Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Pathetic, Alex thinks, as he squirms and buries himself deeper under the duvet. I’m so pathetic! Deeper and deeper he digs himself, socked toes crushed up against the caravan’s wall, wriggling the covers over his shoulders, his jaw, and finally over his freezing cold ears until only the silvery, thinning, top of his head pokes out of his miserable nest. His annoyed, huffed breaths warm the dark duvet cave where he’s curled – his cheap Assistant’s suit pulled circulation-stopping tight where he’s wrapped himself in his own cold arms, knees to his chest, coiled and freezing.

He shakes his head – rubbing his flushed cheek against the navy blue pillow – and turns, tangling himself in the dark covers in the even darker caravan. The covers twist and writhe about him, their tightening darkness pulling back from across his eyes to show him… nothing. Through the window, knife-sharp blades of pale and greenish moonlight are immediately lost in the folds and valleys of Alex’s meagre bed, leaving the rest of the thin-walled vehicle’s interior a lumpy, colourless hole in the earth; as dark as the grave. Nothing stirs in the caravan; not beneath his bed, not tight against the door, not coiled around his ankle, his chest, his throat.

No. No silver eyes glint back at Alex from the darkness.

Because I’m pathetic! Alex thinks, scrunching his eyes closed. Misery squirms in his gut and his body follows suit.

Squirming. It feels appropriate. He feels it, still, in the palm of his right hand; the squirming. The faint feel of grit and the ticklish, terrible, writhing and rolling as miniature musculature arranged in rows of rings of pink and puce and purplish tones had pulsed and pulled and squirmed upon his palm. Bloody bruise coloured on his cold white hand, he’d wrapped it in long pale fingers, clutched to his black-jacketed chest, as he’d scampered up the secret stairwell and paused at the door to the master bedroom. He’d held it over his thundering heart – du-dum, du-dum, du-dum – as he’d wondered whether he was actually going to open the door. Outside, night had long fallen, and the corridors of the Taskmaster House were dark and quiet – except for Alex’s shallow, nervous breathing, and the low, slow rumble of Greg’s snore coming from the gap beneath the door. He’d looked back – over his shoulder – at the inky black hole that were the stairs back down, back outside, back towards the caravan and where Alex ought to be. Then the squirming in his hand had twisted and coiled – almost knotting itself in his damp, dirty hand – and Alex almost jumped out of his nervously sweating skin.

He was going to do it, he’d decided.

With his other hand, he’d slowly, slowly turned the handle to Greg’s room. Holding his breath, he’d pushed it open degree by degree – the dark room yawning in front of him, cavernous and warm, Greg’s breathing setting Alex’s teeth on edge in his jaw-clamped skull. The start of a creak of the door, and Alex winced and froze – waiting, dreading, fearing the snort-gasp of Greg waking up.

It didn’t come.

Alex’s chest hurt. His heart clamoured to claw its way out of the depths of his body – whether through ribcage or up out his tightening throat, he didn’t know. Each thump was echoed by the thing in his hand – twitching, flinching, squirming along with him.

Three slowly shuffled steps, and Alex was at the side of Greg’s bed.

He was huge. He always was. Stretched out and filling even the custom-sized bed Alex had laboured for days to haul and assemble to Greg’s meagre satisfaction, Greg – even asleep – dominated the room. Every breath in, Alex felt himself drawn towards him, like the tides of an ocean. Each breath out felt like it filled the room with His power and presence, tickling the very hairs on the back of Alex’s neck.

Alex had knelt then. Of course.

Just like he had in the studio, earlier that day. Deeper, Alex digs into his memories – remembering remembering the sequence of pathetic events that had led him to now.

In the studio, everything had seemed fine at first. Greg had been on fine form. Laughing and smiling – His grey eyes warm and full of charm as contestant after contestant had tried to entertain Him. Alex, by His side, had sighed happily when he thought Greg might not notice. And sighed wistfully when he was sure He wouldn’t – because grey was all those eyes had been for months now.

Not silver. Not yawning, endlessly black. Not fixed on Alex with a cool, otherworldly possessiveness that scared him almost to screaming, and mercilessly dominated his thoughts in the lonely hours of the night.

Alex had rubbed his hand on his wrist where his white Casio watch was latched just one notch tighter on its band than it should be. Where the rubberized strap dug into his skin, sweaty and slick, and entirely not what he needed it to be. Not a black, cool, tendril tightening around his body as he frantically, helplessly, futilely fought against what he slowly realised he wanted. Needed.

Greg had looked at him then – as the first prickling of a flush had tightened across his chest beneath his horrible thin shirt – and asked him about the VT. Alex had panicked for a second, lost in the moment and dragged, struggling, back to that present.

A surprising delivery. Sophie Duker. It had all come crashing back.

Alex had smiled – that simpering, milquetoast smile he hoped would disarm the Taskmaster’s fury for a moment as he’d recounted Sophie’s surprise; a basket of squirming, writhing, puce and purplish worms.

The VT had shown how he’d released them into the Taskmaster’s garden after the task – safe and sound in the soft, moist dirt of the grounds to live out their lives doing whatever it was that worms do.

Greg had looked unimpressed and started to twist in his mighty throne – the warmth of his gaze already sweeping away from Alex when all of a sudden, Alex had said it. Asked it, really. His voice breaking, his eyebrows raised and hopeful as he pulled himself up on his own meager chair and pleaded with every inch of his pathetic body.

“Would you still love me, Greg, if I were a worm?”

The audience had laughed. Alex heard it rattling in his ears, in his chest, against the fabric on his sweaty back, but it wasn’t important.

What was important was the way the air tightened like a screw, sharpened like a blade of black obsidian, and Greg had paused in His turn. Not a muscle twitched, but the air crackled like storm-strike. Like a hundred thousand eyes all turned to stare at once – with malice.

“A worm?” He’d asked – the creature in His place.

Greg’s eyes were still downturned, hidden behind eyelids and the gleam of the stage lights on black-rimmed lenses. Alex couldn’t see their colour – no matter how he’d stared.

“You’re asking if I’d love you…if you were a worm,” He doesn’t ask, derision dripping like ooze from every word. He tilts his head – stretching his neck as if considering – the tendons and muscles rippling beneath pale, wrinkle-kissed skin. “A pink, tube-like, pathetic worm.”

The audience chuckles. Giggles. Barks a broken laugh as humour is squeezed out of each one of them in turn by His complete mastery of the room. He raises his eyebrow, and like a conductor, the chorus softly makes their mirthful sounds at His command.

Alex was breathing bare teaspoons of air, in and out, waiting. He had nodded – eager – emboldened that Greg had entertained his question at all. The audience had laughed – that helped, he’d thought. Alex remembered that he’d bitten his lip – his teeth pressing hard against the dark red of his skin as it pushed up into the void between them.

“Well, let’s see, shall we?” Greg had said, smoother than satin. “Come over here.” Greg had pointed down at the hard red carpet at His feet, still refusing to make eye contact with Alex.

Alex had obeyed barely before the words were out of Greg’s twisted, smirking mouth – dropping to his knees, feeling the hard wooden stage beneath his aging knees with the hardworking carpet, polyester trousers, and thermal underwear doing little to soften the fall. They’d bruise, he knew from long experience.

It would be just a few crawled paces to Greg’s feet – again, an estimate Alex had years to refine – but before he fell forward to feel the rough red fibers raw against the heels of his hands, Greg reaches and smacks him on the chest with his cards.

“Bah bah bah! No hands. A worm doesn’t have hands, Alex.”

God, Alex had almost vibrated off the stage. His ears rung – laughter, the gallery’s heightening panic, his own traitorous heart ringing them like a blood red bell. He’d thrown his head back, eyes shut, as the shame had washed over him. Of course. Of course a worm doesn’t have hands. Pathetic!

Moving as if in a dream, he’d straightened up on his knees and pulled his arms behind his back – hollowing the small of it and making his stomach push forward, tight against his belt. As worm-like as he could imagine, he’d shuffled knee by knee, inch by inch, tiny little shuffles forward – his shoulders and hips thrown to opposite sides as he did his best to wriggle and writhe for Greg’s pleasure.

Greg had opened his legs wide – those shiny black perfect shoes gleaming as they slipped in opposite directions as Alex squirmed closer and closer. Alex could see his own distorted form in the shine of them – twisted and wrong.

Alex stopped just before his squirming belly had touched the soft red velvet of Greg’s throne. Before he’d have brushed against the stretched tight fabric of the inside of His thighs. Alex had looked up. He only had eyes for Greg.

Greg had leaned down. So close. So close! And finally, finally he’d looked at Alex properly – a dark and terrible glance of endless portals to somewhere dark and vast and eldritch. A look that had pinned Alex more tightly than a hundred tightening tendrils could. A look that stopped his heart, his breath, his mind and held him in the moment, falling – falling – as Greg drew closer and closer still. A flash. A flash of silver in those eyes and then a flash of too white teeth as Greg’s cold breath surrounds and fills and smothers Alex, trembling on the floor and so grateful, fearful, lost in both he doesn’t know or care where he is.

And then it’s gone. Grey eyes. Plain teeth. And Greg leans past his ear and whispers, loud enough for all to hear, “That’s the end of part two. See you after the break!”

Alex can’t remember after that. He’d stood. He’d sat. He must have done. He’d listened to the crowd and crew and smiled and done whatever Greg had asked him. The show went on. The day had closed. And Greg had then done… nothing. No glint, no darkness, no nightmare dreams. Their days had passed just as they had for months before, and every single glance had been a crushing disappointment hid beneath a grateful sigh.

It squirmed in Alex.

So yes, weeks later – earlier tonight – he’d hatched a plan and crept about the garden until he’d found exactly what he sought.

A worm.

Pink and wriggling, red like two-day bruises with a violet-brownish hue – thin and long and then with rings and rings of writhing muscle, short and stubby and twisting in his slightly mucky hand.

It squirmed.

Just as the need had. Just as the plan had, when he’d thought it. Because nothing Alex did had worked – except the mention of these worms. Except to see them on the screen – to shock Greg with them, make him think of Alex as a writhing, squirming, awful thing – pink and wriggling – at His feet.

Alex roiled with fear as he had scampered up those stairs and paused at the master bedroom door. The worm clutched in his hand against his chest – da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum – as he had clutched what little courage he had ever had, and opened up the door.

The worm had struggled – so it seemed – against the thunder of his heart. Da-dum, it flinched. Da-dum, it twitched. Da-dum, it spun and tried to push its sightless, faceless head between the loosely closed gap in Alex’s fingers. Wriggle. Wriggle. Wriggle.

Alex had dropped to his knees on the floor by Greg’s bed.

Alex had put his free arm behind his torso, hollowing his back and pushing out his own squirming, wriggling body.

And Alex had reached with his other – filled – hand and as his heart deafened him even to Greg’s rumbling snores – opened his palm and dropped the twisting living thing on top of Greg’s duvet.

And nothing had happened.

Alex had knelt there – both hands pulled back, swaying only slightly as his knees and back began to ache and scream and burn and tremble – for an hour. And nothing. The worm had lain and turned and rolled, and hardly moved at all on the slowly rising bedclothes covering Greg’s deeply sleeping form.

Alex was pathetic.

Which brings him here. And brings him now. Curled up like a worm beneath the dark blue covers in his own cold, empty bed, in the wee small hours of the morning – alone without… Him.

Du-dum.

The faintest rumble – almost unheard – kisses into his exposed, cold and reddened ear. Drowned out and under all the distant thundering cars that thud and growl across the nearby bridge and water. As scraggly pines creak and shiver – needles scraping all along each other’s bark – as distantly a fox first yaps and then – bloodcurdling – screams, it’s almost more a feeling than a sound.

Du-dum.

A heartbeat. No, not quite. Alex twists, eyes still scrunched with anguish at his own pathetic wants, and bares both ears to the caravan’s cool air. He waits.

There’s nothing. Of course there is. He’s stupid. He’s tired and lonely and he should be happy, except he’s missing something he doesn’t know how to ask for, so all he’s done is wrap it in a joke so stale even the mould upon it died long ago; ‘Would you love me if I were a worm?’

God, he’s so patheti—Du-dum.

Alex starts – half breath broken in his chest with a gasp. He heard it – felt it – clear as day this time. Both in his ears and in the hollow volumes of his lungs that rumbled with a pair of impacts on the ground. The caravan had felt it. Up through stacks of bricks and tired tyres, the wooden slats and fiberglass had shivered – the glass had likely shook within its thin and heat-bleeding frames. He’d felt it! He’d—

Du-dum!

Alex snaps bolt upright, in the dark, eyes wide open his breath held and tight. The sound had come from right outside – no, the slams had! Hard and shaking – in the instant afterwards a hundred little things had rattled – hourglasses and plastic skulls, a dozen photos of Greg and he in groups or pairs – wedded sometimes, or parent and child – embroidered samplers and paintings of fruit. Clatter and shuffle – shaken by the slams from just outside!

Turning to the window, Alex squints and sees… nothing. The dark is pure and absolute – no glint of star or sickly distant streetlamp’s light throws a single photon to his eye. Alex blinks and there’s no difference. He scrubs his hand across his lids and sparks and checkerboards, reds and yellow-purples splash his optic nerves, but when he blinks and blinks and looks again – the darkness is complete.

Du-dum! Du-dum! Du-dum!

Alex is trembled, shaken, rumbled as the caravan rocks with each new thuddy impact that must be just metres from the caravan’s door. He wobbles on the bed and slaps his hand out for balance and meets the glass of the window but it’s wrong… It’s muffled somehow – his hand upon it. Cold and slightly damp as expected from the condensation that gathers when he sleeps here, but it feels dull and not as cold as he’d expect. Alex runs his hand across it – feeling clammy drops gather and wet his hand – and it feels solid and unmoving, not like the single pane of meagre glass that sucked the heat every single night and spewed it into a cooling garden.

Du-dum!

Oh, shit! Alex’s hand flies off the glass as if bitten, as the next terrible, powerful, threatening set of beats shakes not just Alex, and the bed beneath him – but moves the glass in anticipation of the mighty strike. It flexed. It tightened. Something slithered on the other side, causing micro-slipping shudders all across that thin and egg-like shell of glass.

Alex’s sightless eyes widen. Does the air feel stale? Does the caravan creak and shift less than it ought to, as he throws his legs out of the bed, and his unseen, bright-yellow-duck socks, hit the muffled caravan floor?

Du-dum. Du-du-dum.

Up through his soles, each impact rattles his ankles and buzzes his leg hair against the tight white fabric of his underwear. In a panic, Alex launches to his feet and reaches for the door. A memory, then, of scrambling for the door another night – when this cocktail of fear pumped through his veins, heightening his senses and turning his movements jerky and fast – and, like then, even though his cold and trembling fingers slam under the latch to shove it hard – the door doesn’t open.

The door doesn’t open. Much. A millimetre, perhaps, as a terrible, tight and binding force beyond holds it tight and gives only the slightest of degrees. Alex puts his shoulder to it, trying not to think, and heaves – and the door doesn’t budge against something immovable on the other side. Something firm. Something tight. Something that suddenly stiffens taut, and clicks the door more soundly shut. Alex’s fingers scrabble at the latch – its cheap old metal clicking and clattering – and cries out when the metal flicks back and pinches the thin skin webbing between finger and thumb. He shoves it in his mouth, feeling the muscles on his face contorting into a wince, and he scrunches his eyes closed to the sting – but the dark of the caravan is utter and complete and there’s no difference between eyes open or closed.

Du-dum du-dum du-dum du…

The thudding keeps happening. More frequent now. Like a heartbeat as big as a house – slow and deep and rumbling everything. It’s around and inside Alex now, with nowhere to hide. No way out of the one-door caravan.

Sucking his hand and trying to breathe, Alex holds his other hand against the counter. It fizzes and buzzes under his fingertips with every thud, but it’s not as bad as the flexing, shifting, anticipatory tightening he can feel against the glass.

Not the windows then.

He reaches down, hand slippery against the humid surface of the shoddily painted door, and finds the raw-edged gap of the letterbox. In the pitch of the caravan, his eyes are wide and dark – staring up and into nothing as he tentatively crawls his fingertips inside the slot. Every surface around him thumps, every beat of it sending a shockwave through Alex of fear, until he touches aluminium. Cool to the touch, tinny and thin – more than the glass, more than the door and fiberglass of the walls – the letterbox cover lets him feel. The shifting, surging, tightening-and-skittering weight of something on the other side. Cool like a fish. Slick and slithering. When Alex gathers enough courage to flatten his fingertips on the bottom edge of the letterbox lid and push, it moves with a subtle give that so quickly gives way to a muscular firmness that will not move. Not even a finger’s breadth.

With a clack, Alex whips his hand back and staggers back – lost in the darkness of the caravan in the one tiny spot where he can almost stand upright without touching bed or cabinet or sink. Beneath his feet – du-dum – faster and faster. Every beat of it like a jangle of his puppet strings, exhausting and terrifying at once. He reaches out with his foot, and finds his plastic shoes, and toes them on – almost falling over as he does, their thin soles giving almost no protection from the vibrations travelling up his body.

He tries to slow his breathing. Eyes open – eyes closed – it makes no differe— wait. Alex holds his breath and tries not to move despite the thudding making his eyeballs tremble. Eyes wide, head back, he stares. He glances away, and glances back, and yes – there’s a difference in the black on black of everything around him, barely visible in the corner of his eye.

Above him, there’s light. So weak he can barely sense it, a dull blood red haze that he’d mistaken for his own body’s frantic attempt at generating visual information in a world that had none at all – but there. A square of red directly above his head.

He reaches his hand up, and sees the shape of the colour shift and change and he almost cries out with relief. Then his fingers touch the too-close roof of the caravan and he can feel the curved, ancient, clouded plastic of the caravan’s sunroof. Alex gasps.

Both hands now, he reaches and finds the edges – finds the latches – and undoes them even as his body shakes in syncopated time with the now-ever-present beating of the earth all around him. With a held breath, he pushes – and the plastic hinges open a whole inch.

Alex could cry.

The hatch is free – moves easily with his hands – and his heart beats harder than the thing outside with the thunder of hope. He grabs the caravan’s roof with one hand, holding the hatch open with the other, and pulls up a foot – a leg – and knocks over unseen junk as he steps up onto the counter and heaves himself to the roof. Barely big enough, scraping his shoulders through his jacket, Alex turns at an angle and thrusts his torso out of the top of the caravan and into the air.

Into madness.

Everything is red. Black and red and heaving. The grime-slicked roof of the caravan is a hundred shades of blood; veins of ink-black reaching and squirming across its slickened, slimy surface. A thud, and the tendrils tense and tremble – tightening around their creaking captive with a pulse of barely held power. Beyond, the house is dark and unlit – cast dully in that all-encompassing, pallid red light that spills from somewhere behind Alex, behind the hinged-open sunroof and the whole caravan. Crazed black shadows in the sinister red light writhe with blacker still movement, as the house squirms with living vines that leave no window, no door or cracked piece of mortar without a wriggling interrogative tip of slick covered blackness. All of it spreading from some source out of sight – somewhere behind him.

He twists, but he’s stuck – diagonally thrust through the square hole of the caravan’s roof, and shielded by the flipped open, murky plastic hatch. When the earth goes du-dum du-dum, he feels it in the sharp edge of the sunroof digging into his arms, tight and biting. He can hear it’s source – also behind him. Where crimson light and blackest tendrils all converge – somewhere past the caravan’s front windows and just where Alex cannot quite turn to see.

Up then. He kicks off from the cabinet and scrapes all along his arms with twists and stretches. He jams a hand up and out the sharp edged hole and clings to the sweaty roof for leverage. Inch by inch, a shoulder crushed up against an ear, a hip popped against the biting ridge of the hatch and then used as leverage, Alex scrapes and struggles, trapped and gasping, until he can buckle forward – caught with a hastily thrown hand – and breathlessly kick the last few inches out of his black-bound hole.

Two breaths, hastily torn from air thick with sound and light so weak his eyes ache to find it, and Alex flips over to finally, finally see.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Oh my god.

His face goes slack – mouth opening degree by degree, peeling his stuck lips apart so slowly. His widened eyes abortively flick in their sockets – desperate to look away, and unable to do so. He gasps – long and slow and hoarse in his tightened throat, as his hands freeze where they are and his arms – holding him up – burn and tremble, everything else forgotten at the sight of Him.

Because, huge and without end, He fills the sky. Thick ropes, and hawsers uncountable, of blacker-than-midnight fleshy form stretch as far as the eye can see. Twisting and stretching – tight and weightlessly drifting – from the sharpest, finest point of whip-like wiry ends to thick about as a thigh – hundreds and hundreds of every kind of inky tendril taste the earth and house and grounds and air and all of it is His. All of it leads back – pulsing, twisting, thrumming with slickened power barely held – to Him, the deepest blackest heart of everything, suspended in the sky like a… Like a…

And past Him, glimpsed where those black tendrils leave a shattered window through their splayed out form, the source of all the red. High and huge and awesome, once, shadowed by His magnificence and now barely an accessory – the moon, eclipsed. A blood red moon.

That crimson halo casts its light, limning every slimy squirming surface with a blood-hued nimbus and He – Greg – is the centre. Of course, He is the heart and source – the beating, blackest, deepest darkest core – of an awful, awesome, mind-collapsing, heaven-blotting, writhing, black-red sunburst.

There’s movement. Not the constant, swaying, underwater-drifting movement that drains the balance from Alex through his eyes of a field of view of tendrils literally uncountable – but the movement of a man, of Him. Alex strains to see – focuses on the shock of scarlet silvered hair at the nexus of the endless madness all around – and sees black on black on black on… red. An arm that moves. A body turned. Those legs that reach forever hanging in the air from a torso in a perfect suit that boils with tendrils, that move and clutch and hold someone.

Alex tries to gasp and breathe out “No…” at once – and fails to do either. The bitter air within his lungs stalling, hurting, stabbing him instead.

There’s someone there – with Him – held up in those massive arms, coiled about with tendrils thick as ropes, or chains, or wrists – and hidden from Alex’s view by Greg’s perfect, wondrous form. But Alex sees. He sees Him reach His hand so gently up to cradle someone’s face – that pale white massive hand turned bloody red within the dead-moon’s light. But only shadow fills the other – hidden and unseen but oh, Alex knows how sweet that touch could be! Before he even knows what he’s doing, he’s brought his own hand up to barely touch his flushed and tender face – a pathetic shadow of the feeling he craves so much. He shudders with a yearning breath.

He barely sees it. When two great tendrils sway and rise like threatened snakes, hanging in the air but a moment, when suddenly they strike.

DU-DUM!

They strike the earth and everything shakes. The noise is awful. A world’s terrible heartbeat. And Alex slams back – flinching – slipping on the caravan’s roof and barely going anywhere.

“There, there…”

Oh god, He’s talking! Alex scrambles forward as His low and growling, tender words wash over Alex, but oh god – those words are not for Alex. In Greg’s arms, the subject – the person, no, the man – seems to fall to pieces. Startled, maybe, by the awful thumping beat, the hidden figure collapses into Greg’s strong arms, and pain! The stabbing pain of envy twists in Alex like a knife. Greg holds him gently, cooing words of reassurance that barely waft back to caress over Alex’s flushed red ears.

Desperate, Alex crawls forward – crappy trousers soaking up the grit and sticky mix of fir tree sap, condensation, and splattered specks of tentacle slime that spray from where the tendrils squeeze and bind the caravan so tight. On his hands and knees – pale on pale all painted red – until he passes by the hatch.

Metres high above the garden – level with the wind vane – suspended as if hanging from the moon itself, is Greg, and Alex cranes his neck to look. Greg, who’s holding someone – one arm wrapped around his back – the other on his face as He coos and whispers unheard words. Only rumbles reach Alex, almost heard but just not quite. Alex feels it as a stabbing pain, feels his face twist up as he turns his head to try to hear. His plastic shoes almost slip as he stands and leans and listens – torn between closing his eyes to hear more closely or keep them open lest he miss a single second of His form.

He stretches. Reaching. Neck stuck out and strained. He can almost taste it – Greg’s sweet words to that faceless, nameless, blessed man.

“I’m going to kiss you, now…” Greg says.

Gaze snapped like a broken bone, Alex looks. Heart beating all its shattered parts into a powder, he sees – bare reds on blacks on reds and blacks – as Greg holds the hated man in His huge embrace, tilts his face, leans down and then… and then…

The strangled sort of dying noise that Alex makes cuts through the air and startles him as much as anyone. As he crumples, chest first, in on the black hole that was his heart – his hands flying up to clutch at himself, tear at himself, peel open his ribs and let the burning ice-cold ichor burst from him. The feeling that’s as close to envy as a storm is to a fresh sweet summer’s shower, weakens his knees and shatters his spine and almost closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to watch – except the slick of the caravan roof is there beneath his crappy, slippery, plastic shoe sole and suddenly he’s falling.

As his eyes go wide with panic, he sees Greg staring back – a flash of silver in the darkness.

He slams down on the roof, tailbone first, and knocks the air from out his lungs. His hands fly out to grab for purchase and find nothing. The curved front of the caravan is too slick and grimy. Clattering shoes kick and one goes flying – and Alex tries to flip and flatten. His fingers reach – a fiberglass seam – but slip immediately off as gravity hauls him down. His heel hits glass and slick and slippery tendrils.

He yells.

The ground rises up to meet him – face first.

He slams his eyes shut and throws his arms around his head.

Du-dum.

Alex hits the ground with an oof – not a crack. Tightness at his back suddenly disappears and the rest of his weight sags onto the wet grass. The echo of the thunder through the earth – of tentacles that had slammed down just before he’d landed – tingle on his skin. Like the movement all across his front.

Wait.

There’s movement all across his front.

Alex flinches and opens his eyes – and sees the writhing, heaving, squirming mat that weaves its way through and over every blade of black-looking muddy grass in the Taskmaster’s garden. An endless sea that touches every part of him from now-bared sock, over trouser, crotch and torso, up against his bared cold neck and bearded jaw, and through and in between his twitching fingers – red and dark and slimy – worms! A hundred million – endless – worms. A sea of them. An ocean. The floor is made of earthworms. The entire world is worms.

Alex screams – and then he feels them twist and rub against his lip, his nose, his ear – and he flinches back so hard his neck cracks. Snaps his jaw so tight his head sings. He scrabbles back – fists full of worms – until his back slams into tendril wrapped caravan front and he pushes, panicked, even more, going nowhere. Frantic, he brings his hand to wipe his face – and brings a mess of worms along. Tangled in his pale red fingers, coiled like rings and jewellery. Tight and loose and squirming, Alex screams through his nose – daring not to open his mouth – and flings the worms off with a frantic snapping flick.

When he’s sure they’re gone, he scrapes and scrubs all over his face, desperate to make sure he’s clear of pinkish, squirming, muddy things.

That’s when he sees Him. Suspended still from countless tendrils and in the shadow of the shadowed moon, Greg is just a couple of metres above him, staring down amused – that wicked slant to His smirking mouth, the glint of His black eyes behind His black framed glasses, the pose – even hanging in the air impossibly – that says He’s exactly where He wants to be.

“Oh, hello,” Greg purrs, both utterly at ease and odds with Alex’s wide eyed panic. “How nice of you to join us.” With a tilt of his head, Greg gestures somewhere behind him – somewhere Alex still can’t see beyond the all encompassing darkness of Greg who fills his world and mind and vision.

Alex dare not open his mouth.

Greg’s brow twitches as the seconds stretch. Impatience. Annoyance. “Now, Alex – don’t be shy. Especially when I was so generous as to give you everything you asked for.”

Alex’s eyebrows twitch, confused. His nostrils flare as he tries to breathe through the panic without opening his mouth, his heart thundering in his heaving chest.

“No? Mmm…” Greg ponders, bringing His hand up to His chin to rub across His scruff, thoughtfully. “I suppose you did interrupt us…”

A flash of silver in those shadowed eyes is all the warning Alex gets before he’s lashed to the front of the caravan by slick black whipping tendrils. The bindings on his wrists haul his arms out across the caravan’s subtly pulsing skin and his arms are bound with those fat cords of impossible, black flesh that ripple and tighten over bone, muscle and skin – the thin, heat-leaking fabric of his uniform doing nothing to dull the tactile explosion over his immobile body.

“This is what you wanted, after all,” Greg says, turning effortlessly in mid-air – held up and suspended by the dozens, hundreds, thousands of tendrils that burst from His sleeves, His cuffs, and from somewhere behind Him. As He partially pirouettes, His companion – the source of Alex’s envy – comes into view. Cradled in His strong arms – pulled close and pressed against His front, the man all but melts at His touch. Dangling feet, arched back, his arms pinned between their chests where he clutches tight and helpless at Greg’s lapels. As Greg grabs the back of his head – feeds His fingers through the surface there – and dips the man that Alex’s mind cannot yet resolve through the green-mist of envy. Alex wants to be there. Alex feels it – every muscle yearns to echo that pose, that movement – every nerve he has screams its need to feel His touch. His grasp, His body, His kiss.

Greg kisses the other man – hard.

The shadows hide too much and not enough. Alex hears a moan, and only moments later realises it was his. His chest hurts and tightens, and he struggles – but he’s bound and held even as the bindings which are part of Him move and tighten with the echoes of the tongue that Alex can remember owning him, probing him, filling him and not this other man—

The barely there red moonlight catches on Greg’s shoulder as He turns and sways and kisses even harder. Like the dawn, the light runs its touch over hills and valleys of creased wool suiting as Greg grabs and hauls and pins His partner with a growl. Then the light hits that man – his shoulder – and something’s wrong.

It’s moving.

Of course it’s moving! They’re both moving. But the light creeps round as both of them turn and turn and turn so slowly – levitating in the blood moon’s gaze – and more’s picked out. An ear, a hip, a hairline, and where Greg’s huge pale hand has cupped the man’s head to pull him close.

Or so it looked.

Alex gasps – worms not forgotten – as Greg’s fingers card through knots of red worms writhing, tied together, bound and wriggling, in the shape – a mass, a shambling copy – of a man.

Of Alex.

Greg’s growl deepens as He and worm Alex spiral in the shocking, bloody air. Every inch is squirming – pressed against Greg’s black suit. A clump of slimy, puce and pinkish bodies bind themselves around Greg’s fingers where He’s carding through the mass, and then fall to splat upon the writhing ground and dissolve into the mat of all its fellow wormy things.

Alex looks up – having followed the fall – and finds Greg staring down at him past the worm-like doppelganger with its wormy hair and wormy legs and wormy long and slender fingers that now rest upon Greg’s waist in that way that Alex deeply wishes he could do. A worm breaks off and rolls across Greg’s jacket only to flip and find its way back on to worm Alex’s leg and melt into its form again.

When Greg sees Alex watching Him – even as He kisses into the worm Alex’s mouth, even as He clutches worm Alex to His front and mashes face to face – He raises an eyebrow at Alex below.

Alex, who has left his mouth open, forgotten, as it mouths against the cool night air in time with his laboured breathing. Alex, who’s bound so tight to the caravan by his arms and chest, but who mindlessly squirms his arse on the damp grass beneath him in some kind of echo of the pace of His passionate, possessive kisses. Alex, eyes lidded and pleading – face flickering between horror and want, disgust and desire. Twitching and flinching, and biting his lip to muffle the breathy whimpers his chest keeps pushing out his body.

Alex can’t think – his brain screams “Greg!” and “Oh my god!” and “Please!” and “Worms!” and “Please!” and “Please!” and “Please!” on a loop. His mouth is dry and his throat is tight and his stomach squirms and turns and pours pure molten discomfort down to pool in his syncopated crotch. Blood, hot and scared, fills him out fast then slow. Confused lust pumps through rabbit-fast veins, and Alex bucks, taken off guard, with every kick of his cock, every bitten back moan.

And Greg is watching him. Holding him down as He tongue fucks this other man like He owns it. And Alex likes that – god, he does – but he wants it for himself so badly his eyes begin to burn. And the man is him, but not, and Alex watches ‘Alex’ move the way he’d move and melt the way he’d melt and hesitantly clutch the way he’s far too scared to really do. And every muscle in his body aches to make those movements – even though they’re wrong and sick and made of squirming, filthy worms. Worms that press against Greg’s body. God Alex wishes he could press against Greg’s body! Writhe there, pink and filthy in His arms. He’s envy. He’s horror. He’s desperate, needy lust. He’s… He’s… Pathetic.

A long slow blink from Greg breaks that blinkless link, and Greg pulls away from ‘Alex’ – ends the kiss. His head pulls back – dragging on the tangled worms to bring worm Alex’s head away – and shows His tongue slowly go back in His mouth and god! It’s far too long – it’s long and long and keeps retracting – pulling out of ‘Alex’ like a drain snake. A foot at least, and then an arms length. Alex’s watches, mesmerised, his own throat swallowing and swallowing and trembling, wondering what it’s like – willing his own body to give him some faint sense of that forbidden, probing touch. With a flick and then a too-sharp grin, the pointed tip of Greg’s tongue slithers back into His mouth, and Alex’s mouth snaps shut in time – a deafening clack that throws his head back as his scared-stiff cock coughs up a spot of wetness.

“Mmm. I think…” Greg says, his voice silk and dangerous, “I have a better question, Little Alex.”

Alex feels the muscles in the tendrils all about him flex and tighten – and suddenly he’s grasped and gripped and moving up and off the filthy earth. Tendrils tight about his thighs and waist and shoulders haul him inches and then feet above the ground to where Greg hangs – his wormy Alex limp against his chest. Held immobile, Greg’s thick columns wrapped around him almost but not quite close enough to brush against his dick, Alex tries to curl away and hide his panting, pants filled state.

Of course, he can’t.

“No,” Greg starts, calm and thinking. “No, I think the better question has to be: ‘Would you love you if you were a worm, Alex?’ Hmm?”

“I— What?” Shock, more than anything, makes Alex speak.

Greg looks meaningfully between Alex and ‘Alex’, who squirms and turns – still clutched and clutching into Greg – to ‘look’ at Alex, hollow holes in writhing masses of an endless knot of living shadowed earthworms that somehow gaze at Alex in an almost sultry way.

“No!” Alex gasps, horrified, as his dick gets even harder. As his face turns redder – burning – in the weakened blood red light. As his heart beats hard and mouth goes dry and his fingertips start tingling and his skin remembers what it was to touch a worm and have it writhe across his hand – those muscles pulsing, flexing, tight and squirming within a tube of damp and coolish, so soft skin. Alex shakes his head so firmly! “No! No, I… No…” And then his head shakes slower, stops and twitches, timed with broken breaths as his ‘No’s become forgotten. “I don’t…”

“Would you love yourself if you were a worm, Alex – a simple question,” Greg says, His voice gently rumbling through the air and through every single point of contact onto Alex’s body.

Worm Alex looks up at Greg adoringly, and Greg reaches up to stroke its wormy, squirming cheek. Alex’s cheek craves it badly.

“I think it’s only fair, don’t you?” Greg digs his fingers into ‘Alex’s’ face and uses that grasp to turn it back to face Alex – apparently causing the worm man no distress at all. Both of them – Greg and wormthing – look at Alex, eyebrows slightly raised, wrapped in each other.

The worm Alex reaches one pink, shifting arm and holds its hand – or what the mass of knotted worms have made to look like one – out to Alex who is still suspended metres high above the ground. Entreatingly, the worm-thing reaches – long worm fingers gently curved and soft and shifting worm by worm to keep its shape. Alex’s fingers twitch in sympathy.

“I… I’m…” Alex pleads with his eyes up at Greg – words battering at the inside of his skull and breaking into pieces. “It’s…” The worm-thing almost touches him – a worm-made fingertip that coils back on itself, rolling banded sanguine flesh – and Alex flinches back with fear. Panic breaks his voice. “It’s…! Nnnn! Greg, I… Please!”

“Please? Please? You want something, Alex? Something more? After all I’ve done and all you did?”

That wormy finger brushes softly over Alex’s suit jacket sleeve – so lightly Alex cannot feel it, and still he wants to squirm right out his skin.

“What… I didn’t…” Confusion wars with writhing revulsion, even as his worm-self leaves two fingers gently resting on the black polyester.

“Don’t you dare, Little Alex, don’t you dare try to say you’ve done nothing here.” Greg’s tone turns dark and sharp and warning, and yanks Alex’s attention like a leash. “As if you’ve not been sighing like a sick old dog when you think my back’s been turned. As if you haven’t tried to goad me – even on the fucking show you claim to love so much.”

Wide eyed and caught, Alex tries to answer, but Greg just talks right over him – and the lump of guilt grows and grows deep in his stomach.

“As if,” Greg says quite finally, “As if you didn’t creep into my bedroom this very night and leave a fucking worm there.” And as He spits the words – black eyes flashing dangerously behind His red-lit glasses – He claws a handful out of the worm-thing’s cheek. Fat dark worms stretch long and thin for just an instant – stretched like tendrils between hand and jaw – then wriggle free and squirming. Greg flings them – hitting Alex’s face – where they splat, cool and wet, and break apart to tumble down his neck and jacket, writhing in the valley between skin and shirt. Mostly though they fall and scatter, falling down through air and darkness to land on thousands of their fellow worms, squirming in the blades of black-shaded grass. They fall, and are caught by worm-thing hands and half-formed faces turned to look and gaze up at Him. A dozen parts of almost-Alex, made of worms, and all unfinished – hands that reach, long fingered still, that – as Alex watches – melt into individual worms like ice in water – and then reform into a face that opens wide, staring back aghast.

A silent scream. A copy of Alex’s own.

Alex closes his mouth, and the bit of worm-him does the same – gazing up confused and scared and slowly calming down. He looks back up and where Greg tore a chunk of worms from ‘Alex’, Alex brings his own hand up to touch where the rent gash is would be mirrored – feels his own short bristly bearded skin, burning in the cool night’s air – and watches as the other ‘Alex’ reforms itself, worms writhing, as if Greg had never ripped a clew of worms out of it. Two worm fingers still rest softly on the fabric of Alex’s suit, just below the shoulders, a barely present touch.

“I’m sorry,” Alex mouths.

“And yet, that’s not what I want from you,” Greg says. He holds the worm Alex by the shoulders – blunted fingers digging in to worm-made flesh – and shoves it forward, closer to Alex’s face. They all hang suspended – Greg’s web of tight black tendrils holding both of them up – and the worm-thing’s hand alights now fully on Alex’s upper arm. Looks at him with its hollow holes where eyes should be, head dipped, almost bashful. “I want you to prove to me you’d love yourself as this. As it. As a filthy, squirming, pathetic worm.”

Alex looks instead at the hand on his arm – the worms of it twisting in an ever moving roil exposing paler undersides and dark tipped ends – but still, a hand. Touching him without grasping, lightly resting on his arm – calming, grounding, as if to say ‘it’s all okay’. And then, a squeeze – where worms entangled move as one to tighten briefly around his arm like a kindly reassuring squeeze. Alex finds his own hand moving – almost of its own accord – slowly, shakily, his hand moves closer, closer to where the worm-hand rests. He stalls a bare three finger widths away and feels the hand around his jacket twitch, and sees from out the corner of his eye, his worm twin’s head turn to watch his hand.

It’s just worms, he thinks.

It’s not! his mind screams back.

It’s worms and a face and hands and body. It’s longing stares just out of sight from empty sockets made of writhing bodies.

Alex takes a breath and holds it hard, and lets his fingers brush the backs of those other pink squirming fingers. Every hair on Alex’s neck snaps upright – he shivers from head to toe – and his teeth almost shatter in his clenched jaw, as he feels the movement of the worms. Feels their slightly damp cool ridges rippling beneath his fingertips – feels their neverending movement – feels the flinch from the Alex thing, and then how it melts at Alex’s touch. That hand relaxing – wrapping wider, broader, feeling like a flat slow lick.

It’s scared – or nervous, Alex thinks. He glances up, and the face that looks back hasn’t proper eyebrows, only fleeting suggestions of lips or where his beard should be, but the ‘Alex’ made of worms looks grateful, hopeful, and then nods encouragingly.

With that tightly held breath slowly, shudderingly released, Alex wraps his hand around the worm-things hand and gently lifts it off. The worm-thing follows – a slightly parted mouth forms on its squirming wormy face, and a pulse of tiny worm bodies imitates an Adam’s apple bob. Alex tries to look away, but can’t – keeps looking into empty sockets that widen with slow surprise – as Alex brings the other Alex’s hand a little upwards, a little inwards, and lets those fingers brush against his cheek.

Empty eye sockets flutter closed, the masses hole of a mouth drops open, and squirming shoulders slump a little, loosening a worm-made head upon its worm-made neck. A subtle movement of a worm or three, and rough approximations of its eyebrows tilt and soften.

Alex squirms with feelings, touches, emotions – fear and sympathy, relief and horror. The touch is cool and damp and moving, soft and tender, trembling with a gratitude that cores him out. He wants to lean against it but also wants to shudder away. He wants to close his eyes just like the other Alex, but he’s scared.

He’s scared.

With something like a sigh, the moment passes, and the other Alex slowly opens what can pass for eyes. Looks back with all it has to look with, and presses worms together to be its lips as if to sadly say ‘I understand’. A bitter-sweet nod, and then worm Alex moves to pull its hand away.

Alex holds it there. “No it’s— It’s okay.” Alex manages a blink – a slow one – even though his eyelids shiver and his face twitches with his barely held together nerves, and leans his face onto the slowly shifting surface of the other Alex’s hand. Its fingers gently writhe and brush against each individual beard hair, the hand not moving even though each individual piece can’t stop. With an effort and focusing on how the touch is… is nice, Alex makes himself breathe slower.

The other Alex lets its hand curve – cupping Alex’s burning face – and after several moments moves its thumb to lightly caress the skin just by his nose, at the edge of Alex’s greying short mustache.

It tickles. Alex flinches. The other Alex startles, scared, and tries to pull away. Alex lets him go, reluctantly, fingers trailing over worm-made skin – apologetic eyes that meet apologetic holes. “I didn’t mean…” he says. “Tickly,” he states, and points at his own face with his other hand. “I just— I’m ticklish there.”

The worm Alex’s eyeholes widen and other worms shift and move and form into a cautious smile. Alex smiles right back. Then the other Alex turns its empty gaze on to Alex’s other hand and brings its own hand up to almost hold his wrist. Waiting for permission. Alex freezes, tense, then slowly relaxes – and moves his hand a centimetre closer, to then be wrapped by cool and damp and gentle fingers. Worm Alex watches Alex closely as he watches what the other Alex does with his wrist. Both of them moving as if in treacle – as if the dull red night is thick and muffled – as if beneath Greg’s hot gaze even time will cower. With half a dozen pauses, each one a chance to tell it ‘no’, worm Alex brings their hands up to its own face – it’s writhing, squirming, living face – and with a final chance to pull his hand from its loose grasp – rests Alex’s hand against its cheek.

The movement on his palm is strange beyond imagining – Alex tenses up and does his best not to scream – the writhing bodies twist and wriggle beneath his palm, against his fingers – catching sometimes on the tender skin between them – and rolling, rubbing – almost licking – against each tingling fingertip. Alex slams his eyes shut so he doesn’t see and feel it at the same time, and bites his lip to stop the sounds he thinks he’d squeak.

Nothing further happens, though. It gets no worse, it gets no stranger, his hand against that squirming mass of— no, against that other Alex’s face – slowly starts accustomising. The coolness barely cooler than his own skin late at night, the dampness rubbed on to him and gets no damper, and the endless movement becomes a kind of ever present tactile hum – an ocean that his hand can sail on with inconsequential individual waves. He tries to move it – his hand – and the other Alex lets him. With eyes still closed, he strokes down the other Alex’s cheek to find its lumpy jaw. Without a beard, the worms have mimicked texture best they can, but it’s all the same beneath his hand. A soft-bodied jawline, a squirming neck, the shape and form that’s so familiar and yet completely not. Alex moves his hand and wraps it round the back of worm Alex’s neck the way he likes it, and remembers how it felt on him. Where he would have short hairs to play with, worm Alex has an imitation formed with tails and heads that barely peek between the knots of long thin bodies. It’s strange as fuck he thinks, and shivers, hidden in the dark behind his eyelids. He almost laughs!

Then he feels a coolness at his own neck – nothing touching! No, but something’s close and drawing out the heat from his red flushing neck. He starts! Hand spasming on the other Alex’s ‘skin’ – his eyes snap open and finds the other Alex looking – head tilted down but more importantly – its arm is raised and reaching, and its hand is waiting to mirror Alex’s own touch.

Alex nods – barely noticeable and almost unconsciously – but the other Alex sees it with its sightless hollow eyes.

A touch! That cool and heat-starving hand hesitantly rests its fingers – squirming – against the burning blushing skin. Goosebumps tear down Alex’s neck and every single hair stands proud, and then the other Alex lets his hand curl ‘round the back of Alex’s neck, its always moving texture teasing at the short hairs already raised. Alex shivers – foot to head – and the movement travels down his arm to touch the other Alex’s neck. A circuit closed and quite electric. The other Alex leans its head to rest against Alex’s hand – to press a little firmer with its body made of worms. Alex watches as its eyes shut, feels the way its hand relaxes, sees worm-formed eyebrows pinch – and imagines a soft sigh from a lungless body. Alex cradles back and lets his thumb caress and dance across the shifting surface. Watches as the other Alex melts against him, watches as it forms a slightly opened mouth – that Alex mirrors unconsciously. Alex leans, and then moves closer – his bent arm between them, forearm resting against a surface meant to form the shape of the same crap polyester suit. The other Alex’s other hand comes up to wrap around his sleeve – to hold him close and let it nuzzle into him. An endless thrum of movement that falls away and becomes just what it is – a yearning, needy touch.

They’re close now – Alex feels the coolness at his front. His other hand he brings to keep him steady – and rests it over the worm-thing’s breast.

No heartbeat.

Or, no, Alex remembers – every single worm has something like ten heart-like things within its body. Ten or five or maybe none – but nothing beats beneath his fingers – instead ten thousand tiny beats of broken, shattered, not quite hearts in every tiny tube-like form.

Could they love him? The thought strikes him out of nowhere – smashes all his other thoughts and fills his head with a chasm of doubt. Could this other Alex love him back? With almost, not quite, maybe hearts? Without a word, a breath, a sigh? Without eyes to see him, look at, fall into?

Does it matter?

Alex looks, and barely sees its face for all the movement. He blinks, and as his eyes fall closed and blurry, all the writhing forms blend into one and another Alex – pink and blotchy – is all he sees. An Alex thing that holds him close and wants him, needs him, every part – maybe every worm – calls out for Alex’s touch. Leaving his eyes closed, Alex moves his hands and brings them up to cup the other Alex’s face. The other Alex lets its hands fall down and finds Alex’s hips and rests them there – just above the tight black tendrils holding him tight. A gentle touch and one that Alex welcomes.

It smells of earth. Of course it does. It smells like dirt and moss and grasses, like the smell of rain and crumbled, skeletal leaves. The smell fills up Alex as he breathes in – each calming breath slower than the last – and leans his forehead softly forward til they touch.

It’s soft. Alex’s head gently presses against the other Alex’s, and he feels the moving bodies squish and give a little as he does. It’s cool against his fevered brow, and like an evening breeze his greying tuft of hair is rustled by the ever moving worms. The smell is strong but smells like gardens, green and living, like the dew on a broken stem, and Alex takes a long deep breath and sighs.

They’re almost touching nose to nose, and Alex can’t quite open up his eyes to see his worm-made self at such a close range. He feels the tremble of its hands upon his hips. Feels the rolling of its head against his forehead. Even feels the tightening and then release of the jaw this Alex doesn’t have. Feels it underneath his fingers – that almost imperceptible tilt… up.

The coolness touches – nose to nose. They slide against each other – faintly curved identically. There’s worms on you, his brain keeps saying. Round and round until he tells it shush. His nostrils flare and push against a worm – or two – and fill with damp and earthy scents. His lips feel cold – he knows it's waiting, wanting, hoping, but there’s worms on you! Alex makes a noise – something helpless or frustrated. Is this all that he would get? Would he be hanging, waiting, wanting if he smelled of dirt? If his skin was lumpy, blotched and clammy? If he’d lost his sight, his hair, his voice and became the worm he knew he was?

Could no-one love him? Would he deserve it? Would he love himself if he were a worm?

Fuck it.

He pulls the other Alex close and presses lips to wormy lips. It’s cold. It’s damp. It’s soft and gentle. The other Alex’s hand grips tight – surprised and shocked and then engaged. It turns its head and gives him room to breathe while kissing back – it feels obscene to call it chaste but somehow that is what it is. Against his body, the other Alex closes just enough to touch their little paunchy stomachs, Alex’s elbows trapped between their chests as Alex holds the other Alex in the kiss.

They kiss! They kiss and kiss and Alex’s lips are tingling from the excited movement of the worms because they’re all excited – he can feel it – on his fingertips along the other Alex’s jaw, and through the thin cloth of his jacket and his shirt where they touch. And most of all he feels it against his waist as other Alex wraps its long and slender Alex-hands about him slipping underneath the crappy jacket’s hem to touch his handles through the almost see-through shirt.

Alex gasps, and almost turns to catch a breath – the shocking touch that sends a burst of lightning up and down his body. He’s grasped and held and god, he thinks he likes it. He breathes a hot breath out against the cool closed lips of other Alex, and fuck he thinks he likes this too. And so he turns and kisses – pulling other Alex close. He breathes out through his nose and from his tightened throat the faintest sort of whimpered wordless wish.

Oh fucking god! He feels it – knows it – when the worm lips part just barely and something like a tongue flicks out to wipe across his lip. It’s lightning! Goosebumps burst across his chest and Alex shivers out a strangled whine. His hands clench tight with shock and panic, and the other Alex squirms against his front with something very much like pleasure. A broken breath, and then another – and even though his head is spinning – even though the voice inside is screaming incoherently – Alex opens up his mouth and licks against the other’s lips. Oh god, oh god! It’s cool and ribbed and writhes and squirms and feels soft – and smooth – it’s like a… god he can’t call it that! It’s— It’s like a… foreskin; wrinkly, soft and slightly salty – but cool and moving all the time. Before he even knows he’s pulled his tongue away the worm-thing’s tongue has moved to try to meet him half-way, its entire body stalled while every worm within it slows and waits and waits.

Though his heart is almost deafening, and his breath fast and shallow, Alex feels the yearning blasting off the other Alex like it did off him. Like it still does. There’s worms on him – who fucking cares? Who doesn’t have a worm of some kind messing up their perfect looks or squirming in their feelings where they’d really rather not. Would he love himself if he was a worm? Imperfect, lumpy, ruddy, squirming – god, Alex has been that long before now and will again. He is a worm, no better or worse than the ones around him. Than the ones that are him, waiting.

Alex feels them squirm between his fingers where he hadn’t realised he’d dug them into the underside of other Alex’s jaw, and pulls him close to kiss it how he’d want to be. The other Alex melts against him eagerly. Tongues that touch and mouths that press and neither of them ever quite stop moving.

Alex has worms on him.

Alex has worms on him.

He pushes his tongue into a mouth that formed for just this only task, that sucks against his tongue and slips a tongue of worms back in his mouth to feel him and explore. He feels worms against the flat of his tongue, wrap round the tip of it, he feels them run across his wonky teeth and almost catch on the gap. He feels worms suck his lower lip into the thing that is a mouth and press – no teeth to make the bite it wants to do. So Alex does. He feels the writhing bodies of multiple worms that shape the lip of other Alex, and tugs them between his teeth and presses down – their tiny tube like bodies caught between his gapped incisors; squeezing, flattening, soft and squishy in his mouth and other Alex trembles in his hands until he lets it go.

There’s movement – up against his body – and Alex feels the other Alex’s hand move up and find the buttons of his jacket. And god – the thought of more of other Alex against his skin is terrifying! All those worms against his body – writhing over every inch – brushing every single hair and twisting, squirming, never ending, an endless wave of cool sensation sending shockwaves through his nerves. Terrifying, yes! But also… Also…

Alex leans and gives it access to the buttons on his jacket, deepening his desperate kiss. He feels them loosen, popping open first the one, and then the other, and cool hands skim across his shirt – the fabric acting like the skin the worm-thing doesn’t have. Up his stomach – splayed and needy – across his chest to cool his front and pulls a shiver out of him. Pulls a moan that falls into a worm-made hole as Alex pulls his hands out – dripping worms – and lets the other him tear his jacket off his shoulders.

It falls. It falls and drifts – black in the darkness. Somewhere under there are worms who’ll squirm beneath it – turn into a hand to clutch it, turn into a cheek to rest against the still-warm lining, closing eyes and opened mouths to imitate a sigh. They’ll wriggle into pockets, push sightless heads through buttonholes, squirm against the collar damp with sweat and mix that moisture with their own.

They – it – wants this so badly.

A yank, and Alex’s shirt comes out his waistband. Sends a shockwave through and down. Alex wraps his arm around the other Alex and pulls away and for the first time in ages looks down between them in the almost pitch black night. He sees himself – the white-red rumpled shirt across his body, grabbed by darker, pinker hands that barely seem to ripple in the shadows. The other Alex’s body is right there – pressed against his front – the hints of creases that say ‘clothing’ now abandoned in its shape. The mess of worms now forms the rough shape of his body – his rounded shoulders, his hairy chest, the soft swell of his stomach without a shirt or belt or trousers to pinch him in or hide behind. And there, below, Alex sees the tenting of his trousers – matched by the other Alex’s form. It’s formed a dick – identical to his except in all the ways it isn’t. The worms that form it, form it hard and pressing up against Alex’s body – crushed between their close pressed fronts. And god – he feels it now he knows it's there – softer than his own but pushing up against him. Alex cants his hips and slips his leg between the other Alex’s, and it throws its head back with a breathless gasp.

He’s being watched.

Of course he is. Alex turns and sees Greg watching closely – black hole eyes that suffer no spare light to live. He hovers there, suspended, looming, in the shadow of the moon and eats them with His hungry gaze – bites His own lip with those far-too-many teeth. His tendrils still hold both the Alexes – cradled like they’re merely toys He’s watching kiss and when He looks at Alex looking, He grins.

“Go on…” He rumbles, sending shivers up through Alex. “You may continue.”

Alex looks down – he can’t help it – and in the darkness, in the shadow, beneath black fabric he sees Greg is not unaffected. It squirms for him.

Alex tries to jackknife like he’s been punched so hard – his head smashes forward into the neck and chest of ‘Alex’, soft with worms, but also – held around his thighs by Greg his legs buck up and grind against the other Alex hard. The two of them curl into one another – struck down with sensations too much to handle.

“Oh my god… Oh my god…” Alex pants, as he tries so hard not to come right this very moment.

They both tremble, clinging, desperate. Alex mouths against the worm-smooth neck of ‘Alex’, blinded hands that scrabble at its soft and shedding back. A shift, and Alex feels his belt undone by shaking, squirming hands, and he gasps into that knotted, writhing mess. A blur of movement, and Alex feels his cock unveiled – hot in the cool night air and aching – his trousers held up by the tight coils of Greg around his legs.

Oh god, what’s he doing? He pulls himself up to look at ‘Alex’ in the places where his eyes should be, and finds a face that stares back; scared and almost too turned on to function. He finds his own face looking back. He kisses it.

It’s so strange and yet he needs it. He pulls it close and feels the endless squirming against his shirt, against the hair at the tops of his thighs, and – oh god, finally! – against his cock. Cool like lube fresh from the bottle, Alex gasps and shudders – its worms hesitating against his beard. “Oh, fffff…” he hisses, biting harder on his own lip than he dares to do on its. He hangs there, still for a moment – vibrating in its arms, an endless movement of his own – as slowly, slowly, an earth-damp set of elegant fingers brush against his aching cock. Blood-hot in the blood red sky, every touch of every worm leaves a scar of quickly fading cool – almost hissing steam, but it’s just the stream of tight and strangled breath escaping Alex’s mouth. At last they wrap around him – and, oh god, it’s good, it’s weird, it’s fucking unearthly – except its exactly not. Stunned and motionless, the chains inside him snap and Alex bucks hard into its cool fist and fuck! The flesh rolls back and every inch is motion, every centimetre touched, a roiling, squirming, never-ending grasp and suck and taste and fuck! Alex shudders back and jerks his hips unconsciously – and god he’s lost his mind! He fucks into its writhing hand like a broken piston; hard and fast and out of sync with anything. His gasps ratchet higher, tighter, and he gags himself on other Alex’s wormy neck – sucking mouths of mindless kisses that make the other Alex grasp and tighten – a writhing circle of sensation, a knotted worm that squirms against itself. Caught and endless.

A yell, and worms spit out of Alex’s mouth as it all becomes so very much. “I’m— Please! Oh god, I’m close!”

The other Alex holds his face and lets him kiss it. There’s noise and thunder all about. Alex feels the tightening, burning, molten kind of almost death that builds and builds and builds. He’s thrashing, grasping – fistfuls of worms torn from its back. He throws his head back, eyes staring wide until the noise grows louder than the thudding in his ears. He hears:

“I said, stop.”

Chapter Text

Dark flashes at the corners of his vision. He sees two enormous blackened forms that whip into the air and then – while Alex’s mind is all but lost – they’re driven down like missiles and the world explodes.

DU-DUM!

Tendrils beat the earth – one and two – with such power surely hell breaks loose. Alex screams – breathy, creaking – and recoils as far as he can get. Eyes crushed shut, they open only fast enough to see the other Alex crumble. The thumping shakes it – squirming head to writhing toe – and every knot comes loose at once. Alex sees its unkissed wormy lips mouth something like “Love you” just before the worm-thing falls apart. Alex looks down. He has worms on him. Hundreds. Thousands. Mindless, faceless, they tumble off his shirt and off his face and out of bunches in his hands. They roll and slither off his aching, frightened cock, leaving streaks of cool as they plop down onto the grass to join the endless others also writhing all alone and shapeless.

Burning fingers on his jaw, then, lift Alex’s face to look into His darkened eyes. He looks from one tear wet eye to the other, His expression cool and close and simply says, “You’re mine.”

Alex burns beneath His lips.

Greg kisses him, and He’s the sun. Greg kisses him, and Alex feels his soul evaporate. Hot and hard and so possessive – His firm lips pressed against poor Alex, opening his mouth to push His hot thick tongue inside – to own him. It’s everything. Alex freezes – hands still hanging where they held clumps of worms, trousers and all his underwear, weighed down by his undone belt still dangling off his thighs draped over Greg’s fat tendril. Alex sees the world shift round him – eyes shocked open even as Greg licks into his mouth and remakes everything His.

Cold. And wet. Alex’s one socked foot touches down on grass. His other – still with plastic shoe on – lands there too – as Greg brings them down upon the lawn. When his feet make contact, Greg’s tendrils wind and shift and stroke and tighten – and his trousers are no longer there. Greg wraps His huge hand around the back of Alex’s neck – just the way he likes it – and pointed, sharpened, slithering things with barely restrained strength wind and squirm up Alex’s chest and pop each shirt button free. In seconds, Alex is completely naked – feet bare on cool grass, arms limp at his side, body bent back and aching into a kiss that Greg never once stopped – holding him by his loose and weightless head.

“Well, little Alex…” Greg whispers into Alex’s ear. His roughened, ragged voice shivers every short hair on Alex’s neck and goosebumps follow every vortex as His hot breath tears across his skin. “Will you be my little worm?”

Alex tries to nod – held up by Greg. He tries to bend his knees to kneel – held up by Greg.

“Mmm, let me hear you, little Alex,” Greg croons.

“Please,” Alex begs. “Plea—”

“—Ah ah. No,” Greg says, correcting him. Greg tilts Alex’s head left to right. “Ask me, like you did in the studio.”

Alex swallows dry and hears his throat click in his muffled, cottony ears. A breath. Another. Because he’s thought of this – of nothing else – for weeks. His hands are weak, his stomach feels like it has a thousand worms inside it, and he feels Greg’s hand get slippery against the sweat that’s beading on his neck.

He has to close his eyes.

“Would you love me as a worm?”

Alex feels it in the air – the sharp edged, blood red, earth-scented air – he feels it like the crackling burn of an old bar heater or the sucking cold of the caravan window. Alex feels it when He smiles.

“Well,” He whispers over Alex’s head. “Let’s see, shall we?”

Greg loosens his grip, and Alex crumples immediately – his legs all too eager to fall to his knees again. So much like the last time in the studio – so completely not. Instead of the hard wooden stage with rough and sturdy bright red carpet, Alex kneels on wet, blade-broken grass shot through with the soft lumpy mounds of worm castings that squelch under his hairy shins. Movement. Wriggling. As desperate half-formed heaps of living worms surge towards him through some hive-minded urge to be close, and Alex bends – pulling his shoulders back, his elbows behind his chest, and folding away his arms as he tightens his thighs, squishing them together harder than the mud squishes under his knees, and as much as he can do – he becomes a worm. For Him.

He towers above Alex; perfect and terrible. The sky itself is a black, bloodstained cape to blot out the heavens, emanating from his huge, strong shoulders, and like His hand, He wraps Alex with it.

“There he is,” Greg says, licking His too long tongue across those sharp, sharp teeth. Each word said slowly and indulgently as Greg tastes and luxuriates in Alex’s reaction to each tenderly crooned one. “My pathetic worm.”

Alex shudders into Greg’s palm, swaying on the undulating mud with nothing to hold him steady but the inexorable draw of His voice. Worms on his ankles. Worms through his toes. Alex’s eyes flutter closed as Greg caresses His huge blunt thumb across Alex’s cheek – His hot, steadying fingers hooked under the writhing bristles of Alex’s jaw.

Another caress. Alex feels dizzy. Then His thumb slips down, wending its way across the hairs of his beard where it clings desperately to the final memories of colour. When Greg’s thumb brushes across his too sensitive lips, Alex gasps – sensation exploding from the roughened texture of whorls and loops against his thin red skin. His nose fills with His scent – the smell of leather, of salt, and of fruit torn between sweet fermentation and fetid decay. Then taste explodes there – the salty, softly metallic taste of skin – as He draws His thumb down Alex’s lip to expose the scarlet, shining, softly wet insides. As He thumbs over that impossibly soft part of Alex to ease His finger further – to brush against the rippled surface of Alex’s gums and the slick and slippery, broken enamel battlements of his teeth. Alex hears His touch echo through his skull – carried by tooth and bone – as His fingernail clicks and clatters against off-white and pushes past to find Alex’s waiting tongue. To press against that pink and writhing surface, wet and yielding, as Alex opens his mouth to let Him in. He pushes into the muscle, He feels it squirm beneath His touch, and Alex’s world narrows to nothing but the flat pad of His thumb pushing and pushing and pushing.

The hair on the back of His thumb shivers as Alex’s moan slithers past it.

“Look at you; a fleshy tube writhing in the mud at my feet. Pathetic. A worm.” Greg brings his other hand around to tilt Alex’s head up as He pries Alex’s mouth wider with his thumb still digging into the flesh of his tongue that slithers beneath his grasp. His whispers shiver the silver on Alex’s head – the sweetness of His tone at odds with the casual cruelty of His words. “You’re just a mindless thing with a hole, aren’t you?”

Alex tries to nod, his closed eyes prickling with tears at the corners. Spit gathers in his mouth, and he swallows – lips held open as he struggles not to cough. His back is arched, his hips too far forward and his thighs would begin to burn if he were a man and not the worm that Greg says he is. He’s a worm. Like the ones all around him. Worse, maybe. And Greg shouldn’t be touching him. Shouldn’t even look at him. He’s a worm! He’s a worm. Disgusting. Pink and filthy on the grass, pale and dark plum – swaying, lost, like after the rain. The first tear burns down Alex’s face leaving a scar of freezing salt, scoring down his cheek and getting lost in the forest of his beard. It’s followed by others – just as forgotten. Just as lost.

Alex tries to shake his head, his face crumpling as he begs forgiveness for just existing. He tries to turn away – to curl up like the worm he carried in his hand and dared to leave on His bed. Shame. Where his hands were clasped behind his back, he begins to unlace his white-cold fingers. His moan turns breathy – turns into a whine shot through with shame and laced with a swelling sense of anguish.

Greg’s hands tighten on him. Holds him still. Holds him up. “Hey! None of that,” He croons, bent closer.

“You may be a disgusting little worm, Alex – but you’re my disgusting little worm.”

Alex’s whine catches in his throat as Greg’s possessiveness washes over him. As His hands hold him at the dead centre of a maelstrom of self-pity.

Greg’s voice twists somehow – darkens and roughens and drapes itself on Alex’s shoulders like loops of heavy tendrils. “You looked so pathetic, your tiny little tongue and your puny little hands all over that other worm you,” He murmurs, His fingers flexing and scraping through the short hair at the back of Alex’s head. “It disgusted me, Alex,” He says, whispering it like a confession. “You disgust me, Alex.”

The darkness behind Alex’s eyelids turns darker still, and his eyes flutter open just in time to see Greg lean down for a black-eyed, ravenous kiss – His thumb still hauling Alex’s slobbering mouth wide.

Hot lips against his shame-burnt face. The taste of his own salt. Greg pulls His thumb to the side and smears His kisses anywhere He wants. Alex moans – the sound of it caught and released as Greg attacks his mouth. Greg licks and sucks and – pulled taut by His finger still – scrapes His too-sharp teeth over Alex’s flushed and trembling lower lip as He pulls away just to attack again.

Alex throws his shoulders back and clings – white fingered – to his own pulled back wrists as Greg flicks His tongue into Alex’s slob pooling mouth. Alex whines. Alex whines and is His worm. Whatever He wants.

The tongue slithers in. It slides slick and strong against Alex’s own and pushes and presses like His thumb had done. It occupies him – stretches against his cheek, pushing it until his skin feels taut, coils and writhes under his tongue and then whips up to curl around it, pulling it towards Him to be sucked hard. Alex whimpers through his nose. A cold slithering shocks a startled moan out of Alex as a cool, slimy tendril makes contact through the goosebump raised fluff of his shoulder, slicking it down as it writhes its way, heavy and sure, across his hot skin towards his neck. Another, from the other side, does the same, and then another and another, from all angles – and still Greg drives His tongue further into Alex’s forced open mouth.

Alex shivers from muddy, worm-woven toes, to the trembling, greying hair at the top of his head.

And then Greg kisses him more.

His tongue – His impossible tongue – flicks and fills and squirms in his mouth until all the spit dribbles out of the corners to leave his beard soaking wet. And then – and then like something impossible – His tongue brushes up against the tight closed back of Alex’s throat. Alex jerks – or he would – but Greg holds him. His hands on his head and now the tendrils that were all over his shoulders have coiled and spiralled about his neck until he feels them wrap around him like a many-pieced collar. A black sunburst tightening about his throat. Alex’s eyes snap open, scrunch closed, flutter and finally as His thick tongue pushes down into Alex’s loosening throat – roll back in his head.

So this is what it was like.

Greg’s lips still smash against Alex’s – his tongue, fat now at the base, still fills Alex’s mouth – but the blunted hot tip of it stretches Alex’s throat until it seems too much. Until he feels the black living collar around his neck press the thin skin and flesh, prickly with beard, between tongue and tendril. He’s just a thin layer between Him and Himself. Oh god, he’s just a fleshy tube. He’s a hole.

Greg’s tongue surges into him, and Alex goes limp – resigned to his fate. He can feel it squeeze through his throat, he can feel His heat in the core of his chest – feel it against his lungs. Alex’s heart thunders in his ear – no longer drowned out by whining, moaning breaths – and Alex feels that in his throat as well. Greg’s tongue squirms in him, and Alex’s stomach clenches – but he lets himself go limp.

If He wanted, he could coil His tongue around that beating core of him. So close. So close! A piercing push – an ache he can almost taste – and He could lick Alex’s heart while it clenched in double-time. Oh god, to feel Greg’s tongue lick into him – in and through those chambers – squirming up against the valves as they flutter at His touch. The thought sends Alex reeling even as Greg fills him so full he distantly thinks he might burst. The world turns grey behind his trembling eyelids – Greg’s starving kisses so rough against his lips feel fainter and fainter, and the fingers in his hair and the tendrils round his neck take more and more of his softening, weakening weight.

He’s never been so hard in his life.

Alex gasps – air freezing his lungs compared to the heat of Greg’s now missing tongue. He breathes in and in and in, and his chest fills to bursting. The grey of the world explodes leaving tear-kaleidoscoped visions of rich, warm blacks and violently vibrant crimsons. The muffled underwater sounds sharpen and Alex hears the warm rumble of His voice as it vibrates his body and reawakens his bones.

“...not done with you yet, my little worm. Shhh. You’ll wriggle for me a little more, won’t you?”

Alex’s throat is raw and he coughs as he comes back to himself. His hands had released from behind himself in the uncounted moments when there was nothing but Him, and they hang limply by Alex’s sides. His eyes flutter as he sways – the tendrils loose about his neck now – and his heart feels deafening in his ears once more. That soft grey silence fades, and only slowly, Greg’s words start to make any sense at all.

He looks up at Him.

“Mmm, there you are,” Greg rumbles, as he draws a finger up Alex’s hot, taut neck. “My good little worm.”

Alex shudders. Satisfaction is too smug a word – gratitude too weak – to convey the viciously pathetic satiation he feels at being that for Him. To see His lopsided smirk in the eclipse’s soft light and the gentle crinkles around His depthless black eyes directed at him, as the wooziness wears off.

“But Alex…” Greg leans down to whisper in his ear, His hands moving around to Alex’s tendril-slicked shoulders, to turn him around – feet squelching on the mud. “A worm isn’t so special…”

As Greg moves him so that his back is pulled against His black-clothed front, Alex finds himself facing the back of the garden. The hutch to his left, the hedge tall to his right, and in the shadow of the fences, the charcoal on black shape of His statue – and high above the dim red light of the moon. All about them, painted in its bloody light, the floor squirms and shifts and moves. With His words, forms congeal and heaps turn higher and higher – writhing against themselves until they become figurelike.

“...I could have as many worms as I want.”

Greg’s hands on Alex’s shoulders stroke down and grasp the meat of his upper arms – pinning him against His chest, as Greg’s warm, soft, unsettling words slither into Alex’s ears.

The shapes – the worms – congeal and sharpen. A body – a head – a lurch that forms a pair of legs that slowly shamble in Alex’s direction. Each shuffling, shedding, red-limned step refining the worm-thing until Alex sees first one, and then two – and three – worm Alexes approach.

“I could have you as a worm whenever I want.”

The first worm Alex reaches out, and its squirming, still forming, pink hand brushes against Alex’s cheek. Alex doesn’t move – doesn’t know what to do. The cool air against his front freezes against the heat of Him behind, and Alex can feel the hard, insistent press of Greg’s cock through His trousers, against his arse. The worm thing in front of him full-body squirms – rapt at the touch of Alex – and the terrifying, wonderful, press of Greg’s dick squirms too in a way that’s completely impossible. The second worm Alex gets closer now, casting Alex’s trembling body into shadow, and steps – almost slithering – up against his front. It puts its squirming hand against Alex’s chest and draws it down – cooler than the cool night air – and trails goosebumps until it leaves its hand resting softly on his hip.

“They do anything I want, of course…” Greg says, before He leans and licks a hot streak against the skin behind Alex’s ear. “Just like you would.”

Electrified by His touch, Alex stalls before nodding furiously. Of course he would. Will. Wants to. Needs to. Anything. Anything at all.

“But…” Greg teases, one hand slipping across Alex's front to hold him tight, while the other crawls down over his hip and inches closer to Alex's cock. “...There's one thing they can't do for me, Alex.”

Alex's eyes widen and he holds his breath – pinned not just between Greg's firm body and His grasp, but between sensation and His words. The third worm Alex sinks to its knees, one wormy hand stroking down Alex's thigh, feather light as it looks up at Alex – desire in its empty sockets.

It opens its mouth.

Du-dum.

Softly. Distantly. That deep and sonorous heartbeat begins again. The thud-thud of two of His ink-black tendrils gently beating the night-damp grass.

The shock of it startles Alex and he flinches. So do the worm things. Greg's grip on his chest tightens with the beat.

“What do you think that might be, Little Alex?”

A pinch, and Alex cries out before he can even hazard an answer. Greg's huge fingers tight as a vice on Alex's nipple. Before he can gasp the air back in, there's cool wet pressure on the tip of his cock and his breath snaps into a backwards moan. The third worm Alex tightens it's squirming lips around him and somehow sucks – the feel of it wrong and so fucking good his hips snap forward instinctively. Then cool wet pressure against his forgotten mouth, as another worm Alex leans up and kisses the whimper off his lips. Hands. Worm hands. Too many. He's got worms on him. Everywhere. Worm kisses on his neck. Worm caresses on his thighs. Cupping and squirming against his balls. A tongue of worms that licks – earthy and cool – against his teeth. His own squirming tongue.

Greg twists His pinch, and Alex squirms in His grasp – against the heat of His body and the hard insistence of His massive bulge.

Du-dum!

Beats. Closer or harder. Louder. Alex feels it through his body – soles of his naked feet to the shivering ends of his silvering hair. He feels it through Greg's body. He feels it on the worm things that stop and jerk and spasm. A kiss turned messy. A suck suddenly slurped. Hands that turn to worms that turn to hands again, all over him.

Du-dum!

Again.

Du-dum!!

Every beat blanks Alex’s mind as every wormy touch dissolves and forms anew. His eyes blink open and sees the worm Alex pressed against his face become shapeless – struggling to hold together as—

Du-dum!

Louder! Nearer! The earth trembles and the worm things smash like waves upon the cliff. A heap of one becomes the other as their bodies melt into and through each other. Alex looks down, and for a moment, two worm things suck his dick at once – one face splitting into two as worms divide and spread and try to hew the end of one and beginning of another.

Greg's hand slips through the mess of them – through the rhythmically disintegrating mess of them, and wraps around Alex's aching hard cock.

Alex cries out, head thrown back against His shoulder, and worms fly off his face with the force of it. Greg's hand – tight and hot and huge – is everything. It's the burning flame on the wick of his destruction. Alex feels the heat of Him pooling in Alex's gut and tightening his body like a clamp.

“Well?” Greg asks, as if he's not taking Alex to pieces.

Barely gasped breathy chains of ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ are all Alex can get out. Greg strokes him once and it's scalding. A cool, writhing lick over the head, turns Alex inside out with a choked back “Holy fuck!”

DU-DUM!

The world explodes. Everything shakes at His strike, and Alex yells, terrified. It slams his lungs and rattles his teeth – the earth quakes and every single thing creaks or cracks or trembles.

The hundred squirming touches are gone. Only He remains.

His grasp on Alex's chest, tight against his burning body – black in the bloodlit night. His hand on Alex's painfully hard cock, stalled and still tight, feeling Alex's thundering pulse within it. His deep and delighted breath against Alex's temple, His wide and toothy smile audible in His satisfied rumbling hum.

“They fall apart too easily, Alex,” Greg whispers, his breath teasing across Alex's fluttered closed eyelashes and warming his eyelids. “You wouldn't do that now, would you?”

Chapter Text

Greg strokes him – makes a point of it – and Alex wants to die. The pressure in him tightens til it's sharp and Greg grinds against Alex's arse – the size of his still clothed cock pushing hard between Alex's cheeks and already easing them apart.

A promise of flesh.

Or a threat.

Alex wants to be good. Wants to make a promise of his own; he'll do what Greg wants. He won't fall apart like the worms did. But oh my god – how? How can he, when with just one twist—

“Aaaah!” Alex squeaks. So close he can taste it. He mustn't! He can't! Tears, hot and furious at himself, pool at the corners of his eyes and he slams his teeth together, grimacing through the razor sharp pleasure.

He can hear his own skull hissing in his ears.

Then the worst of it passes and Alex tears air into his lungs again – just enough to babble “No, Greg. No. I'll be good. Please. I'll— I p–promise. Please!”

“You better.”

Alex gasps. A hundred tendrils swarm him. They coil around his legs, slither up his soft-skinned inner thighs and taste the back of his knees. Greg’s hand uncoils from his dick, as instead His black touches slither along the crease of his hip, curling and spiralling, leaving cool red-tint silvery trails through the thickening hair across Alex’s core. Tendrils wind and bind about his shoulders, burrowing into the hollow of his collarbones, and laving like a cool slick tongue against the grain of his beard’s budding shadow. Under his armpits, across the sweat-smooth, pale skin of the inside of his arms where the blue veins turn black in a light with only one colour.

The ground drops away.

Alex’s feet leave the mud – a sucking sound as the earth itself kisses him one last time – messy and sloppy and cold. His toes point down as He lifts them both off the filthy, vulgar ground.

Greg’s hands roam Alex’s body – a body bound by His black ribbons. Like a school of fish around a predator, the tentacles flee at His hand’s approach, rippling all across Alex’s goosebumped skin.

Up and up. Higher and higher. Greg finally wraps one hand around Alex’s chest to hold him still, while the other slips down between his legs. They’re so high, Alex feels dizzy. He grabs Greg’s arm and holds tight.

“I’ve got you, little worm.” He feels the rumble of His laughter. “You’re mine to hold. Mine to play with. Mine to tear apart.”

Greg’s hand – branding hot in the cool night air – scorches through the hair on Alex’s belly, across the thin skin of his gutter. His huge fingers slip around the swell of Alex’s hairy thigh, His thumb tracing the sweat-damp crease, until He brushes against Alex’s tight balls and then further, to the hot seam beneath. Two fingers – flat padded tips – Greg pulls up and presses, rubbing the base of him and sending deep tingles into his core.

Greg licks up Alex’s neck, stopping just beneath his ear to whisper, hot, “Don’t fall apart until I say so, worm.”

Alex’s dick kicks in the air, electricity flashing across his skin, as the thought of it tightens his everything. They hang together in the still eclipsed red sky. Hovering high above the house, the hedges, the black-green trees. The rolling black hills of muddy golf course stretch out beneath them, the red-silver gleam of the river to their right, and the flat featureless expanse of the rugby pitch to the left and the sky – endless and black, smeared with the pale white ghost of galaxies long dead. Greg bares him to the universe, exposed and more naked than anyone's ever been, and Alex feels like he's dangling on the edge of an infinite pit of night, about to fall into the sky. His fingers turn white, clutching the rich fabric of Greg's sleeve, as he turns his gaze aside and whimpers for too many reasons.

Two fingers. Just two fingers Greg teases him with, rhythmically rubbing his perineum until Alex's hips grind back almost imperceptibly. Greg grinds back. Greg nuzzles up the back of Alex's neck – hot breath through his close trimmed hair, and Alex shivers. He grazes those razor sharp teeth along the ridge of Alex's tensed taut neck, and Alex gasps.

“Alex…” He growls. “Remember the last time I told you not to move?”

Oh. Oh god. Yes – yes Alex does remember. Before he knows what he's doing, Alex snaps his gaze down, staring at what's happening. Seeing the tendrils lash his body tighter to His – dive through the air to bind him immobile, before a languidly drifting length of slick and shining black – it's fine sharp point gleaming in the moonlight – swaying like a snake about to strike, hovers just finger widths away from the head of Alex's frantically bobbing cock.

Alex gasps – whispering “Oh my god. Oh my god!” Over and over as he inhales. His eyes widen, as the mesmerising tip seems to eye him up – finding its target – His target – and then dives!

Alex. Snaps. Rigid. And. Screams!

Pressure inside him. Along his length! Wiggling and slick and tight and tight and tight! Aaaaaagh! The tendril burrows into his dick, feeling him – tasting him – cool and wet inside the tight hot flesh of him. Alex watches, transfixed twice, as He holds him perfectly still. The body of the tendril thrashes as it squeezes inside him, thickening only slightly as another inch disappears down his urethra. Alex pants – short, sharp, burning breaths that turn dry and ragged in his throat.

It stops. He stops. For a moment, for a breath. Alex’s world is nothing but the feeling of that suddenly slack black filament filling him and stretching him from the inside out. It stings, and then it doesn’t. It almost burns, but it stops. It’s fire and lightning and the awful, perfect, ache of a long stiffened stretch. It’s in him. He’s in him! Floating in the night air, a line links Him directly into the dick of Alex.

Oh, fuck! Greg rubs him again. Two fucking fingers! Alex tries to leap out of his skin like a salmon upstream – but He has him. Implacable. Unstoppable. Overpowering. Alex’s muscles clench and pull – flesh striped with bands of black as his arms tense and his body fights and his dick pulses, hardening still with moon-red blood. Alex, unable to look away, watches as a dribble – a pearl – of precome breaches the join where His tendril fills his slit as Greg’s massaging fingers send delicious pressure up through his body.

The tendril slowly stiffens once more.

“Oh my guhhh…” Alex stammers, his eyes slamming closed and opening wide once again. As he feels the movement deep inside him, like an itch he forgot finally scratched, Alex groans and whines and tries to swallow dry air.

What the fuck is that? The tendril – one of a hundred filling the sky – moves in a way he’s not seen before. A pulse that travels down its long and sinuous length, getting closer and closer and closer. Only Alex’s eyes are free to track its advance – a thickening like a wave too deep beneath the ocean to fully show its strength. It approaches. Alex’s breath locks in his chest – caught behind his desperately hammering heart as it traces down the tendril and then, at last, reaches the tip of Alex’s cock. A bead of thickness no bigger than a pea – it slows and slows and finally it – doesn’t stop. Every muscle in Alex’s body screams and doesn’t move. A tidal wave of feelings explode down the length of Alex’s dick as the pulse bores into him. He sees his dick kick and fight and feels it fuller than its ever been a hundred times over and— holy fucking shit!

Alex would jackknife. His neck explodes with tendons and muscles raised as he tries to thrash and yell and squirm like the worm he wished he was as Greg’s tendril brushes up against his prostate and pulses into the surface of it.

Two fingers. One tendril. Gently pinched between his body, He rubs and strokes inside and out, and Alex cannot fucking breathe! His stomach clenches – his chest goes tight – every single muscle in his body wants to tear his bones apart and Greg lets him thrash only millimetres against the iron-like bands of His thick and many tentacles.

When Alex’s eyes snap open – a random act in a body fully at war – he freezes. Down the tendril a dozen more beads of a pulse journey down its winding length. Taking their time, taking His time, Alex’s agonizing ecstasy barrels down at him without mercy.

“Oh my god…” he breathes.

“Yes, little worm?” Greg pants into his held-immobile, flush-burning ear.

They’re only inches away – the pulses – from the tip of his wine-dark cock.

“I— I can’t! Please! It’s too— I’m not—”

They don’t even hesitate.

“You will.”

They thunder inside him – a machinegun of sensation – battering him with the stretch, the heat, the flash of a sting and the silky soft bliss of their passing and then they touch! Him! There! One after the other. Unstoppable. Alex’s jaw aches as he grits his teeth around a cry that pulls him inside out. Du-dum! Du-dum! DU-DUM! Squeezing him. Rubbing him from the inside. Caressing him with each hidden bead of pulsing pleasure that disappears into his dick.

He’s going to—! He can’t—! The pressure builds and builds and his balls tighten so hard they’ll shatter like his teeth. He’d thrash his head. His keening catches in his empty lungs. His fingers white and numb digging into the iron grip of Greg’s forearm against his chest.

His body starts to shake and he can’t stop it.

“Ah ah! What did I tell you?” Greg warns.

Panic. Fear. Fear of a different kind. He mustn’t! He promised! Terror lances through Alex’s veins like ice and he feels like he’s going to be sick. His eyes snap wide and unseeing as he tries desperately to clench – or unclench – just the right way to stop the utterly unstoppable. His mouth falls open as he pants dry into the night.

It’s almost impossible to hear him gasp, “Help!”

Then tight! A clamp! A coiling, wrapping grasp that binds him, ties him, and pinches about the base of his hair-trigger cock. Tight! So tight! It hurts and he focuses on that as the cork is hammered back into the bottle of his orgasm. Barely.

It passes, and Alex sobs around his gasping breaths – tears streaming from his face to be lost in the channels of His tendrils. His hands spasm and release from their deathgrip on Greg’s arm, pins and needles screaming through every finger and bone, and his body goes limp as the sobs claw their way out of his tight-wrapped chest.

“Shhhh. There there. You’re trying so hard, aren’t you? Fighting your pathetic worm nature for me.” Greg turns Alex’s head to the side, and kisses his wet cheek with a tenderness that only makes the tears fall harder. “What a good little worm. My good little worm.”

Alex tries to lean his face towards His gentle, awful words but the tentacles hold him where He chooses and no closer. He gulps and sniffles as the overwhelming balm of relief flushes through his veins where terror had frozen him and arousal had scorched him to the bone.

“Yes, good worm. Look at you. Almost a mess – almost fell apart, didn’t you?”

Hiccoughing, Alex starts to apologise. “I’m s—”

“—Bah bah bah! You didn’t – and that’s what I want. Good worm. Good Alex.” Greg licks up Alex’s face – his prehensile tongue flicking and curling around the salt wet of his face and slithering back into His sharp hot mouth to savour every drop. “But it’s my turn now.”

The words ooze like treacle into the folds of Alex’s brain – the echo of them bounding around the shell of his ear – leaving moments before their ominous meaning sharpens and forms.

Movement. Behind him. Tendrils that slither into that tight sweated space between Alex’s back and Greg’s clothed front and do something where Alex can’t see. Greg brings His hand up and holds Alex’s throat by His five heavy fingers – each one burning against his tear-cooled skin – and kisses him on the corner of his mouth. It’s slow and soft and isn’t at all the velvet wrapped threat his words clearly are.

Greg’s belt is undone. The button fly eased through with a tendril’s touch. A zip drawn down by the slither of a muscular tentacle that slips across Alex’s sweat soaked back.

Alex’s eyes are open, but he sees nothing – his mind too focused on the press of Him at his back. He doesn’t even feel the last lingering lick of Greg’s too long tongue across his lip, in time with the shucking of His black suit trousers to release His massive cock at last.

It’s hot – so hot – and huge. Alex feels it hard against the valley of his arse – curved up and pressed tight against Greg’s stomach and Alex’s lower back. Crushed between them and as Greg turns Alex’s head to face forwards again, it writhes against his body with a will of its own. Alex tightens at the thought of it, and his breath quickens again.

With His hand still wrapped around Alex’s windpipe – holding it and feeling the thunder in Alex’s veins – Greg grinds His dick against Alex’s pinned body with an audible grin. “Do better, Alex. Prove you’re not just a worm. Haul your pathetic body out of the dirt and I will show you the stars.” With that, He tilts Alex’s head up – Greg’s fingers scorching against his tightening skin – and Alex’s eyes fill with the black of midnight, speckled with the distant flames beyond.

Greg cants His hips backwards, and rests the head of his terrifying cock at Alex’s fluttering entrance. Hot against his spread open cheeks – slick with its own shining wetness – Alex fears and needs it in equal, devastating measure. He’s bent back – curved against the swell of His front – and feels exposed to the universe. Like his ribs have flayed open and bared his writhing, wriggling, pulsing insides to the voyeuristic moon. He feels each trembling, hesitant breath in as he fights every muscle inside – like they’re individual worms making up his pathetic form – to relax and let Him in.

The tendrils tighten. Lashed against his thighs – pale white pillowy flesh banded black that quilts his body as He slowly pulls him down.

Mouth open. Eyes wide. No scream escapes His grasp. Greg pushes in and the stretch goes on and on and on beyond the moon and sky and stars and Alex’s lungs still as full as his mind is empty.

Wider and wider. Hotter. Pain. Stinging stretch. A fullness he feels against his pelvis. The sky turns grey and the night goes silent and Alex almost breaks his fingers grasping Greg’s forearm so tightly. Explosions of nerve endings that scream like Alex can’t. He feels it in his gut – his lungs – feels it push against the empty lump in his silenced throat.

Seconds pass as years and then He stops. Holds Alex there as he shudders uncontrollably in His arms. A handful of panicked heartbeats until He loosens his grasp and Alex cries out the echo of the scream that had deafened his mind.

Air. Gasping. Fullness. Pain! And then it passes. Then he breathes and then he sees the stars again. Greg is huge inside him – barely inside him! Alex pants and sweats as his body takes more than he’d dreamed or even feared in his wettest nightmares. And before he can even try to pretend he can stand it, Greg pushes up with those two fingers and rubs him through his skin.

Alex wails! He wails and sighs and tries to breathe and breathe and breathe and then Greg’s tendril – down into his urethra – moves and rubs and Alex is lost.

Behind him, Greg rocks his hips a tiny bit, and Alex can’t. He can’t! It’s everywhere – He’s everywhere. He’s up against his perineum, down his cock and so fucking in him he’s lost and lost and lost! Greg pushes in and the universe explodes in Alex’s eyes – supernovas of white hot pleasure stripped of their incandescent glory by the beauty of black holes of iridescent pain.

And then – oh god – Greg pushes into him and presses there.

Three. Three places. Three points of contact. Three times He squeezes against that place inside him from three different angles to leave Alex nowhere left to hide. He feels the shivering pulse of fluid desperate to burst from his dick fill him backwards instead. Feels Him pushing on that gland from every angle and he’ll burst – he’ll burst!

And Greg pulls back and then with aching slowness, pushes back inside and god – it’s worse/better now! It’s more. It’s more! Again – that slick, hot slide that splits him open. Alex feels the press of it against his fucking eyeballs as his body shakes and shakes and shakes.

He’s babbling. How long for, Alex doesn’t know. His dry-cracked lips won’t stop mouthing begging, pleading, desperate words – stopped not by inhales or exhales. “Please,” he whispers, “I can’t,” he lies, and worst of all – the word that turns his soul the colour of His eyes – a confession for only Him:

“More!”

Greg growls into Alex’s hair and draws out once more before driving back inside deeper again. So agonizingly slowly – each millimetre won with sweat and ragged, red hot breath. Deeper again. And again. Alex feels Him churn his insides – feels the stretch against his skin above where his dick is held still by the black sound inside. He feels Him squirm. In time with each trembling thrust, Greg strokes him deep inside and rubs his knuckles underneath. A three sided roll that never ends.

Faster now. And almost all the way. Alex’s stuttering breaths come faster too – inhaling shakily with each drive into his arse and gasping, hollow-chested groans as Greg draws back for the next thrust.

Even faster. And god – His thighs finally touch Alex’s legs and Greg groans long and hard – every tendril quaking – as he bottoms out at last. Greg hauls him so fucking tight against His body – crushes his lungs and tightens black bindings all across Alex’s stomach and the pressure squirms His dick around inside Alex’s insides. Greg’s fingers ‘round his throat. Greg’s mouth against his neck – hot and open as He breathes Alex in like He needs him more than air.

The thought pierces Alex. And then His teeth do.

Alex’s empty lungs sigh a scream as he feels Him bite. Feels the razor points press against his skin and pierce – slipping into red flushed skin like rare tender meat. So sharp the agony almost passes him by. He feels Greg’s hot lips wrap around his skin and that impossible tongue laps and licks and flicks across the red wet skin. And then He sucks.

He’s in him, and he’s in Him. Bound tighter than a bandage – consumed and consuming both – Alex doesn’t know where he ends and He begins and when He tears his mouth off of Alex with a rumbling, red-lipped growl of vicious satisfaction – god help him, the loss is almost too much.

In and in – Greg drives again. A slapping, slamming, shallow thrust that pounds Alex where the lightning lives. Alex can’t remember what he was before this. Before pleasure broke his body into trembling tiny bits. Before the tightness, pressure, heat and aching lust replaced his insides to be churned and squeezed and moulded by His thrusts. Before he was a squirming empty vessel for Him to use.

The fingers move – and Alex barely registers it. The hand slips down, and Alex’s hands are left bereft and aching – twitching against sweaty night air. His rolled back eyes flutter and he looks down to see His hand wrap tight about Alex’s cock – the tendril still inside – and Alex has nothing left to scream with. His mouth falls open and only silent worship escapes.

Greg grunts and slams inside – harder now – and Alex gave up on giving up so long ago. He’s broken. He’s lost. He forgets his name and what he ever was. His body held together only by His bindings, his eyes disbelieving what he sees as Greg grabs him roughly and strokes in time with His thrusts.

His dick distends Alex’s stomach so far, His wrist knocks against it with every slapping, wet pump, and Alex somehow remembers to gasp.

Tears – he thought he had none left – well in Alex’s eyes as he suddenly panics, fearing he’s forgotten how to come. Terrified he’ll live like this forever – abused by sensations too good, too much, too rich to bear. He finds a breath and sobs it as the teardrops splash hot upon His hand.

Du-dum. Du-dum. Du-dum.

The thunder. The strikes. The rumble far below as with every harder, faster slam Greg makes, his tendrils beat the earth. Louder. Harder. Everything shakes. The earth and air and sky and moon tremble as Alex takes it all – takes it all and cries.

Du-du-du-du-dum…

Greg’s hand is slick with the fluids Alex leaks around the thrusting, twisting sound. The slapping, wet noises drown out everything. Greg twists his thumb around the tip of Alex’s dick – squeezing his own tendril and sending a thousand shockwaves to get lost amongst a million more.

“Do it,” Greg commands him – hot breath on blooded neck. “I give you permission, worm.”

All three pressures press at once – fingers, sound and cock – while Greg wanks him off tight and hard and fast and Alex freezes for an instant. He’s scared! His heart thunders and his eyes snap open and his ears ring with his words and he’s so fucking scared and the tears fall harder and his chest fucking hurts and his body won’t stop shaking – won’t stop shaking!

His mouth hangs open in a rictus cry; frozen horror and ecstatic joy twist his face in a way no face should twist – and then hot lips against his own. His head turned to His. And Greg kisses him with a tenderness that breaks and heals Alex’s heart a hundred thousand times and it happens.

Every muscle fights its final battle – leaving nothing back – and tenses. His guts contract about Him, his hole swallows back, and Alex’s poor body comes at last.

In a world of black and red – everything goes white. The tendril sound shoots out with the force of it – as Alex’s come spurts out like fireworks. Like he’s liquified his spine to spray it – pearly red – into the night. Like Greg’s unceasing thrusts pump it out of him from the inside and turn him inside out. Like his blackened soul just turned incandescent white and burst from his body taking everything that makes Alex, Alex, away – leaving nothing but an empty vessel.

Alex isn’t there, any more.

Chapter Text

Hair on a chest, stroked by His hand. Rubies of sweat shivered by His breath. Sounds that rumble bones long before His voice registers in an ear. Gentle touches, gentle words – a heart that slows and a pair of lungs recalls a gasping purpose. Words. Hands. A bristly nuzzle against a neck. His neck. Alex’s neck.

Alex shivers and twitches – sheet lightning across his sky. A chain reaction that sends spasms and shudders and hitched broken gasps back and forth and up and down his body that aches and sings and screams and glows like a pale hairy sun.

“G— Greg!” he gasps.

Hot lips against the nape of his neck buzz with the deep rumble of His hum. “Mmm, oh good. You survived.”

Alex almost laughs – until Greg leisurely fucks into him in one tight, slow push.

“Oh my god! I— Oh fuck!”

Greg is still hard. Still huge. Still slick and hot and filling Alex entirely. Alex dangles – limp from every binding – and bonelessly takes every single one of His writhing inches. Greg pulls out and with barely a hesitation slams back into Alex with teeth-rattling force. Alex’s exhausted body – strapped in place by those slick cool tendrils – exhales a voiceless “Haaa…” Greg grabs his hips and goes again – a rhythm building that breaks every thought Alex might have but this. Him. Everywhere it’s Him. Alex is just a thing for Him to use. As He fucks him like He’d break him, as He slams against Alex’s sweating arse and digs His fingers into the singing, glowing, aching and exhausted flesh of him and hauls him harder onto His cock. As He growls into the hair between Alex’s shoulder blades, His breath a maelstrom in the sweaty space between His body and Alex’s, and He watches His own massive cock disappearing into Alex’s pliant body.

The thought of it – the feel of it – paints a burning flush up Alex’s neck to the tips of his ears – prickling harder with every one of His bone-jarring, growling, possessive slams. Alex moans, wanton and lost.

That drives Him on. Harder He smashes into Alex’s hole – knocking all the breath from Alex on every hastening slam. Greg smears his sweating forehead across Alex’s shoulder to mop his brow, and goes harder still. Alex ragdolls – his insides pulverised as His cock pulls half out and drives back in again and again. Alex gasps and whines – shuddering sounds interrupted by every wet smack of their bodies. Du-dum du-dum du-dum go His tendrils – beating the earth as He uses Alex’s body to chase His own pleasure. Harder. “Oh fuck!” Alex cries – cut short when the breath’s driven out of him. “Oh god—!” he gasps, beads of ruby sweat flying off into the night as his broken body spasms. His head hangs from his bitten neck, lolling with every whine and grunt and brutal fuck. When Greg hefts him higher – hot hands and tendrils both at work – and shifts the angle, Alex wordlessly cries out as every. single. slam. squeezes hard against that poor abused part deep inside and beats it back to life.

Alex’s cock – flopping to His rhythm in the cool night air – starts to fill again, and Alex slowly starts to wail.

He shoves his hand into his mouth to muffle it – but the very next slam has him shudder and spasm and fling his hand away. He tries again, and sobs when it happens again – burning up with the shame of the noises he’s making. “I can’t—” he sobs. “I’m so—. I’m sorr— Aaah! Greg, I— Plea—!”

Alex grabs a tendril – one about his chest – and weak and flailing, tries with both hands to pull it up and across his mouth. The cool slick of it is wet against his dry lips – a relief – and Alex pulls it tight to gag himself – wetly muffling his unending stream of pitiful apologies and pleas. The next slam throws his hands away as his body fills with Him and the shock of his own arousal. He wails into the tendril, and it escapes in thin, whining, bursting bubbles of thin slime against his lips.

“No,” Greg growls, as the tendril whips off Alex’s mouth. “You don’t. Get to. Hide. Worm.” Greg’s words, broken in time with His every thrust, wash over Alex’s neck where it’s already burning with shame. He brings one of His huge hands up to wrap around Alex’s neck, and Alex gasps – expecting the squeeze – but none comes. Instead, to Alex’s despair, Greg lets him breathe and whine and whimper – growling His satisfaction with every piteous sound Alex makes.

Du-dum. Du-dum!

“Beg me,” Greg whispers over Alex’s pulse – his whiskery cheek scouring Alex’s blush-tender neck.

“Please!” Alex whines, licking tendril-slicked lips. “Please, I— I don’t— Please, Greg! I don’t— I don’t— Oh, please!” Alex’s head pushes side to side in Greg’s grasp. Despair and ecstasy fighting over the puppet strings of his broken body.

“You don’t… Even know… What you’re… Begging for.” Greg’s smug grin leaves beard burn against Alex’s throat.

Alex wails and it’s true. It’s true! The earth shakes and the air thunders and Alex is full to bursting and then bereft. His dick is hard again and slaps against his stomach with every smacking slam – milked out drops of agonised pleasure thrown out into the night to rain onto a lawn of trembling, shedding, heaving heaps of writhing proto-bodies made of worms that stare with empty sockets filled with naked lust up at Alex – their wormy, crumbling, open mouths desperate for his taste.

“Beg me. For my. Cock.”

“Oh god—!” Alex gasps. “Yes! God, please! Please, Greg. I want— I want your— Your cock! Please! G— Give it— To me.” Alex babbles – hearing the pitiful, awful, senseless words come from his mouth and he burns with the shame of it.

Greg slams harder and grunts hard against Alex’s skin – hot and dangerous.

“Beg me. To let you. Come.”

Alex whimpers, a broken sound that stops and starts with every driving slam. “Please,” he whispers. “I don’t— don’t know— if I can— but plea—! Please, Greg. Please. Please. Please.” He’s so broken. Tired. Used up and empty. But his dick is hard and aching and Greg punches hot tightening lighting across his skin and into his core with every slam. And he fears it might kill him, but he needs it so much, and if Greg would let him…

“Beg me. Little Alex.” Greg starts, then licks against the raw skin of Alex throat and soothes it like a balm. “Beg me. Like the... Worm… You are. Beg me. To….” Greg stops fucking Alex. Stops dead – hilt deep in Alex right when Alex is caught mid-gasp, and says, “Beg me to love you.”

The words crack open Alex’s chest with bloody claws and squeeze his heart two-handed. They backhand his brain and leave it reeling in his skull. They tear his voice from his raw throat and bite it in half, leaving it ragged, torn, and breathless. Would He love him if he were a worm?

“Oh no…” Alex mouths, his eyes widening, his vision stolen by the realisation of his own unworthiness – and it horrifies him. The shame already burning on his skin and in his chest becomes a cold inferno, and it hurts. “Nnngh… No.” Alex shakes his head and tries to look away from where He’s staring at the side of Alex’s face.

“No?” Greg asks, eyebrow clearly audible by the incredulity of His voice. “You’re too good to beg?”

Alex gasps, and twists to look into Greg’s black eyes – so close he fears he might fall into them. “No! No, I— You… You shouldn’t love me. I shouldn’t make you.”

Greg smiles, and for a moment, it’s sweet.

“Oh, Alex.’ Greg holds Alex’s face by the chin – gently at first – and leans around to brush his lips against Alex’s lips, his warm breath tickling in between their beards. He whispers the next words into Alex’s fallen open mouth. “As if there’s anything at all a pathetic worm like you could do… To stop me.”

“...Wha—uuuhhh” Alex’s brain empties out as Greg pulls out almost all the way, and then drives back in with a smack. The words rattle around, jostled as Greg does it again and again, the meaning too big to grasp in the shortening moments between each thrust. Stop Him what—? Does He mean—? Does He lo—? Greg jackhammers into Alex – churning the butterflies that fill him now – as Alex blushes and gasps and reels and grasps on to anything of Greg’s he can touch.

Alex gasps and brokenly sobs his thanks, over and over and over – clinging to Him lest he float away into the blood dark sky. He feels so full.

Greg hauls his face around with a grunt. “Shut up,” He says before He smashes His mouth onto Alex’s, and makes him.

The earth thunders and trembles and Alex does too. Greg fucks him broken til His rhythm starts to break. His huge tongue in Alex’s mouth thrashes like a creature as His ragged breathing ratchets tighter and tighter.

He holds Alex so tight. So, so tight.

It happens. Greg snaps rigid and Alex almost breaks in half. Every tendril desperately pulls Alex into Him – onto Him – as he shudders His first thundering release. Alex feels it – a hot gush deep inside him as Greg stutters and groans and shakes the whole fucking earth. Again – a wet hard smack as loud as gunfire as Greg tries to fuck all the way into Alex. Inside him. Alex feels the pulse – the trembling swelling that fills him up. Again and again – desperate, clinging thrusts, each one more broken – as Greg comes so hard Alex feels like he’ll burst. Alex tries to kiss Him – one hand stroking that sweat-dripping brow of His – though He’s stalled and panting against his lips. Alex’s other hand slips down to his stomach where he feels the last thrashes of Greg’s orgasm through his skin – writhing and pulsing and distending Alex’s pathetic hairy body. His gut swells and sloshes – blood-hot and so full of His come.

A smack – and Alex’s hand is entirely covered by His – his dick crushed between Him and the back of Alex’s hand. Barely before Alex can gasp, He presses Alex’s cock hard between them – a double sandwich of Greg’s dick, Alex’s stomach and hand, Alex’s dick, and Greg’s hand – and wanks him rough and hard. Greg pushes down – they can feel everything – and both of them cry out together. Alex feels himself hot against the back of his hand and feels Greg through the flimsy layer of his fat and skin and insides, not yet softening and bucking at the sensations deep inside him. Feels his hand pushed down against the fullness, wetness, tight ballooning of his gut that pushes the stretch inside him with every. rough. stroke. Greg’s hand is burning in the night, burns against Alex’s own hot aching prick that leaks and drips and trembles in His touch. It burns, it aches, it tightens and pools and flashes all across his skin. He’s so full. He’s so full!

The night goes white and Alex can’t remember screaming.

It’s too bright. Alex flinches and his face bumps into His warm black shirt. Wait. He’s being held – warm against his side, around his shoulders and underneath his knees. He opens up his crushed closed eyes and blinks – His perfect face is there, from the side, shining silver and pale skin pink in the bright white moonlight. Alex stares, refilled with awe, and barely notices the tree tops appearing, the house roof coming into view, the gutters and windows sliding up the backdrop of His beautiful face. Barely feels when His feet gently touch the crunching gravel of the path.

Alex shivers, and his muscles whimper all across his body. But there’s something warm against his shoulders and over the tops of his folded tight arms – something soft and silken. He looks down, and sees His jacket wrapped around his body – comforting with the heat and smell of Him and brushing against the sweat damp hair all over Alex’s body.

Alex’s mouth drops open to form an overwhelmed and deeply touched, “Oh”.

Greg turns them, and He gazes out onto the lawn. Alex follows, and sees – by the light of the first blinding fingernail of white moonlight, as the eclipse finally ends – dribs and drabs of movement. Tiny heaps of squirming, pinkish-brown filaments of flesh wriggle and tumble and quickly disappear into the soft damp earth of the garden, until not a single worm is found.

“All where they belong,” Greg says.

Alex looks back up at Him, and his breath gets stuck – struck by His beauty again. Alex feels hazy and drunk and utterly exhausted – but his eyes adoringly trace the sharp contours of His lips as Greg starts to smirk and look back down at him.

Alex’s poor body tries to blush again, and he turns to hide his face in His chest.

“Every worm but one.”

Greg carries him into the house. The gentle rocking of His strides and the deep rhythm of His heart by Alex’s ear sends Alex drifting in and out of an utterly exhausted sleep, until the click of the door of His bedroom and Alex starts awake. Greg turns and ducks and brings them both inside.

“Ah yes. One last worm,” Greg says as He steps up to the bed and gently lowers Alex’s legs to the ground. He reaches over, and there – on the duvet – is the worm that started it all. The worm Alex had dropped onto Greg’s bed at the start of the night.

Alex drops his gaze, ashamed, and sees his naked feet on the carpet of Greg’s bedroom – twisting his toes together like worms themselves.

Greg turns – Alex sees it by his perfect shoes and the movement around his shoulders. He feels it when Greg wraps his arms around him and lets Alex’s ducked head knock against the soft warmth of His chest. He feels the dark heat of Him, the rich and heady scent of Him – sweat and sex and the strange subtle sweetness of death – and he feels the firm, possessive grip of Him about his body, then the rumble of His voice.

“I know exactly where this worm belongs.”

Alex melts and sighs and wakes up unknown hours later with a start. The room is dimly lit by the first grey of dawn crawling through the curtain gaps, and Alex is stiff and curled up on the carpet – naked and far too cold. He starts to shiver, pulling the blanket – no it’s not a blanket, it’s His jacket tighter about his body. Oh god – he’s on Greg’s bedroom floor! Naked! With His jacket! Alex starts to panic – heart thumping and breath tightening when suddenly – touch!

Alex bites his yelp back – but only just. Greg, in the bed above him, shifts under his covers and reaches even further towards Alex’s ruffled hair – resting his massive hand on his grey and thinning crown.

Thick with sleep – not yet awake – Greg mumbles, “Mmm there he is.”

Alex holds his breath and wonders what lies beneath those softly resting eyelids – grey or endless, depthless black.

A deeper sleep comes for Greg then, and the absentminded caress turns into a heavy, grasped dead weight. Alex’s ears strain to hear His last few, drool-marked, deeply satisfied words.

“Mmm. My… pathetic… worm.”