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Midnight, the curtains drawn, the headlights of passing cars licking through the worn fabric. In bedrooms all over the world, children are pressed to their mothers' bosoms. Their milky murmurs sift through the still air, tingling against Mark's skull. Mark rolls his shoulders, settles into the dark, this little cocoon he's made for himself. He tenses his thighs over the mattress with sweat on his tongue, skin warmed by the knowledge that he is everywhere in this room, inescapable.
William's head falls between his knees and bounces off the mattress. Mark smiles benevolently down at him, feels himself heat all over as William's pupils constrict. There are no quips or witticisms, only William’s pounding heartbeat, and the slow, rousing gurgle deep in Mark’s belly— William is unused to seeing him naked in this world, and he’s afraid. For himself, of himself. Scared shaking because he doesn't understand why he's here, how he's here. Why he doesn't want to leave. Mark takes his dick in his hand and lays it over William's cheek, pulls his foreskin forward, then back so the head nudges insistent against William's mouth. Drags it up his face, smearing precome over the corner of his eye. "I could fuck your eyes out," Mark tells him. "Straight into your skull and out the other side."
"Don't you dare." His own voice emerges from the shadow at the foot of the bed, then his own body. His same broad chest and ruinous hands and his same cock. This Mark's face is easier to look at, less hooks and jags for William to cut himself on. Less warning sign for imminent devastation, more tragic romance novel pretty boy, a Mr. Darcy knockoff with a hit of horror. He’s scrubbed most of the blood off his face, but there’s still the suggestion of it in a sparse crust over his cheekbone.
Mark grins, delighted. They could put his face on nukes, but the other Mark's face is fascinating and despicable to him for the reason that he cannot recognise it. “They’re so blue, it’d be a waste. Only one William, after all. Who’s fault is that?”
The pretty boy pulls William toward him by his thighs, hooks William's ankles over his shoulders. "Don't look at him," he instructs, more merciful than any Viltrumite before him, and kisses William's forehead. "Don't worry, it's just me. Look at me. Is this okay? William, is this okay?"
He doesn't wait, slides his cock into him before the air in William's open mouth can form into an answer. "Oh, God, William. Oh my God—"
If William was going to say anything at all, the pretty boy steals it from him when he rushes downward to kiss him. He takes and he takes and he takes. Mark smiles. Palms idly over his dick, thumb swiveling around the head, the hint of a nail into the slit as the pretty boy presses William into the mattress and William throws his head back and takes it, gasping. His breath comes short, sharp. Each time his eyes roll back he looks at Mark; each time, Mark pulls back his lips to reveal the star attraction, and William whimpers. He’s sheened over in sweat, but his face is the worst— he must be close to crying. Mark can smell the salt frosting him, and the moisture that glimmers beneath his eyelids is as bright as dew over fresh fruit. "I missed you," sighs the pretty boy. "You have no idea how much I missed you, you— no words, nothing, I'd do anything—"
"Burn Paris," Mark reminds him. "Burn Earth." He keeps one hand on his cock, slides the other over William's cheek, a silent threat at the ridge of his eye socket. "Eat people." Tears bubble against his thumb as he pushes in, blurring William's vision until all he sees is Mark and Mark and the indeterminate darkness that merges them. "Eat yourself."
"Mark," gasps William. "Mark, please—"
Mark's smile splits his lip. The pretty boy put up a real fight to get to go first, but now that they're finally here, Mark's enjoying himself. Twin streams of blood twine from his mouth, draw spatters over his chin. They slide quickly over William’s cheeks where they mingle with tears, racing into his open mouth. The pretty boy takes William's ankles off his shoulders and turns him on his side, slaps his dick against the curve of William's ass, "William— is this okay— is it— is that good? It’s good, yeah?" grinds in, long and slow, refuses to pull William's hair or slap his slack face, gets William to hit a high note with his cock alone. Real sorry sound, trapped animal sound, high and haunting. Not a single word in any human language to describe how sorry William sounds for ever having met either of them at all. Maybe his Mark too, even. Wouldn’t that be lucky, to collect the whole set, and be pinned down by each in turn. "William, I—"
Mark tilts his head, feels his mouth water, his dick straining towards the noises around him. Protracted, syrupy sighs and the smack of skin against skin. Even though none of him is touching another, he feels the blood-warmth of William's body wash over him through sound alone. The pretty boy kneads the meat on William's hip, digs his fingers in, then releases. "Holy shit— William, this is insane, I can't believe I never thought I'd see you again, I waited—"
Mark curls his index finger against the vein through his dick, nudges upward, not enough to get him anywhere, just the suggestion of pressure to keep all of him interested. There should be more teeth, by now. The pretty boy must do something William really likes because his chin tips back, and there's another one of those sounds, almost fear; not nearly close enough to fear. His eyebrows bunch together and he bites his lip and tells the pretty boy: "There, oh my God, Mark, can you—"
Mark slips his thumb into William's mouth and fish-hooks the inside of his cheek. The pretty boy is panting, fucking into him at a brutal pace, the rhythm heavy, punishing. It's Mark's body pushing him down, Mark's mouth salivating over his shoulder, Mark's teeth that are grit and Mark’s voice forcing through all the same: "William, I'd do anything, anything to keep you." Mark watches the pretty boy ramble as he fucks, same vocal chords, same tongue, same lips— again, same bend in his cock, something that consistently amuses him. In the wasteland, Mark had time to check. He's still disappointed that the prisoner's dick wasn’t nearly so mutilated as the rest of him.
When the pretty boy pulls out and pushes himself upright to roll William back onto his back, Mark thinks it, really turns it over. He wants to ask: how hard are you willing to fight to get away from me, and me, but mostly me? Do you remember when we were kids, when I'd set traps around the back of the house, where mom wouldn't see? Do you remember that squirrel that chewed its own leg off to get away from me? Do you think you'd do that? Do you think you'd do what we did, there in the wasteland? Do you have it in you, to fill yourself with your self?
William bites into the mattress with a whine. Rather than disrupt it, Mark separates himself from the headboard and turns William's jaw over to face him. He licks his teeth, glittering there in the dark. He spits into William's mouth and laughs as it spills down his chin. The pretty boy slaps him away and plummets down to kiss William, swirling his tongue through his mouth, Mark's spit, the vestiges of blood that never truly wash out. "C'mon, say my name, my name. Will, I'm so— I'm so close—"
Mark clucks his tongue in mock disappointment. “Put the brakes on— look at him. He’ll need more than that.” Mark's never denied himself anything, but he knows how to bide his time. Amidst snarling, polluted fires and demolished buildings, Eve once called him an endurance predator, and then he waited for her to put her guard down, and snapped her spine with a well-placed tap. Good things come to those who wait. Though he lacks many of the ordinary virtues, he understands patience. He smells the air and sucks on his teeth as William obliges his doppelganger, roused by the tremor of William's voice.
"Mark, Mark, come on—" With each word, another tendon in Marks body coils taut. He’s barely touching himself but already he anticipates the first shivers of release. "Mark," sighs William, and the pretty boy mewls into his neck, and Mark tips his head back, laughs in a mad rush. The William he knew made a similar sound around the shape of his name— this one's got it bad for bad boys, they must all do. Multiversal constant. Maybe all the poor Angstroms who had their teeth stomped out by Marks made note of it. When they meet again —and they will meet again— Mark will ask him. There’s got to be someone left in Angstrom’s life that he hasn’t crushed in his fist— they can trade, a fact about a friend for a fact about another friend. I bet you didn’t know that your brother pisses himself whenever he’s really, truly scared! Your wife, too, and that soldier that blabbed about the quantum bombs! They just flock to you, don’t they? Ask me how I know! Go on, ask! For every William, there must be a Mark that spoils him rotten. With teeth, with tongue.
The pretty boy rushes to fill the quiet Mark's spared him, groaning in a pitch badly-fit to him: "William, William, you feel so good, I'm not gonna last long." He pushes out a whimper and pulls his cock out of William to catch himself. "Sorry, give me a—"
Mark clicks his canines together, knits his brows, forces his mouth to go slack. He doesn’t get it entirely right— he knows how much his face differs from the pretty boy’s by how William gawps beneath him, horrified. Mark smiles. Remembers that he’s not supposed to smile. He rolls his balls through his hand, squeezes, tries again. Brows knit, mouth fallen open, and the eyes—
Burning brightly in the pretty boy’s eyes is something that will never die. It presses over him, forcing his body against William, into William, so insistent that Mark knows if he separated them, the pretty boy would go for his throat just— like— that, with no regard for consequence. Mark has never felt a weight like that. Living, single-minded, gravitational. It swallows the pretty boy so completely that he pays Mark no mind, though he should: they’re the same, Mark and the pretty boy, though the gulf between their strength widens each day, and they spent enough time in the wasteland for Mark to know exactly where to put his fingers to pull the pretty boy apart. A long time ago, the pretty boy screamed his little head off as William fell to pieces in his hands. At the same fixed point in time but an unfathomable span of distance away, Mark coaxed William into a dark room much like this one. Down into the mattress, moaning much the same as Mark tore through him.
Now, Mark sits. Thighs twitching, tensing over the bedsheets as the pretty boy turns William’s ankle over in his hand, marvelling at the shape and solidness of the joint. He sucks a bruise into William’s stomach as he crawls up, and his arms cage William either side as he manhandles William into a mating press, boosting them both off the bed for ease of access. William laughs as he collides back into the mattress. Surprise flits over his face, like he never knew he could laugh at all, and then he laughs again.
"Sure, Mark, lift me up and drop me!"
"I thought you liked flying,"
"Now? During— wait, is that on the table? And be serious, don’t say yes and then drop me while you're inside me."
"No, I'd never drop you, not again. William, I'd never—"
"Well..." William grins up at the pretty boy as if it's not Mark's face, Mark's mouth, Mark's teeth that flash out at him. "You could always prove it."
Mark makes himself comfortable against the headboard, silent as William loops an arm around pretty boy's pretty, wringable neck, soothes him, coaxes his cock back into him. "'S’okay, 's'okay. Mark, it's good, you're so good—" The pretty boy isn’t William’s to keep, either —another constant, maybe, that no William gets to keep their Mark even if their Mark keeps them, in fetters or in a huge, gnashing maw— but William has learnt how to hold him. Mark watches. Their wires must be crossed over. Mark watches. The pretty boy claimed, for the entirety of the time they spent in the desert, that he lost everything worth anything in his world. Mark watches. Somehow, the pretty boy’s garnered something from nothing.
Mark opens his mouth.
Shuts it.
The pretty boy buries his laughter in William's neck. "Okay, William, we'll go again. Whatever you want." The pretty boy’s eyes are Mark's eyes and they roll back in his head as he slides his dick back into William, and the strong arms that William’s legs hook around are Mark’s arms, and it’s Mark’s voice that whispers and wants and pleads into Williams ear. Mark squeezes his own cock, cants his head. Considers. For the most part, he prefers to participate rather than observe. Not everything needs to be a dissertation of who and how and what and why. He's a kinetic learner— he remembers this from before he got his powers, when the worst he was capable of was a skinned dog or cat or a peer pushed down the stairs— or William, what he did to William.
For Mark to know something, he has to hold it in his hands. He held William's wrist, once, when William was still sneaking glances at Mark and raids through Mark’s dirty laundry, huffing and puffing away as Mark beat the tar out of whatever worthless jock William handed his sloppy seconds to. Debbie held him when she found the head in their crawlspace, and she knew him then, and that it was a lie— he never had to kill anyone or any of the critters piled up beneath their floorboards; there was joy in just holding them and wondering if they knew what he wanted to do.
The pretty boy himself is holding onto William's wrist, his forearm brushing Mark's knee as he pins William down. He's whispering. "Never gonna let you go again. Never ever, William, I missed you. Oh, fuck. You're so tight. I’d die for this."
Mark bites the inside of his cheek. He considers saying it: yeah? Want to repeat that? Maybe: can I get that in writing? Maybe: Will's first, then. Instead, he eases into stroking his own cock with a slow, indulgent touch. Thinks of Debbie, when she found the carcasses beneath the mahogany floorboards, and laid his head on her thigh as she carded her fingers through his hair. It’s okay, Mark, we'll move. There'll be a new house, we’ll go further out, the fresh air will be good for us both. Imagine that: deer and elk and moose. No, Mark, I’m sure the plural of moose isn't meese. Thinks of William, his skin flayed from him in soaking strips. Is— is that his head? In the fridge? Is that Rick's head? Thinks of Eve, the last notes of her voice twitching through her full, round, and bloodless mouth. You weren’t supposed to be like this. When I met you, you were different. I don’t even know you anymore. Mark, you weren’t—
Mark hisses, tightens his grip, picks up the pace to match the pretty boy's as he begins to hammer into William, tongue stuck down William’s mouth, their fingers interlaced. William's eyes flick back to him and Mark meets them with a generous smile, tugs on William’s hair, says nothing. He knows what he wants, knows to wait for it; that single delicious moment that Viltrum called bloodthirst, but what Mark knows to be the instant of understanding where between he and the delicate thing in his hands each boundary falls, and the knowing riddles through, and the fear reigns absolute over soft tissue. "Oh my God," whispers the pretty boy. His fingernails drag welts into Williams thighs as he lifts him up by his hips, hauls him back onto his cock so they meet with each thrust. William squeals, and Mark startles as the pretty boy's hips jerk, and Mark bites hard into his lip as the pretty boy puts his head down into the junction between William’s neck and shoulder, and sucks.
The rhythm he follows is steady, hydraulic, each muscle in his body strained and sweat sliding off him and onto William. Mark leans back and breathes hard through his teeth, yields completely to it, jacking himself off as the man wearing his face bites back tears. “Oh, God, I missed you, I’ve always missed you, I can’t believe I let go of you.” The pretty boy bites hard into William’s bottom lip, and Mark studies him though hunger flickers through him. His hand in William’s hair clenches, scrapes against his scalp.
It’s in the eyes. It must be in the eyes. He should have put a mirror up when he sifted through William’s slick viscera, all those years ago. He didn’t anticipate wanting to. “Don’t come until he does,” drawls Mark, and the pretty boy’s head snaps up to glower at him. “You know you can give it to him harder than that, man. He can take it harder than that.”
He leers down at William, pulling back his lip to flaunt the serrated edge of one single canine, and that must do something to him, must light something that doesn’t know how not to burn in all Williams, because the pretty boy chokes on a gasp. Mark’s eyelashes flutter. “Yeah, come on. Feel him squeeze around you— I did that.” William looks directly at him, pupils like pinpricks drowned in blue. Mark thinks about bending down, prying his eyes right out of his sockets. Thinks about lavishing his tongue through the humours, vitreous and aqueous, the acoustic scrape of teeth against the optic nerve. He gasps, looking right at William; his cock jumps against his belly; the pretty boy groans; William heaves out a high, fraught sound through his teeth.
“Yeah, you can take it. You love it.” He takes his hand off his dick to smear precome across William’s face, hooking his fingers once more into William’s mouth, and the pretty boy gets his guts together, really puts his back into it. Fucks into him desperate, his whole body shaking, sweat spiralling over his bare chest, the rhythm he sets strong and inexorable. Mark drools down onto William’s face, shoots a wink at his double as he knuckles into his own taint. “I bet he just went really tight right then. Thank me later, man.”
The pretty boy scowls at him, and Mark schools his face into that same expression. The pretty boy’s face stiffens into a grim challenge, armoured over by resolve. Mark pulls his eyebrows together, forces his lips into a grimace, glowers straight back at him until tears begin to well in his eyes. He dissolves into laughter as the pretty boy gets his hands into the ditches of William’s knees, folds him all the way against the mattress. He sighs, “oh, William,” and sinks into him deeper, harder. Mark draws a circle on the back of William’s tongue, flicking the soft, swinging meat at the back of his mouth.
“No gag reflex, huh. That’s new.” He pulls on his dick as he stirs spit from the back of William’s throat to the tip of his tongue; feels it then, that sweet, aching coil in the pit of his belly. It’s hunger if hunger was slow and dripping, and it pulls taut like a spring as his cock oozes precome through his fingers. “This William’s looser than ours. Yours, and mine too— past tense, of course. Look, we made a good call after all, you and me.”
The pretty boy shakes his head. “Not loose,” he grinds out. William covers his eyes with his hands and groans, embarrassed, and Mark puts them on his cock. He notches his teeth back into his lower lip, laps eagerly at his own blood.
“Come on, keep it together. Look at him, man, really look. You’ve got to fuck him like you never want him to fuck anybody else ever again. You can manage that.”
“Shut up—”
“Think about how angry you’ll get when you find him fucking around, all loose and easy. You know that he does— he never learnt otherwise. Now you get the chance to show him.”
The pretty boy exhales hard through his teeth. William tugs on Mark’s cock uncertainly, once or twice, and then the pretty boy makes an executive decision, crushes him with a brutal thrust into him. He and Mark fuck the same, because they are the same. He's most himself in motion, finds and loses himself in the array of textures blood slides through when drying, the shift from resistance to relent. He’s slaughtered his way through thousands to pinpoint—isolate—savour how that micro-instant twinges in his hindgut, and for this reason he knows that the pretty boy would rather kill than stop fucking William now. He rubs his thumb around the head of his cock, feeling out its flared crown as William fumbles around his shaft. When pretty boy suffocates another whimper with William's tongue, he feels that, too. Mark juts out his lower jaw and furrows his brow, grinds his teeth, constructs his guise. He can only manage the pretty boy’s expression for a few moments before William squeezes his cock and want flinches through him, unexpected and searing, like light.
“You’ll want to split him in half. C'mon, he wants it. Drill him in.” He’s gasping, shaking, and so are William’s hands, and the pretty boy’s thighs as he readjusts, pulls William back up onto his legs, anything to get deeper into him. All the way through his guts, puncturing the velveteen softness of all his internal convolutions and linings and vessels, stabbing through his stomach, birthed in blood out through the tender skin of his belly— Mark lurches over, shudders, pleasure spiking through his spine, and so does the pretty boy. All of them shaking up a precipice, all of them meat, all smacking against each other, the sound wet and ripe, obscene. Mark has a special treat saved for times like these. What he did with William was so long ago, but he’s hoarded the flavour beneath his tongue. He can taste it now: iron, salt, fat, the rank slick of fear dripped generously throughout, and it shivers within him from his gut and through his throat, forcing its way out as animal panting. If there’s anything he can muster up a mote of remorse for, it’s that he anticipated neither that it would linger nor that he’d covet it so deeply. The pretty boy has so much to learn if he thinks Mark will let him keep William entire, but Mark can learn too. From his faces, his voices, the ardour with which he fucks William beneath them; a hunger unexplained by the appetite Mark’s come to recognise as his crux. He yanks his dick out of William's hand and slaps it back onto his cheek and coos to him, venomous. “He’s not going to finish you off, so I think I’m next. I’m next, aren’t I? It’s only fair, and you’re fair, right? William always goes for what he wants, and he wants me. I can taste it in your sweat.”
“William,” sighs the pretty boy. He releases William’s legs. His face splits into a smile with far too few teeth when they cross over his back. Mark cants his head, observes with great interest. “William, I’m gonna come.”
William’s eyes flicker between them, and then he makes this garbled noise, this— “Okay, okay, Mark, please—”
The pretty boy’s chest heaves; so does Mark's. His rhythm collapses into single-minded rabbit rutting and Mark digs his nails into his taint, pulls his foreskin back and over the head of his cock, and then the pretty boy is whimpering, Mark’s voice, Mark’s wet eyes, and William says, “holy shit, you are so hot,” to neither of them in particular and Mark feels—
“Mark, what the fuck— where did you learn how to do that, in your world, did you, what the fuck—”
—what the pretty boy must feel as his hips slap against William’s ass, doggedly chasing his release, and Mark hisses as it hooks into him, this need transcending hunger that careens and glows and pulls him toward the best part, the bit where he dissolves entirely, no longer Mark nor Invincible nor the umbral cavity where the two collide and kill each other—
“I, uh, practiced for you, Will—”
—but a blur of tactile awareness, his hands wet without blood, his mouth fallen open without meat to occupy it, but animal all the same, animal-hungry and trembling on a precipice, and then the pretty boy’s mouth gapes, and Mark’s does the same, and the pretty boy flattens himself against William, pours his tongue into his mouth, kisses him so hard their teeth smack together, and Mark gazes down at William; his blue eyes; the soft throat he missed the chance to cut a hole through and fuck, and the soft belly harbouring tender loops of arteries and intestines—
“Fuck, I told you, you can give it to him harder than that. You’re making me feel bad, man. Go on, show him how hard we can give it.”
—and remembers that fighting is fucking and killing is fucking and fucking is violence and the worst violence of them all is the pretty boy kissing William indulgently as William rakes his nails down his back; murmuring, “I do love you, I do, I do, William, you can’t forget that, you can’t,” and the light in his eyes is bright and honest, remarkably horrifying—
“Mark, you can’t say that—”
—and Mark recognises him then, pictures his own face superimposed over the pretty boy’s, aligned at the eyes; an appetite shared, a fervour that stretched on for light years to bridge the gap between them, and then the pretty boy whimpers, and the sweet and sore and starving coil unwinds through him; starting from his gut, ending at his mouth, and Mark makes that sound, too, and he comes, and he comes.
He falls back against the headboard, forces air through his teeth as the pretty boy’s juddering thrusts slowly dwindle down into stillness. He’s still gasping as the pretty boy kisses around William’s nose, browbone, forehead. “I’m sorry I didn't make you come.”
William swallows hard. When the pretty boy readjusts himself to rest on his elbows, Mark sees that his cheeks are flushed. So much blood inside him, all of it called to the surface, waiting. “’s’okay,” he says shakily. “That was— that was. I’m the first guy in Upstate to get fucked like crazy by an alien. Probably the whole state. Maybe the whole country— no, probably not, I take that back, knowing people. Take the Guiness World Records off the phone.” The pretty boy manages a subdued grin as Mark bares his teeth down at them, and William might be underneath the pretty boy, but he’s looking at Mark when he exclaims: “Oh, shit. You’re still hard. It’s, like, twitching. How’re you—”
“I can take it out if you want.”
“I didn’t say that that's what I wanted. I didn't say anything at all.”
The pretty boy’s face twitches into something simple, sensitive, bashful. Mark touches his fingers to the bow of his own lips, the bridge of his nose. His eyelids, his forehead. His heartbeat settles into its ordinary pace, and he watches and watches silently.
“Give me two minutes, and we’ll go again.” With great reluctance and a long-suffering wince, the pretty boy pulls his cock out of William and rocks back onto his haunches. “I’ll get you some water. Are you hungry? You must be hungry. Something to eat, too. Wait right there.” Mark taps the heavy head of his dick, bites his tongue as his mind matches his thighs to the pretty boy’s thighs, his arms, his dick.
“You’ve loosened him up enough,” he croons, and the taunt is dark and wicked, with poison simmering within. “Now, I get a turn.”
“You don’t want a turn,” pretty boy answers him. “You want to waste mine.” He vanishes from the room and deep into the darkness. There’s a sliver where the shadow does not touch as the door creaks open, and Mark’s left watching the wedge of light the pretty boy leaves behind.
William blinks wetly up at him. He’s still splayed over the bed, chest rising and falling, blood storming through each soft and fallible inch of him. When he realizes that Mark’s watching him, watching the quiver of his pulse through his throat, watching for the blue of his veins through midnight blackness, he sits up and sighs, wipes sweat from his face. "This is the weirdest horror movie porn parody ever.”
He should be sorry, so sorry that he lives in a world where any Mark ever existed at all. He should be begging and crying to be reborn in the world where he dies long before he nears comprehension of the gulf between them.
Mark reaches up to his own face and pulls the corners of his mouth into a simple smile. The pretty boy’s face is still his own face is still elastic enough to contort into true, ravaging grief. He has plenty of time to shape that face into something befitting of the name Mark Grayson. For now, he folds himself up on the bed and the taste of William’s flesh back underneath his tongue. He rests his head on William’s thigh.
“Play with my hair,” says Mark, and shows all of his teeth.