Work Text:
After getting your ass thoroughly handed to you, you run back to the tower with your tail tucked between your legs. You’re halfway to your room when Ashley stops you and tells you what Starlight has done. You walk away from her without a word, the ringing in your ears drowning out her panicked protests.
Twenty-four hours ago, you’d had complete faith that you were the most powerful man on the planet. William Butcher and Hughie Campbell were human, and Soldier Boy had been dead for almost forty years. Starlight was—tentatively—cooperating. But just like that, the status quo has changed.
In the artificial safety of your room, you find yourself staring out over the city, over your city. If you close your eyes, strain your ears, you can hear your own voice booming from hundreds of TV sets. You can hear every murmur of agreement and every grumble of dissent. You can hear little boys playing with their fathers and men seducing their lovers. Somewhere, there’s a child crying for her mother. Her wails mingle with the moans of a woman in ecstasy halfway across the city. When your eyes blink open again, it all blends back into an unwavering buzz in the background of your mind.
This city should belong to you, yet you can feel it slipping out of your grasp. Everything seems to be slipping. Your world is tilting on its axis.
Something Vogelbaum said to you once, more a triumphant crow of victory than an assurance, echoes in your head: There’s nothing and no one on this earth that can hurt you.
“I think we both know that isn’t true.”
The words bounce around the room just as much as they resonate inside your head. Just as real as they are a delusion.
You refuse to look at him. At yourself. You know what you’ll see in those sharp blue eyes.
Disgust. Pity. Worst of all, disappointment.
You’ve never felt the disappointment of a father, but you’re willing to bet that this hurts just as bad.
“Take a look at yourself, tiger,” your reflection croons.
You don’t want to. You don’t want to face yourself, but he says it again, an edge to his voice, and you look over. Ever obedient, spitting in the face of everything you’ve done to extinguish that instinct within yourself. Your stomach clenches in anticipation of disappointment, but what you see when your eyes finally meet the mirror is infinitely more horrifying.
There’s a bruise on your cheek. It mars your skin like rot disfigures the petals of a lily. Your perfect marble exterior is chipping away.
Your mouth falls open ever so slightly. You slip a hand out of your unwieldy gloves and reach up to touch it. Your reflection watches, hands clasped in front of him: confident, immovable. Your fingers shake as they meet your cheek.
It stings.
In an instant, you’re jolted back in time thirty years, give or take. You’re five and figures in hazmat suits are watching as you convulse in a room that slowly fills with poison. It’s colorless and odorless but the second you hear the hiss of it entering the room, you’re doubling over, dry-heaving. It hurts. You’re seven and a man five times your size is pinning you to the ground, his fingers digging into your skull. He reeks of sweat and desperation and burnt flesh from where your lasers have grazed him, but he’s got you pinned anyway. It hurts. You’re ten and you’re drowning, your lungs aching. Your fists are slamming against bulletproof glass, the scientists taking notes below you distorted grotesquely by the roiling water. It hurts.
It hurts it hurts it hurts. You never thought you’d feel that way again.
“Hey. Kiddo.”
You haven’t thought of yourself like that in a long time. The shock of it jolts you out of the deluge of memories, and staring back into his bright blue eyes grounds you. He’s always been there for you. He’s always gotten you out of these things.
“You see now, right?” the man you wish you were asks, his voice low and steady.
“See what?” you ask, your voice so much weaker, frailer in comparison.
“It’s just us. It always has been. Everyone you’ve ever loved has been afraid of you. Did you really think Starlight would be any different? She never even wanted you.”
The words pierce through you the way that bullets or blades never could. You can’t keep looking at the mirror because you can feel your bottom lip trembling, and watching as your reflection’s face stays infuriatingly still only makes you feel even more unworthy by comparison.
“You were never their priority. Madelyn had that fucking baby, Maeve had her little girlfriend, Stormfront cared more about pushing her agenda, and your own son chose William Butcher over you. I’m the only one you can trust to put you first, understand?”
You don’t move, looking pointedly in any direction but the mirror.
“Come on, tiger. You can do it. Say it. You don’t need anyone but yourself.”
You still can’t bring yourself to speak. You keep seeing Madelyn’s, Maeve’s, Stormfront’s, Starlight’s eyes behind your eyelids, hearing the whispers of their voices. The rare kind word from any one of them had been the only thing that came close to satiating the hollow ache inside you. The desperate need to be loved.
You don’t say any of this, of course, but he knows anyway.
“Love,” he says, spitting the word out like poison. “We went the first eighteen years of our life without any, and we turned out just fine. You don’t need it. You’re stronger without it.”
He’s right. You don’t have any natural weaknesses. You’re the apex predator of all apex predators. Letting something as trivial as love interfere with that is—
“Pathetic,” he finishes for you. You have to blink a few times to clear away the tears that start to blur your vision.
“Letting yourself love someone weaker than you makes you weak,” he tells you. “Their weaknesses become yours. You’re better than that. You’re the best there is, kiddo. And you deserve the best.”
There’s a lilt to his voice on the last word that catches you off guard enough to look back up at your reflection. You watch as he palms at the front of his suit, and, despite not moving, you can feel yourself getting hard too. Your breath stutters. You can almost feel his touch.
“I know you,” he says firmly, in a way that makes you want to listen to him. “I know what you need.”
His voice cuts straight to your core. Heat curls in your belly. You’re already so hard it aches.
It’s not about the person you see in the mirror. It’s not about his body, or your own body, even. It’s more like a desperate last resort. A shot in the dark that you hope will somehow meet the target of the gaping hole in your heart.
It doesn’t quite fill that void, but at least it makes you feel something other than the ache of loneliness. Your hand tightens around your cock on the next stroke. You’re not quite sure when you undid your belt, pulled your pants down, but you’re thrusting into your fist and it’s too late to stop now. He’s been talking this whole time, murmuring about how good and strong and worthy you are. It’s hard to focus on the individual words when your cock is throbbing like this, when your toes are starting to curl and the muscles of your stomach are starting to tense up—
“Easy, tiger.”
Your hand stops, seemingly of its own accord. A low moan slips past your lips, wanton and desperate. You’re close, so close that stopping hurts. You feel like a cocked pistol, ready to go off at the slightest twitch of his fingers.
“I’m not going to ask again. I want to hear you say it. I’m the only one.”
A sob threatens to bubble up in your chest. You still don’t want to hear yourself say it, but he’s made it impossible not to obey, with how desperate you are.
“It’s just you,” you admit, voice ragged. Under your breath, resolve breaking: “Please.”
Your hand starts moving again in unison with your reflection’s: long strokes up the length of your cock. The heat radiating from your core shoots through to the tip of your cock, making it feel hot and heavy in your hand. The tang of arousal is thick in the air, and you pray that Ashley doesn’t take this opportunity to enter without knocking again, because there would be no hiding it, even from a human nose.
Just when you think you can’t take any more, you watch as your reflection brings his free hand up to his mouth, parting his lips to take two digits into his mouth and sucking intently. Your own hand doesn’t move, but you can feel it anyway, the soft velvet of his mouth and the sharp points of his canines, your stomach lurching as he sucks harder, takes his own fingers deeper. You’re not going to last much longer. You’ve always been a touch too sensitive, an after effect of being starved of affection most of your life.
He slips his fingers out of his mouth and your eyes are glued to the strings of saliva that stretch between them and his mouth. Your cock is twitching in your hand as the pleasure twisting through you threatens to crest.
“Attaboy,” he says, the tone of his voice almost reverent. For the briefest moment you feel something other than the aching, hollow sense of being utterly alone, and the coil in your stomach springs taut. Your head falls back as a moan claws its way out of your chest.
He talks you through your orgasm, his praise a mix of things you’d say to a lover and things you’d say to a son, and you’re not quite sure which makes you come harder. You can feel his eyes on you the whole time, boring a hole straight through you and making you feel exposed, raw. The intensity of it has your eyes rolling back, images flashing through your head of his mouth around your fingers and your lips wrapped around his cock. Your cheeks flush with shame because you know he knows. He’s you, refracted, after all.
When you finally manage to catch your breath and look back at the mirror, he meets your eyes and deliberately raises his hand that had been wrapped around his dick a moment earlier to his mouth and licks the come off of it, making a show of his tongue wrapping around each finger.
You feel repulsed and entranced by it at the same time. Your hand is hanging by your side, but you can almost taste the salty tang of come on your tongue anyway. If he doesn’t stop looking at you like that and using his mouth like that, you’re going to start getting hard again.
Mercifully, his hand drops to his side, and you and your reflection are once again almost mirror images of each other, save for the cold, hardened look to his face that your own lacks.
“You’re on the right track, kiddo. If we keep working together, those cocksuckers don’t stand a chance.”
You nod, but you can’t help but feel that the more you embrace him, the more you lose of yourself. You’re not sure it’s possible to coexist with him without him slowly eroding away at what keeps you clinging to your humanity.
But maybe it’s time to stop fighting him. When has showing your humanity ever worked out for you? You’re tired of getting hurt. You were raised to be a gun with a hair trigger. It’s time to start acting like one. If you can’t be loved, at least you can be feared.
And if things go wrong, if the worst comes to pass, at least you’ll go down together, talon in talon, locked in a never-ending downward spiral of self-sabotage.