Archive of Our Own ^beta

She’s a sleepwalker. She’s sick. His mother is many different things, many different people, many different faces depending on the time of day. 

But not one of those faces ever seems to hold a smile for him.

But sometimes in the moonlight, without rhyme or reason, she’ll come into his room and sit on his bed, the small of her back pressing up against his bent knees, and she’ll look at him as if maybe, just maybe, the silver light paints him in a shade she could recognize as her son.

Or something else. Something she’d be willing to love. 

Tonight her hand is lingering. Not glancing off of him as if she’d been burnt, exposed to infection, instead she leans down, breathing in his disease. He feigns sleep for as long as he can. Until he can no longer take it, until her lips graze his jaw, and he can’t control the way his lashes flutter, not the way his breath catches in his throat. 

She never kisses him. Never. 

Not without drawing blood. 

Not without hurting him like only she can. 

If he was stronger, he’d bat her away. He doesn’t. His arm stays trapped by his side. 

“Sh. Shhh baby, I’m sorry,” She whispers, her breath wine-hot, sickly-sweet against his skin. She doesn’t mean it, he can tell. “Did I wake you?”

He shakes his head, robbed of his voice. He wants to disappear. He was to be cradled inside of her arms, lose himself there. 

It’s safer to imagine it as a dream.

There will be no evidence left behind, nothing morning’s light can confirm as tangible or real - if it’s a dream, it can live inside of his head. Where it is safe. Where it will only harm him. 

Because if he wakes up tomorrow to flesh that is tender and bitten and bruised- 

It’ll just be another sign that he’s more like his mother than his father, sick, slowly losing his mind. That whatever malady this is, it is one that they share.

“Are you tired?” She asks and again he nods. She hums, low in her throat. Instead of soothing it sounds more like a feral animal’s growl. “Can’t sleep?”

“Just thinking,” he whispers, his throat bone-dry. He does not know why he gave an answer that was not required of him. In this moment, he is nothing. Just her doll, her puppet. A vessel she can use to play pretend to hide from a reality that is slowly consuming her. As her son, her flesh and blood, Peter thinks he understands. But then again, he’s never understood his mother. Still, he speaks. “‘ve got a test early tomorrow morning.”

It’s meant to be a deterrent, maybe. A plea, perhaps - his voice is certainly fragile enough for it, as delicate as the gossamer wings of a butterfly pinned to a wall. 

“Then what are you doing awake?” His mom asks. She tilts her head, golden hair trailing over his cheek. She’s closer than he thought. “Don’t need the school calling me to say you fell asleep at your desk again,” she mutters, voice dark with barely concealed disdain. The shadows beneath her eyes seem to deepen. Peter finds himself looking into twin hollow pits, as if his mother’s eyes had just been scooped out. As if they’d never been there in the first place, and the abyss was all that lurked behind the illusion of a human. He swallows, rough. He blinks up at her, this facsimile of a mother, not sure what to say. What comes next. 

Then, something in his mother’s expression softens. It’s too dark for Peter to make out exactly what. All he knows is that one moment he’s bracing himself to be screamed at, and then flinching as his mother cards her fingers through his hair. He expected a slap, not - whatever this is. This tender show of motherly affection. Because it must be a show. It must. 

“Here. Come here,” she murmurs. “Mommy will hold you.”

She crawls into bed behind him and holds him, tucking him up tight against her, her chest pressing into his back. She isn’t wearing a bra. Peter hates that he can tell. That he is intimately familiar with what it feels like, the press of unhindered flesh.

He holds onto her forearms as if that will help ground him.

He can feel her eyes raking over him, and even without looking, he knows how she’s staring at him. Like he’s just a thing. A disgusting thing. A thing beyond contempt.

Hell, for not pulling away, maybe he is. 

He wishes she’d say I love you. He doesn’t know if that would make it worse when she begins kissing the nape of his neck, her lips a sticky smear of heat. It burns like acid against his skin.

Peter wishes he felt nothing for his mother. It would be so simple, straightforward. Stitches to close the wound, even if it left a scar.

But what he feels for his mother is many things. Many twisted, sick things. Though none of them are pretty, not all of them fit into one grotesque shape. 

He’s afraid of her. Deathly so. He wonders if she can tell. Wonders if she can smell it on him. He wonders if that’s a good enough excuse for the way he goes limp, not encouraging her advancements, but not pushing back.

It's easier, it's safer, to just go along. And it is disgustingly, horribly comforting, to know that his mother is the most dangerous thing here inside of his room. 

Nothing could ever hurt him more than his mother. 

Through his sweatpants, she palms his cock. For a moment, Peter seriously thinks he’ll be sick. He thinks all the words he’s tried so hard to keep locked inside his throat will spill through his lips in a scream, snarling and messy and frantic. He lies there, stiff and still as a corpse, trying to swallow down bile. Trying to pretend as if he can not feel the heat slowly but surely collecting in the cradle of his hips. It almost rivals the heat pulsing behind his eyes. 

Their family is good at that, pretending. Yet at the same time, the night strips everyone bare. The dark is uncaring of nakedness, wretchedness. In the dark, nothing really feels like a sin. There are a million reasons that this is okay. She’s his mother, he’s an extension of her, she knows what she’s doing, she’ll protect him - though she never has before - she'd never hurt him - though she has, a million times - but that’s fine, because when the sun sets and the moon crawls out of hiding, she’s not herself, she turns into a stranger wearing his mother’s face, so this isn’t his mother, but something other. Out of everything he hates his mother for, this cannot be one of them.

Peter cannot bring himself to hate her. 

He’s bitter, poisoned by it. Her hand on his cock takes the edge off and replaces it with something blissful. Her bare skin against his bare skin feels like an electric shock. Peter can’t help the unbidden buck of his hips as her fingertips ghost his jumping abdomen, sliding lower, lower. Her intent is undeniably clear. 

Her hand pets through his hair, hushing him as he squirms. He hates this. He hates it. He hopes it never stops. Her hand, smooth yet callused, rough yet gentle, wraps around his cock, hard and already leaking, and Peter can’t help the small noise that escapes him. And it sounds so weak. So wounded. His mother must like it because she squeezes, hard, like she’s trying to break him. Maybe she is. 

Tonight he’s spellbound by the dregs of a high. It’s left his limbs heavy and his head absentminded, his eyes hazy and starry. He feels as if he’s floating yet gripped with spy, intangible claws, the only things keeping the frayed, traveling strands of him together.

Maybe, if not a dream, this can be a hallucination. That way it can sit on his tongue sweetly, guilt-free. 

His mother’s strokes pick up speed, fervor. She spreads his precum along his shaft so the slide is fast and filthy and wet, and the sick, slick sounds echo aimlessly around the room. It sounds like a sound effect from some cheap horror movie, the wet squelch of cherry-red arterial spray. Peter’s mind whispers to him, is precum dripping from you, or is it blood? Peter arches against her, teeth sinking into his bottom lip. It feels as if there is a fishhook caught behind his navel and slowly, but surely, it is being tugged from his body, attempting to extract something inextricable. He feels as if his guts are moments away from pouring messily out. And it would be painful, of course it would be, but this burning pleasure confuses him, consumes him, whispering that the pain is something he even might like. 

He can't hold this all inside of him. He'll die if he tries.  

Keening whimpers won’t stop falling from his lips. His eyes are burning with tears. His stomach is in knots.  Maybe she’ll kill him if he doesn’t voice some praise. If he pretends he isn’t enjoying this. Is he? Does it matter if he is?

It’s wrong, he knows, but hardly anything looks right in the swallowing darkness of the night. Shadows of the leaves from the skeleton tree outside dance across the sheets as the outline of an arm moves faster and faster, a snake slithering up his body, preparing to sink its fangs into his heart. 

“You’re a good boy,” his mother whispers, and it hits him like a gut-punch. It hurts like one, too, but pleasure is quick to rush into the hollowness left inside him. Her thumbnail cruelly digs into his slit and he can’t help gasping her name-

“Mommy,” he breathes, a secret. Sacrilege. He feels the shadow of her smile against his throat, and it cuts his skin, leaving a neat gash. He could bleed out, wearing the mark of that sinister smile. 

And to think, he’d once thought she had no more ways left to hurt him. 

All of a sudden he’s rolled onto his back. His stomach flips. He knows what comes next. His throat closes up as fabric rustles beside him, a hasty stripping, and then his mother is on top of him, looming like an angel of death. Instinctively, his hands go to her hips, to hold her, even though it should be the other way around. His fingernails sink into her downy skin, pale and ghost-like. 

She sits astride his hips and slowly, agonizingly, pierces herself on his cock. He’s the one to let out a sob at the feeling. Her cunt hugs him so tightly that tears cannot help but fall, beading on his lashes like glass. She’s warm and wet and velvet-soft and if he closes his eyes she could be the girl who sits in front of him in English class, except then a taloned-hand wraps around his throat, forcing his gaze back on her, as she rasps with half-lidded eyes, “That's it. Just like that. Oh, you're so good. Who’s my good boy?”

“I am,” he whispers, his voice breaking as she takes him to the root. He shudders, back arching.

“You’re my good boy,” she affirms, her muscles flattering around him. “I love you, baby. I love you so much. You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

Wordlessly, Peter shakes his head. It’s all so overwhelming, too-much. Heat spreads through him, burning him alive. She's finally set him alight - but maybe it's okay. At least he can die warm, inside of her arms. 

He can taste acetone on his lips. He's drunk off of it. Drunk off her. 

The pressure collecting in the cradle of his hips is almost painful. It almost makes him panic - it feels too big for his body. It feels as if it is going to tear through him. It feels like a live thing is trapped inside of him - like his body holds some monstrous thing that is desperate for escape. 

“Use your words, sweetheart,” she leans down, her lashes fluttering as her hips rock, taking his cock deeper. Peter tries to turn his head away but the kiss is inevitable; wet and hungry and biting. She’s ravenous for him, on these nights. The nights in which all is quiet, so quiet that even a gasp sounds like a scream. So quiet that he can hear the ravenous beat of his mother’s black heart.

“N-Not afraid,” he forces out between kisses and his mother hums. The lie must taste sweet on her tongue. The smooth, relentless rolling of her hips is going to drive him mad. He swears he can feel the head of his cock kissing sweetly against her cervix. She’s rocking him to sleep like he’s still her child. 

"That's right," she mutters, almost to herself. His headboard is knocking against the wall rhythmically. A spike of ice-cold terror pierces through the heat - he wonders if his father will hear. What he would do, if he saw. What would his mother do. Would she kill him? Would his father kill them both, put an end to this ouroboros of misery? He can't breathe. She kisses him, sharing the poisoned air inside of her lungs. 

"That's right," his mother keeps repeating, her thighs hugging him, crushing him. "You just want to be good for me, don't you? Ha. How did I end up with a son like you?"

Shadows crawl across her face, making her eyes appear darker. Lightless. She looks like a monster - a monster he has only ever known as his mother. 

He comes embarrassingly, breathtakingly, gut-wrenchingly quickly. His face flushes with shame as his cock flushes with heat, as he shoots hot and wet deep inside of her. He's purging himself of this sickness, he wants it out out out. It feels much like he imagines the universe must feel, trembling around a dying star. 

It's such a terrifying relief. 

It lasts for an endless moment, in which the dark fully overtakes him, overwrites him, erases him. He becomes insentience itself. When he does manage to come back to himself a hand is gliding down his chest in long, sweeping strokes. His heaving chest, he realizes through his tears. He clings to these barest touches, hating himself for his need. 

“Sweetie,” his mother whispers, and Peter scrubs at his eyes, throws an arm over his face. Don’t look at me. Please, please don’t wake up and see what you’ve done. “No, don’t cry, don’t cry. You did such a good job, filling me up. Mommy isn’t mad. Mommy loves you.”

“Look,” she kisses the tip of his nose. Another sob breaks from his throat. “You’re making mommy feel so good. See?”

And despite himself, Peter can’t deny her anything. He peeks through his sodden lashes, looking at something that should never be seen. His mother astride his hips, grinding down against his softening cock, her thighs wet with her slick and his cum, dripping out of her, because in the end, her body never was his home. Two of her fingers are mercilessly assaulting her clit and though it’s so horrible, Peter can’t look away. That thing trapped inside of him flexes its claws. 

There's something wrong inside of him. And she put it there. It's all her fault. 

She’s ruined him. Peter’s hand hugs the sharp curve of her hip. He hates her.

But he wants her. He wants his mother, in whatever way he can have her.

Even if that means she touches him like no mother should ever touch her child. Even if that means the next day at school he’ll have to wear a high-necked shirt to cover up the bruises she left in the shape of her hungry mouth. Even if that means he lies her supine, helpless but willing, unable to be anything but, even as she looks down at him like he’s not worthy to be her son, or even human, just a toy to be used for her pleasure. But fuck, he wants to be whatever he can be, for her. He just wants to be good for his mother. 

She cums like that, using him to the point of pain, but he doesn’t protest. He lies there, paralyzed under the thick, inescapable blanket of night. Underneath his mother’s body, so soft and warm and thrumming with life. She tucks her head and breathes out a quiet sigh in the unmistakable shape of his father’s name. 

Peter hugs her close to her body, shaking. She whispers a slurred sweet nothing, pressing a kiss that could almost be described as tender against his cheek. He doesn’t know whether or not he wants her to wake up. Maybe not yet. She never hugs him while she is awake. And tonight, he doesn’t want to be alone with the whispers and screams trapped inside of his head. 

Especially because those whispers and screams take on the high-pitched, hissing, hateful sound of his mother’s voice.

They sound almost inhuman, on the darkest of nights.