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He can feel their restlessness—his restlessness. Fifty years in their time. Paltry numbers on an arbitrary calendar. They concern themselves with orbits and time dilation and this insignificant planet he's found himself in the slingshot loop of in a long list of planets. There are no methods of propulsion needed in the way these humans have forced fate into their hands. Faster, faster. They're not so merely satisfied to sit and wait and bide their time. They are finite.
He is limitless.
It is in that window of desperation where he finds an opportunity.
The frailty of humanity serves to his advantage. The limited brilliance of them. Perhaps there, in the way a dying star reaches outwards desperately before it collapses, this human has stumbled upon something he was never meant to grasp.
Somehow, this miniscule being called to him.
'Him', in the way a human can understand it. He's never been so singular, so small, and yet he knows if he were to show even this human the scope of what he's truly faced with, his mind wouldn't be able to reckon with it. So, he keeps himself contained. To this. A singular, malleable form. And it is odd, amongst the metal boughs and soft breaths of their own strange comet, to be so contained.
Gerald. It names itself. Pet-like, he finds, as he combs through what it knows and understands of itself, how it sees its predicament through its eyes. Devil. Demon. Alien. Doomed. Black Doom. It's an adequate enough title. Sons, family, granddaughter, a dog on a leash; he has no context for these things, only the knowledge gained as Gerald looks up at him like something to be revered. You can save her—them, humanity—if you help me. Please. I'll ask nothing else of you but this. A savior. Worshipped; clasped hands and kneeled bodies. This Earth. This surface…
Perhaps merely devouring them this time would be a waste.
Rotted trees, blackened limbs tearing at a sky he hasn't seen in over two thousand of their years, a warped reflection of his being takes form in Gerald's mind as he describes his people to the man in turn. Gerald will never understand what they are. Something buried beneath darkness and void and tucked away in the stars, to be forgotten until he hungers again. The Black Arms, Gerald calls him. Them. Gerald still cannot fathom legion. Gerald cannot fathom one. All. This human sees only the limbs, the fruits they can bear, never the tree, not the roots. Perhaps it is the fault of such limited beings to only ever look for their end and never the beginning.
Their sentience brings opportunity, however. The universe is vast, populated by things more suited as food and fodder, and never conversation. Here, Gerald presents him with something he's never considered before. Progeny. A vessel. This current form serves its purpose, but he can feel it, a thrum of power scattered across their planet. Gerald tells him of chaos energy, explains his knowledge of it and he can tell the human has hardly scratched the surface of limitless potential. A prophecy, Gerald says, excitement in his blood. Sweet-sharp in a way he's grown to recognize the smell of.
They make a deal. A pact, something he can see the human has done again and again as Gerald reaches out to him—the source of the energy below in exchange for a way to sustain their attempts at immortal life. Foolish, unsurprising. He is in no haste to collect his end of the bargain, he can wait. These humans, in their eagerness to prolong the inevitable, cannot.
And, within Gerald's mind, he finds that their reproduction is halved, as inefficient and desperate as the rest of their planet's methods. It's fascinating. It intrigues him. His own spawn are born from pieces, chipped off and molded from himself. Him and not him and always him. But this, a son, his son—he could be something else entirely.
Deoxyribonucleic acid. Sperm. Ovum. Fertilization. Organic names for fleshy, flawed organic concepts. Gerald holds these things with passion. With depth. It's an understanding he brushes himself close to as he asks Gerald to show him what it means.
He has no mouth. He has no standard means by which Gerald can understand him dimorphically the way Gerald's own, lesser species is arbitrarily categorized. He is neither and all. He is what Gerald looks up to with wide-eyed reverence and learned devotion as he recreates what Gerald knows.
Sweat, blood, cum; the names for each new sensation come from the body gasping beneath him. Fluids and sounds, communion handed off to him under tendrils and a smothering where he would have so easily devoured before. Delicate. Hands, fragile in their wake, slip through his changing form. Cracked lips, blunt teeth. Drool, spit. Bitter hunger. It's the hunger that he understands. Every new, pathetic sound that Gerald makes drives his own need—throbbing, deep, ancient, never-ending—inside of him. It thrums throughout all of him; the entire breadth of himself that Gerald still fails to completely fathom.
Impossibly, predictably, he finds himself wanting to pull this human apart underneath him the longer it goes, this animal-thing rutting up into that carved, slick part of him he created from its desires. Its memories. Its needs. Its wants. His wants… He wants to consume this wretched cattle in ways he's never known. It begs beneath him. Groans and cries his name, the name it gave him. It asks him for everything. For more. It needs him in ways he's never been needed before.
Cock-driven, its heated flesh aching and turgid where it settles in to the root on each thrust, pulsing and alive and weeping. It bucks up and up and holds him and moans, desperate through its teeth. He hardly recognizes the thing beneath him. No longer bright-eyed and intelligent. Now mindless and witless. He hardly recognizes himself where they've become one, thrumming whole. The loop woven between them intoxicates him further. Pleasure settles; a heady, new sensation he cradles himself against, immaterial and collapsing.
It moves him, turns them over until it's under the illusion of control instead. He lets it. Allows it. It no longer matters to him when he knows it will always be a part of him now. It melds back into him. Eager and unable to wait a moment longer apart. Singularly, chasing its ruin the way he's watched it do so since it called out to him. Buried inside him once more, he clenches around the physical of it and feels white-hot. Heavy and full. It's chased by a sudden flare of heat from Gerald that swirls low in a belly and a cock that isn't his.
Hardening, twitching, blunt-slick on every new thrust. Deep. Deep. Deep. Gerald pulls him closer. Fucks him faster. Harder, frantic. Desperate grunts leaving him that he can no longer discern the origins to. Face red, eyes shut, glasses tumbled off somewhere unknown. Pained and helpless. Gerald's mouth dropped open and then clenched shut, teeth bared. Their mouth. Their cock, wrapped in the tight, velvet heat of their cunt. Again and again. Their body. Theirs.
His name, broken open on Gerald's lips. A curse, a prayer, a promise —this is what Gerald promised him. A becoming. Their becoming. A shuddering groan. A frantic, endless grind. In, in, in. One that strikes and strikes and flints in wet, filthy curls. Gerald's hand—their hand—smooths over the seal of them, reverent and wanting. It pushes at him deliberately on every drive forward. Circles. Kneads. Like memory. Until the sensation builds and snaps in a way it shouldn't.
Something inside of him shivers in incomplete satisfaction. Makes him bear down in a manner that causes Gerald to breathe sharply and his hips to stutter against him. And choke. Pushed in as far as he can go. Feet scraping for a foothold. Pulsing. A heartbeat stuck low between them as a new, burning heat fills him. Fills them.
Where their minds mesh and fray, Gerald comes and he feels it as if himself.
He rewards Gerald with a fraction of his whole, an infinitesimal speck in comparison to the rest. Gerald cradles it as if it is everything in the world to him. True satisfaction, he finds—loathsomely—is a feeling that he envies these beings for.
He leaves, even as Gerald begs him to stay. To help. To watch him succeed and to reap what rewards he does not care for nor need.
Gerald will grow him a new body. One that thinks and feels completely. One that will raise itself without the need to coddle it. And, when the time is right, when the rest of him has made its orbit back into their delicate understanding. It will bring him what he needs, what Gerald promised. He will test it.
He will see what Gerald's soft, necessary cruelty has molded into form.