Chapter Text
June 24, 2027
"No."
The word was a quiet, dead syllable that didn’t belong to the drunk girl who had just been giggling on the porch less than an hour ago.
John removed his hands from her thighs, his palms pressing hard against her shoulders to shove her off him. "Annie, get the fuck off me."
He was furious—at her, at the room, but mostly at the white-hot pulse between his legs. He hated the powerlessness of it, the degrading reality of being pinned like a weak human.
On any other night, he wouldn't have minded. If she had shoved him down and climbed on top with that filthy grin and those clear, doe eyes, teasing, “Ride or die, Farm Boy,” he would have grabbed her hips. He would have let her take whatever she wanted. He would have begged her to.
But Sober Annie was gone.
This was Moonshine Annie. And she didn’t ask, and she certainly didn't yield. Leaning forward, she planted her palms against his shoulders, letting her full weight press him down with an inescapable torque.
John let out a sharp groan as the pressure forced his spine flat against the mattress; he could already feel her grip painting tomorrow’s mottled bruises deep into his skin. He braced his feet, trying to buck his hips and roll her off, but it was no use. Without the Compound V, he was trying to shift an anvil.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he snarled, his neck straining as he tried to dislodge her.
Suddenly, Annie’s face crumpled.
"What the fuck is wrong with me?" Annie echoed, her voice cracking, her glassy eyes turning hard and feral. She slammed both palms against his torso, pinning him flat.
"You. You're what's wrong with me."
She swayed above him, her wet hair falling around his face like a curtain, the alcohol loosening a dam that had been holding back months of wreckage. Her words tumbled out in a desperate, slurring rush.
“It’s you and your stupid, sexy beard. Stupid. An’ how cute your butt looks in those jeans. Could pop a nickel off that ass—”
"Annie—"
"An' your dumb smile. 'M talking about the real one, not that... that creepy Homelander shit you do for the cameras. An' your voice when you read t’me—it does that rumbly thing in your chest an’ it makes my spine sing. An’ your laugh, an' the way you look at me like I'm—" She hiccupped, her brow furrowing as she lost the thought. "Like I'm the only thing. Like you'd... you'd set the whole world on fire jus' to keep me warm."
She choked on a sob, her tears dripping down to splash against his bare throat.
"But you killed 'em. You killed so many... You hurt me. Tried to make me kill Hughie. You killed Alex." She shook her head, a bitter, broken sound escaping her. "You’re a monster. You’re a fuckin' monster, and I... I can't stop thinking 'bout you. Every fuckin’ minute. It's... it's tearing me apart."
She leaned down closer, her breath hot against his lips, her eyes wild with a desperate, warped logic. She rocked her hips forward, a deliberate friction against his erection.
"I jus' need it out. If I fuck you. Jus' once... right now... then maybe I can get you out my head. Maybe I can fuckin’ breathe again."
She dragged her nose along his cheek, chasing the line of his jaw. "Please, John. Jus'... please."
John listened, a cold, venomous rage building with her every word. His nostrils flared, his upper lip curling back over his teeth.
The patient, understanding Farm Boy he had spent months building didn’t recede so much as get shoved out of the chair. The man who replaced him sat straighter, smiled wider, and had significantly less interest in being polite.
The Homelander.
"Oh, Starlight," he rumbled, a sharp, hollow little smile cutting through his fury. "You think a drunk, sloppy hate-fuck is gonna get me out of your system? I’m in your blood. Your marrow. You can't just… fuck me out of your head. I'm not your little toy soldier in the tractor shed.”
Annie flinched. He tracked the wince, a dark satisfaction warring with the sickening plunge in his stomach. He couldn’t tell if she was recoiling from his cruelty, or from the undeniable truth of what she’d done.
He waited for the pushback, for some furious denial to tumble out of her mouth.
Nothing came.
The thought that she might actually be letting him touch her—that she might be riding Soldier Boy when he wasn't around—threatened to tear the bottom right out of his stomach.
“You could bounce on my dick ‘til you’re raw,” Homelander pushed on, his voice dropping to a dangerous, unstable purr. “Drain my balls dry every night ‘til this shit farm rots in the dirt, and you’d still taste me in the back of your throat every time you close your fucking eyes. You can’t get rid of me that easily. Because what you want from me—what you really want—isn’t something you can get on your back.”
"I can try," she whined, her tongue heavy over the words. "Jus’ stop fighting it an'... an' lemme."
With a clumsy, uncoordinated heave, she lifted off his shoulders just long enough to wrench the wet cotton shirt over her head, her back arching as the fabric dragged across her breasts. The shirt caught on her ear, twisted inside-out, and sailed into the dark.
Her breasts swung free, the areolas flushed and damp, the pink peaks puckered tightly from the chill. Below her, John’s cock jutted against the confines of his sweatpants so violently that the grinding in his jaw produced a sharp, audible pop.
He scrambled to shift his weight and pitch her off his lap, but Annie was too fast. She caught his shoulders and hammered him back into the mattress, her knees digging into the sides of his ribcage with enough supe-strength to compress the cartilage until his lungs barked out a sharp grunt of pain.
“Stop it,” she warned, a dark, drunken petulance bleeding into her tone. Her bare breasts swayed inches from his face as she pinned his wrists against the mattress. She studied his white-knuckled fists with a heavy-lidded fascination. "You keep bein' bad, Farm Boy, an' I'm gonna have t'tie these pretty hands to the headboard.”
The word tie hit a tripwire.
The room vanished, replaced by the sterile, blinding white of the Bad Room, the cold bite of the leather straps, the smell of ozone, and his own childhood terror. A dark, vicious reflex snapped inside his chest.
“You want to tie me down?” Homelander whispered. His voice had gone somewhere subterranean—the sound of a man speaking from the far side of locked door. “The last people who strapped me down, I tore them apart. You try it, and I’ll split you wide open from the inside out.”
Annie didn't hear a threat over the thrum of her own liquor-addled brain; she heard an invitation.
“Yeah,” she whimpered, manic and feverish. “Do it. Split me open. Wreck me. Break my fucking pussy, John.”
Annie gathered both of his wrists into one hand, her small fingers barely circling the joint but the power behind them made the grip absolute. With her free hand, she reached down and fumbled with the front buttons of her vintage skirt.
Her coordination was shot; the small plastic discs kept slipping from her grip. With a frustrated growl, she fisted her hand into the fabric and pulled. The material tore with a sharp, ragged rip, the remaining buttons popping off to click against the floorboards.
The torn fabric fell away, leaving her in nothing but black lace panties that sat low on her hipbones.
John averted his gaze, studying a crack in the plaster of the ceiling like it contained the secrets of the fucking universe.
"Look at me," Annie commanded.
When he didn't move a muscle, she ground the soaked lace down onto his hard length—a burning, breath-taking drag that forced a strangled hiss through his teeth.
"Look. At. Me."
Annie's grip on his wrists vanished as something more urgent caught her attention. She grabbed the collar of his shirt with both fists and pulled, muttering that she wanted to see him. The fabric tore cleanly down the middle, exposing his chest.
"Wanna see you," she mumbled, nuzzling her face into his chest hair. She dragged her breasts along his torso, her hard nipples raking through the coarse hair, and the friction pulled a low, shuddering moan out of her throat. "God, you smell good. Wood smoke and... jus'... man."
John fisted his hands into the bedsheet, his knuckles turning white, keeping his eyes glued to the ceiling plaster.
"Touch me," she whined, her gaze snapping back up to his, heavy and commanding despite the glaze of the alcohol. "John. Please. Touch me."
“No.”
"I said touch me," she breathed, prying his fingers from the sheets with a strength that made his grip feel decorative.
She guided both of his hands to her breasts, pressing his palms flat against the warm, heavy weight of them, forcing his fingers to curl around the soft flesh. His calloused thumbs grazed her nipples involuntarily and she gasped, her spine rolling, her hips grinding down against his cock in a motion that dragged an obscene, throaty sound out of both of them.
"'S exactly right," she moaned, squeezing his hands tighter against her chest. "Jus’ like that."
John bit his lip so hard he tasted blood. “You are making it exceptionally fucking difficult to keep up this noble Farm Boy bullshit right now.”
“Fuck the farm boy. I wan’ the psycho. I wanna feel that huge fuckin’ Homelander dick deep inside me.”
Homelander let out a dry, mocking laugh. “As flattering as that is, Starlight. I’m not a vibrator you can switch on because you’re sad and horny. Go fuck yourself.”
“M’kay,” she shrugged. “Gonna make you watch.”
Annie let go of one of his hands, leaving his palm resting heavily against her bare breast, and brought her fingers up to his throat. Her hand closed around his neck—not with a lethal squeeze, but with a firm, unyielding pressure that pinned his windpipe just enough for him to feel the manufactured Vought strength behind it.
"Look at me," she whispered.
He kept his head turned, fighting the violent urge to throw her through the drywall. Annie let out a loose, frustrated sigh, sliding her wet center along the rigid length of his sweatpants, squeezing his throat infinitesimally harder at the same time.
The friction was intense, his thick shaft trapped flat against his stomach, getting crushed by her molten weight. A scrambled, broken sound tore out of John's throat—a crude vibration of pure, agonized restraint as he fought with everything he had to keep from moaning.
Homelander finally snapped his gaze down, glaring at her with eyes that promised retribution.
"There he is," Annie crooned.
Keeping her hand locked around his pulse, Annie raised her free hand to his mouth. Her index and middle fingers prodded clumsily against his lower lip.
"Open," she commanded softly.
Homelander held her gaze, a dark, hateful fire burning in his eyes. He thought about refusing. He thought about spitting in her face. But he was partially curious, partially drowning in the sheer, filthy eroticism of the moment, and separately, there was a cold spark of primitive fear in the back of his mind that reminded him she could snap his neck like a twig if she lost control.
Slowly, begrudgingly, he parted his lips.
Annie shoved her fingers deep into his mouth, against the damp heat of his tongue. “Suck.”
For one dark second, Homelander considered biting clean through her knuckles. Annie must have felt the tension lock through his jaw, because an impish, conspiratorial grin spread across her face.
"Go ahead, tough guy," she mocked, pressing her fingers deeper against his tongue. "You'd only break ‘em.”
John let his jaw relax. He began to suck her fingers down forcefully, wrapping his lips tight around her knuckles and working his tongue in long, deliberate strokes, making a loud, wet swallowing sound as he tasted her. His eyes never left hers.
"Good boy," Annie breathed, her eyes rolling back.
The phrase was a direct hit to his psychology, but the physical sensation was doing something worse to her. The suction of his mouth on her fingers was an erogenous lightning rod that sent a visible tingle straight to her clit. She let out a loud, uninhibited moan, her head tossing back as her hips gave another wet twitch against his lap.
She withdrew her glistening fingers from his mouth with a slow, wet drag, a string of saliva stretching between her hand and his lips. Her eyes were hooded as she looked down at him.
"Watch.”
Annie reached down, clumsily pushing the black lace of her panties to the side, exposing her bare, dripping slit.
Keeping her hand firmly on his throat, she pushed those same saliva-slicked fingers deep inside her heat, stretching her tight opening right in front of his face. She let out a stuttering gasp as she began to finger herself vigorously, the wet, squelching sound of her arousal filling the quiet bedroom as her hips undulated in a slow, torturous rhythm against his thighs.
"Look how wet I am for you," she keened, her thumb circling her clit.
John lay beneath her, his mind a chaotic, screaming void. His pupils were blown wide, consuming the blue of his irises. Beneath his sweatpants, his cock twitched violently, leaking a dark stain into the gray fleece.
He hated the circumstances, he hated the powerlessness, but the filthy "good boy" praise and the sight of her touching herself on top of him was a sensory overload he couldn't block out.
From the darkest sub-basement of his mind, a fantasy unspooled with a terrifying vividness that turned his stomach and hardened his cock in the same beat. It was a brutal craving for control.
He imagined grabbing a fistful of her hair and wrenching her head back, spitting in her mouth just to watch her choke on it. He pictured forcing her on her knees, shoving his dick down her throat, and pinching her nose shut until her eyes bulged, her throat convulsing around him while tears streaked her cheeks.
He fantasized about flipping her face-down, tearing her panties aside, and driving himself balls deep into her ass without warning, without lube—just a raw, splitting shock of it while she screamed into the mattress.
He wanted to force-feed her the reality of being powerless, to make her beg him to stop and hear nothing in return but her own choking.
The image lasted two seconds. The taste it left was acid and bile, because the fantasy wasn't alien. Because the man who had done exactly this—who had taken and taken and taken without hearing a single no—was not dead.
He was in a cage, and Annie was rattling the bars.
The cage was holding, but the beast inside it was smiling.
That's not who I am. That's not who I am anymore.
"Oh God," she wailed, her thighs clenching harder around his ribs. "Fuck. Fuck, John—can feel you under me—so fuckin' hard — s’good—God—m’gonna come jus' from this—"
Her rhythm spiraled. As her movements grew more frantic, the wet sounds of flesh on flesh escalated to a fever pitch. Annie lost all abandon. She drove her fingers deeper and faster, working herself into a frenzy. Her moans climbed into a sharp, breathy whine, her back arching so hard her spine bowed.
Her internal muscles clamped down on her fingers in a rapid, crushing vice as long, trembling convulsions tore through her. She came hard, crying out as her pussy spasmed around her hand.
Annie sagged forward, gasping, her free hand migrating south to brace against his heaving chest. After a moment, she slowly pulled her fingers free, her breath hitching as she smeared the thick, cream-streaked come all over her folds, coating her clit and her inner lips until she was gleaming in the dim light. It was a deliberate display designed to obliterate the remaining threads of John’s composure.
She brought her soaked fingers right back to his lips. "Taste."
John may have been pissed, but his body was more obedient this time. He opened his mouth, taking her fingers all the way into his throat, savoring the distinct, musky flavor of her climax. An involuntary, low hum of pure enjoyment vibrated in his throat.
The sight of him doing that—the absolute submission of the mighty Homelander sucking her fingers clean with a purr of pleasure he couldn’t suppress—sent a fresh jolt of heat straight to Annie's core. The arousal spiked so hard and fast she briefly wondered if she was ovulating.
Her hands were trembling as she reached down and rucked the waistband of his sweatpants and boxers down his thighs. His cock sprang free—long, thick, and fully engorged, the purple head throbbing against his stomach.
Annie's mouth literally watered. A string of drool stretched from her lower lip and dropped, landing squarely on the swollen head of his cock.
John let out a tense, high-pitched whine—an animal caught in a snare.
"Fuck.” His hips jerked off the mattress, chasing the contact.
"Stop," Homelander growled. "I mean it. Touch my dick again, you little brat, and I’ll make the rest of your birthday profoundly unpleasant. I might be powerless right now, but if you don’t get the fuck off me right now, I swear to fuckin’ God I will find a way to severely punish you for this."
"Shhhh." Her left hand returned to his throat. With her right, she wrapped her fingers around the base of his cock and stroked him in long, twisting pulls from root to tip. "S’okay, baby. M'gonna help you. You're so hard it looks like it hurts. Lemme take care of you. Lemme make my Farm Boy feel good."
She guided him to her cleft and began to rub the rigid length against the glossy, swollen folds of her pussy, dragging the cleft of her skin up and down his shaft in a torturous, dry-humping friction.
Annie was so soaked that his cock slid effortlessly against her, the wet, slapping sound of their skin meeting turning the air in the room thick. With every upward thrust, the hard head of his cock clipped her hyper-sensitive clit.
John's head drove back into the pillow. The tendons in his neck stood out like cables. His fists had torn through the top sheet entirely, his fingers now shredding the fitted sheet beneath. A string of unwilling, highly aroused vocalizations spilled out of him.
As Annie got closer to her own peak again, her fingers tightened convulsively around his neck.
"Annie—" Her name came out mangled, shoved sideways through the shrinking space in his windpipe. "You need to let go of my throat. Right fucking now. You squeeze any harder, you're gonna crush my trachea like a fucking juice box, and I’d prefer to keep breathing."
She loosened her grip by an infinitesimal fraction, just enough to let oxygen slip past his vocal cords, but the terrifying weight of her fingers remained. She could end him right here, accidentally, and he couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.
Her hips moved faster. The drenched, rhythmic sound of her pussy sliding along his cock filled the room, punctuated by her increasingly incoherent moans and John's losing battle of hostile silence.
Annie let out a sharp cry, her hips hitching as she came for the second time, the sheer friction of his shaft against her clit pushing her over the edge. The orgasm rolled through her in visible waves, the hot evidence of it flooding against his cock and dripping down his shaft.
John was desperately trying to will his erection away.
Drunkenly offended that he hadn't tipped over the edge with her, Annie wrapped her hand around his glazed shaft. "Make a mess for me," she demanded, jerking him with a fast, ruthless pace.
She pumped his length without mercy, her hand coated in her own juices; the friction was absolute agony. John closed his eyes tight, gritting his teeth and trying with everything in his soul to deny her the satisfaction of breaking him.
"C'mon," she coaxed, her voice wrecked and raw. " I want it. I wan' it all over me, John. Wanna feel how hard you come. Give it t'me."
His willpower held for eight more seconds.
With a harsh, guttural shout, he came hard—thick ropes of heat spilling over her hand, her bare thighs, and pooling in the hollow of his stomach.
Relinquishing her grip on his pulse just long enough to lift her hand, Annie held her fingers up between them. They were glazed, strung thick with the milky web of his arousal. Her tongue carved a shameless path across her palm, lapping up the syrupy mess like a starved animal.
A wicked smile curved her lips as she savored the mess. She took her index and middle fingers deep past her lips, sucking them clean with vulgar greed, her cheeks hollowing around the digits. She released them with a wet smack, her tongue lazily chasing a final streak of moisture down to the knuckle.
“Mmm,” she hummed. “You taste like such a good boy.”
A predatory heat burned in her eyes as she began to drag her heavy, fever-flushed body down his torso. “Let’s clean up the rest.”
She leaned down, her tongue swiping flat across his abdomen, lapping up the cooling stripe of release with the lazy focus of a cat at a saucer.
John lay beneath her, utterly dazed, panting as he tried to catch his breath from the aftermath of the release. She slid her lips over the wet head of his cock, taking the top two inches into her mouth and sucking once, hard, before releasing it with a loud, wet pop.
Annie slid back up his body, her eyes completely out of focus now.
"M'gonna fuck you," she mumbled against the hollow of his throat, hand fisting into his gray sweatpants to drag them down further. "Gonna fuck you s'good, John. Jus'... jus' lemme get you hard again and I'll..."
With her other hand, she reached between them. She began jerking his semi-flaccid cock, her sticky hand trying to pump him back to a full erection a second time.
Her hand was no longer on his throat; it was splayed flat across his navel, her fingers tangling in the dark hair of his stomach. She hoisted her hips, positioning her wet, glistening hole directly over the head of his cock, preparing to slide down and impale herself.
Something in him—something that had been building since the moment she first shoved him onto this bed, something that had been accumulating pressure behind his eyes and in his chest and in the marrow of his goddamn bones—reached its limit.
He snapped.
With a sudden, explosive surge of adrenaline that surprised both of them, his hands shot up and clamped around her waist. He twisted his torso, throwing his full weight into her flank and rolling her over.
The mattress slammed against the wall; the headboard cracked against the plaster. The springs shrieked in protest as Annie hit the mattress hard on her back.
Before she could even process the shift, The Homelander was over her.
He pinned her wrists to the bed on either side of her head, threading his fingers through hers, his knees bracketing her thighs. His cock, still half-hard and slick with the mingled evidence of both of them, rested heavy against her mound, the intimidating length of him laid flat against her stomach from her folds to her navel.
"Enough!" The word erupted from him in a deep, guttural roar.
Annie gasped, dazed by the sudden, impossible violence of the reversal.
Homelander’s eyes were blazing— a deep, molten red that illuminated Annie's face in a warm, eerie glow, casting ruby shadows across the pillow and turning the dark room into something out of a fever dream.
Annie stared up at him through the red-tinted dark, her pupils blown wide, her mouth hanging open. The light from his eyes played across her features like firelight.
"Pretty," she whispered.
The sight of him like this—the unexpected return of the domineering Homelander towering over her, pinning her to the sheets—sent an involuntary spasm rippling through her. She moaned, shuddering, and he could feel her gushing hot all over his balls.
Every primal instinct John possessed was screaming at him to wrap her legs around his waist and plunge deep inside her.
He took a ragged, grounding breath. The wonder in her voice—the childlike, completely unafraid awe of a drunk woman looking at the weapon that had terrified the world and seeing something beautiful—hit him in a place he didn't know he had.
“I said enough,” he breathed, his voice vibrating with absolute authority. He closed the distance between them until his breath ghosted across the tip of her nose, his arms trembling where they braced on either side of her head, the last ring of fading red dissolving until there was only clear blue.
Annie stared up at him, the alcohol and the rejection colliding in a messy, emotional wreck. Tears spilled hot out of the corners of her eyes, tracking sideways into her hair.
"Why don' you want me?"
John looked down at her—at the tears, the shredded skirt, the beautiful, chaotic ruin of the woman he loved. The arrogant sneer melted off his face, leaving behind the exhausted, desperate Farm Boy.
"I do want you," he snapped, the mean edge of Homelander softening into something raw and vulnerable. “But I’m not going to be your mistake. I’m not going to fuck you when you’re hammered on bathtub moonshine and crying. I’m not going to be the piece of garbage you try to scrub off your skin tomorrow morning because your life is a goddamn clusterfuck and you think throwing yourself at the villain will fix it. I’m not a toy you get to use to punish yourself.”
He dropped his forehead to hers. “You think I want a drunk late-night fuck you won't remember? Some messy, blackout hook up where you pass out halfway through and I get to jerk off to the memory like some pathetic fucking teenager? I waited a year, Annie. I chopped your goddamn firewood and read your shitty novels and ate your cooking and slept ten feet from you every single night for a year. I am not a fucking side dish, Princess. When I have you, I am having all of you.”
The pet name landed between them, caustic and dripping with arrogant condescension. Annie’s pupils bled wide and hungry, consuming the warm brown of her irises in the dim shadows of the bedroom until there was only volcanic black.
A damp flush crept up the column of her throat, chased by a wave of gooseflesh that pebbled across her bare shoulders and tightened the peaks of her breasts. Her teeth sank deep into her swollen lower lip, trapping a pathetic, needy little whine behind it.
Oh, she likes that. The Homelander's satisfaction was instantaneous and predatory. Even blind-drunk and crying, the word struck a chord that went straight to her cunt. John tracked the flush, the dilated pupils, the helpless shiver, and filed it all away in the vault for later.
His thumb traced her knuckle. "You’re the best person I know. And you're lying underneath me, wet and willing, telling me I have pretty eyes. And I'm trying not to lose my goddamn mind. So please. Please stop. And just go to sleep."
Annie let out a soft, broken hiccup. “Don’t leave me.”
She turned her face into his neck, her body beginning to go slack as the alcohol finally began to drag her under.
“M sorry,” she mumbled, so quietly he almost missed it. "I jus'... I jus' wanted..."
She didn't finish the sentence. Within seconds, her breathing evened out into the deep, measured pull of a blackout sleep.
John stayed propped up over her for a long minute, listening to her breathe, waiting for the tremulous vibrations in his own muscles to subside.
Spite told him to leave her exactly as she was—tits out, pussy bare and sticky—out of pure, petty malice for what she had put him through. But he couldn’t do it.
He slid off her, his joints voicing their discontent in the quiet room. He tucked himself back into his sweatpants, the waistband snapping against the still-sensitive skin hard enough to make him hiss.
The reptilian part of his brain offered one last poisonous gift: his hand in her hair, his cock between those slack lips, using her sleeping mouth until he emptied himself down her throat and left his come sitting on her tongue — a parting gift she'd wake up tasting and never be able to scrub clean.
He forced the thought away.
Picking up the remnants of her skirt from the floor, he used the clean linen to gently wipe the drying come from her thighs, her stomach, and his own skin.
He crossed to her dresser, ignoring his previous rule about not digging through her things, and pulled out a pair of clean cotton panties and an oversized gray t-shirt.
With an exaggerated, careful tenderness, he redressed her limp body, pulling the shirt over her head and guiding her legs into the underwear without waking her. He lifted her blankets, tucking her securely beneath the covers up to her chin.
Before he turned away, he reached out, the pad of his thumb running once over her swollen lower lip in a tender caress.
Then he turned and walked out of the room.
John descended the dark stairs on legs that didn’t feel entirely his own, his chest tight, every nerve vibrating with an adrenaline high he couldn't shake. The screen door groaned briefly as he shouldered through it.
The night air was cool now, the fireflies gone, the fields stretching out into a vast, black void. There was a bite of chill in the breeze, but it did nothing to clear the dense fog in his brain.
He was reeling, his mind trying to process everything that had occurred upstairs. He closed his eyes, feeling the familiar, burning pressure building behind his retinas.
Behind his eyelids, the world was not dark. A dull, throbbing pressure pulsed in the space between his brow and his temples—the hot, building charge he hadn't felt at full strength in almost a year. It was as though there was a furnace behind his eyes, warming up, the infrastructure rebuilding itself one synapse at a time.
No.
He bore down on it, a desperate hand clamped over a hemorrhaging wound. The pressure pushed back, patient, indifferent to his opinion on the matter.
For a split second, a pathetic, bruised piece of him wanted to let it happen. It craved the heat back in his eyes; it wanted to scour this fragile, mortal weakness right out of his blood so he would never have to feel helpless again. But if he let the god wake up, the Farm Boy died—and he took Annie with him. Godhood meant empty skies and cold sheets.
I don't want them back, he mentally snarled, violently crushing the craving. Whatever you are, whatever's rebuilding in there—stay down. Stay the fuck down.
He leaned against the porch railing and closed his eyes, gripping the banister to steady the tremor in his hands. The wood groaned beneath his palms, hairline fractures suddenly spiderwebbing through the surface. He squeezed harder.
There was a sudden, sickening crunch of yielding timber.
The pressure pulsed once more, sullen and slow, and receded to a low hum at the base of his skull. Not gone. Waiting.
His eyes snapped open. The solid, two-by-four wooden railing had crumbled in his grip, reduced to a handful of jagged splinters that rained down into the grass.
"Fuck," he whispered. Then louder, to the empty yard and the dark field and the indifferent stars: "Fuck. FUCK!"
He stared at the crushed remains of the railing in his fist—the splintered wood, the compressed grain, the kind of structural damage no mortal grip should have been capable of producing—and felt the confirmation settle into his gut like a swallowed stone. "Motherfucker," he whispered.
John let loose a quiet, ragged string of creative profanities, his forehead coming down to rest against his knuckles. He stayed like that for five minutes, waiting for the trembling in his chest to stop.
Then, his eyes found the ceramic jug Ben had left sitting on the porch railing.
John reached out, pulled the cork with his teeth, and tilted the heavy clay back. He took a punishing gulp straight from the mouth of it. The 200-proof sugar shine hit his throat like liquid glass, burning a track from tongue to sternum and radiating outward through his limbs. His eyes watered, every nerve ending ignited simultaneously, and for one blinding, merciful second, he felt all the noise and pain disappear.
He drank again, longer this time, letting the fire scorch a path straight down to the returning monster trying to break free.