Archive of Our Own

thalassophobia (n.)
the persistent and intense fear of deep bodies of water.

◐

In Jungkook’s dream, he drowns.

Brine floods his mouth and fills his lungs. His limbs constrict tight to his body. Held in place for—he isn’t quite sure what, losing oxygen fast. There’s no time to feel anything, other than the realization of what, exactly, is coiling around him.

His mind goes numb with fear. The last of the light around him is dimming, fading fast as he sinks. As he’s pulled under, something colder than the water fills his mouth and shoves down his throat, a high giggle ringing in his ears and inside his head—

Jungkook wakes up laughing to match it.

When he touches a hand to his cheek, it comes away wet.

◐

Two days after Jungkook arrives at the cabin, he starts dreaming about the lake. 

He’s well aware that most nightmares have worse subjects. Still, there’s something about the water that doesn’t quite sit right with him during the light of day, much less after dark in murky dreams. Its water looks gross, surface choked with algae and unnaturally still. The air hangs thicker around the water’s edge, and on his first night Jungkook had looked out across the lake and could have sworn it glowed with more than moonlight.

He had been unable to find any topographical information about its depth, aside from the discovery that a few inlets on its other shore connect down the mountain and to the sea. Jungkook likes to consider himself a logical person, a scientific person, but it makes him trust the lake even less.

This is not something he shares over the phone. There’s no reception up at the cabin, so Jungkook makes all his connections in a parking lot in town, phone tucked under his chin as he loads groceries into a truck older than he is.

“You know you can come home whenever,” his sister ends the call, when silence has trailed too long between them. Her voice is gentle. Jungkook grimaces at its kindness. “You can always come home if you need it. If you… you know.”

“If I don’t find anything?”

“That, too. We miss you.”

Jungkook hums absently.

You can come home whenever. Can he? There’s more than a few reasons he’d chosen the region for study. It’s remote, for a start, accessible via only one pass that’s blocked off more often than not. If it’s not slow it’s mudslides, a clerk had sniffed on his first day here, with a distrustful glance down the single road in town. And the area is beautiful, anyway, an isolated coastal mountain range with little road access, a blend of beach elevating up to meet woodland. And it’s far, a full day’s drive from the home he’s avoiding.

And, of course, the main reason he’d picked the place had been—

“Good luck finding your aliens!”

He groans at its cheer. “Heejin.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she apologizes quickly, and yet he can hear the grin in her voice when she corrects, “Your alien germs.”

“Heejin,” Jungkook tries to scold again, but he’s smiling.

Before he hangs up, he sends along well wishes, with a final promise that he’s fine.

Even if it weren’t, it’s not something he’d share back home. Even if he knew how to talk about it.

Because that night, he dreams again. The same dream, only this time there’s teeth in his neck, and when Jungkook wakes sitting up with a gasp there’s a moan on his lips instead of a scream.

The sweat on his brow isn’t from a nightmare. He’s hard.

Jungkook takes care of it quickly, shamefully, with more than a little confusion.

◐

The next day, Jungkook visits the town’s single bookstore. He scans the local history shelf, but doesn’t see anything interesting or that he doesn’t already know. Drifting to the Science section comes naturally after that.

“That’s a good one,” a voice at his elbow startles him. Jungkook fumbles, slamming shut the book he’d been skimming through: Microbes Beyond the Microcosm: Speculative Microbiology. Its publish date is a little too old for him to take all its hypotheses at face value, and its subject is far too niche to have gone far in any circle, but Jungkook still finds its premise fascinating. The woman apologizes quickly, “Sorry. Just… a fan of the book.”

Jungkook recovers, though he stares for just a little too long first. It doesn’t seem like the kind of text many people would call themselves a fan of.

“No worries. You said it’s good?”

“Yeah,” she nods to the book in his hands. “Is it for a class, or…?”

“Sort of?” Jungkook shrugs. “I’m looking for a thesis. Was it a class for you?”

She shrugs back, looking a little embarrassed. She echoes: “Sort of. What do you study?”

“Microbial ecology,” Jungkook answers automatically, and clarifies, “It’s like… the ecology of microbes, their diversity and relationships with the environment and us and each other. A blend of microbio and ecology. It’s a pretty new field. I’m interested in, um. Symbiosis?”

He decides not to mention his side interest in astrobiology, his reason for picking up the book in the first place. If she’s a local she has opinions, and he’d rather not end up on anyone’s bad side if he ends up sticking around longer for study. Small towns talk.

She blinks. “Oh, like Venom?”

Jungkook blinks back, and chuckles. “Actually, yeah, kind of. Like, I’ve done a lot of work with—you know pitcher plants?”

She shakes her head. And Jungkook can feel his least favorite thing happening, an uncontrollable urge to share, an excited outpouring of information jumbling out in an unstoppable rush. By habit he always steels himself for the worst case scenarios, to be ignored or mocked, but the woman seems kind. Interested, at least in him, if not in his research—but he’d like to believe it’s the latter too.

“They’re these carnivorous plants, shaped a bit like a pitcher I guess—Bellsprout’s design is based off them, if you know the Pokemon?” Jungkook winces internally when she shakes her head. “Anyway, most people think the liquid inside the plant is what dissolves trapped insects, but it’s actually bacterial colonies living inside the pitcher that break down insects into nutrients for the plant. It’s a perfect symbiosis—the bacteria get a relatively safe place to live, and in exchange they help make food for the plant.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Relatively?”

“Well, other microorganisms can get in there too, small unicellular protists or tiny animals like rotifers that prey on the bacteria. And mosquito larvae prey on the rotifers. But it all works together as a food web, a whole mini-ecosystem cohabitating inside one plant, and barely anyone knows it’s a symbiosis and not the plant itself killing the bugs that fall in. Even the researchers working on its bacterial strains don’t know much else yet.”

The woman doesn’t look bored. She looks more fond than anything, if a bit wistful. “You sound a lot like someone I know—that’s a compliment. I’m a lab tech, so I do quite a bit of thinking about bacteria. Only the ones that cause disease, though, really—I know most aren’t pathogenic, don’t worry,” she interrupts herself with a chuckle, as if she’s spoken to someone like Jungkook before. “We just… tend to focus only on the ones that hurt us.”

“Yeah,” Jungkook sighs. “That’s one of the hangups of the field—a lot of people ask why we should care about studying the bacteria that don’t make us sick. But they’re doing… stuff out there in the world, denitrification and decomposition and soil engineering, and plenty of engineering inside us, too. We have next to no idea what else our microbiome might do for us aside from digestion, but we know that changes to it can alter behavior and that we’re more likely to get sick without good gut diversity. And even when we do care…”

He gestures his hands in frustration. “...that’s the other hangup of the field. How do we even study microscopic organisms in the wild? Their interactions with each other, how their environment affects their activity? We can’t exactly set up wildlife cams for observation. We’ve identified less than 1% of all bacteria species to exist, and we don’t even know how to culture 99% of the species we do know about. Even the ones we know how to culture—we’re growing them in a lab, under optimal conditions.”

She’s smiling at his enthusiasm, at least. So far. “My job, you mean.”

“Exactly,” Jungkook nods, matching her smile. “That’s good for identification, of course. But ecology is about relationships, and if a species is isolated in the lab, we have no idea how it plays with other microbes, let alone how its behavior changes in a living system out there,” he waves a hand vaguely towards the window. “Maybe their behavior changes in a lab environment and we’re studying them wrong and we have no way of knowing until technology advances enough. Even some of the calculations we use are based on theoretical estimates or approximations, and we’re just hoping they work? We’re decades away from understanding our own microbiome’s role in our health, let alone that of every other animal on Earth, or what microbes do in the soil or ocean or air. All we know is they were here first and they engineer the planet and they’ll still be here long after we’re gone. And a lot are symbiotically associated with us, and every other organism and system on the planet, so. That’s the kind of relationships I wanna study.”

Jungkook shrugs as he concludes, burning hot with the rush of embarrassment whenever his passion makes him too much and too loud, but she doesn’t seem perturbed. She’s actually staring at the book, he realizes.

“You’d enjoy talking to my dad.”

“He’s a microbiologist?”

She points at the book with a wry smile. “You’re holding his book.”

“Oh. Oh!” Jungkook looks down at the book with a new reverence. “Oh, wow. That’s how you know it?”

“Yep,” she pops the sound of it. Her smile turns a little sad. “I moved back here to take care of him. He’s getting older.”

Jungkook nods in understanding. He tucks the book under his arm and assures, “Well, it sounds like something I’ll enjoy. I’m buying it, thanks.”

“I’ll let him know,” she says with kind, sad eyes. “Thank you, seriously. He’ll be happy to hear his stuff’s still getting read. He—” she hesitates, voice lowering. “His last expedition fell apart. He never went back into research, or back out into the field. But he wrote that book with my mom, before she…”

Her voice trails off. They share an understanding smile, Jungkook’s sympathetic. “Thanks for the recommendation,” he says again, and means it.

“No problem. Where are you staying?”

Jungkook starts to describe the small shoreside cabin and its creepy lake with a laugh, expecting to defend his decision to be so far out of town and isolated up in the mountains.

To his surprise, though, her previously warm demeanor goes cold. At the mention of the lake her friendly face shutters, and the conversation wraps quickly after that. Jungkook is mystified when she offers a last hesitant, “Be careful around the water up there. A lot of the lakes are deeper than they look.”

It’s an easy thing to promise. Jungkook didn’t come here to swim, anyway, and certainly not through the algae his lake is choking on.

It’s only while walking away that Jungkook wonders if he should have offered his number. He might have, until the conversation took a turn. And he wouldn’t want to seem like he was being friendly only to network with her father, though he certainly wouldn’t mind a conversation with the man.

Oh, well. It’s a small town, he reasons. 863 residents last census—he checked. If Jungkook sees her again, he’ll be politer.

At the checkout counter, Jungkook stares at a wheel of tacky souvenirs while the book rings up. Magnets, pins, stickers, postcards, all of them gathering a layer of dust and one section conspicuously UFO-themed.

The owner of the store catches Jungkook looking at the display. He’s older, and a little embarrassed when he says, “Look, it’s for tourists. Like… like Roswell, Area 51?"

Tourists. Privately, Jungkook doubts there are very many of those. He’s done his homework; no major roads were able to be built crossing the range, the rugged terrain isolating this stretch of coastline. All hopes for a highway were dashed decades ago. He feigns curiosity, “Wait, like, aliens?”

“Oh. Yeah,” the owner looks excited to get to explain to someone, for once. Jungkook lets him. “There was a pretty heavy meteorite hail here in the 90s, a bunch of research teams showed up—until the lead scientist of the biggest one drowned or something, and most of the others packed up. They never found anything, anyway, so it dried up the UFO tourism real quick.” 

The man squints at the magnets, scratching the beginnings of a beard with lips pursed in displeasure, as though he’s looking at the original unsold stock he ordered almost three decades ago. He probably is.

The meteorite shower, Jungkook knows about. It’s the number one—and most embarrassing—reason he’d selected this location for his trip.

But the last bit is new. Jungkook makes a note to himself to dig around more if he can, cursing himself for not sharing numbers with the woman he’d spoken to after all—she’d said her father was a scientist, and getting older. He’d almost certainly know more, is maybe even one of the researchers who stayed in the area. Jungkook backtracks up to the second floor of the shop to check, but she’s nowhere to be found.

◐

That night, sleep evades him. Jungkook takes the book out to the rickety old dock to sit and try to quiet his mind. He takes a few notes in the margins, but ends up too restless to read, and idly begins sketching the lake in his notebook instead.

He gets exactly five minutes to himself before he begins to feel like he’s being watched.

The sensation starts slow, a prickling at the back of his neck. Jungkook ignores it until he can no longer, and then glances up to find a thick, cloying stillness settling around him. The shoreside has gone unnaturally quiet, even the hum of insects gone silent.

Jungkook tries to scold himself for the nerves. He’s backpacked solo—he knows all too well the kind of tricks solitude can play on the mind. That self-reassurance doesn’t do much to keep his hair from raising. Jungkook squints out across the lake, the reflection of the moon so stable in the still waters that their surface may as well be a mirror.

And then, close enough to the dock for discomfort, something splashes. Jungkook is on his feet and fleeing to his cabin before he fully understands the urge, sketch crumpling in his hand and his instincts screaming at him.

◐

Jungkook feels silly in the morning, after a few hours’ sleep. Dreamless, this time. He tells himself off for getting so easily startled the night before; after three days he should be more than used to the lake and its atrocious vibes. 

Humorously, he recalls a line from one of his Ecology courses, a rebuke to how often water bodies like wetlands and bogs are associated with monsters and myth. An easily understandable way to ward off children from wandering too close to the water’s edge and drowning. Haunted places deserve protection too, his professor had joked, and that had been that. Nearly every legend has its roots in a lesson like that.

AKA a real threat, his mind supplies unhelpfully. Jungkook scoffs, glancing out at the lake through the cabin window. It looks the same as ever: unsettlingly placid, so dark and stagnant and dead-calm that Jungkook has to remind himself it’s those thick algal blooms mattifying the surface.

When he cracks the window, the breeze is gentle enough to excuse the lack of ripples, and Jungkook can hear birdsong. He can almost trick himself into thinking he’d imagined the intense, unnatural silence of the night before—the hairs on the back of his neck rise again to remember it, but it was late, Jungkook reminds himself. And at the end of a long day, plus the forty-minute drive each way to and from town.

He’s in for another long day, though he rises late, packing up and heading out in the early afternoon. If Jungkook can’t avoid the lake, he’ll conquer it. It’s a better shot than waiting around for inspiration to strike.

Some data might do him good, he thinks, lugging two buckets down to the shoreline, stocked with flag markers and quadrat frames.

◐

Field work is never easy, but it’s rewarding. Jungkook strips down to his tank to work a little easier in the heat, more humidity hanging in the air up in the mountains than down by the coast. He hums to himself as he works, then sings aloud as he gets more comfortable, falling into the familiar work of measuring and marking a boundary around the water’s edge to estimate plant cover later.

As he works, the thick algae keeps catching his suspicious eye. He’s no botanist, but Jungkook still isn’t sure if he imagined that faint glow on the first night. He isn’t sure how common (or not) bioluminescence is in freshwater bodies, but the spattering of lichen lapping every rock alongside the water makes him wonder if it’s an association he could identify, maybe even the study subject he’s looking for.

Jungkook tries to tell himself to stay on track—finish taking his frame counts, don’t get distracted, think of where to start first instead of rushing in blind—but, he reasons, it couldn’t hurt to get one sample for his microscope tonight.

He eyes the water with distrust for a moment, then scolds himself. He’s waded in more water bodies than he can count, for study and for leisure; he hasn’t feared something unknown beneath the surface since he was a small child. Feeling silly, Jungkook shakes himself. After a bracing breath, he kicks off his shoes, peels off his socks, rolls up his shorts and wades in.

His first step sinks into the silky silt. Jungkook grimaces at the feeling, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary for lakebeds. He doesn’t know why he feels like he should expect something else. A second step, a third, hissing out a breath at the cold water lapping against his ankles then shins then thighs.

He reaches the nearest bloom, making a face as he gathers up a stringy clump of algae and funnels it into a sample tube. Jungkook is just sealing it closed with a huff when he realizes the world has fallen silent once more.

It’s too quiet, again. Like last night on the dock. That strange stillness settles around him like fog, sticking to his skin like sweat. This time, every hair on Jungkook’s body raises. He fights the instinctual urge to run, steeling himself with a deep breath. There’s nothing in the water. He’s a scientist, for god’s sake.

Feeling better with his self-reassurance, anxiety conquered, Jungkook turns to wade calmly back to shore.

He never gets a chance to. Something wraps around his ankle.

And yanks him under.

Before he can react, Jungkook is flat on his back, breaking down through the surface of the water with a splash. He struggles to stagger back up, mind racing with confusion—did he slip? trip?—and then faster than he can comprehend, something is dragging him away, whipping him across the lakebed and down, plunging him into the shock of cold water.

The edge drops off into deeper water, steepness far more dramatic than he might have guessed. Jungkook is still in the water for only a second, stunned as he floats, and then panic sets in proper. He starts to kick and propel himself upwards, only to find that whatever is wrapped around his ankle still has a grip. It's squeezing his ankle tighter, squirming up his shin.

It’s not alone. 

Algae—ropes—snakes? Eels? Jungkook isn’t sure, but whatever they are, he’s surrounded in the span of a few seconds. He can blink through murky water to see dozens around him, closing in fast.

He can’t hold back a scream. It bursts warbled from his lips, water flooding his mouth. Jungkook scrabbles to find purchase on anything that isn’t dark water or slick slime, terror pulsing in his chest. There’s no time to think. No time to feel anything, other than adrenaline—and the horror of realizing what, exactly, is coiling around him.

It’s tentacles that surround him in the water, almost certainly attached to some larger living thing. Tapered at their ends, slippery but winning the fight to curl lovingly around his torso. Constricting Jungkook’s limbs tight to his body, holding him in place for—for—he isn’t sure why, losing oxygen fast. His limbs jerk desperately.

Something touches his mouth.

Jungkook’s mind goes numb with fear. The light around him is dimming. Sinking deeper, the last of his consciousness supplies helpfully. Jungkook wishes he would black out faster. He would rather fade away than see the impossibility in front of him, wide black eyes set into a full moon of a human face. He would rather be unconscious than feel the creature press close to him, their mouths meeting in a sick kind of kiss. Something forces its way past Jungkook’s lips—its tongue?

He can’t be sure, but whatever it is fills his mouth with cold. It shoves down Jungkook’s throat, seeping something inky and sweet that numbs everything it touches. So that it’s only a distant violation, like something out of a dream, when Jungkook’s mouth and airway and lungs choke around a pulsing black gel that crawls out of his mouth and up his face.

The creature pulls away. Jungkook barely notices. He’s panicking again, realizing that the inky mass is spilling up his lips to cover his mouth and nose in a thick filamentous mat.

Jungkook doesn’t have enough air left to cough it out. His chest spasms helplessly. For one moment of pure, bone-chilling dread, Jungkook is certain that the growth will continue to spread, creeping up and over his eyes and sealing him away. He thinks he pisses himself in terror. He can’t be sure in the cold depths. The warmth is gone in seconds.

But the ooze stops before reaching his eyes. Its growth halts just above his nose and sticks there, tendrils of snapped-off ends drifting in the current.

And Jungkook realizes—he’s breathing.

Somehow, he’s breathing. Underwater.

He tests it, barely daring to believe it, unable to comprehend it. Jungkook sucks in breath after desperate breath, and he can’t feel any air moving but he can’t feel water entering either. Dazedly, his hypoxic mind supplies a flood of disjointed respiratory concepts in explanation—alveolar ventilation gas exchange partial pressure gradient—then he shakes himself back to his senses, and realizes the creature is watching him.

It has a surprisingly sapien face, all things considered (and Jungkook is absolutely considering the tentacles). Ethereal, but distinctly inhuman, all angles sharp and predatory. Like the approximation of a face, sketched by a child asked to draw a bad dream. Those all-black shark eyes peer into Jungkook’s, no pupil visible within stained sclera, watching him watch it back.

Too-human lips move to reveal sharp teeth, a carnivore’s jaw. The creature clicks something to him, muffled underwater and incomprehensible to him regardless. It looks frustrated when Jungkook stares back at it without comprehending, and then its face smooths in concentration.

Something cold and smooth and slick presses into Jungkook’s left ear.

Bubbles burst from the inky mat sealed across his face. Jungkook tries to scream again, the brief recovery of his brain shutting right back down to base instinct. His limbs thrash against his living bondage as he kicks, frantic, all senses narrowing down to his pounding heart and burning lungs and hindbrain response to the pure instinctual panic of being prey.

Pressure swells in his ear. Jungkook struggles through a second of blinding pain, heaving mindlessly in fear. Something thin and slimy is worming itself even thinner still to squeeze into his ear canal. Like the other intrusion, it seeps something numbing as it burrows deeper, so he can barely feel the discomfort splitting against his skull and oh god it’s inside his head, it’s inside his head it’s inside his head IT’S INSIDE HIS HEAD—

Jungkook goes limp.

Not by choice. Not even breathing. He can’t even make himself try to grunt the beginning of a scream when he feels the tentacle in his ear squirm one last time to press in and take control.

Jungkook’s eyes roll up, and his body breathes again.

His body, not of his own will. Jungkook isn’t controlling it, not anymore. Somehow the creature is controlling his lungs, his autonomy flipped as easily as a switch.

The creature breathes for him as it learns his brain and body, keeping his respiration steady and slow. All Jungkook can do is stare at it, and feel the way the creature’s control keeps him from fighting back. It swims around him, clicking another few otherworldly siren-calls, leaning in once to lave a dark flat tongue up his neck. Learning him, learning how to puppet him. Jungkook’s muscles twitch and jerk beyond his control with the creature’s exploration, and still he can’t scream, denied even the blessing of blacking out. Locked-in syndrome, to a sinister extreme.

The creature feels satisfied. Not looks satisfied; with horror, Jungkook realizes that somehow he can feel its touch inside his head. The connection is so intimately violating that he can understand, even before the creature’s face sours, that it’s displeased with his reaction. 

Something—it—shifts inside his head. Searching. Whatever this animal is, it plucks at Jungkook’s brain like a chord. In a few minutes, it finds what it’s looking for: his language.

Host calm, flashes in Jungkook’s mind, like broadcast lights on a midnight billboard. 

Jungkook does exactly the opposite of calm. He still can’t control his own body, can’t thrash his limbs in the panic that seizes him, can barely even feel the numb cold of the murky water. But he can still think, mindless terror pulsing shock and disbelief: HOST? HOST? HOST? like a silent scream inside his head, a a half-dozen horror movies brought to mind by the word.

The creature doesn’t seem to like these internal screams very much. It flinches away from him. The tentacle inside Jungkook’s ear squirms a threat, and Jungkook goes silent with dread. He stares into the creature’s eyes defiantly, hoping his death will be quick.

The creature doesn’t seem to like that thought very much either. Thick, startlingly human lips pout. And inside his head, he hears again—

Need host, the creature thinks at him, voiced without a voice inside his own head. Need host alive.

Jungkook doesn’t understand the emphasis placed on alive, until he does. 

In nature, alive rarely equates to safe. More images flash through Jungkook’s mind, now horribly specific: parasitoid wasps and botfly larvae and Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien.

Jungkook panics anew, struggling to seize back control of his limbs, or at least the ability to cry. This time, the creature seems amused by his efforts. It subdues him with ease, shoving him down into the back of his own head. Its stern instruction flashes behind Jungkook’s eyes: Host calm. Host submit.

Before Jungkook can even begin to process or protest, the creature’s teeth sink into his shoulder.

The pain only lasts a second. Something indescribable replaces it. Something giddy, a burning heat radiating out from Jungkook’s shoulder and bubbling manic warm through his chest with each traitorous beat of his heart.

A few bubbles escape the filamentous mask sealed over Jungkook’s face once more, this time from an involuntary, delirious giggle. His body manages to shake with it, even with his muscles kept loose and lax. Jungkook is horrified to realize that he’s aroused, cock hardening to a painful ache in seconds. He can grasp an understanding from the creature, in that horrible telepathic way without words: that it’s the drip of venom in his veins doing this to him. 

The coils around his body squirm as the creature drags them down into the depths. Too late, Jungkook remembers—

Be careful around the water up there. A lot of the lakes are deeper than they look.

He remembers, though he can’t make himself care. Not with a euphoria like this flooding him, heat surging downwards. Jungkook can’t even feel afraid, anymore. The arousal is overwhelming; it feels good, expected, natural. And with that thought, the tentacle worms deeper in his ear, the creature singing something soft and sweet—a jolt of pleasure, a reward for his compliance that shoots straight to his straining cock.

Jungkook can’t guess how far away the surface is now, more darkness enveloping them the deeper they sink. He manages to drag dazed eyes down, ever the biologist, as if documenting the creature in the last light he has could help him now. 

Of what he can see, an oddly human torso transitions into a dark inky mass below the waist, more tentacles than Jungkook can see or count curling thick in the water and around his body. 

It should scare him, but Jungkook can’t stop shaking. Fits of giggling wrack his body, twisting upwards into moans. The creature is amused by his reactions—Jungkook can still feel it inside his head—and it gifts him back enough control over his vocal cords to embarrass himself with a whine, then seizes back the reins before Jungkook can use the newfound freedom to scream.

If he even would scream, a traitorous thought terrifies him. Darkness fully engulfs them both. Jungkook’s sight blinks out, lost completely with either the depth or something worse. Jungkook aches with desire as he’s settled onto something soft, praying it’s only algae.

The creature curls close to him, clicking incomprehensibly and fussing over its prey, each touch electric. It examines every inch of his body, inspecting him with the violating press of pale fingerpads and silky tentacles and that bizarrely flat tongue.

It also, presumably, explores him with its eyes. They’d been so big, Jungkook remembers dazedly, so dark. This creature can probably see even in the depths—if it can see at all, if its eyes aren’t just a vestigial structure leftover from… actually, Jungkook can’t even begin to imagine what a creature like this could have possibly evolved from.

He can barely think at all.

Need host alive, the creature had promised clumsily, but Jungkook has a knowledgeable enough scope of kingdom Animalia to know that is no guarantee of safety. He thinks again of the 1979 Alien, of Captain Dallas cocooned to bear the xenomorph’s offspring, begging a horrified Ellen Ripley: kill me.

And yet Jungkook can’t manage to feel fear, not even disgust. It’s maybe the worst part; his body actually responds to the idea of Dallas’ fate with another dizzying wave of heat. How could he possibly feel so warm, buried so deep?

His answer comes with the creature’s tongue rasping lovingly over the bite mark. Jungkook wonders deliriously if it’s a blessing in disguise that he can’t see anymore. He isn’t even sure anymore if his eyes are open or closed, and wishes to blink uselessly against the dark to know at least that one thing. To stay sane in some small way, to be anything but weak and willing and wanting.

Jungkook can’t make himself believe that it’s all a dream—he’d been too clear-minded collecting the sample—but he doesn’t know what else this could possibly be. He’s still bound by tentacles, limbs constricted to his sides even with his muscles gone lax. When the creature shifts atop him, cold body pressing against Jungkook’s like a lover, Jungkook’s head rolls back like an unsupported infant’s. 

It feels like assent. It feels safe, even if he’s never been less safe in his life. The last of his clothing is shredded.

The creature keeps Jungkook's breathing calm and slow and still as it inspects him. It’s just as well it does, that it has complete and total control; Jungkook is no longer sure if he’d use free will to try and fight or fuck, if his hips wouldn’t just buck up into the awful unsteady pressure of a tentacle wrapping around his aching cock. It begins to milk him, the squeeze tighter than anything he’s ever felt, the surface smooth and streaked with something viscous. 

If he’d felt delirious before, it’s a hundred times amplified now with his need answered. Embarrassingly, Jungkook feels another moan building in him. It muffles in his throat when the creature lets him move, Jungkook's hips thrusting up with embarrassingly desperate jerks the second he regains control of his body.

He can't stop. It feels too good. It feels good, and Jungkook is certain now that he’s dreaming or dead or lost his mind. He can’t grasp a coherent thought for more than a moment at a time, and that last one is snatched away from him the second the creature’s teeth scrape lovingly over the bitemark on his shoulder.

Something envelops the head of his cock with suction. A tapered end flicks and worms into the slit, and Jungkook wishes he could pretend the scream rising in him is one of fear and not pleasure.

Please, he begs it mentally, and tries to add don’t, but his mind flickers dark after the first word. He feels feverish, venom racing in his veins. He thinks he’d be sweating if he weren’t underwater, a wicked heat licking at his belly as he approaches the peak of what he can tell will be the most intense orgasm of his life.

The creature makes itself known in his head again. Encouragement this time, as much as there is curiosity. An image flickers in Jungkook’s mind, for just one moment; a strange greyscaled vision of himself, as if it’s proud of the way he’s gone limp in the dark with its tentacles curled around his body. His face blank, hair floating in the water, eyes unblinking and unseeing. Cradled, hips granted permission to rock up humiliatingly. The creature thinks of his climax with excitement, with anticipation. 

The image of himself is gone in a blink, but the pressure inside his ear and the reminder that this animal is inside his head is enough to send Jungkook tipping over the edge.

He nearly blacks out with the orgasm's intensity. He wishes he would. Jungkook tries to beg for that relief, but unmercifully, he’s ripped from the twilight back into his own body.

Forced back into consciousness, by the creature holding his strings. Jungkook’s hips don’t stop rocking up into the slick pulsing chill of the tentacle. He can’t make his hips stop. He’s no longer sure if it’s the creature controlling his body or his own unnatural lust, no longer certain where the monster ends and he begins. 

A monster is all he can think to call it, as overstimulation begins to claw Jungkook toward another climax, and another. The tentacle keeps squeezing tight, beaded tip serving as a sound to milk his cock. 

Host calm, it tells him, when he’s come enough times to see stars. And: Eggs ready soon.

Jungkook tries to cry. He tries to do anything other than feel his body betray him with each thrust, venom surging hot in his veins and the tentacle in his ear seeping excitement into him.

<Let me go> he tries to tell it, shoving the more-articulate thought upward. There’s no response, but Jungkook can feel it listening. It hears him—it just doesn’t care. <Please>

Host calm, the creature repeats stubbornly. Movement in his ear. A flood of endorphins. The bribery feels like almost nothing when Jungkook’s already floating far above his body on an unwilling Cloud 9.

He tries to beg it again, more desperate this time. Not quite Captain Dallas yet, but a plea all the same; he thinks dizzily that Dallas must have begged the xenomorph like this, too, long before Ripley came along to find him. <Please> Jungkook begs again, broken into delirium. <Please let me sleep>

This, the monster considers. Its tentacles twist around and inside him, coaxing another orgasm out of his spent cock. This one is painful, but with the venom’s kiss, even an agonizing throb is twisted into dizzying pleasure.

Host sleep, it agrees, almost kind.

Everything goes dark.

◐

Jungkook isn’t sure how long he sleeps. Slumber is dreamless, either a blessing from fate or the creature’s mercy. When he wakes again, there’s a few seconds of conscious confusion before memory rushes back to him and he realizes where he is. Immediately he begins thrashing against the creature’s control, caught in blind panic.

He can feel it wince away from him, both inside his head and in the way its tentacles squeeze tighter around his body with agitation. It’s still stimulating him, Jungkook realizes with hysteria. Still fucking him. How long has it been—?

Host calm, the creature reminds him. This time its mental ‘voice’ sounds almost exasperated.

<FUCK YOU> Jungkook pushes back at it immediately, as loudly and harshly as he can. The steady rhythm of the tentacles coiling around him slips for a second, the creature flinching back. It emboldens him: <Fuck you, get off me, get away from me, don’t you dare fucking touch me—>

QUIET brands across his mind, white-hot. Like a distinctly annoyed flash of light inside Jungkook’s head, stunning his brain into silence. It repeats, Eggs ready soon.

Locked into paralysis, Jungkook tries to make himself gag. He can’t even be sick, can’t make himself do anything. <What eggs? How?> he pushes at it, and overruns his own query in his frantic state: <How long? How? How long?>

The creature doesn’t seem to understand, mystified when it rifles through his head and finds his concept of Time. It gives up on understanding almost immediately, offering him the equivalent of a mental shrug: Soon.

<No, no, fuck you—how long, how long—how long, please, don’t do this—how long, don’t touch me, how long, don’t, don’t—>

Jungkook’s thoughts disjoint with fear. A host of horrid outcomes flash through his imagination—being trapped down here until he freezes or starves alone in the dark, or being devoured alive after whatever horrors he can’t imagine done to his body with the eggs the creature keeps referring to.

Through it all, he feels that same almost-human exasperation ring out from the creature, irate intent when it shifts on top of him. Jungkook reads its intentions too late to brace himself.

Teeth sink into his skin once more. Jungkook tries to protest, but once more he’s flooded with sickly sweet heat, his muscles loosening and body gone limp and a moan choking out through the mass in his mouth.

◐

The next time he wakes, Jungkook doesn’t know if he’s awake or asleep or dead. 

He can’t see, but that’s nothing new. 

Host awake? the creature trills inside his head. Happiness wriggles across their link, alongside an intent Jungkook doesn’t dare name. He’s hard again, and might even manage to be horrified if enough lingering venom weren’t still pulsing through his veins and laying him bare to the wretched, inescapable stimulation. He tries dizzily to reach to the creature in his head, to beg it for sleep again.

It feels amused. And aroused. Jungkook is sick to realize it, only that’s a lie, because he can feel himself moaning around whatever is stuffing his mouth and enabling him to breathe. The creature’s tongue laps across his throat to taste the buzz of Jungkook’s voice under his skin, amusement turning smug as it sings: Host likes it.

It hits Jungkook like a gunshot. He can feel the creature moving around inside his head, acquiring his tongue and improving its grammar and rummaging through the darkest, most shameful depths of his mind. <No> Jungkook insists forcefully, trying to barricade his thoughts and hide whatever he can from the creature's prying. <No, get out, get out, no, no, NO>

Yes, host likes it, the creature insists smugly. Its mass shifts atop him, against him, and another forceful orgasm is dragged from Jungkook’s limp body. Tears sting hot at his eyes, dissipating in seconds into the cold water.

<Monster MADE me like it with that stupid fucking bite> Jungkook tries to snap back mockery, defiant.

Correct, the creature purrs, appreciative of his accusation. Jungkook's hostility goes right over its head. 

And it had had a head, hadn’t it? Had a face, too, almost human. Too human, for the tentacles he’d seen. Almost pretty, for a predator.

Then what is it—?

Like any other time he tries to think too hard through the venom, Jungkook’s intellect drifts away from him, thoughts popping like bubbles and gone just as quick.

Inside his head, the creature feels delighted by this lack of thought. It praises, Good host.

Jungkook comes again, immediately. He tells himself he hates it, but the venom has turned his body into an instrument. One easily played, one that surges desperately into each and every hideous touch.

<Why?> he tries desperately. <Why, why, please, how, why, please, please, please, please—>

Somewhere along the way, Jungkook’s pleas for freedom twist into pleas for more. He’s never felt so good, every nerve in his body alight with arousal. He wishes he were able to throw up. He’s not Dallas yet, but if Jungkook were able to feel anything other than mindless heat he thinks he’d be scared that he’s getting close. And closer every time it tells him its eerie reassurance:

Eggs ready soon, it says. And, Host sleep.

Jungkook can only be absurdly grateful for the mercy. And desperately, despairingly turned on.

He’s out immediately—

—and awake again in what feels like mere seconds, consciousness switched on and off like a light. Unfairly, it feels like a game to the creature; Jungkook’s mind is dragged up only to be sunk back down for who knows how long, orgasms wrung mercilessly from his body, a venom pushing him beyond human limits of stamina.

<Please> Jungkook thinks dazedly, slave to the torturous stroke of the tentacle squeezed around his cock. The touch is as perfect as it is awful. The creature has learned his body too well in his time underneath it, however long it’s been. Desperate, he asks—begs—again: <How long?> 

The creature doesn’t answer.

Jungkook isn’t sure that it has an answer to give him. It seems puzzled when he asks: <hours? days? weeks?> in mounting fear; it feels bemused when he tries to help define day for it by rise and fall of the sun.

Jungkook consoles himself that he can’t have been captive for too long, sealed away in dark depths with nothing more than ragged sensation and telepathic violation to stretch out the time. It can’t have been as long as it feels, can’t possibly have been more than a day or two at most, because Jungkook is certain he’ll go insane if this is all there is, and also because he’s only just starting to feel hungry despite his last meal seeming like a lifetime ago.

His stomach growls with the thought. The creature is startled by it, jolting away then flattening a wary hand to Jungkook’s abdomen. He can feel it thinking in that wordless way he can’t quite comprehend, its mind too vast and alien to touch. It reaches into his mind for an answer, searching until it understands his hunger. When it does, it feels almost... affectionate, doting. Like an unspoken promise to meet his needs. To take care of him.

Jungkook barely has time to feel disturbed. A second later, a tentacle pries into his mouth.

Jungkook can’t fight it. His jaw aches with the effort to bite down, but he’s paralyzed, feeling the squishy intrusion push through the matted tendrils spilling all through his mouth and airway with ease. As if the mass that feels so sticky on his tongue and keeps his jaw slack is nothing at all, parting as easily as ink for the creature’s tentacle. His throat is still numbed, but Jungkook can tell the tapered end is wriggling as it works through the mat. Towards the back of his mouth, beginning to worm down his throat.

The creature’s paralysis restricts Jungkook’s gag reflex with ease. It keeps his body breathing, forcing him to keep slow paced breaths, every muscle gone sickeningly elastic with the venom. Jungkook can’t feel the tentacle past a certain point in his throat, but he can feel it still sliding past his lips, and he realizes with a distant horror that it’s still going down—how deep inside him he knows not, down his esophagus, maybe all the way to his stomach—

And yet the fear is impossible to truly feel. Jungkook can only feel good. Desperately, agonizingly good. Acclimation is apparently nonexistent; he’s not any more tolerant of the venom’s effect even after several bites. 

If anything, it only seems to affect him more each time he’s bitten, as if his body anticipates and welcomes the altered state of unbridled pleasure. Jungkook's only consolation, cock so hard it hurts, is that he’s unable to act as pathetically as the arousal might make him otherwise.

Paralyzed like this, he can’t squirm or whine or humiliate himself begging for it the way he fears he might if he could move. The creature rarely gives him back control. Even then, it's usually limited enough that Jungkook can at least pretend the moans in his throat and his tongue lapping at the tentacle are entirely the monster’s control, not his own actions. He can tell himself the mindless please please please echoing inside his skull are pleas for freedom, instead of for more touch.

Pleas are all that's playing in Jungkook's head now, as he drools around the tentacle intubated in his throat. It’s seeping something into his stomach, he can feel the creature concentrating on the fact, but even if Jungkook hadn’t been practicing how to read the monster back he would still feel the way his hunger pangs ease.

It’s feeding him.

The hunger is replaced with horror. That, Jungkook can feel too clearly, as his body burns through the tail end of the last envenomation. He's learned, too, what that feels like—a fever fading, a return of cognition over mindless arousal.

With his veins clearing once more, Jungkook can think more easily. Enough to realize anew that it’s feeding him, which means—

For strength, the creature explains helpfully. And, like it still thinks this could possibly calm Jungkook to hear: Eggs ready soon.

—he won’t starve to death, but he could be held down here indefinitely, then, be kept alive and placid and held in place and fucked. Bred, as the creature promises. For how long? How long? <How long> Jungkook demands once more inside his head. <How long, how long, how long—?>

For the first time, it answers.

Don't know, the creature tells him, horribly honest. 

Jungkook hates the answer, but he can tell it’s the truth. He wonders if the creature even knows what lying is—annoyingly, even as he thinks it, Jungkook can feel the monster begin to scan his memories to learn the concept of lying.

It feels fascinated by the idea of deceit, something that doesn’t make Jungkook feel any better about his future with it, even when the creature tries to send its usual rewarding jolt of pleasure through his body. A reward, for letting it learn from him without struggling.

As if Jungkook really had any choice.

He can’t fight the creature’s hold inside his head, even when the venom fades. Jungkook doesn’t want to consider the impossibility that it had fit something into his ear canal and played against the cranial nerve there and found a way to puppet him, he's sick just thinking about it, but—

He knows what he felt. What he still feels, every second that the monster steers him with ease. Overriding his own control as if it had a direct line to his brain because it does, because it’s in his head—

One more mental defense crumbles off the edge of sanity into hysteria.

<What do you mean you don’t know> Jungkook’s internal voice escalates, hiking up until he’s all but screeching inside his head. He claws at the place inside his skull where the creature has made home. <How long has it been, how fucking long has it been, HOW LONG?>

The creature flinches back physically, shoving Jungkook down into his own head. Disapproving clicks sound by Jungkook’s ear. He can feel it searching for words, then gift him a frustrated wordless understanding when it can’t find any language sufficient: that the creature doesn’t know how long it’s been or how much longer it will be or even seen the sun at all, because it has stayed down here with him, atop him, inside him, locked to him, preparing to breed him.

Jungkook regrets asking immediately. Knowing that answer is worse than ignorance. To think that he’s been locked to this creature for only god knows how long, or for how much longer, and that he can feel the monster’s own inhuman arousal when it thinks happily about its plan for him.

Jungkook tries to wrestle back enough control to scream. The monster lets him have it, but Jungkook pretends he’d won a fight for his voice, desperately needing to feel any semblance of control. Yet the howl he attempts is barely more than a desperate gurgle around the tentacle in his throat.

The creature’s fingerpads trace over Jungkook’s throat, pressing into his larynx, feeling the vibration of his voice with apparent fascination. Over his own terror and muffled through water, Jungkook can hear the monster trying to mimic sounds of its own. Pitifully strangled and too terribly similar in tone, his distress made a mockery of. Jungkook's hurt stings.

No, no, the creature pushes back on that thought. Jungkook can't believe it has the audacity to scold him. Somehow it still expects Jungkook to be reassured, when it consoles him: Host calm.

<Host is NOT calm, I’m not your host, I’m not your fucking HOST> Jungkook lashes out in panic, sudden and loud enough for the creature to flinch back from their connection again. Then all its coils tighten, this time a new tentacle looping around Jungkook’s neck, squeezing just enough of a threat that Jungkook falls silent with fear.

He remains so until it bites him again. Jungkook tries to stay quiet, even then, but arousal drips thick in his veins and spreads faster than fire to touch every nerve in his body. 

And this time the creature gives him back almost all of his body, cruelly stripping away any deniability or doubt; so that Jungkook knows it’s him arching into the creature’s touch, it’s him moaning around the thick mass in his throat and squirming within a writhing mass of tentacles like a bitch in heat. It’s his voice that begs for another bite, for breeding.

When the creature is satisfied enough with Jungkook’s despair and overstimulation it sends him back down, with pressure in his ear and its authoritative command to sleep.

◐

The next few times he wakes, Jungkook tries a different approach.

The creature is clearly sentient, and its thought process becomes clearer and more understandable to Jungkook the more it reads him, the more he tries to reach out to it. To interface, to connect. Learn. Understand. Communicate. Play nice.

It’s quite literally all he has.

Jungkook's body feels separate from him, detached in darkness until he’s bitten again and then once more burning with blissed arousal. He still can’t see, let alone be certain if his eyes have managed to close or are still open and unblinking in the dark like the monster had shown him.

The visual churns his stomach whenever the venom has worn off enough to let him feel disgust. Jungkook doesn’t get to go too long without it—each time he starts to come back to himself, enough venom cleared from his veins for a return of rationality, the creature bites him again. No matter what they had been struggling through a species barrier to speak about, no matter how much progress he’d thought they had made, no matter how frantically he begs. It always bites him again, and gives Jungkook back that giddy mindless rush, coupled with the same promise: Eggs ready soon.

Jungkook has deduced, from the creature's vague instinctual understanding, that it’s waiting for confirmation of fertilization. It thinks they’ve coupled. Jungkook has certainly provided it samples by force, but the method doesn’t make sense to him. He doesn’t know how the two of them could possibly be reproductively compatible, even if the creature’s upper half appears human. Jungkook has no idea what it could actually be—it never answers when he asks, nor reassures him of what eggs entails.

Insultingly, the creature feels more amused by Jungkook’s efforts than anything. When he's entertaining enough, it answers him—it ignores most of his questions, but sometimes it likes his struggling. Probably because Jungkook can’t muster up much of a real rebellion, tossed back and forth between sleep and the bite’s submission. 

Still, he can tell the creature likes his spirit, up to a point. That point seems to be a barrier of cross-species understanding that makes Jungkook’s head hurt to try and breach. Jungkook's head hurts if he tries to reach too far into its inhuman mind, and in turn, the creature has trouble understanding any thought of his that gets too complex.

Even Jungkook’s attempt to analyze the venom and its otherworldly arousal is too intricate for the creature’s liking. On the comedown of one bite, Jungkook had tried to drowsily puzzle what class of protein the toxin could possibly be. What pathways it hijacks in his body, the mechanisms of how it might clear from his system; before he could even begin to summon up what he remembers of his physiology and biochemistry studies, the creature had stirred in displeasure to bite him again.

Jungkook likes to imagine, vindictively, that any thought of his too complex gives the creature its own equivalent of a headache. Host calm, it scolds him every time, always followed by its promise: Eggs ready soon.

But the monster does like a little bit of rebellion from him, as long as Jungkook’s defiance is too dazed to think of anything too complicated. It seems to enjoy picking through his brain, examining words and memories and concepts with a voracious curiosity that leads Jungkook to suspect that it’s never encountered a human before.

The monster admires some struggle, and it respects that he never gives up challenging it, over and over: <What are you?>

The tentacle around Jungkook's cock twitches with the creature’s amusement. It squeezes at the base, a lazy upstroke of a reward. Jungkook has to fight the haze that threatens to settle over him from it, pleasure sparked low on his spine and thick as cotton in his head.

He never stops asking, and the creature never seems sure how to answer him. As if it doesn’t even know, itself. For the first time it answers, but it can only give Jungkook what it is not, contrasting itself with him: Not human, not host.

Jungkook doesn’t know how long he’s been down here. He doesn’t seem to get hungry, or cold. He doesn’t want to think about what the creature might be doing to his body to keep him alive, least of all because thinking too hard always earns him a trip sent right back down into the daze.

What Jungkook hates most of all is that his body reacts with arousal, now, whenever the creature calls him host, the word tainted after how many times it’s been crooned to him during climax.

The creature reads that thought inside his head, and likes it. It likes his submission even more than his struggling, covets Jungkook’s pleasure above all else. Even that reflection is too much awareness on his end for it, though—Jungkook can feel it considering another bite, can brush against the place where their minds meet and feel its memory of his terrifyingly soft flesh under its fangs. The creature trembles with pleasure imagining it, closing in on decision. 

Desperate to stay lucid for a little longer, even like this, Jungkook attempts to distract it. He ransacks his mind for anything as the creature presses closer to bite, blurting out desperately—

<Not Human is a shit name, I’m not calling you that>

The distraction works, though Jungkook can tell the creature is aware of his ulterior motive. He can’t truly keep any secret from it. He can only find vindication in the fact that it seems to be getting harder for the creature to keep anything from him, either, the longer Jungkook is linked to its mind.

Not that it seems to care about, or even have a concept of privacy. The creature is always wholly unbothered by any prying on Jungkook’s end, regarding his attempts to understand its inhuman mind with amusement.

Probably because every attempt Jungkook has made thus far to read its mind further than the surface has left him with a migraine.

This, however, is a novel enough topic that the creature allows Jungkook to distract it; it likes biting him, but it likes learning from him, too.

Name? it queries, and begins to search through his brain. Jungkook hates that he’s getting used to the intrusion. It feels a bit like being a browser window, all parts of his mind parting under the creature’s touch and open for picking through like a filing cabinet. He’s tried to resist the creature’s inquiries, once or twice, and quickly learned that it was easier not to fight.

Within him, the creature finds his understanding of a name, finds Jungkook’s own and a dozen other examples. Satisfaction with new knowledge radiates from it, and Jungkook has to pretend for his own sake that he hates how its delight feels. The truth is anything but. After the associations his assaulted brain has formed to stay sane, considering his usual state when the monster is pleased, its achievements feel like his own.

Name, it confirms understanding, pleased with itself for once again learning from him, for taking even more from him. Its conclusion is simple: No name. Not human.

Its attention drifts again. Back to his neck, weight shifting and fangs baring. Desperate, Jungkook pushes, <Then pick one. You don’t have to be human to have a name>

The creature hesitates.

After a moment, it begins to pick through his brain again. Jungkook would like to pretend that he grimaces, but the image of himself paralyzed and sightless still haunts him; even his facial muscles are kept beyond his control.

For the first time, the creature can’t seem to find an easy answer to whatever it’s looking for. Something almost like true frustration arises in it, different than its usual agitation when Jungkook fights too hard or shouts too loudly inside his head.

It searches, first within Jungkook, and then within itself for articulation. After a long minute, it manages: Why?

It doesn’t understand why he cares. It’s something Jungkook barely understands himself. The creature doesn’t understand why Jungkook wants to give it a name, because it’s a feeling, not information. Something to be interpreted, not merely retrieved. The creature has gotten quite good at the latter; it’s never attempted the former. 

Jungkook barely understands his own reasons for requesting it. The demand is distinctly, desperately human of him. The need to anthropomorphize the thing inside his head, assign a label to understand, have something to scream to keep his sanity intact.

<Humans name everything> is all Jungkook can offer, a mental shrug. <It helps us understand each other. It makes it easier to think about you>

The creature doesn’t seem impressed. That is all?

<Yes that’s fucking all> Jungkook snaps at it, anger flashing in him. <Play along. You owe me. I’ll scream if you don’t>

The creature twitches back from his threat, tentacles straining for a second with the contraction of muscle. Annoyed, it warns, Will bite again.

<I don’t give a fuck, you bite me every five seconds either way> Jungkook snarls back, scaling up his mental voice to as loud of a shout as he can manage. <And I’ll scream every time I wake back up until you either let me have this one thing and name yourself or get it over with and eat me, do you hear me, you obnoxious oviparous piece of—>

Name! Name, the creature acquiesces, recoiling from its end of their connection with a wince. Almost appeasing, Host pick name.

<You think I know what you should be called? I don’t even know what you are> Jungkook would scowl if he could, though privately he’s thrilled with the small victory. Maybe the creature can be reasoned with, to some extent. <It’s your name, so you pick>

The creature’s annoyance grows. It feels dizzy with the longest conversation they’ve had thus far, at least without sedating Jungkook again, twinging away from the amount of new words and ideas exchanged. Yet—something about the idea sticks.

The creature reaches back into him again, back into the place in Jungkook’s brain where it had found the concept of a name. It scans once more, flipping through hundreds of possibilities in seconds. Jungkook wishes he could grit his teeth against the invasion, head beginning to ache, and wonders if it’s a mercy after all that the creature usually keeps him sedated. He’s not sure the human mind is meant to understand something like their mental link, at least not unscathed.

Jimin, the creature selects, after how long he knows not. It feels proud.

Exhausted, delirious, paralyzed, not quite sure if this purgatory is real or if he’s finally snapped and sitting in a padded cell somewhere, Jungkook does the mental equivalent of wrinkling his nose in distaste. <No. Absolutely not. That’s my cousin’s name>

Mine now, the creature tells him primly. He can sense its intention above him, teeth baring once more. Host quiet now.

<Don’t you dare—>

The creature—Jimin, it reminds him inside his head, almost smug—bites him again. Jungkook’s moan muffles into the ooze choking him. His hips rock up again, a too-sensitive drag into the tentacle wrapped around and suctioning the head of his cock for however long he’s been down here.

That he has no way of knowing how long it’s been is almost enough to drive Jungkook mad, were he not already losing the last of his mind to the heat the venom surges between his legs. He can no longer discern where his arousal ends and the monster’s begins. 

<How long> Jungkook begs it again, knowing it’s useless. So very nearly Dallas, close to begging for anything other than this watery limbo when he pleads, <How long?>

Soon. Very soon. Host sleep, is all the creature croons to him. The thin tapered end of the tentacle swirling inside his cockhead pulses, and Jungkook’s hips stutter with another pitiful climax. The creature considers his trembling, and offers: Sleep, Jungkook.

He twitches mindlessly to hear it use his name, an unconscious jerk wracked by aftershocks. The tentacles keep working his body mercilessly, his mouth still stuffed. Jungkook might be terrified to imagine what more could possibly be coming, what the creature plans for him in its ominous promises, if he were able to feel anything at all other than the pleasure of the creature’s bite.

Jimin’s bite.

His mind goes dark once more.

◐

Jimin takes to its chosen name with pride. So much so that Jungkook isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to hear or say the name again if he escapes. Depressingly, that’s starting to feel like a pretty big if. The creature—Jimin, because it has started to do the mental equivalent of hovering over his shoulder if it feels Jungkook dwell too long without referring to it by its new name—ignores any questioning on that topic.

And yet Jimin refuses to give Jungkook any privacy in return. He’s pointedly thought that particular criticism in Jimin’s direction several times now, his own bitter joke, one the creature usually ignores. This time, though, he can feel Jimin surrender with something like a sigh, beginning to dig through his memories to finally find a definition of privacy.

Jimin flips through Jungkook’s brain like a magazine. When it finds what it’s looking for, it doesn’t seem to understand the human importance of preserving privacy, nor the insult of its violation. In fact, Jimin has the audacity to feel amused when Jungkook snaps, <You’re violating it right now>

Thinking too much, Jungkook, Jimin teases. It’s getting better at speech patterns, more human in the shape of its thoughts, the longer it makes itself a home inside Jungkook’s head. Need another bite?

<Fuck off> Jungkook thinks. It’s no use. They can both feel the arousal that swells in him at just the suggestion of it, overstimulated cock already picking back up. Drooling, he’s come to crave the bite.

Jungkook reassures himself that anyone would fall prey to the same fate—it’s addiction physiology, it’s an escape from an unbelievable reality, it’s any excuse he can tell himself to deny the dependence he can feel forming.

None of those excuses help ease the humiliation of his reaction when Jimin noses into Jungkook's neck, letting out the strange high pitched giggle that he’d heard in his dreams. Jimin all but laughs at the involuntary electric shock of desire that goes through Jungkook at just the thought of its venom.

He can only imagine the bruising that must be covering his shoulders and chest and neck by now, spattered like so much paint and dotted with teethmarks. It would be obvious to anyone who looked. If anyone were able to see him. 

If anyone will ever see him again.

The thought should terrify him. But the horrible truth is that Jungkook is starting to crave it, even in his right mind; an urge to bare his neck and beg, body trained by now to expect reward and anticipate ecstasy in exchange for teeth. It renders him dumb, docile, a collection of nerve impulses waiting to be played like an instrument.

Jimin’s version of a giggle rings high in its throat again, a sweet inhuman trill. It likes when Jungkook reflects on his helplessness. Eggs ready soon, it tells him fondly. Jimin still expects that promise to reassure him.

It absolutely should not reassure Jungkook.

But sometimes, he thinks it might, if there’s a chance that it will feel just as good as—

No. There’s no way it will feel anything even remotely like good. Jungkook slams the brakes on the thought.

Too late. His effort to bury the desire draws Jimin’s interest and attention, easily swatting aside Jungkook’s pitiful resistance and uncovering what it wants to see, ignoring Jungkook’s renewed protest of <Privacy!>

Jimin is delighted with the thoughts it finds, with Jungkook’s desire. Eggs very soon, it repeats, its croon now a hundred times more self-satisfied.

The promise doesn’t answer Jungkook’s question. Feeling pitiful, and more like an extension of the monster now than his own person, he asks almost childishly: <Will it hurt?>

Jimin doesn’t answer. But Jungkook can tell that it heard him. Fear claws up his throat.

<Jimin> Jungkook addresses it directly, for the first time with its chosen name. He can feel Jimin tremble with pleasure to hear it; not just inside his head, but a strange shudder shot through every tentacle wrapped around his body. <Please. Tell me. Will it hurt?>

…if not compatible, Jimin finally admits. Adding hastily, But Jungkook will be a good host. Strong and healthy. And bite will help.

It’s the most Jimin has spoken at once. And the most genuinely reassuring it has been yet.

It’s also distracting him. It knows what just the mention of its bite does to him, now. Jungkook can feel its satisfaction with his conditioned response, desire rising in him against his will. Jimin curls close to the crook of his neck, mouthing over his skin and drawing Jungkook back down into the depths of euphoria.

<But what if I’m not compatible> Jungkook manages to push back dazedly.

Jimin repeats itself, almost stubborn. Jungkook good host.

<Jimin> Jungkook warns again, but his thoughts derail at the drag of Jimin’s teeth over his pulse. Not even breaking the skin, not yet, but close enough that Jungkook’s body feels the scrape of fangs and tenses up all over, orgasm flooding him purely in anticipation of being bitten.

He’s distantly shocked by it, but Jungkook can’t summon the shame he knows he should feel. Not when he wants to be bitten again this badly.

Jungkook good host, Jimin repeats confidently, as if his climax has proven something.

Jungkook can’t clear his head enough to puzzle if it does. His heart races, and his head spins, eager to feel the venom promised by the teeth at his neck.

And if not, Jimin sighs an afterthought, almost morose. Still a good snack.

Jimin bites him mid-sentence, so that even the last few pitiful alarm bells Jungkook has left are swept away by the tide of arousal before he can feel terror. Jungkook blacks out even without a command to sleep, moaning around the tentacle choking him.

◐

The next time Jungkook wakes, Jimin’s presence in his mind feels different. Excited. Urgent. It seizes onto him the second he's conscious, shaking his shoulders with oddly human hands, trilling for him.

Jungkook, Jimin sings inside his head, suspiciously happy. Eggs ready now!

Jungkook’s eyes slam open. At least they would, if he had any control over his body. A few bubbles trail from his mouth with an attempt at a scream; Jimin shuts him down before the exhalation can burst out, nipping his vocalization in the bud and nipping at his neck to scold him. Jungkook ignores how dizzy the teeth near his neck make him, realizing too late how complacent he's gotten, as if Jimin hasn't been promising this all along.

<Don’t, please, don’t, don't try it, we’re not compatible, we’re not fucking compatible, it won’t work> Jungkook begs hysterically. He can’t wrestle back control of his limbs, no matter how hard he tries. He can’t think what he would possibly do with them even if he could. The grasp of Jimin’s tentacles have proven themselves much, much stronger than he is, dragging him down into the water with ease even before the monster so rudely inserted itself into his mind. A nearly incoherent flood of pleading: <Please, Jimin, let me go, it won’t work, it’s not gonna work, let me go—>

Jungkook good host, Jimin insists determinedly, and bites down.

Familiar pleasure rushes him. It’s almost enough to distract Jungkook from the unknown impossibility about to happen to him. Only terror keeps him treading enough water to beg for an answer.

And finally, Jimin gives him one. Its understanding of the process is placed directly into Jungkook’s brain, wordless but clear, a flood of images and sensations and ideas, everything Jimin plans to do. Jungkook untangles them, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

Two things happen at once. 

The first: Jungkook climaxes. Embarrassingly hard, almost unbearable levels of ecstasy burning through his body like fever.

The second: Jungkook panics. What Jimin shows him—how many there are—it can’t possibly all fit inside him. Especially not through his—

Jungkook, Jimin soothes. Relax. You need to relax.

For once, Jimin feels serious. But Jungkook can’t appreciate it. He can’t even appreciate Jimin’s grasp of possessive pronouns improving, something Jungkook has been trying to teach it for what feels like days at least. He can barely even think with the venom's arousal quickening his blood, and maybe he should let go into the haze and be better off blacking out, but—

<How the fuck am I supposed to relax> Jungkook sobs inside his head. <You’re going to kill me!>

No kill, Jimin promises. Which almost reassures Jungkook, until it adds: Not if you take them.

Them, meaning the eggs. The understanding Jimin had shown him flashes in Jungkook’s head like high beams again. He would hyperventilate if he could still control his lungs. As it stands, all Jungkook is allowed to do is moan helplessly.

The size of them—

Jimin bites him again. Jungkook’s body jerks involuntarily, but Jimin keeps his teeth locked in Jungkook’s skin, a doubled dosage of venom nearly shutting him down. What he called heat before now feels like comparing a candle to a wildfire.

Jungkook. You need to relax, Jimin tells him again, even more sternly. The bite will help. Trust me.

Jungkook is hysterical. <Why the hell would I trust you?>

Jimin feels perplexed. Why not?

Jungkook nearly sobs again. But—Jimin hasn’t lied to him, not once yet. Jimin had to learn the concept of lying from Jungkook’s brain in the first place. And—what other choice does he have, really?

At least, Jungkook reflects dimly, the venom feels good. And even better, when he stops fighting and gives in to its pleasure. Before he does, Jungkook offers one last desperate thought before coherency leaves him completely:

<If you kill me, even accidentally, I will haunt you forever, do you understand?>

No, Jimin clicks back in confusion. Jungkook can feel it scan rapidly through his brain for the concept of haunting, which leads Jimin to ghosts, and from there it finds links to ideas of afterlife and souls and gets so confused that it gives up to retreat, overwhelmed. Jimin doesn’t seem to care about learning right now, batting aside the metaphysical with impatience to refocus on its eggs.

They’re hurting it. Jungkook can feel a dull, distant ache inside Jimin, across whatever links their minds. And he can feel his own horror, to realize he’s actually feeling a throb of sympathy for the literal tentacle monster holding him hostage underwater.

With his last coherent thought, Jungkook reflects again: at least it feels good.

Jimin feels him surrender, and bites Jungkook again. And again, and again, flooding him with it. Jungkook’s body twitches with each envenomation, spasms of giddy pleasure that are all too easy to sink in and surrender to. It’s not as if he has any other option but to surrender, against the inescapable wall of arousal that slams into him like a freight train.

<Oh fuck> Jungkook manages coherently. It’s about the only thing he can manage. How much venom could Jimin possibly produce? Jungkook’s delirious mind tries to swim for an answer, various animal toxins flashing through his mind—he can’t think of any other venomous animal storing this much.

And then he can’t think much of anything at all.

Jimin bites him too many times to count, and Jungkook loses himself. He can hear himself moaning, long and low and choked out ragged around the tentacle in his mouth. He feels hot, nearly boiling, flush with what must be the tentacle monster equivalent of ten Viagra. His cock is painfully hard, and Jungkook could nearly cry with relief when Jimin’s tentacle squeezes tighter around it, working up and curling around the shaft with embarrassingly expert skill.

Embarrassing, because after however long locked together, Jimin knows exactly what Jungkook likes and just how he likes it. Jungkook had thought that two bites was the absolute peak of pleasure, and finds now that he was so, so wrong. Each slow steady squeeze-and-stroke around his cock shuts off his brain and sparks electricity under his skin.

It’s almost too much, even though the glide of the tentacle is as easy as ever. Simultaneously, it's almost not enough.

<Touch me> Jungkook is shocked to hear himself beg. Yet he can’t summon any shame for it, not when his skin is on fire and his only relief is wherever Jimin’s body presses against his skin, tentacles keeping him coiled and close and safe.

Alarm bells blare in his brain at the thought. Jungkook should not feel safe right now. He twitches with the traitorous thought, and then again when a pleasure blossoms through him, gifted by his captor. Jimin’s reward melts away what little of Jungkook’s mind was left to struggle.

<Please touch me> is all Jungkook can beg, over and over and over again. <Please, please, touch me, I need it, touch me—>

My name? Jimin demands, almost sweet in its fascination. Jungkook sobs wretchedly. He regrets every grammar lesson, regrets how much closer Jimin feels in his mind right now, because too late he realizes: the less Jimin sounds like a creature from the Black fucking Lagoon, the easier it is for Jungkook’s mind to view Jimin as human. To anthropomorphize it… and to empathize with it.

And be dangerously attracted to it.

<Jimin> he thinks, all but whimpering. Another burst of pleasure is Jungkook’s reward for obedience. He begins to plead even more frantically. <Please, Jimin, touch me, please, touch me—>

For once, Jimin obeys him. The creature presses to Jungkook’s front with sick satisfaction thrumming in its mind, coils tightening. It’s humiliating to beg, but Jungkook can’t seem to stop doing it, engulfed in a mindless heat that itches under his skin anywhere Jimin isn’t touching him. 

<It’s not enough> Jungkook slurs inside his head, addled. He can barely think. Absently, he realizes that Jimin has let him have back control of most of his upper body, just to let Jungkook squirm and writhe pathetically in the grips of its tentacles. Jungkook struggles against them with as much as he can muster, but they barely budge, making clear their strength. Jimin’s strength.

Helplessness in the face of such a monster is just one more thing that should horrify him. Should absolutely not arouse him.

And yet.

Jungkook twists in the grip of Jimin’s tentacles, unsure if he’s fighting against or bucking up into them. Maybe both. The impossibility of escape is almost liberating, allowing Jungkook to twist in the coils with all his strength until he tires and still end up cradled close.

Not enough? Jimin scoffs at Jungkook’s complaint. It picks through his brain for the word it’s looking for, finds it: Greedy, it scolds. Jungkook whimpers around the tentacle in his mouth.

It starts to thrust between his lips, Jimin reading Jungkook’s unconscious desire easily. Jungkook can feel his eyes roll back. The tentacle is slimy and slick in his mouth and heavy on his tongue, close enough to a blowjob to turn him on and bizarre enough to land him somewhere between horny and terrified. It pulses like a living thing of its own, undulations rippling down it with the squeeze of muscle. 

It feels downright alien. Jungkook thinks so, and distantly, something clicks into place in his brain. The whisper of revelation vanishes in an instant with a tentacle slipping between his legs.

<Oh fuck> Jungkook repeats. It’s the most intelligent thing he can manage, feeling the tapered end of a tentacle worm towards his ass and poke an inspection at his hole. Its flick at his rim is enough to wipe out the rest of his mind, if any of it still remained.

Jimin clicks a scolding sound at him. Tight, it complains.

Before Jungkook can react, two tentacles coil around each one of his ankles. Jungkook sobs with sick need as his legs are yanked up and apart, pushed back against his chest in a mating press. 

Better, Jimin tells him approvingly. Jungkook imagines those black eyes scanning over his body in the dark, and nearly comes again in anticipation alone.

<Fuck> Jungkook gasps inside his head again. He doesn’t have many words left, not with a tentacle trailing a circle around his rim, twisting teasingly over the entrance every so often. Under the venom’s pulse it creates such a desperate need in him that Jungkook struggles to remember why he didn’t want this. <Oh, fuck, Jimin, please—>

Good host, Jimin praises, approving. The tentacle presses in.

Jungkook comes immediately, release rocking him hard. The thin probe burrowed into the very tip of his cock milks it, dragging out aftershocks for nearly a minute. It’s how these eggs were fertilized, Jungkook knows—though he doesn't know much else, with the way Jimin has ignored every question about its anatomy—

It’s just as well, because in his current state of mind Jungkook isn’t even sure he could tell left from right, let alone muse over reproductive physiology.

The intrusion is unlike anything else he’s ever felt. The tentacle starting to work its way into his ass is every bit as smooth and viscous as the other tentacles currently restraining or fucking him. Its press is sickly satisfying as it splits him open and slips in, sensual pressure where its girth keeps him stretched open and practically impaled.

And it just keeps pushing deeper. Jungkook can feel it filling him, slowly, inch by inch, like nothing else he’s ever felt before. Its length squeezes into his ass, girth thickening the farther it gets, until Jungkook nearly blacks out from the pressure and pleasure. 

There’s a suspicious lack of pain, Jimin numbing him or the venom loosening him or both. Delirious, Jungkook tries to ask Jimin how much of the tentacle is already inside him, how much more Jimin will try to fit inside him—but he can’t make words work, and he isn’t sure he wants to hear the answer anyway. 

Jimin flips the switch to freeze all of Jungkook's body in place again, ostensibly to keep Jungkook from harming himself. He can feel the tentacle worked deep into his guts now, maybe even more of its length inside him than the one in his stomach, and tries to seize back just enough control to let himself sob. 

It’s more likely, though, that he’d moan instead. Especially when Jungkook feels a second tentacle tip prying at his rim, and then a third, seeking to squeeze right in alongside the monster gaping him.

<Wait, wait, what—what are you doing—>

Jimin searches for the word inside Jungkook’s head. It finds it quickly, because the word is already on the tip of Jungkook’s tongue, in the forefront of his mind and burning in his core: Stretching.

Jungkook wishes that the statement could make him feel anything other than mindless, complacent need. He tries to hate it. His mental voice is slow to come, losing more of himself to arousal with each breath. He thinks he loses consciousness for a moment when the second tentacle’s tip manages to slip into him, rim bulging around it.

<You’re breaking me> Jungkook pushes through the haze. He’s physically prevented from panic, only pleasure available to him.

No, Jimin tells him firmly, mind skipping a second as it tackles construction of its next sentence. When it speaks again, each word is each word is distinctly, directly plucked from Jungkook’s mind, articulated for him to understand with perfect clarity: I am breeding you.

With that, the second tentacle squeezes in fully alongside the first. Jungkook can’t believe how easily his muscles just give to it, easily accepting what must be an obscene stretch, hole sucking in what must be at least the girth of a fist or more. 

Definitely more, when the third tentacle manages to push into him. It squirms in like an eel to ease its passage, an incredible blinding pressure filling Jungkook and pushing him far past Cloud 9.

<It won’t fit> Jungkook mumbles inside his head, delayed. Too late. It already has. Somehow, it had.

It’s too much language for Jimin to bother with anymore, but when the monster senses his marvel, Jungkook is gifted with an impatient pulse of wordless ideas to untangle: that the venom relaxes him, that he won’t feel any pain because there won’t be any damage if he’s good, that Jungkook needs to be good and give in and let go or there will be.

Five minutes ago, the warning might have made him panic again. But Jungkook has already given in. 

Now, he lets go. 

If he were in control of his lungs, he might take a deep breath to steady himself. As it stands, Jimin has been pacing his breaths slow and evenly for him since the tentacle first stabbed into Jungkook’s ear. The steady respiratory rate is almost too slow for the exertion his body is undergoing, but Jungkook prefers the lightheadedness of hypoxia anyway. It makes his head and limbs go fuzzy enough to understand less.

He can’t control his own lungs. He can’t control his own body, he can’t control anything. He’s barely maintained a grasp on his own mind. That vulnerability has been haunting him, breaking him for—days, weeks?—Jungkook isn’t sure he wants to know how long it’s been, anymore. 

It’s so, so much easier to let go. And when he does, Jungkook finds that letting go is a lot like floating. He’s still inside his body, still buried deep and locked away, but instead of scrabbling at the walls of his mental prison, Jungkook forgets to fight and focuses on feeling instead.

And what he feels…

Maybe control is overrated, anyway. Jungkook can’t even control the desperate giggles and moans slipping involuntarily from him with each breath, muffled underwater. The sounds are twisted with what Jungkook is ashamed to admit are sobs of pleasure. 

Three tentacles are pistoning into his ass—at least Jungkook thinks it’s still three, he’d like to hope he would have noticed a fourth—and even without their blackout-inducing girth, the tentacles themselves are, unfortunately, so much better than anything any human has ever been born with or created. 

If Jungkook could still think, he might either feel spiteful or horrified enough to hate that Jimin is able to handle him so well. But then, it’s to be expected—Jimin is inside his head. Jungkook can feel it hovering mentally over him even now, taking stock of what Jungkook likes.

Currently, that includes just about everything. Even his brain feels fucked-out and blissed, the tentacle twitching in his ear, and Jungkook is just gone enough to imagine that it’s Jimin skullfucking him. 

As he thinks it, the tentacles in his ass swell and throb, one dragging against his prostate with each thrust. His mouth can’t move, but Jungkook screams inside his head with the force of his climax, rough and rippled and enough for him to nearly black out. Another orgasm and he just might. 

Dazedly, Jungkook wonders—is it possible to die from getting fucked too good?

He could think of worse ways to go.

Well, maybe not at the moment. Jungkook is having trouble thinking about anything other than how much he loves the twist of Jimin's tentacles around his body, holding them close in the depths like treasure.

That thought is embarrassingly all his. It’s fueled by the venom, sure, but every bit of its origin is all Jungkook, a hopeless romantic at heart and altered enough to think tentacles wrapped around and shoved inside him actually means something. Jungkook tries to quash the thought before Jimin catches it, as though efforts like that don't usually just draw Jimin’s attention more.

Mercifully, Jimin doesn’t seem interested in learning what romance is from Jungkook’s brain today. Instead the monster feels focused, fretting over Jungkook and its own role.

Right, Jungkook’s mind supplies dazedly. The tentacles are just step one. Jimin is going to put eggs inside him.  

He should probably be trying to scream. But Jungkook obeyed, he let go, and there’s no denying now what it’s done to him. Jimin has given him back just enough control over his mouth for Jungkook to know that it’s him lapping a desperate tongue along the slimy underside of the tentacle stuffing his mouth and moaning like a whore.

By now he’s used to the strange taste, but there’s a new thrill to it now, ten times more enthralling with ten times the venom in his system. Jungkook can tell that he would be drooling if he weren’t underwater, a stupid grin splitting his cheeks until they hurt. 

Even without sight, Jungkook can imagine what he looks like. Engulfed in a mass of tentacles like a low-budget hentai, their dark coils squeezed around him and pinning his limbs into place. His lips stretch lewdly around the tentacle thrusting into his mouth, his ass stuffed with the squirming tentacles fucking deeper than Jungkook is comfortable thinking about. 

Or maybe he’s more comfortable with it than he realized. Every thought Jungkook has is consumed by the venom, nightmare fuel forcibly converted into fetish, and suddenly the idea of Jimin’s tentacles violating him so completely and intimately is enough to have him right back on the razor edge of climax.

His expression is probably still slack and mindless. Jimin is too distracted now to lock down every muscle the way he usually does, and Jungkook can feel his gaze drift cross-eyed with pleasure. The tentacle that’s been wrapped around his cock for days or weeks keeps milking him to the point of tears. Somehow Jungkook is still hard anyway, cock weeping into cold water whatever the tentacle tip inside his slit misses.

It has to be the venom. Keeping him awake, and keeping him aroused. He tries to curse at it, but there’s no real bite to the thought. If anything, Jungkook actually feels a wave of shameless arousal and anticipation at the idea of Jimin’s bite, even after a dozen of them.

If he ever gets out of here, Jungkook is never going to be able to look at a cephalopod’s tentacles again without crying or getting hard or both.

Jungkook uses the last sanity left in him to mumble: <Oh, perfect> with a twinge of hysteria he can’t make himself truly feel. <You fucking Pavlov’d me>

The reference goes right over Jimin’s head. Jimin doesn’t bother searching his brain for it, either. Jungkook focus, Jimin scolds. Something in its mental voice is tense. It’s been patting around his abdomen fretfully, and Jungkook understands when it clicks: Eggs ready now.

Jungkook doesn’t answer. He can’t. He doesn’t have the words left.

All he can do is moan when the first egg presses in.

A solid round mass swells the thickest tentacle inside him. By now Jungkook must be stretched beyond belief, but he can still feel the girth of it, a tennis ball-sized bulge that begins to squeeze down what must be an ovipositor thrusting inside him. The egg feels firm against the wet give of the tentacle’s squishy surface, and slowly, inch by inch, it begins to push into him.

Jungkook doesn’t feel any pain, but he does feel the stretch. The egg gets wider as its thickest part starts to pass into him, almost too slow for how bad he needs it. Blood roars in Jungkook’s ears, a fire ignited under his skin. It’s like the venom in his veins is responding to its purpose, dialing up the heat and hijacking his instincts. Every inch of his skin feels hot. He struggles against Jimin’s grip on his brain mindlessly, desperate to fuck his hips down onto the tentacles without concern or care.

Suddenly, Jungkook understands why whatever Jimin’s species is might have evolved the ability to control and pin its prey telepathically; the tentacles are thick and deeper than he knows, and with this much pleasure there’s no way Jungkook could stop his hips from jerking around the massive intrusions and potentially injuring himself.

He can’t even stop himself from begging. <please please please jimin please jimin please please> floods from Jungkook’s mind in a rush of need. It's incoherent. He barely feels human in the first place, burning up with the desire to be filled and fucked like it's all he's meant for.

Jimin gifts him a wordless reassurance, too intently focused on its own task to do much more. In his current state, Jungkook’s brain is warped enough to cling to the kindness like it’s the sweetest he’s ever known, and that’s the state he’s in when the first egg finally pushes inside him.

The widest part of the egg finally slips past the ring of muscle, rim swallowing its shape in and sucking it up inside. The thick tentacle undulates, and Jungkook can feel the egg shoot down its length and burst free of the flared tip and sink deep inside him.

It drops into him like a weight, deeper than any toy has ever been. Like a stone settled, a new heaviness. Jungkook might moan if he could, more likely scream, another orgasm shuddering through him. He’s coming dry by now, cock spent and yet tortured back to half-mast, body under assault from tentacles inside and out.

In a blink, Jungkook's mind goes dark. Gone, and grateful for it. He can’t do anything more than take it and feel it, with barely any time to process between each egg. The second pushes at his rim just a few seconds after the first. 

In his head, Jimin understands the arousal that Jungkook is too stunned to groan out. The monster flattens its human half over Jungkook’s torso, clicking incomprehensibly but clearly just as affected as he is. Jimin bites him again, this time more for mutual relief than for more venom. It keeps its teeth pinned in his neck, something to lock onto and brace its thrusting against while it fills him.

While it breeds him.

The thought can’t scare him, not anymore. Jungkook has never felt so good in his life. He's fucked-out and full, eggs accepted faster and faster as his body gets used to the ovipositor’s bunching and bulging against and into his ass. He must be laughably loose at this point, and by the fifth intrusion the eggs no longer meet any resistance. They start all but popping into him, one after another in rapid succession.

He loses count quickly, too turned on to do anything but go blank and dumb and drooly. Jungkook almost wishes he’d kept track of the number. He can only imagine how many he’s taken now, when he can feel each one shoving further into him, body giving way with terrifying elasticity. 

Jungkook nearly blacks out with each stretch. The clutch shifts within him with each new arrival, so full his walls spasm around them. Nearly every other second, one of the eggs shoves up firmly into his prostate. The grind of them in his guts is almost too much to bear. 

He’s back to begging like he had at the beginning of his captivity. This time, though, the only freedom Jungkook begs for is the bliss of Jimin’s hold. Tentacles fucking both his holes and fisting his cock, Jungkook tries to summon words to ask how many and somehow ends up repeating a slurred: <It’s not enough>

Still too focused to talk, Jimin gifts him something like a flicker of amusement. To Jungkook’s overstimulated mind, it’s as good as praise. The eggs just keep coming, swelling at their widest and popping into him. Pressure without pain, pleasure blinding. 

For the first time since he last saw the sun, Jungkook sees something—stars, behind his eyelids.

And then nothing at all.

Jungkook has no way of knowing how long he’s out. Seconds, minutes, hours—all he knows is that he snaps back to consciousness, and gets shoved right back down into the glitter. 

Before he does, he realizes that Jimin is still fucking him. Jungkook is still taking the eggs, still burning up with bliss, his body heated and limp and loose. Dangling in the dark like an incubator. The feeling of fullness within him is overwhelming.

He tries to summon up horror, but it refuses to come to his call. Everything feels disjointed, too good to be real. How long, Jungkook tries to ask again, and decides he doesn’t want to hear the answer. He floats away again.

The next time he wakes is just as surreal. Jungkook wonders, distant and disoriented, if it’s Jimin that keeps suppressing his consciousness, or his own mind shutting down to escape. He doesn’t like either possibility very much, but he can’t get a good enough grasp on his intellect to weigh them against each other anyway.

<How many> Jungkook remembers to ask.

Jimin sidesteps the question gracefully. Almost done, Jungkook.

It sounds proud of him, which is not something that should be stirring butterflies in Jungkook’s stomach. He shouldn’t even have the fucking room left over down there.

His body still pulses with the delirious arousal of the venom. Either Jungkook hasn’t been out as long as he thinks, or Jimin bit another dose into him while he slept. Once again, Jungkook doesn’t like either option. He decides he’s better off not knowing.

He really should have internalized the futility of it by now, but Jungkook has spent two and a half decades in control of his body; it’ll take longer than however long he’s been down here to break that habit. So he tries to reach out, addled mind bewildered when his arms don’t respond to his command.

Almost done, Jimin repeats. Definitely proud. Like it’s a kindness, one oddly human hand wraps clumsily around Jungkook’s wrist, tentacles loosening around his arms just enough to allow Jimin to pick up Jungkook’s paralyzed hand and place it on his stomach.

Jungkook can feel the touch, but he doesn’t recognize the flesh beneath his fingertips. The venom muddies his mind, making it impossible to truly panic, but enough shock jolts through him that Jimin winces back from their connection.

Jungkook doesn’t notice Jimin’s annoyance, a distant horror finally rising within him. His hand rests atop a swollen stomach that can’t possibly belong to him, taut firm skin stretched over a distended bulge.

A scream builds and dies in his throat. Jungkook can only lay there, unable to move or resist, only able to succumb to the split of his psyche ripping in two. Because it still feels good, somehow, the thrusting tentacles barraging him, wave after wave of electric pleasure with each piston into his ass and mouth.

Maybe it’s just been long enough since the last bite, that reality is finally allowed to flood his senses. Jungkook feels dizzy, disoriented, trapped inside a mind still half-clouded with lust. His eyes roll back in ecstasy, even as shame and disgust try to gnaw at him.

But reality can’t escape being overwritten. Any negative feeling is overridden in seconds by the indescribable pleasure of tentacles squirming into his holes like living things, greedily licking at the clutch inside him with each shove deeper. He can feel every inch of each slimy textured shaft rubbing against his insides, each bulge of his belly with another egg. He’s fucked relentlessly from both ends, probed as though he were nothing more than a pouch for storage.

<Too much> Jungkook tries to articulate. A few bubbles huff from the mat over his face with a mindless gurgle.

Not enough, Jimin counters. At least it’s kind enough to move Jungkook’s hand off the swell of his belly, to quell his distant distress. Jungkook said not enough.

Did he? Jungkook doesn’t remember. And surely that was at least two dozen eggs ago.

<Please> Jungkook says weakly. <I can’t take any more>

Jungkook can, Jimin tells him sternly. Jungkook sobs. Jungkook will. Jungkook will take them all.

The tentacles in his ass fill him like demanding, elongated fingers, curling and twisting inside both orifices, slicking up every nerve ending and impossible to resist. Somehow they push deeper still, an intimate invasion stretching Jungkook wider and filling him with more pleasure than he ever felt possible. The eggs move and shift against each other with each thrust deep inside him, ecstasy bursting behind his eyes and low on his spine.

That it feels so good is maybe the worst part. There’s a sick thrill to being filled to the brim. Jungkook is aroused beyond reason, helpless to resist the physical and psychological pleasure of the grotesque dance.

Another egg scrapes his prostate. Jungkook tenses with another orgasm ripped from him. This time, Jimin lets him scream around the tentacle in his mouth.

Jungkook blanks the last few eggs’ entrance. He only knows it’s over when Jimin’s tentacles try to retreat from his ass, and Jungkook finds he is still able to feel panic after all, only it's reserved for the idea of being left empty. Enough distressed noises burst low from Jungkook's throat that Jimin pauses. After a moment, it slides the tentacles back home with something smug clicked beside Jungkook’s ear.

Jungkook doesn’t care. He can’t. Let Jimin gloat. All that matters is being kept full. He can only imagine the gape that must be between his legs, muscles spasming around tentacles burrowed inside him.

Done, Jimin sings to him sweetly. It’s a croon in his mind, almost mocking in its sympathy but not quite, not truly unkind. Full, Jungkook?

Jungkook barely has the presence of mind to offer a mental groan. Jimin’s amusement grows. There’s a drowsiness laced within it, though, one that makes sense when Jungkook considers—he's exhausted, and he’d only had to take it. Jimin is the one who had to puppet him and give it all, both tentacles and eggs, for however long they’ve been locked together.

Jimin’s body shifts atop him. Jungkook whimpers at how the motion presses on his belly, gently rolling the clutch nestled inside him. Jimin’s strangely human face tucks close to Jungkook’s neck, and with the last of the venom and that kind of proximity, Jungkook is a goner.

Something small and needy and sad curls in his chest, a lifelong ache that Jungkook is too ashamed to name. He tries to hide the humiliating desire before Jimin sees it, but of course his effort only draws Jimin’s attention to it more.

Jimin reads his yearning for praise easily. It’s not too hard to understand, at least not to Jimin, who interprets it as Jungkook's reward for taking it: Good host.

Okay, so Jungkook was hoping for something more along the lines of Good job, but maybe he’ll take it. In fact, the more Jungkook thinks about it—that's more than enough for him, actually. Jimin indulging his desire so kindly makes Jungkook's chest stir with the beginnings of fondness.

Wait, what? That thought scares him. It had cropped up so neatly, from seemingly nowhere. Jungkook is suspicious of being unable to identify its origin. Fuck, what did this just do to him?

What is Jimin inside his head doing to him?

Static blanks Jungkook’s brain. He can barely stay awake, Jimin’s end of the connection dropping off too. Jungkook didn’t even know for certain if Jimin needed sleep. Jungkook is usually the one that gets shoved down in his mind and sentenced to slumber first.

He wishes he had been sedated tonight, too, because on the edge of unconsciousness, enough of the afterglow fades for Jungkook realize with a jolt—

<Wait, Jimin> he rattles their connection frantically. The monster flinches away from him, startled from sleep. <Wait, the eggs, what happens to the eggs, how do they come out, what happens to the eggs, what happens to me—?>

Jimin isn’t listening. Jungkook can tell. They’ve been linked together long enough for Jungkook to read Jimin’s drowsy content, twisting into annoyance the longer Jungkook’s distraught inquiry wails inside of their head.

Jungkook quiet, Jimin shushes him. And with the same ungracious bedside manner, it gives Jungkook its usual shove down into his own head. Jungkook, sleep.

Jungkook sleeps.

He doesn’t have a choice.

◐

Jimin has little tolerance for conversation after breeding him. That’s all Jungkook can name it, the word Jimin had plucked from his own mind, and he feels ill the few times he’s able to think.

Which isn’t often. Jimin doesn’t seem as willing to entertain his fight anymore. Jungkook might even be hurt by the dismissal—despite the fact that his warped mind really shouldn’t feel hurt by the monster’s dismissal at all—if Jungkook weren’t able to tell that the problem isn’t him, per se.

Instead it's that every time Jungkook is more than a little lucid, paranoia rises in Jimin, distress centered on Jungkook’s stomach. It’s worried about the eggs, fretting over them so much that every time Jungkook starts to come back to himself he gets another bite before he gets a chance to think.

Annoyingly enough, Jungkook understands Jimin’s worry. At least on an instinctual level, if not shared. He’s a biologist, and he's human—plenty of animals, Homo sapiens included, evolved to safeguard the reproductive investment that is their offspring. But it’s still fucking disrespectful, the way Jungkook can’t even get a word out before Jimin sinks fangs back into his neck with its paranoid reassurance of host calm and host sleep, repeated until enough sedation pulses through Jungkook to pull him back down into the mindless desire of the venom.

At least they’re no longer locked together, not all the time anyway. Jimin does insist on checking on the eggs, and more often than not this inspection involves a tentacle exploring inside Jungkook’s ass with an expertise bordering on sinful. Two sleeps ago Jimin had pressed the tip of it into his prostate, a kind of reward, twirling with the intensity and precision of a massager. Jungkook had come until he came dry.

He has no way of knowing how long he spends like that, cycled between overwhelming pleasure and empty bliss.

If he even could be called empty. A few bubbles escape from the gooey mat over Jungkook's face with his attempt at a sob or laugh, but Jungkook freezes when Jimin stirs slightly at it, the creature asleep atop him.

Distantly, across their link, he can feel the vague shape of what might be dreams. He doesn’t dare reach into them, not wanting to waste these rare fleeting moments of cognition. Jungkook has learned the hard way that any attempt to seize back control or think too loudly will wake Jimin sooner rather than later.

In the time he has, Jungkook tries to wrack his mind for all the animals sharing similar traits and morphology to Jimin. He wishes now he’d picked invertebrates over Mammology for his zoology breadth courses—or Herpetology, or—he’s not sure what Jimin is, actually, or if Jimin belongs to any known taxonomic classification at all.

And in the time he has, Jungkook reaches two conclusions.

The first: Jimin is big. Jungkook doesn’t know how big, but he remembers seeing quite a few tentacles stretched quite a ways out before he’d been taken. Jimin is at least as large as any human, and much larger with the tentacles included. Even without being certain of size, Jimin is clearly not a small animal. And sure, the local area is on the remote side, its winding mountain road not the easiest drive to make, but the cabin is only fifty kilometers from town, not five hundred. The town itself is only a four hour drive from the nearest major city.

Undiscovered animals in this day and age have to either live in remote inaccessible areas, or be physically small and thus difficult to find, or both. There’s no undiscovered megafauna outside a sub-metropolitan area, and certainly not one that’s predatory to humans.

Thus comes his second conclusion: the fact that something this large and this dangerous and this close to people isn’t known to local indigenous myth or documented by modern science means that no human who has ever seen Jimin has lived to tell the tale.

Fear starts creeping back up his spine. Jungkook thinks, dizzily, that he really is Dallas now. Not quite begging for death yet, but his mind can only conjure up horrors when he imagines what might happen at the end of this incubation period. Far too many invertebrates cannibalize their partners post-coitus for Jungkook to feel comfortable.

Jimin doesn’t look like an insect or chelicerate, nevermind whatever it's got going on downstairs, and its upper torso certainly appears to have a spine considering its pseudo-sapien appearance. But maybe Jimin doesn’t need to kill Jungkook to take him as its meal. Maybe the eggs will do that.

If that’s the case, Jungkook can only hope that it’s fast, or that he’s numbed through it, that Jimin gives him the bite he’ll beg for and shuts off his mind entirely. 

It’s thinking of the Alien chestburster with the beginnings of a sob that Jungkook’s brain is finally clear enough to make the connection. Alien. Aliens. Space. Meteorites. The meteorite shower. The scientist that went missing—

It’s all too much, too quick. Jungkook’s shock at the realization stirs Jimin, its half of the connection pulsing with displeasure at the sour feel of Jungkook’s fear.

<You’re an alien> Jungkook realizes numbly. He shoves the understanding across the bond in a dull panic, as if his astonishment could possibly mean anything to Jimin. Jimin won’t understand any of the revelation without finding it in his brain first, but Jungkook is too astounded to slow down. <oh my god, Jimin, you’re an alien, THAT’S what you are, you’re a fucking alien, you—you’re a hybrid, aren’t you? Your face looks human because something crashed in the water with those meteorites and found a human to breed with—holy shit, the scientist who drowned—what’s happening to me happened to her, and they made you—Jimin, you’re an alien—holy shit, aliens are real—>

With each frantic connection, Jungkook’s thoughts jumble more, excitement overflowing to spill across the link in a flood of information. He’s too excited, even, to realize what it means for him that that 'drowned' scientist clearly never escaped to share the story.

Jungkook starts wondrously marveling at the possibilities of genetics, what potential mechanisms of recombination could have occurred, what Jimin is. What its genome might look like on the molecular level, how similar or how different, what the implications are. Where, if at all, on the known tree of life Jimin's species stands taxonomically. If they’re reproductively compatible after all.

It’s too much all at once. Jungkook's enthusiasm and the increasingly more complex topics crowd out a cringing Jimin, now properly awake and annoyed, something like a headache twinging across the bond.

Oh, god, when had Jungkook started to think of it as a bond?

Jungkook calm, Jimin huffs irritably. Jungkook quiet.

He knows better, but Jungkook still tries to fight every time. <No, wait, please, Jimin, wait, please, this is important—>

Jungkook gets two bites this time. His body jerks with the double dosage, eggs shifting pleasurably inside him with Jimin’s weight. Jungkook falls back down into nothingness with a giggle.

◐

The next time Jungkook wakes up, he starts begging immediately.

<Please wait> he pushes across the bond. <Please, Jimin, I need to talk to you>

His plea is desperate enough that Jimin pauses, hovering, but Jungkook can tell that the monster—the alien—is wary, hyper-vigilantly monitoring anything that might disturb its eggs. After a moment of deliberation, it acquiesces.

Be calm, Jimin warns him sternly.

It's a tall ask, but Jungkook tries to be.

<What’s going to happen to me?> he asks, thoughts straying to the weight inside him that Jimin fusses over so intently. <When the eggs… come out. Am I going to hurt? …Am I going to die?>

Distress swirls in Jungkook at the thought. He can’t help it. Jimin twitches suspiciously at it, and Jungkook forces himself to shove the negative feelings down, begging again.

<Please, I need to know>

Jimin doesn’t answer him. It’s paying more attention to the eggs than Jungkook now, poking the bulge of his stomach and clicking something fretful.

<Jimin. Please—>

Shouldn’t hurt, Jimin mutters in his head. Shouldn’t kill.

Jungkook tries to force himself to be calm. It’s a nearly impossible task. 

<…shouldn’t?>

Should be compatible, Jimin amends. Jungkook much better host than others.

In an instant, staying calm goes from an improbable task to outright Herculean. <Others?!>

Jimin’s hand presses to Jungkook’s stomach, almost reassuring. Its words are anything but: Jungkook is compatible.

There’s enough comfort in the croon that Jungkook wants to believe it. And there’s enough stubborn care drifting across the link, that Jungkook wants to believe even a little bit of it is reserved for his own safety too, not just that of the eggs.

Melded together too long, Jimin’s thoughts bleed over into Jungkook’s. At least, that’s the only acceptable explanation Jungkook has for why he feels a fond sort of curiosity whenever he thinks about the clutch gestating inside him. 

He doesn’t dare explore the possibility that the fond interest could be his own.

But, Jungkook reflects uncomfortably, an adaptation that converts an unwilling host to care about and thus protect its forced brood would be one hell of an evolutionary advantage. It would almost certainly persist in a population's genetics for its benefit to the offspring's survival.

<Jimin> Jungkook ventures. He doesn’t know why he asks. <I want to see>

He expects Jimin to deny him. What use would his sight be to the creature? 

He absolutely does not expect enthusiasm.

Excitement pulses across the bond, enough that Jungkook grins by proxy even in ragdoll mode, limp and mostly-paralyzed and cradled close in dark coils. Eager, proud, Jimin reaches into him, the ease of its control disconcerting. Whatever telepathy Jimin uses, humans have evolved no defense against it. Something like a switch flips inside Jungkook's head.

And for the first time since being dragged below the surface, Jungkook can see.

They're in some sort of underwater cave. He can tell, despite the depth they must be at judging by the pitch darkness at the entrance, because a smattering of bioluminescent algae shimmers green across the rocky cavern walls. Jungkook nearly scoffs; he knew he’d seen a glow in the water his first night here.

The faint light illuminates Jimin, too, every bit as monstrous as Jungkook had remembered. Shark-like black eyes, large in an unnaturally beautiful face, all sharp angles until hips etch down into the impossible inky swirl of dark tentacles.

Although. With startled shame, Jungkook finds that after the enforced intimacy of everything Jimin has done to him, he can only find the alien bizarrely attractive. Jimin reads the thought and smiles down at him, a stretch of sinfully thick lips that show sharp teeth. Its black eyes crinkle sweetly with the expression.

Without thinking, Jungkook smiles back.

It reminds him of the tentacle in his mouth in the worst way possible, a little bit of salt that feels just wrong enough to be right. And why is Jungkook smiling back at Jimin, anyway? He can no longer rule out that something has been done to his mind.

Yet Jungkook finds he can still feel fear when he sees the skull sitting beside him. 

It’s clearly human, orbital sockets yawned open into macabre maws where eyes once sat. It’s human, and it’s not alone; there’s bones littering the cave floor as far as Jungkook can see now that he can see, milky bones picked clean of meat and flickering under the dim green glow. Skulls staring into the dark, ribcages carving through algal mats.

Not all of the bones look human, but there’s more than enough that do for Jungkook to panic. Let me see, he’d begged, and he regrets it now, almost as much as he regrets ever stepping into this water in the first place. That decision feels like a lifetime ago, even further away now than the memory of the sun. 

Worse even than the graveyard around them is the bulge of Jungkook’s lower abdomen, the sight of thick dark tentacles wrapped impossibly around his body. Jungkook’s mind whites out in terror. He tries to scream, and can actually see the bubbles that choke out of the viscous mat grown into his mouth and lungs. 

They swirl away with Jimin’s displeased surge forward, his clicks frenetic and face disapproving. Jungkook barely notices. Mind lost to panic, he’s somehow seized back enough control to thrash in panic, though he’s wrapped up so helplessly by tentacles that the motion barely translates to some futile twisting. Like a worm stuck on a hook, or prey squeezed in a python’s coils—

Host calm, Jimin urges. It’s almost a plea this time, though not without preternatural command: Jungkook calm.

Not of his own volition, Jungkook's muscles go limp once more. He's cradled even closer. Jimin rifles impatiently through Jungkook’s head to find his concept of comfort, and then oddly human hands cup Jungkook’s cheeks. Jimin’s forehead presses to his. Jungkook wishes he had used the fleeting moment of control to close his own eyes and avoid Jimin’s dark gaze now.

Jungkook calm, Jimin repeats. This time it sounds a little stung, as if the monster had actually expected Jungkook to see a watery tomb and an egg-bound belly and feel the joys of fatherhood. Please. Calm. Important.

<For compatibility?> Jungkook means it as mockery, but what translates across the bond is more of a sob. 

He can tell Jimin doesn’t understand his distress. Yes, important for brood. After a moment’s consideration, it pats his cheeks reassuringly, a clumsy, almost human motion. Important for Jungkook too.

Despair and rage boil up inside Jungkook so suddenly that he spits: <I HATE you>

Jimin doesn’t know the word. It promptly scans inside Jungkook’s mind for hate and doesn’t understand what it sees, recoiling from its findings. For the first time, it feels disturbed.

Why? Jimin asks him, baffled. Jungkook can tell that Jimin isn’t asking why Jungkook hates it; rather, it doesn’t understand the concept of hate itself.

As exhausted, scared, disgusted, and a little bit traitorously aroused as Jungkook always feels now, he can’t help a fleeting moment of wonder. 

Jungkook has been viewing Jimin as more monster than man, more predator than partner—all well within his right. Yet here is a creature clearly sentient, enough to learn his language and his mind and even how to offer him comfort, and the concept of hate is as foreign to it as flying.

That Jimin is acting on pure instinct rather than any real malevolent desire to hurt him doesn’t exactly make Jungkook feel better about his potential fate. But it does, somehow, help him calm as asked. It’s more acceptance, really, prey stilling inside a trap, but it feels better than fighting.

With the departure of panic, all that remains is exhaustion. As well as Jimin’s presence in his head, lurking forever and always, still discomfited by the concept of hatred. Even tired, even scared, Jungkook summons up enough of himself to wryly manage: <Now I know you’ve never met any other humans>

He starts to fade, even without the last lingering tendrils of venom. Maybe Jimin granting his request to see, comforting Jungkook rather than simply biting him to send him back down into bliss, means something good for him. Maybe it means the monster cares. 

Or it could mean something worse, that maybe Jungkook has really, truly, finally lost it. Alien’s Captain Dallas begs Ripley for death; all Jungkook can find himself wishing for is sleep.

Minutes later, Jungkook barely understands Jimin’s thought-speak filtering down to him through the gloom. Its speech is the most complex yet, carefully pulling strings inside Jungkook’s head and taking its time to find words, making extra effort to be clearly understood.

There have been others, Jimin admits, black lidless eyes staring endlessly into his. Human hands still cup Jungkook’s face, as if a shark’s gaze could possibly assuage the fears of its food. They were not compatible. I could not link with them. But I can link with you. So, Jungkook is compatible.

Jimin feels—not quite hopeful, but determined. Even the strangely silky tentacles seem to curl around Jungkook with more of a stroke to his skin than usual, as if Jungkook could possibly find the squeeze comforting. 

He refuses to admit that a part of him does.

This revelation from the monster’s mouth means something, Jungkook knows it must, but he’s drifting back down into the dark before he has a chance to understand.

◐

Trapped in the dark, Jungkook continues to lose time. He prays he isn’t losing his self as well. Sometimes he’s disquieted by his own grim acceptance, but he’s long since learned that he literally cannot resist. 

And he’s beginning to wonder, with increasing frequency, if something irrevocable has changed inside him. When he wakes there’s nearly always a soft strange silence in his head, a low buzz of lulled contentment, thoughts turning to Jimin and its bite more often than not.

Sometimes he wakes to find himself getting fucked again, and loses himself immediately; warped into a creature of need, fixated only on how good it feels to be cradled close and filled and and fucked. Once, Jungkook wakes to find Jimin picking through his mind for what feels suspiciously like an olive branch or white flag or both, and what the monster finds has it sliding down his body to mouth pretty pouty lips up the length of Jungkook’s cock like a truce. 

The tentacles withdraw just for Jimin’s mouth to sink down around his dick instead, and when Jungkook looks at Jimin’s black eyes and sharp teeth and feels its flat amphibious tongue toy with him he tries to scream but can only manage a moan.

◐

<How are we speaking> Jungkook tries once, towards the end. Ever the scientist. <Like this?>

Jimin shifts and clicks consideringly. It raises itself to hover above him, floating hair a halo around a too-human and yet not-human-enough face, far prettier than it has any right to be. It makes sure Jungkook is looking at it, bathed in the faint green bioluminescent glow. 

I put this, it says, and one tentacle raises to point at Jimin’s head. It lowers with its next words, Jungkook flinching at the slimy tap to his temple. Inside here.

<You called it a link> Jungkook remembers, eyes allowed to drift shut. Jimin lets him have that, now.<Is it permanent? Forever?>

Inside his head, Jimin feels confused. It rattles around for clarity, then retreats, as always deeply unimpressed by the human concept of time.

Jungkook doesn’t let it get away. <How long?> he presses again, the old familiar plea. For the first time, Jimin entertains him.

How long, it muses. Don’t know. The others…

The others. Surrounded by skeletons, Jungkook has to force himself to stay calm to avoid another bite. Jimin scrutinizes the momentary fear warily, but lets it go when Jungkook’s heart rate smooths back out.

Others could not link. Could not understand, Jimin explains. One of its hands cups the swell of Jungkook’s stomach. Jungkook can’t bear to look down, but he can feel it. Eggs did not take.

The honesty only makes Jungkook feel worse. <Like… not at all? They died, or—or did you—did you kill them?>

Jungkook, please calm.

<Did you kill them?> This time, Jungkook can’t help himself. The flood of panic is unstoppable, unrelenting. It darkens the swirling edges of already dim vision, a frantic haze descending over him. <Will you kill me? Will they kill me?>

Jimin presses flush to him, keening at his distress, a spider fussing over an unruly fly in its web. Its promise, Not on purpose, does nothing to ease Jungkook’s rising terror. Jungkook, please, calm.

Jimin’s frown is prominent, and terrifyingly human. Its expressions are becoming more sapient each time he wakes. That correlates, Jungkook knows, to how long the creature—the alien, he realizes all over again, this alien half-bred and hybridized—has been inside his head.

<Please don’t, please don’t let it kill me> Jungkook begs, seizing at the place in his mind where Jimin rests and clawing at it, like nails splitting on a barred gate. Jimin flinches back, as distressed as it is disappointed. It bares its teeth and drifts toward its neck. Jungkook’s struggle increases, <No, no, wait, Jimin, please—>

Jungkook calm, is the last thing Jungkook hears sighed to him, teeth sunk sharp into his neck. Let me help.

By now Jungkook’s veins welcome the venom, addict licking eager for the next drops. He’s dizzy and flushed with heat and panting through giggles in seconds, sunk back into the abyss.

◐

Jimin keeps him drugged again, after that. 

For his own good, ostensibly, but Jungkook can’t think much of its motivations. He can’t think at all.

There’s no way to tell the passage of time in the depths, locked together into a dance in the dark. 

◐

An indeterminable amount of time later, the music ends. Jungkook shocks awake with an indescribable pressure building inside him.

He panics, the last bite long enough ago now that he’s able to. Jungkook tries to thrash and scream and sob, eyes blown wide in the dark. Jimin is alerted in an instant, stirring from its slumber to realize in an instant what’s happening. Its mind overrides Jungkook’s fear with unbridled excitement and glee, both hands and every tentacle fretting over Jungkook and squeezing him even tighter into his watery bed.

<please oh god please no please please no no no> Jungkook shoves across the link at Jimin, horror stripping back all rationale and every bare-minimum reassurance to the blind terror of being prey once more. He can’t think, he can’t see, he can’t breathe—

Jimin’s hands clutch his cheeks, its mouth nuzzling all over Jungkook’s face in what he can tell are meant to be kisses. All of its expressions and comforts are like this, nuances of human touch lost in translation. The idea of a kiss, half-scraped from Jungkook’s brain, is methodical and precise and strangely sensual. Jimin’s lips are remarkably human, and deliciously thick at that, almost attractive when Jungkook lets himself forget the fangs behind them.

<I don’t want your fucking help> Jungkook shrieks at Jimin inside his head, tearing at the place in his brain that connects them as if he could possibly uproot the monster after all this time. <I don’t want help, oh god, I want to die—>

Jimin snarls at that, a higher-pitched hiss and gnashed teeth. Its nails dig into Jungkook’s cheeks. NO. Calm. It helps. I will help, it promises, tentacles probing at and inside him with terrifyingly intimate insistence. All that stills Jungkook is the undercurrent of anxiety he can feel beneath Jimin’s words, so uncharacteristic of a predator when it bargains: Please. I need you to help.

Jungkook can’t believe he actually feels himself wavering. On principle alone, he offers one last defiant whisper: <I’m not your fucking incubator>

I do not know what that is, Jimin snaps in his head, twinging in anxious pain the longer it has to focus on communication and offer less attention for the clutch as a result. Stop hurting our link and stop hurting yourself and stop hurting brood.

Tears sting at Jungkook’s eyes, fleeting warmth in the water. He hasn’t been able to truly feel its chill since Jimin’s first bite. Sometimes only the memory of cold keeps him from forgetting that this is not all there is, that there’s a world outside this cave and Jimin’s inky clutches, one he used to be part of.

I’m scared, Jungkook almost tells it. A frightened child locked in a dark room, curled into the monster under his bed for comfort. Instead: <You’ll help me?> he asks, mental voice trembling. Before Jungkook can stop himself, he admits quietly, <I don’t actually want to die>

Then don't, Jimin answers, deceptively simple. 

Its teeth sink home into Jungkook’s flesh once more.

Jungkook chokes on a sob. Jimin bites him, over and over again, more times even than when it had bred him, methodical in its mission to get as much venom into Jungkook as it can. With the first bite, Jungkook’s sob twists into a sigh. With the second, he’s giggling. With the third, his gasps become moans. He’s gone by the fifth, surrendering willingly to the familiar fire in his veins, heat curling in his belly and blood pooling low.

He’s desperate to submit to it, to be anywhere else mentally. Jimin’s bite feels like an old friend by now, and he gives more than Jungkook can count. Relax, the monster croons to him, and Jungkook goes more limp than he knew was possible. Obedience rewards him with another flood of endorphins, and Jungkook knows without looking that he’s hard by how badly he aches for his monster’s touch.

The tentacles tight around his thighs and ankles lift his knees up to his chest, a squatted version of the obscene V he’d been forced into when Jimin first bred him. A bizarre imitation of a mating press, made erotic by the aphrodisiacs boiling his blood, twisting him into little more than a body of base need.

Relax, Jimin keeps singing to guide him. Calm. 

Jungkook obeys, and feels the urgent need arise inside him again, easier now to deal with. It’s not as scary when Jungkook is unable to feel fear. If anything—

In all his imaginings, he’d pictured being clawed open from inside, or bursting like rotted fruit spoiled under hot sun, or being torn open and devoured alive by Jimin. All the worst of nature he’d ever studied, but in not one of those wildest imaginings had Jungkook ever thought that this might actually feel good.

The shift inside him should be horrifying, but the venom repaints it into carnal desire. Jungkook’s cock jumps against his belly. A tentacle curls around it, a slick squeeze working the shaft in encouragement.

On its third stroke, the first egg crowns.

Relax, like that, Jimin instructs, surprisingly sweet in its encouragement. It might just be the venom coloring Jungkook’s perception, but he can’t care, lost in hunger and suddenly uncaring how it’s satisfied. Good human. Good host.

It should be demeaning, but an electric shock of pleasure courses down Jungkook’s spine, tipping him to the edge. He can’t even begin to imagine how the egg must look, an obscene stretch bulging against his rim. It aches like a plug might, slowing to tug at its widest girth—and then popping out in an instant.

Jungkook comes so hard he nearly blacks out, flood of warmth against stomach going cold in seconds.

The egg comes out easier than expected. They all do. And it gets easier with each one, Jungkook pressed to do little more than relax and let it happen, let one of Jimin’s tentacles squirm in and coax inside him, slick against his walls and doing all the work. Work made easy by Jungkook gone limp and loose, his eyes rolling up with each unconscious shudder as the eggs start to come faster, pressing out in a rush. 

His moans are unrecognizable in his own ears. Jimin has given him back his voice, and distantly, Jungkook can feel the alien is pleased with his mindless pleasure. There’s nothing else Jungkook could possibly feel but pleasure. Each egg grazes deliciously against his prostate on the way out, grinding with pleasant insistence against the others in the clutch and his own sensitive walls until one-by-one they push past the ring of muscle to slip out. The stretch of it is indescribable.

For all his defiance, the fear he can barely remember now, the way Jungkook had spit rebelliously against being an incubator—it suddenly feels as if his body had evolved solely to warm Jimin’s clutch. To host.

He knows it’s the venom reshaping his body and thoughts, but that doesn’t do anything to quell the heights of euphoria. If anything, Jungkook only feels better with each egg that slips out of him, softer than when they’d first pressed in.

Jimin pleasures him through it, with nips to his neck and tentacles squeezing and fucking and teasing every erogenous zone Jungkook has. It’s barely needed. The venom fills Jungkook's mind and body with an unbearable buzz, as though he’s split open on cock instead of his monster’s brood. He feels a little like he might break, never felt so good or fucked so deep, and Jungkook comes until he’s coming dry, muscles spasming with endless pleasure almost to the point of blackout.

Through it all, Jimin’s own pleasure—and a sick sort of pride—fills Jungkook’s head, a reward all its own. Jungkook is full, so full, and emptying slowly, giggling and moaning and twitching and left behind with a satisfied empty ache.

And then finally, Jungkook is really, truly empty, head lolling to the side. He can see the eggs lit a dim green under the algae’s glow, color nearly indistinguishable from the skeletons they sit upon. They look soft and fleshy when they split open, carved apart from inside by dark squirming masses. Jungkook sees what looks like a small tentacle poke out from one before his eyes cross.

He fights unconsciousness, desperate to see details for however long the hatching takes. He tells himself it’s purely zoological interest, defies that it could be anything else; when Jungkook tries to inquire, about developmental stages or the impending question of his own fate, all Jungkook can feel from Jimin is a rush of pride and relief and wonder. A swell of wordless emotion, more human than Jungkook has ever felt from it.

Maybe he’s been wrong to use human as the sole comparative for sentience. 

Or, maybe, Jimin has learned from Jungkook how to deceive and lie, and Jungkook is about to be devoured after all.

The venom’s pulse fades remarkably fast, arousal burning off after serving its purpose. With it, fear begins to creep back into the corners of Jungkook’s vision. He finds that Jimin’s control is distracted enough, that Jungkook can almost will his twitching muscles into movement of his own volition, jerking more frantically against the tentacles coiled tightly around him with each passing second. 

He’s been so, so stupid. Certainly the venom has served its biological purpose, kept Jungkook calm and compliant to ensure a safe gestation and birth, and now his wriggling form is soft flesh for the dark shapes creeping over bone… 

…crawling not towards Jungkook, but towards the cave entrance, slipping out into the dark.

Jimin’s delight is overwhelming, flooding their mental link until Jungkook feels tears prickle at his eyes again, emotion he hopes is none of his own.

And then it’s gone.

Jimin is gone, gone from his head, as the tentacle burrowed into Jungkook’s ear for days or weeks or months slips free. The tentacle wormed into his mouth begins to pull out, taking almost half a minute of slick flesh moving against his lips to do so. All the tentacles curled around Jungkook’s body loosen their coils, and then Jimin is gone in a blink, following its offspring out the cave entrance.

For one horrible second, Jungkook’s entire body goes limp. Terror burns his lungs, and he wonders if this is how he dies, suffocating at the bottom of a lake under still lungs that have forgotten how to breathe on their own.

But it’s just one missed step, a few seconds of struggle, and then Jungkook gains back full control of his body with a gasp. He’d almost forgotten what control felt like. His chest heaves desperately, bubbles bursting from the mat grown over his mouth and nose. Without Jimin to cradle him, Jungkook sinks into the silty graveyard at the bottom of the dim cave, blinking in disbelief at the bones around him and the unfamiliar feeling of freedom.

He closes his eyes and pokes around in his head. Jungkook finds a chasm left behind in his brain, Jimin’s absence gaping like a dark maw, roots grown deep enough to feel their loss upon harvest.

It feels empty. Almost lonely.

Jungkook has never felt alone in his own head before.

And then sense slams back into him. Jungkook opens his eyes to see that the creature is still gone. Jimin is gone.

Jimin is gone, and Jungkook doesn’t quite feel up to finding out what it might do to him when it comes back.

He kicks his legs, finding it difficult after however long he was kept pliant and still. Only ever moved around to be fucked and tasted and touched, as if Jungkook expected Jimin to understand the consequences of atrophy. His muscles burn in protest, but Jungkook forces himself to kick free of the cave and up towards distant light, barely daring to hope.

The light grows around him with each kick. Until Jungkook is blinking painfully against it, the blur of reeds rushing up around him the closer he gets until he bursts through the surface with a frantic breath.

The sun blinds him. He doesn’t care; he never thought he’d see it again. Jungkook chokes on a sob, stars smearing across his burning vision. He spins in the water, treading and squinting until his heart leaps in his chest to spot the shore.

He tries to force himself to swim slowly, smoothly, barely disturbing the water. Until something brushes against his ankle—maybe a plant, a fish, a tentacle—and Jungkook is swallowed once more by panic, thrashing frantically to land as fast as he can, expecting any second to feel the slimy wet give of a tentacle coil around a limb and suck him right back under.

He can’t believe it when his feet find mud, slipping in the silt, and hauls himself up out of the water. His body is oddly heavy, the foreign weight of gravity forgotten. The dry air feels strange on his skin. Jungkook stumbles out of the lake and onto the shore and collapses immediately, twisting and clawing and crawling through the mud and away from the water’s edge with adrenaline hammering his heart.

When he’s far enough away, Jungkook can hear himself sobbing. His cries whistle through whatever is on his face, grown into his lungs, suddenly choking him. Jungkook seizes at the slippery mass pulsing over his mouth and yanks, heaving in terror. 

He thanks every god listening that it peels out and away easily. There’s so much of it, and it’s numbed him well but not enough that he can’t still distantly feel it sliding up and out of his throat. It just keeps coming, and coming, until Jungkook is sobbing and retching and coughing the last of it out, a dark smear splashed onto the ground like vomit. Jungkook staggers to his feet and stomps down onto it, gas sac bursting with a splatter, and then runs without looking back.

The cabin feels miles away. Jungkook has never been so grateful to see a shitty old house in his life, wood sodden and split from decades of mountain humidity. Its door is slightly ajar, latch left unfastened by the person he’ll never be again. Jungkook rips the door open with shaking hands. He slams it shut behind him, falling back against the door with a pounding heart and sliding to the floor.

There’s no way a creature like that could make it onto land. Right? Jungkook tries to recall the flashes he’d seen of Jimin’s lower half in the dim light, a pale abdomen giving way to the mass of tentacles below, and shudders so violently that he nearly retches again.

Worst of all, he's still half hard.

◐

Jungkook sits there slumped against the door for hours, staring into nothing. He can barely think, mind slowed by the strange new absence in his brain where Jimin had lived, but when he can he wonders what to do. 

Wonders if any of it was real at all.

He has to leave. Obviously, he has to leave. He has to get help, has to tell someone, has to get access to the lake closed off and its waters investigated, he has to leave—

But the more Jungkook thinks about it, the less of a possibility it becomes. No one will believe him. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. He’s crazy, isn’t he? 

Isn’t he?

Jungkook looks down at his trembling hands, at the last few strips of torn clothes clinging to him. The faint red marks around his limbs and torso in the shape of coils give him all the answer he needs. Nausea rises in him.

He tries to rein himself under control. First things first—

How long?

His own plea, come back to haunt him. This time, Jungkook has the freedom to investigate. 

◐

All his food is spoiled. Jungkook tries to open the fridge and is bent over gagging the second the smell of his leftovers hits him, slamming the door shut to stand there heaving. 

His phone must now lie at the bottom of the lake, and it’s been long enough that his laptop is dead. But once the latter charges up enough to turn back on, Jungkook finds that just over two weeks have passed. 

Two weeks in the depths. Two weeks tied to an alien, one that Jungkook’s mind increasingly refuses to believe was ever real, as a survival mechanism if nothing else. It’s almost tempting to convince himself that he’s gone mad; the truth is worse.

Jungkook steps into the bathroom to see it anyway.

Looking into the mirror is a little like looking at a dead man. Jungkook stares at his face for long minutes, entranced by his own dull eyes. He picks algae out of his hair with shaking fingers, and takes even longer to work up the courage to tear away the last strips of his shredded clothes.

When Jungkook can make himself look at the mirror again, this time for his body, he flinches at the sight. His shoulders and neck and chest are mottled with splashes of marks, flesh bruised and bitten like fruit, weeks of old imprints made fresh under fluorescent light. His torso and limbs all bear pressure marks of constriction. When Jungkook pokes a finger into the path of one, he can almost feel the ghost of the tentacle that had coiled around his skin to cradle him close and tight.

Jungkook stumbles, numb, into the shower. His hand can’t bear the temperature any higher than lukewarm, and when he steps under the showerhead Jungkook finds himself shivering away from the touch of water regardless. 

He tells himself it’s just to get clean, but his own hands betray him. His fumbling fingers trace low and lower on his body, heart pounding in terror of his own examination. Jungkook bites his lip on a sob to work his hand behind him and between his legs, expecting to find himself ruined and gaped—

And yet, when he does, the marks of the tentacles begin to fade before his eyes. The bruises he can see are melting away like paint. Jungkook can’t find the injuries he expects, and even his weak muscles are beginning to steady and strengthen, like some mechanism to repair the incubator before round two. Like a clock turned back on his body, and Jungkook should be grateful, but all he can feel is horror to realize that in mere minutes there will be no proof any of it ever happened.

If it had ever happened at all. If he hasn’t just lost it completely, imagined the lake and the rotten food and the calendar date and the monster he refuses to name even inside the safety of his own head—as if he could ever believe in such a thing as privacy ever again—

Jungkook vomits. Black slime spills from his lips, a viscous ooze that shimmers under the stark light and clings to itself in stringy clumps when Jungkook claws frantically at his lips. Its taste is startlingly, sickeningly sweet.

He slips with the force of it, head hitting the side tiling with a dull clang. The ache rings in his head. Jungkook ends up on his knees, body wracked with convulsions beyond his control, stomach spasming and squeezing up the last of whatever Jimin had fed him. He can still feel the tentacle’s pulse against his lips when he thinks it, and the memory alone makes Jungkook retch again, mouth souring with his own spit.

When the last of it clears, Jungkook is left on stinging knees, sobbing and shrieking and desperately shoving the last gobs of slime and bile down the drain. He shudders and hiccups at the fleshy feel of it rinsing away, gagging on the confectionary-sweet taste staining his lips and the salty taste of his own tears.

Eventually, with enough scrubbing, even the dark residue stained along the bottom of the shower washes away. Jungkook sits in the shower and stares at the drain, shaking hands exploring his healed body in numb disbelief.

He only comes back to himself when the water runs cold.

◐

Getting dressed feels strange. Jungkook moves numbly through the motions, tugging on his largest oversize shirt and baggiest shorts with all the ritual of dressing a mannequin. Nothing is light or loose or soft enough for comfort. Fabric feels scratchy on his skin, nothing like the weightless give of water.

He marches to his truck with eyes fixed firmly on it, refusing to look at the lake. He feels like it watches him anyway, or like something within it does, hair raising on the back of his neck the longer Jungkook fumbles with the key in the door and then the ignition.

Jungkook drives to town. He's as desperate for normality as he is to be away from the shore. He blanks the entire ride down the mountain in silence, barely coming back to himself in time to make the easily-missed turn into the general store lot. When he parks, he sits in his car for almost an hour, staring at the comings and goings of other people and feeling a world apart from them.

Eventually, he drags himself into the small town’s sole market, vast and empty and old. He ignores the concern on the cashier’s face when he asks to borrow a phone, his own lost to the depths. Once it’s in his hand, Jungkook finds he’s unable to imagine speaking on a call right now, and stares at the screen hesitantly before punching open a new text message. 

It takes a moment for his brain to work enough to remember his sister’s phone number. The vague, simple message he types is the most he can manage: Broke my phone. Lost track of time. Will call soon. JK

He hits send and hands back the phone to the increasingly concerned cashier without a word, wandering away in a daze. He opts for a cart, after shuddering at the pressure of the shopping basket’s handle on his wrist. Jungkook shops aimlessly, throwing random unrelated items into the cart with barely a second glance, no appetite in him.

It’s like he’s in a dream, disconnected from every person he sees. Each smile and conversation around him drifts into his fuzzy head from a million miles away. In the checkout line, Jungkook winces away from the cashier’s offer to read the response text, shaking his head and gathering up his bags with a grimace.

It’s after unloading the bags and slamming the trunk of his old car that he sees her. A woman walking past him in the parking lot, almost to the market door. Jungkook stares after her for a moment, confused why someone in a strange town would seem familiar, until all of a sudden memories from another life slam back into him: 

The woman in the bookstore. The book she’d shared. 

The daughter of the missing scientist.

“Hey,” Jungkook strides after her, the call slipping from his mouth before he can stop himself. He jogs to catch up to her, pulse pounding in his ears. “Hey. Wait. Hey—”

She spins just as Jungkook reaches her, eyes wide. She looks startled, but then Jungkook sees recognition register in her eyes, and she relaxes to smile at him. “Oh. Hey. It’s you. How’s your—”

She cuts off at the clasp of Jungkook’s trembling hands on her shoulders. Her eyes fall to his touch, and widen to see black stained under his nails like gravedigger dirt.

“Your mother,” Jungkook says. “What happened to her?”

She flinches back, but Jungkook's grip stays firm. She stares at him, aghast. “Excuse me?”

“Please.”

The woman searches his eyes, face twisting like she’s trying to be angry until she recoils from whatever she sees in his gaze. The truth spills free like a burst gut. 

“Drowned,” she stammers, eyes wide. “My parents, they—they came here like other research teams, to sample the meteorites for any microbial life, but she—”

Her voice breaks. It has the hollow ring of a story that hasn’t been told in years, heavy with skeletons in a closet. Or in a cave, Jungkook thinks, and has to swallow back nausea.

“She started dreaming about the water, sleepwalking,” the woman whispers. “It got so bad my dad offered to leave. She left her trailer without telling him the same night. The footsteps they could find led to a lake up in the mountains, but they… they never found a body.”

Jungkook nods slowly. He tries to open his mouth to respond—to offer his condolences, to tell her the truth—and then something inside him slams his jaw shut.

As smoothly as a new pilot settling into the driver seat, Jungkook’s brain hums, green washing over his vision. His mouth closes, and his legs spin of their own volition, turning him away and marching him back to the truck.

“Hey, wait—” she calls. Jungkook manages to seize back enough control to turn his head, to tell her he’s sorry, but he can’t make his lips move. All he can do is watch her eyes fall from confusion to hurt, and Jungkook finds that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t care.

He can’t care about anything.

He can’t care that his brain and body start the car and drive him back up the mountain on an autopilot that should scare him. Numb, he can’t care about the dozens of missed messages he must have on a dead phone sunk into the depths. He can’t care that his eyes slide off any sign he tries to read, that his mind steers itself away from thinking about anything more complex than the fog filling his head. 

His empty head, rattling around the space vacated by quite possibly the worst roommate in the entire animal kingdom. Jungkook certainly can’t care anymore about a thesis; he’s already found the alien he joked about looking for, academic concerns so trivial now.

Unbidden, his mind whispers traitorously that he’s already found a subject to study. Jungkook has to yank the steering wheel to swerve off the side of the road and kick open the car door to retch again.

◐

Once he turns onto the dirt road that leads up to the cabin, Jungkook kills the engine and sits in the car until the sun baking it begins to make him sweat.

Eventually, he can’t put it off any longer. He restarts the engine and drives the rest of the way up as slowly as he can, very purposely avoiding any glance at the lake. It can’t hurt you, he tells himself like a prayer as he makes trips back and forth, carrying groceries into the cabin. It can’t hurt him, because it’s just a body of water, and what happened couldn’t have possibly been real.

Even if it was, it certainly can’t reach him outside the water.

Jungkook tells himself this, ignoring the prickling feeling of being watched rising at the back of his neck, until he makes his last trip out and sees a trail of dark ink dragged across the hood of the car in a sticky smear. 

The milk carton in his hands drops, smashing on cobblestone and bursting to spill into the dirt. Jungkook flees inside with a scream building in his throat.

◐

That evening, Jungkook barricades the door. 

He drags furniture in its path and locks every window, and curls into his bed sobbing, hands clutched over his ears. He blasts music, the loudest harshest songs he can find to white out his mind, screaming the lyrics aloud at the top of his lungs in a banshee singalong until his throat goes hoarse and raw. Anything to pretend he can’t feel something shifting inside the depths of his mind, curling back into place like a cat and watching him from behind his own eyes.

Somehow, Jungkook makes himself eat. Somehow, he keeps the food down. Somehow he stays awake, but he can’t forever, and Jungkook finds that when his body finally gives out and his mind shuts down, he sees Jimin.

In his dreams, he’s back in the lake. The water’s cold touch is welcoming, and Jimin is even more so, its tentacles coiling back around Jungkook’s body where they were always meant to be. Cradled as close as treasure, all his needs met forever. When Jungkook hears Jimin’s smug sirensong humming in his head he craves it more than he’s ever desired anything else, arching into an alien touch and rocking with pleasure when Jimin names him its host—

Jungkook wakes up with a stagger, pain blossoming in his thigh where he’d stumbled into the table he’d barricaded in front of the door. He’s sleepwalking on his feet, hard cock in hand, and even as horror rises in him he can’t stop touching himself. He bites one fist to muffle his sobs into it. The other keeps pumping his cock, dry and rough and worlds away from the slick tentacle he’s imagining. 

He comes to the thought of Jimin, Jimin wrapped around him, Jimin inside him again. His monster, Jungkook had started to think of it, back when he’d lost hope of ever seeing the sun again. The attachment makes him sick, a Stockholm fondness bursting in him like a tick swollen fat and gorged on blood.

Jungkook sinks to his knees, cum dripping from his palm, and thinks.

Jimin could have killed him in that cave, if it had wanted to. Jimin could have reached him at the car, if it liked. Jungkook shudders at the memory. Instead the ink was smeared like a sign. A warning that makes Jungkook feel cold: I could get to you, I can get you, and I didn’t.

The coils he can feel in the back of his mind urge him to his feet. Jungkook rises slowly, and moves in a daze, pulling the furniture away from the door. He breaks down his makeshift blockade as though in a trance, and barely remembers to re-tie his robe before stepping out onto the porch.

The moon is full and high in the sky. Jungkook blanks a zombie’s shuffle out to the dock and sits at its edge, staring out across the still water with nothing but that strange hum in his head.

◐

The moon is low over the horizon by the time Jimin surfaces. Jungkook looks at it, and it watches him back, dark eyes all-knowing.

Eventually, Jungkook makes his numb lips move. “What,” he manages listlessly, quiet. “Did you do to me?”

The brush inside his mind is almost amused. Jungkook remembers this feeling, the thing between them that Jimin had called a link and Jungkook had once deliriously named a bond.  

Of course it’s still inside his fucking head.

You remember, is all Jimin says.

Jungkook does. Memory flickers through him, unwelcome. He can’t tell if it’s his own recollections, or Jimin stirring them up from its home inside his head, or both. He shudders.

“I mean,” Jungkook swallows. His mouth tastes sweet again. Of course he remembers, all too well; what he's asking is how he can still hear and feel Jimin inside him. “What did you do to my head?”

Ah, Jimin understands. A tentacle lifts from the water to tap the side of its skull, then point at Jungkook, a mockery of the motion it had once done in the depths. Jimin smiles at him, the kindness of it marred by sharp teeth. Touched. Shared.

Jungkook doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Your mouth looks human,” he settles on eventually. Jungkook feels detached from his body, watching the eerie exchange from the clouds—or maybe from the depths. “Can you speak?”

“Speak,” Jimin repeats aloud. Its voice is softer than Jungkook expected, a high musing lilt. It drags out the syllable. Jungkook knows-without-knowing, from that place touching in their minds, that the monster is testing the shape of words in its mouth for the first time. After learning from you— “Yes,” it licks its lips. But it is… Annoying. Inefficient. 

Jungkook catches himself agreeing. After spending two weeks sightless and blurred into a horrifically intimate amalgam with Jimin’s mind, speech does feel clumsy. 

But speech is what he’s most used to. At least, what he should be most used to. Jungkook refuses to let this change him more than it already has.

Feeling strange, Jungkook swallows past his dry throat. “How is the… the b-brood?”

As if I care, Jungkook tries to scoff internally. It’s hollow. A traitorous part of his brain does care, slick and sick with slime.

Jimin shrugs, the motion surprisingly human. It’s an exact replica of the slight shrug Jungkook usually gives, and it’s eerie to see his own habit mirrored. Jungkook wonders how many other pieces of himself he might see in Jimin’s mannerisms if he watched his monster long enough, habits scraped and stolen from his brain.

This is my territory, Jimin’s response is simple. And startlingly callous, until Jungkook remembers that parental investment is a highly varied strategy, its patterns widely diversified across the animal kingdom. His social ape brain is taking offense at something that must make perfect sense to Jimin’s species. They must find their own. Most went down, to the big water.

The ocean, then. Out one of the inlets and down a mountain stream and into the seas. Jungkook shudders to remember how many there were, where they might go.

What they’ll do to whoever they encounter, wherever they end up.

Even if there’s a reproductive barrier in the offspring, as is often the case with hybrids, preventing further breeding with humans—and Jungkook doubts that, seeing the success of his own coupling—each one of those things will get hungry. Will eventually seek out hosts of their own, as Jimin did.

Jungkook tries to worry about it, and once again finds that he can’t make himself care. All that matters is Jimin’s touch in his mind, Jimin’s knowing gaze on him.

“What did they look like?” Jungkook blurts out before he can stop himself. 

Jimin looks him over for a moment. “Like me,” it says aloud, pointing down to the water where Jungkook knows its tentacles must simmer just below the surface. Then Jimin grins, and points back up at its face: Like us.

Jungkook shudders again. He won’t admit it, but deep down, it’s exactly what he hoped to hear.

But if Jimin’s species lets go of its offspring so easily, then Jungkook will ignore the oddly paternal instincts battling within him and let it go, too. He'd like to hope the thought is all his own, but he can feel enough of Jimin stirring in his head to be suspicious.

Still, Jungkook brushes it away. He’d rather ask what’s haunted him for the last day and a half, whispering, “What do you want from me?”

The brood survived, Jimin reminds. Others failed. All others failed. I need you to breed.

The words are tinged with an old frustration. Jungkook remembers the cave, littered so thick with bones as to render the floor invisible, and wonders with a shiver how many times and with how many people, how many creatures Jimin has tried—and failed—to reproduce with.

He should be horrified to feel a pang of sympathy within him, but Jungkook can't even seem to manage fear. “I don’t understand why we’re talking about it. You could have grabbed me at the car. You could grab me now. What’s the catch?”

If Jimin felt irked before, it feels outright frustrated now. The brood survived because we linked and you obeyed. I need you to obey again.

With Jimin’s irritation, the rest of its thoughts leak across their link, unspoken: that it’s hard work to make Jungkook obey. It had taken more energy and effort on Jimin’s end than Jungkook had realized, to keep him frozen still and subdued. Jimin had been half-starved by the end of their coupling. On a purely mathematical basis, it makes sense—reproduction is much less energetically costly with a compliant host.

Jimin wants Jungkook to be its compliant host.

Jungkook should run. He can’t make his limbs move. He can’t make himself feel afraid or repulsed. He can’t feel anything other than arousal at the thought.

Dully, “And if I refuse?”

“You will not,” Jimin says aloud. It’s matter-of-fact, not even arrogant. One of Jimin’s tentacles raises out of the water, dripping, to poke Jimin’s forehead. At the same time, Jungkook watches his own arm lift beyond his control to mirror the motion on his skull. The bond wants this. You want this.

Jungkook drops his arm back down to his side the second he’s able to. He huffs. “Why would I do that again? What’s in it for me?”

Two more tentacles emerge from the water. Jungkook almost expects to be grabbed right then, flinching away from their approach, but Jimin moves slowly and keeps them at a respectful distance. The tentacles place two objects at the end of the dock before retreating.

It’s hard to tear his eyes away from Jimin’s gaze, but after a second, Jungkook makes himself look down at what he’s been gifted. He blinks to see his lost phone, and the test tube sample of algae that he’d wandered into the water for a lifetime ago.

Jungkook picks up his phone with numb hands. He tries to turn it on, but of course it’s dead, its screen flickering for one moment before going dark once more. Jungkook snorts. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

An almost-human annoyance pulses across the thread between their minds. It is what humans call ‘courtship.’

Now, Jungkook is mad. At least, he’s trying to be. He still can’t really feel anything other than placid calm this close to Jimin. Well, that, and—

He swallows back bile to remember the arousal and pleasure of the venom. Not fast enough, though, to quell the sick craving that rises in him.

Jungkook presses on regardless; annoyed, at least artificially, by memories of studying flashy mating displays in a Wildlife course years ago. 

“Seriously? That’s how you court me? You know most animals evolved special songs and dances and colors just to impress potential mates, right? And you give me back my own shit, my phone that I only lost because you dragged me to the bottom of your fucking—”

His voice chokes out, as Jungkook shudders at the memory of the cave. He expects nausea to swell in him again. It does not.

He looks up to catch Jimin watching him. His monster has drifted closer to the dock, closer to Jungkook, humming something soft inside his head.

It really shouldn’t soothe him. It does, anyway.

Weakly, Jungkook mutters, “What do you care about courtship, anyway?”

Jimin gives that bizarre mirrored shrug again. You can’t hide anything from me. It is important to you. So I will court, it concludes, and shows sharp teeth to articulate aloud, “Happy host is non-combative host. Fights less.” Jimin pokes at its temple again to make its point.

Jungkook stares. “Right, well, this is still my stuff, and the phone doesn’t even work anymore, so—it’s a pretty shitty courting gift, all things considered.”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Jungkook can’t believe the moment of regret that flashes through him, as though he’s actually concerned about Jimin’s feelings. He doesn’t know why he bothers; Jimin just stares back at him blankly.

I can kill anything Jungkook desires, Jimin offers. Any prey. Name it.

“I don’t want you to kill anything for me, I—” Jungkook hesitates, brow furrowing. “At least, I don’t think I do? No, no, I don’t. What am I saying? Get out of my head, I don’t want to be courted. I don’t want to go into any water ever again."

He’s lying. Something inside Jungkook is urging him to go back into this water, expeditiously at that. He’s fighting it. He knows he should run to his car, get back down the mountain and put as much distance between himself and the lake and Jimin as possible, but he’s afraid to attempt it and discover if his legs will disobey him.

Afraid to discover, too, if there’s no limit to the distance that Jimin can reach inside his head. 

“If you leave,” Jimin tries, tongue still a little slow and thick around the curl of speech. “Then you cannot learn the… the…”

Frustrated, it gives up and shoves wordless understanding at him over their link. Flashes of its meaning build up like a puzzle: that if Jungkook leaves, refuses, then he’ll go home empty-handed, without a subject to study, having left behind arguably one of the most important discoveries in all of human history. Just one histological sample from Jimin would seal Jungkook’s place into textbooks forever.

Jungkook doesn’t want to know how Jimin knows all this. He can tell Jimin doesn’t really understand the implications, or the concept of research, or science at all, really, but it hands over the faint impression of Jungkook’s own thoughts. And Jungkook wants to believe that it's all things Jimin read from him underwater, or only just pulled out of his head here and now on the dock; the only alternative explanation is that Jimin had somehow heard Jungkook think the same thoughts earlier, when he was still halfway down the mountain.

He’d been all the way in town, too, when something had steered him away from confiding in the woman. Again Jungkook finds himself wondering just how far Jimin can reach him, or if something more sinister is at play.

Even that would be worth studying, though. Jungkook grimaces.

“But I’d still be alive,” he says, more because he knows he's supposed to protest than out of any real desire to.

Jimin has the audacity to look cross. “Would not kill you.”

Jungkook snorts again, shoving cold hands inside his robe. “Like I can trust that.”

Jimin opens its mouth, then growls low in its throat with frustration. Again it forgoes language to shove a wordless tangle of meaning across the bond: that Jungkook is the first creature to be compatible with it, the first to understand Jimin and the first that Jimin could understand in turn. The first it could bond with.

And a significance underlying it all, one that Jimin isn't hiding and Jungkook is too afraid to face: that Jimin likes learning from Jungkook, that Jimin likes Jungkook. Jimin likes him. Wants him. Wants to breed him, again and again and again.

Jungkook tries to feel disgust. Tries to feel anything other than flattery, the heat of a blush rising to his cheeks.

He takes too long to mull it over. Jimin gets bored of patience, and ruins the moment with its eerily cheerful offer, “Bite will help you want it again."

Jungkook flinches. Rebellion rises in him, a futile defiance. Jimin is, after all, inside his head. Still, he has enough of himself left to snarl, “You think I fucking wanted any of that—”

Jungkook enjoyed, Jimin interrupts. The statement is even more of a slap inside his own skull than aloud; Jungkook jerks back as if he could escape the telepathy. His response emboldens Jimin. Slyly, it insists, “Host enjoyed. Host can’t hide anything, remember? Jungkook enjoyed it. Don’t lie.”

And like that, Jungkook can’t.

He also finds that he likes hearing his name in Jimin’s actual voice a lot more than he should.

Do not be upset, Jimin continues, almost kindly. Jungkook can tell that his monster is both amused and perplexed by Jungkook’s reaction. “It is simply… what you name… what you study…” 

Jimin trails off, squinting. It looks like it’s searching for words again, and Jungkook can feel a coil wrapped around his brain, stirring around inside his skull like a filing cabinet to conclude: It is nature.

“Yeah,” Jungkook echoes hollowly. He does study nature, as a biologist, doesn’t he? Jimin is the zoological finding of the millennium, and yet nothing has ever felt less important. “Yeah. Well. One of the reasons humans crawled out of the primordial fuckin’ ooze you shit in is by deciding that some aspects of nature are cruel and wrong.”

He can tell that Jimin doesn’t understand. Might blink at him, if it even has eyelids. It hasn’t blinked once that Jungkook has ever seen. Jimin tilts its head inquisitively, parroting, “Wrong?”

“Like… ethics. Against our ethics. And… morals, and... stuff. And—I mean, what are your customs?” Jungkook shoots back, flustered. Jimin stares back. “Like, how does your… species… usually show interest? Or… court each other?”

Jimin just keeps staring at him, those unsettling all-black eyes confused. “I won the fight.”

“Humans don’t fight to breed,” Jungkook says exhaustedly. How would that have even been fair? He remembers all too well how frail his human body had felt fighting against even one of Jimin’s tentacles. Of course he knows, too, that nature doesn’t care about fairness, or cruelty, or any other moral framework humans try to apply to make sense of it. Still—  “You have to ask me to breed. I have to say yes.”

“Asking now,” Jimin says, the pout on its lips surprisingly human.

Jungkook shakes his head. “Not how it works.”

“Would let you go,” Jimin promises. Much more quietly, sinking so that its lips are half submerged, it mutters: “Sometimes.”

“I’m supposed to trust that?”

Jimin sulks. “Did it already once.”

Suddenly, Jungkook’s pulse pounds in his head. “No, that’s—I swam away,” he says, feeling cold. “You left, you didn’t see me. I escaped.”

Jimin’s lips curve into a smile. Did you?

“You… You left,” Jungkook repeats, more uncertainly. “I got away.”

He thinks about it, picturing Jimin in the depths, watching Jungkook swim away and letting him go—marking his car, just to show him it could—letting him go, because it knew Jungkook would come back.

And he did.

I needed food more than mate, Jimin dismisses. Its eyes flick over Jungkook with obvious interest. “Will need mate again, though.”

Mate. In the cave it had always been Host. Jungkook should not feel fondness stir in his chest. He waits to be repulsed by it.

He isn’t.

…He can’t believe he’s considering it.

But maybe it’s not so unbelievable after all. Jungkook can feel something pulsing on the edge of his consciousness, present since even before he left the lake. The space where Jimin made home inside his head, carved out for its comfort, fucked hollow and shaped to its preference. 

Maybe it’s not just Jimin's telepathy, either. Jungkook’s mind drifts. He thinks of what might be inside his body after their coupling, microbial colony units forming in his gut and perhaps even crossing the blood-brain barrier. What sort of microbiome might flourish on Jimin’s tentacles, a kind of symbiotic co-evolution like so many of the mutualisms Jungkook has studied, bacterial strains gifted slimy shelter in exchange for creating a compliant host.

Once more Jungkook tries to panic, more because he remembers he should than out of any real urge to. He finds that he can’t. He can’t panic, even as he thinks of examples of the millions of ways microbes influence host behavior: 

The pathogenic Cordyceps fungi, compelling infected ants to climb to a more suitable microclimate and wait to be devoured from the inside out, body fruiting for spore dispersal. The parasitic Toxoplasma, increasing the risk-taking behavior of the host whose brain it reaches, to eliminate fear of predators and drive rodents into danger to ensure the parasite's spread to a feline host. The documented, but poorly understood, link between the human microbiome and production of neurotransmitters; the way microglial reshaping of neural circuitry can be influenced by crosstalk between the nervous system and gut microbiota.

Jungkook can only begin to imagine what microbial community might exist in symbiosis with Jimin, living on its tentacles and teeth and now inside himself, producing compounds to interact with his neurochemistry and alter his behavior.

He finds that he can’t care. Part of the evolutionary advantage of it, Jungkook supposes, with a distant horror he's unable to truly feel. If he were able to feel it, he thinks he might start screaming and never stop, to realize—

Jimin can let him wander free, because Jimin grew a leash inside his brain.

Jimin knows that he’ll always come back.

It should terrify Jungkook. It doesn’t.

He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to feel fear around Jimin again.

He physically can’t.

Jimin doesn’t like being ignored. It finally gets antsy enough at the lack of attention to slap a tentacle on the deck, a threat display nullified by the pout back on its human lips. Almost a whine inside his head: Jungkook. Do not ignore me.

“I’m thinking,” Jungkook says automatically. It’s a lie, against Jimin's command, and the pressure in his head twinges threateningly for it. He’s not thinking at all, really, not anymore. Something else is thinking for him, an intruder influencing his thoughts, all his behavioral patterns and biochemical pathways of risk awareness hijacked. Something else thinks for him now, and Jungkook can feel it make his decision for him.

He stands. Jimin looks up at him with sly eyes, and Jungkook can tell, in that new curious hollow space in his head carved out for Jimin’s control, that his monster already knows his answer.

“You can’t hurt or kill me,” Jungkook says dully. Before Jimin can respond, “Not now, not ever. You get to… breed, and I get to study you, and each time that you’re done, you let me go. It goes both ways. You have to promise."

I can't spend the rest of my life at the bottom of a lake, Jungkook almost adds, but his mouth dries and the words die on his tongue to realize how hollow the sentiment feels. If anything, there's a traitorous flicker of arousal in him at the idea, brought on by the memory of Jimin's venom.

Jimin’s frowning mouth has sunk back below the water. Mystified, by what it most likely views as ridiculously elaborate demands from its mate, so much more than most animals bargain. The ripples do nothing to muffle its mutter: "Humans strange."

“I mean it.”

“Humans difficult.”

“Jimin,” Jungkook warns, and finds that his body shivers to speak aloud the name that had sung inside him in the depths. Buried so deep beneath the surface, cradled and claimed.

“Will not kill,” Jimin insists stubbornly. Its eyes narrow in sudden amusement, perhaps sensing his thoughts, and it offers out a mischievous purr: Not ever. Jungkook is pretty. Jungkook is perfect mate. Jungkook is too good at breeding to waste on eating.

Jungkook fights back another traitorous quiver in his head. It makes him feel giddy, preening at his mate’s praise.

And it feels good when Jungkook gives up on pretending to ignore the feeling and gives in, a rewarding pulse providing enough pleasure for positive reinforcement. A feedback loop, as inescapable as a whirlpool—or his monster’s embrace. Consumption, if not quite physical or mutual, and his new inability to feel any fear at the thought.

Jungkook had always imagined love to feel a little like being devoured.

“And you...” Jungkook swallows, looking away. His voice drops, but of course Jimin hears it. If not his whisper on the wind, then the intent inside his head, when Jungkook manages shamefully: “And it’ll feel good, again? You’ll make sure it feels good?”

The smile Jimin gives him is cocky. Each tooth is sharp, stark bone, slicked over with a shimmer. Jungkook’s knees go weak to remember what that venom had done to him.

Very good, Jungkook, Jimin croons the promise. Better, even. My mate.

Jungkook feels himself nod. His head spins when he turns around. 

He walks back up to the cabin on unsteady legs. Once back inside, he isn’t quite sure what he’s looking for, until he sees the sketch of the lake he’d started while sitting on the docks, weeks ago now. 

At the time he’d felt silly for succumbing to fear and crumpling it up and running inside—but he knows now that his instincts weren’t wrong. Something had been watching him from the water, after all.

Jungkook picks his way back down to the shore, the sketch fluttering in his hand in the slight breeze. When he reaches the dock, he smooths out the paper against his thigh, and then holds it up to show Jimin. “For you,” he says clumsily. “My courting gift. I made it.”

A tentacle lifts from the water and reaches for the paper. Jungkook lets the slimy appendage take the sketch from him by a quickly-soaked corner and carry it back to Jimin, who examines it closely, flipping the paper over and around and upside down.

It seems pleased. Jungkook can feel Jimin's satisfaction inside his head. It makes him feel dizzy, to have delighted his mate. After a moment’s inspection, Jimin shoves the dripping paper into its mouth and swallows it whole.

Jungkook stares. Jimin stares back at him, eyes glittering with hunger. Its offer is silent, its temptation a beckon echoing inside his head. Jungkook can barely remember what privacy feels like; he doesn’t want it anymore. He can’t imagine how terribly lonely it would feel to be left alone inside his own head, after this.

As dawn breaks, Jungkook unties his robe and drops it to the dock. He can’t feel the cold when he slips home into their lake—all that matters is the tentacles that catch him like a lover, cradling him close to his monster. Jungkook lifts his hands to touch Jimin for the first time, cradling his monster's face, his breath exhaled shakily between them.

Jimin still doesn’t quite understand the romantic significance of a kiss, but it reads enough desire for one from Jungkook to indulge him. When its tongue dips into his mouth, the filamentous ink spills into and over Jungkook’s mouth and nose once more.

They slip, together, below the surface. The water welcomes him as its own. Jungkook sucks in a breath, his last thought for a long time that—he should probably put this stuff under a microscope, eventually, maybe even replicate and patent it. The ability to breathe underwater is useful for more than fucking a tentacle monster, probably, even if he can’t quite think of much else right now. Even if he can't imagine thinking of much else ever again.

And then Jimin’s teeth find his neck, and Jungkook thinks of nothing at all.