In dreaming
"Have you had enough, little frosch?" The demon asks, lips pressed close to the shell of Todd's ear and a tremor runs through him.
The room is muggy, he feels like he's sweat out half his body weight. Though calling where they are a room might be a stretch. He can't see the ceiling and the floor is covered in creeper vines and moss, but the light here isn't natural, it has the strange glow of blacklight, casting the plants in eerie luminescence that makes his vision warp and blur if he stares too long. And the shadows are so deep, all he can see of his tormentor are twin glowing embers over a sharp white sickle, and the occasional flicker of a velvet limb that sucks in all the light from the corner of his eye.
He'd woken up here, who knows how long ago, to claws running down his neck and a hot, fanged mouth in his shoulder. That voice, low and rumbling, like water rasping over river stone, had murmured, "Welcome little visitor, tonight you find yourself in hell, but be not afraid. You will not be given more than you can endure."
That was all the explanation and warning he'd gotten before the hands, mouth, and something long and twining, familiar in a way that slipped through his fingers every time he tried to pin it down, roamed over him, into him, with a tireless fervor that had him shaking apart.
His mind was there, but his body was sluggish, uncoordinated as if in a half-dream as strong arms hauled him to a warm chest, coiled thick bands of rope around his limbs, til his ungainly attempts to hop away, to get an understanding of his surroundings, or reach up and pull that teasing mouth closer, slide his tongue past those wicked fangs, stilled, and he could only writhe and jerk, hung in the air like a spider's meal.
Something about this place, this room that's not a room, makes Todd's skin crawl with the feeling of being somewhere that's out of place, like setting foot inside the sleeping bones of an abandoned building long reclaimed by chirping things and dandelions from the false world of humans. His existence here trespasses, and he quails at the thought of being discovered.
But his tormentor, hardly seen but deeply felt, is familiar in ways that have Todd leaning into every caress, groaning as every scratch and bite sends sweet pleasurable aches through him. As dedicated as the demon's attention is, he always catches Todd just on the edge, never letting him tip fully over. Todd doesn't know how he finds him out, even when he tries to stay still, stay quiet enough to feel those hands work him over through climax, feel that hot mouth on him, they retreat before he can ride it through.
More than once, a claw has run feather-light and dagger-sharp over the tip of his dick as he hits that edge, sensation sweet and just enough to have him dripping, white leaking from him in a unclimax that lights him up, leaves him hard and shivering with a tenderness in his skin that doesn't fade. He's so sensitive, even the demon's breath ghosting over his ear makes his entire body sing, makes his dick jerk and drip even though he should be empty by now.
"Please, yeah, I'm good. I can be good. Please." Todd babbles in response to the question, the part of him that's still capable of thought recognizing his words don't actually answer anything, that he isn't asking for this to end but isn't sure what exactly he is asking for.
"Oh, Todd." His name is whispered like a prayer, like a call home.
The amphibious mutant keens at his name on that unseen tongue, body jerking against the ties that hold him as a hand cups his chin, holding him with the same reverence that voice calls him.
Lips press featherlight over his face as if mapping the shape of him. A pair of strong arms wrap around his shoulders, stilling the slow sway he'd fallen into in the ropes.
"Hell has no secrets, liebling, though you may keep them from yourself." The demon says, hands stroking gently over Todd's feverish skin, "I know what you do with the money you slip away from the accounts of greedy men with violent hearts. I know who wipes clean the late payments on utility bills and erases traffic tickets. I know who pulls faces til children crying in their exhausted parent's arms laugh. I know all the tender points in your heart you hide with a smile like a dagger and a venomous tongue."
"No." Todd cries, shrinking back from those words, squirming against the arms that hold him. "Why am I here then?"
"You tell me, you called me by name." The voice says, "I only answered, and I will again. As many times as it takes."
A car alarm blares on the street below and Todd chokes on a gasp, blinking blearily into the late afternoon light of his bedroom.
His hand wraps around his dick before he's fully awake, pumping a fast, tight rhythm. His sheets tangle around him, soaked with sweat and his teeth find the edge of his pillow as climax sweeps over his head and drags him under in minutes, snippets of that feverish dream, of hot, shadowed hands on his skin and sharp teeth against his neck playing behind his eyelids.
He drags himself out of bed on shaky legs and stumbles for the shower. Yesterday's mission had been a nightmare of a victory, and he'd crashed out almost as soon as they'd gotten back in. An explosion had forced him to go hurtling through a window, at a height not even his legs could take, and he'd been scrambling for a landing point that wouldn't splatter him when a clap of thunder sounded through the cloudless night and the familiar scent of boiled eggs and blown out candles had filled his mouth.
"Even some jumps are out of your depth, mein freund." The voice of a mutant no one had seen for months whispered in his ear as warm arms wrapped around him.
Then he was somewhere burning and bright, before he was on the roof of one of the surrounding buildings, alone, with thunder echoing in his ears as Freddy's voice shouted his name panicked over the comms.
As flashes from his dream flicker through his mind, arms hauling him up into darkness overlay with arms pulling him from freefall.
"Kurt." He whispers, voice shaking as he wipes water from his face.
The blue mutant’s been missing for months, vanishing somewhere weeks after returning to Europe with the Kit Kat, weeks after an unexpected catching up in a crowded bar had led to an unexpected getting to know each other on the blue mutant’s hotel room bed. Kurt stopped texting one day, breaking their steady chain, and Todd had shrugged it off, not the first time a lover lost interest with distance. But then he’d come home to Lance and Tabby sitting at the table surrounded by a pile of crumpled napkins and a ring of empty beer cans crumpled around an ashtray with the smoldering end of a joint abandoned in it. Tabby’s face hadn’t looked that haunted since her father got convicted, since Amara had to move home for the first time when they were kids.
“Nightcrawler’s missing.” Is all Lance said, and Todd lost a week from that moment forward. He’d pulled himself back together after Freddy dragged him from he and Forge’s lab, hauling him over his shoulder like a sack of flour, ignoring Todd’s petulant hissing as he threw him under a running shower, not bothering to let him strip out of the stained tank top and worn jorts he’d been wearing for days.
The rest of the Brotherhood hadn’t said anything, hadn’t pointed out the Kurt shaped hole Todd dropped into, but since then Todd couldn’t go more than a day locked in the lab without someone banging through the door with food in their hands and a waterfall of words on their lips, prodding Todd into eating, into talking until he laughed or snarled, climbing his way out of the lab to look at whatever bullshit thing they insisted was on the fritz.
There hadn’t been any news after those two words, but work had picked up after the first month, the anti-mutant movements suddenly flushed to the surface like roaches when you shift a decrepit fridge, disturbing their nest. For every base they busted, they heard of two more brought to a smoldering ruin, members running to police stations, to SHIELD with tears in their rolling eyes to confess their crimes. It should be a relief, but though none of them said it, all of them felt an unease at the shift, at the rapid changes of heart as bastards all over the Americas and Europe fell to their knees weeping for mercy.
Last night had been no different. They hadn’t even cracked all the way through the base’s mainframe before guards came shrieking up from the basement, insisting ‘the hunger’ was there, begging to be taken into custody. Though when they went looking, they’d found only freshly emptied cells where mutants had been freed and a few cringing antis whose injuries kept them from joining the panicked rush.
Except last night, someone had saved him from blowing his kneecaps out or busting his face catching himself on the side of the smoldering building he’d lept from.
He makes his way downstairs a half-hour later, stumbling into the Brotherhood kitchen, a towel on his shoulders to keep his shirt from getting soaked. The Shadowcat is sitting at their kitchen table, and he jumps as time accordions and six years vanish in an instant. Kitty stops spinning the "knuck if you buck" mug between her hands on the table so fast coffee sloshes over her fingers. It phases right through her as she knocks her chair back.
"Shit, Kitty, watch yourself." Lance says, but Kitty's still staring at Todd like he's a surgeon who's stepped out of the OR with news.
"Lance says you saw him." It isn't a question, and Todd flushes hot as his mind flashes to a broad hand cradling his neck as a hot mouth finds his shoulder, because how does she know about that, before his brain remembers the mission.
"He caught me in midair." Todd says, hands twisting the ends of his towel. "Vanished before I could turn around and see him."
Kitty’s legs give out, and Lance catches her, hands half slipping through her arm as he guides her back to the chair.
“Where the fuck is he?” she whispers, voice wet.
A dark voice echoes in his ear and Todd shudders, heat coiling in his gut, “I have a guess.”