red. Taints their touch with the aftertaste of carnage.

You kiss their scarred lips, licking the ichor from their teeth. Satiating yourself in the sin they force down your throat as they fill that howling emptiness inside of you.

(“over and over again, hen—until you forget what it's like to be without us.”)

They cradle you in their palms—wolves taking dominion over a lost little lamb.

(“we'll carve them from your chest, and fill the barren hole with nothin’ but ourselves.”)

What an honour, you think, as the maw closes in around you. The jowls of the beasts snap shut. You sleep, safe and tucked away from the whole world, nestled behind rows of sharp teeth.

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