Work Text:
David knew something was wrong the moment he saw the syringe.
It sat on the table beside Max’s chair, an ugly little intrusion among all the old things Max liked to collect, glass and metal catching the amber light from the lamp. There was something dark inside it, not quite enough to fill the barrel, and David stopped in the doorway with one hand still resting against the frame as he tried to decide whether it was red or merely looked that way through the shadows. Max noticed him looking eventually. He had a book open across one knee and regarded David over the top of it for a moment before following his gaze toward the table, as though the syringe had somehow slipped his mind.
“What is that?” David asked, and Max closed the book around one finger to hold his place.
“Something I acquired recently. Come in, David.”
David stayed where he was. There was nothing particularly threatening in Max’s voice yet, but that meant very little. Max had been alive long enough to make patience threatening all by itself, and David had learned years ago that come here could remain a request for exactly as long as Max found it entertaining to pretend David had a choice. “I can see you acquired it. I’m asking why whatever you acquired is in a fucking needle.”
Max’s mouth twitched slightly before he looked back toward the syringe. “It’s blood.”
“No shit.”
“Not human blood.”
That made David’s fingers tighten against the doorframe. Vampire blood didn’t need needles; Max had demonstrated that thoroughly enough when he’d opened his own wrist and shoved it against David’s mouth years ago, back when David had been dying too quickly to understand that surviving one thing could mean belonging to another. Vampires bit, drank and healed. They did not sit around filling syringes with one another’s blood, and whatever was in that glass smelled wrong even from across the room, familiar enough that David’s body recognized blood while every other instinct insisted it had come from something he’d never encountered.
“What kind?” he asked. Max smiled, and David’s stomach dropped before he ever answered.
“A siren.”
David laughed. He genuinely couldn’t help it. One short, incredulous sound escaped him as he looked from Max to the syringe and waited for the part where this became anything other than the stupidest conversation they’d ever had. Max didn’t join him, though, and David’s laughter disappeared almost as quickly as it had come. “No.”
“You haven’t heard what I intend to do with it.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you intend to do with it.” David pushed away from the doorway, but it was backward into the hall rather than forward into the room. “Whatever you’re thinking, find somebody else.”
“There isn’t anybody else.”
“Sounds like a you problem.”
Max finally put the book aside and stood, and David took another step back before he could stop himself. The movement irritated him immediately. He hated giving Max even that much, hated letting him see the moment when annoyance became apprehension, but the syringe remained on the table between them and Max had already said enough for David to know he wanted it nowhere near his body.
“Think about it,” Max said, still standing beside his chair rather than following. “Two predatory species with remarkably similar adaptations. Both depend upon attraction to bring prey close. Both possess heightened senses and regenerative capabilities, and both have been associated for centuries with forms of influence humans have never been able to adequately explain.”
“I said I’m not interested.”
“Vampire influence is largely visual. Siren influence, if the accounts are accurate, appears to be primarily vocal. There are enough similarities to suggest compatibility, but enough differences that-”
“You want to put that in me.”
Max stopped.
David looked at the syringe again, then back at him, and the silence answered before Max could. “That’s what this is. You got your hands on siren blood and now you want to put it in a vampire to see what happens.”
“I want to understand what happens.”
Something cold settled beneath David’s ribs. “You don’t know?”
“There are theories.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“No,” Max admitted. “I don’t know.”
David stared at him for several seconds before the next question occurred to him, and by then he already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. “Will it kill me?”
Max hesitated.
It wasn’t long. Half a second, maybe less, but David had spent years learning Max’s face, and that half second was enough.
“You don’t fucking know if it’ll kill me.”
“I don’t believe it will. Your body has survived extraordinary trauma before, and vampire regeneration is remarkably resilient.”
“My body,” David repeated, because apparently Max had somehow missed the most important word in his own sentence. “You want to gamble with my body because you think it’ll probably survive.”
“I turned you. I know exactly what your body is capable of.”
“No, you know what you made it capable of.” David took another step into the hall. “You want to know what happens when you mix a vampire and a siren, find a vampire who volunteers.”
“You’re already here.”
For a moment David could only look at him. There were times Max said something so completely, casually monstrous that anger took a second to catch up, and when it did David laughed again, breathless and disbelieving. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
He turned to leave.
“Sit down, David.”
The bond closed around him before he made it three steps.
David’s entire body locked so abruptly that one foot dragged against the floor. He fought before the command had even finished settling into him, every muscle in his legs straining against an instruction that didn’t live in muscle at all, but resistance only made his knees shake. His body turned without permission and carried him back through the doorway while Max watched. David caught the frame hard enough to splinter wood beneath his fingers, trying to hold himself there, but even that lasted only a moment before his grip released and he crossed the room.
“Max, don’t fucking do this.” The chair waited beside the table, and David hated it before his body ever lowered into it. He gripped both arms as soon as he was seated, wood creaking beneath his fingers while he glared up at Max. “You asked. I answered. That’s what no means.”
“You’re reacting to something you don’t understand.”
“You don’t fucking understand it either!”
Max reached for the syringe, and David’s anger finally broke through the fear hard enough that he kicked at him. His boot caught Max in the knee and sent him stumbling against the edge of the table. The syringe rattled but didn’t fall. Max straightened slowly, whatever indulgent patience he’d been wearing finally gone, and David bared his teeth at him.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Give me your arm.”
“No.”
“David.”
“Fuck you.”
The command came through the bond without Max needing to raise his voice. David’s right arm started to move, and he caught his own wrist with his left hand before it could extend toward Max. For one glorious second he held it there, shoulders shaking with the effort while his nails sank through his own skin. Blood welled beneath them and ran across his palm, but he barely felt it over the sickening sensation of his own body fighting him from the inside.
“Fuck you,” he gasped again, tightening his grip until something in his wrist protested. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck-”
His fingers opened.
David watched his own arm extend.
Max took his wrist and pushed the sleeve up.
The smell hit harder now. Blood, unmistakably, but threaded with something strange enough to make David’s stomach twist. There was salt in it, or something his mind translated into salt, and for no reason he could explain he became abruptly aware of the Pacific beyond the walls of the house.
“Where did you get it?” David demanded as Max checked the syringe. “Who did you take it from?”
“Does that matter?”
“It came out of somebody, so yeah, I’d say it fucking matters. Did they give it to you?”
Max didn’t answer, which was answer enough. David jerked uselessly against his grip, but the command held his arm steady even as the rest of him fought. “Of course they didn’t. Jesus Christ, Max, put it down. You want to experiment on something so fucking badly, use yourself.”
“This isn’t going to kill you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t believe-”
“You don’t fucking know.”
The needle touched his skin.
David’s anger collapsed into something uglier.
“Please don’t.”
Max paused.
Hope came so quickly that David hated himself for it. He looked up, and for one stupid second Max’s expression seemed almost gentle, familiar enough that David could remember other nights and other injuries, Max telling him he’d survive because Max had decided he would.
“You’re going to be all right,” Max said.
Then he pushed the needle in.
The puncture itself barely hurt. That almost made it worse. There should have been some physical sensation big enough to match what was happening, but all David felt was a brief sting and the pressure of Max’s fingers around his arm while something that had never belonged inside him disappeared beneath his skin. He screamed at Max anyway, fury ripping the sound out of him as the plunger emptied.
“You fucking bastard!”
Max withdrew the needle and stepped away before David could snap his teeth into his hand. A bead of blood rose where the needle had been and disappeared almost immediately as the tiny wound healed.
David stared at the unbroken skin.
Max watched him.
“Release me.”
“I want to make sure-”
“You got what you fucking wanted. Release me.”
Max hesitated only briefly before nodding. “You’re released.”
David was out of the chair before the last word finished leaving his mouth.
He hit Max hard enough to send him backward into the table, one hand fisted in the front of his shirt, and for a second David genuinely thought he might kill him. He wanted to. He wanted to put Max through the wall, wanted to tear open his throat and make him choke on all the reassuring bullshit he’d offered while forcing a needle into David’s arm. Max caught his wrist before David could strike again, and they stayed there for a moment, David snarling inches from his face while Max looked irritatingly calm.
Then David’s side twitched.
He froze.
It was small enough that he might have ignored it under any other circumstances, nothing more than the sensation of a muscle contracting beneath his ribs. Max felt him stop fighting and looked down, attention immediately sharpening.
David shoved him away.
“Don’t.”
“What do you feel?”
“Nothing.”
Another spasm seized his side.
This one hurt.
David’s hand flew to his ribs, and the pain vanished almost as quickly as it had come. He stood there breathing unnecessarily hard, waiting for another one while Max watched him with exactly the expression David didn’t want to see.
Nothing happened.
David laughed.
The relief was so sudden it made him lightheaded. “That’s it?”
“David.”
“You wasted it.” He looked down at the place where the needle had entered, still perfectly healed, then back at Max. “Whatever you thought was gonna happen, my body killed it.”
“Perhaps.”
“Don’t sound so fucking disappointed.”
The third spasm drove David to his knees.
There was no warning this time. Pain tore through his side so violently that his legs simply stopped holding him, one knee striking the floor before he caught himself on both hands. For a second he couldn’t make a sound. His mouth opened around nothing while something beneath his ribs seized and pulled, and when breath finally returned it came with a broken curse.
“Fuck-”
Max moved toward him.
“Stay the fuck away from me.”
The pain spread before Max could answer, running across David’s ribs and around his back in a line of fire that felt horribly, impossibly purposeful. This wasn’t an injury. There was nothing for his body to heal because his body was the thing hurting him, muscle and skin and something deeper pulling themselves toward a shape they had never occupied before.
David rolled onto one hip and clawed at his shirt. “What the fuck did you do?”
“What do you feel?”
“Pain, you fucking idiot!”
“Where?”
“Everywhere!”
The next wave folded him completely.
David curled around his side on the floor, forehead nearly striking the wood as he fought for a position that hurt less and found none. His shirt suddenly felt intolerable against his skin. He grabbed the hem and ripped, fabric tearing open beneath his hands as he twisted enough to see his ribs.
For a second there was nothing there.
Then his skin split.
David stopped breathing.
Something dark pushed through the blood.
It was small at first, no bigger than a fingernail, flat and glistening in the lamplight. Another appeared beside it before David could understand the first, then another below that, each one forcing its way through skin that tore to make room and immediately tried to heal around it.
“What the fuck?”
Max crouched.
David recoiled from him so violently that his shoulder hit the floor. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
“I need to see.”
“You can see from there!”
Another line of scales pushed through.
David screamed.
The pain wasn’t the worst he’d ever experienced. That almost made it more frightening. He knew what catastrophic injury felt like; he’d been broken open before and survived. This was smaller and everywhere, hundreds of tiny violations as his skin opened and healed and opened again, his vampire body apparently accepting each new piece as quickly as it appeared.
He hooked a fingernail beneath one without thinking.
The pain sharpened.
David ripped.
The scale came free with a wet little snap and hit the floor beside him.
Tink.
Blood welled from the place it had been.
David stared.
His skin closed.
For half a second it was smooth again.
Then the scale pushed back through.
“No.”
He tore it out again.
It returned.
David clawed at the entire patch.
Scales scattered across the floor, tiny hard sounds almost lost beneath his breathing as he ripped them out faster than his body could replace them. Blood coated his fingers and smeared across his side, but every wound healed, every empty place filled, and still he kept digging.
“Get them out.”
Max caught his wrist.
David screamed and twisted away from him. “GET THEM THE FUCK OUT!”
“You’re only injuring yourself.”
“You did this!”
“David, stop tearing at them.”
“Then make them stop coming back!”
Another wave hit his back.
David wrenched free and rolled onto his stomach, nails scraping uselessly against the floor as his body arched. He could feel more of them pushing through where he couldn’t reach, lines of pressure and tearing skin along either side of his spine. He tried to twist enough to claw at those too, but the movement sent pain shooting through his ribs and he collapsed onto his side again.
“You fucking did this,” he gasped, looking up at Max through hair stuck to his face with sweat and blood. “You did this to me.”
Max wasn’t looking at his face.
He was looking at the scales.
David saw it.
Something about that hurt worse than the scales themselves.
Then his mouth changed.
His jaw snapped shut hard enough that his teeth cut through his tongue. David gagged at the sudden rush of blood and pushed himself onto one elbow, spitting red onto the floor. The wound healed almost immediately, but when he ran his tongue over his teeth he caught it again on an edge that had never been there before.
He froze.
His fangs were familiar. He knew their shape as intimately as he’d once known his human smile, even if no mirror had shown them to him in years.
These weren’t his fangs.
Several of the teeth around them had sharpened too, finer and more predatory than vampire teeth had any reason to be. David touched one with the tip of his tongue and sliced himself again.
“No.”
Max’s attention shifted to his mouth.
David covered it instinctively.
“Let me see.”
“No.”
“David-”
“Fuck off.”
His own voice sounded wrong.
David stopped.
The change was tiny, so small he might have blamed the pain if Max’s expression hadn’t altered at the same moment.
David swallowed. “What?”
Max leaned closer.
David backed across the floor on one hand, the other still pressed against his side. “What?”
“Say something again.”
Fear finally broke through everything else.
“Go fuck yourself.”
The last word dipped lower than it should have.
The glass in the cabinet trembled.
David stared at it.
Then pain closed around his throat.
David grabbed his neck with both hands as the first tear happened somewhere inside, deep enough that he couldn’t reach it and distinct enough that he knew something had actually ripped. His throat spasmed around a sound that wouldn’t come out. Healing caught the damage almost immediately, pulling whatever had torn back together, but before David could even process the relief something shifted again and ripped in a different direction.
He gagged.
There was something happening inside his throat.
Not an injury. Not something Max’s blood could heal and be finished with. Something was changing in there, pulling apart structures David couldn’t see and rebuilding them before tearing into them again, and blind panic overwhelmed every rational thought he might have had about what his hands could possibly accomplish from the outside.
“Get it out.”
Max moved closer. “David-”
“Get it the fuck out!”
David’s nails broke the skin of his throat.
Pain flared beneath his fingers, sharp and comprehensible compared to the impossible tearing inside, and he dug harder. His skin opened easily beneath vampire strength. Blood spilled hot over his hands and down his chest as he hooked his fingers into the wound and pulled.
Max’s face changed.
David tore his throat open.
The pain was enormous. His body tried to heal before he’d even finished doing the damage, flesh drawing itself together around his fingers while he clawed deeper, desperate to reach whatever was ripping him apart from somewhere he couldn’t touch. He didn’t know what he expected to find. Something foreign. Something he could grab and tear out. The siren blood itself, maybe, as though it might still exist as a separate thing inside him instead of something his body had already accepted.
There was nothing to grab.
Only himself.
“David, stop.”
David couldn’t.
He ripped the wound wider.
Blood poured between his fingers. His knees slid against the floor, and he folded over himself with one hand braced against the wood while the other remained buried against his own throat. The wound kept trying to close around him. Every time regeneration pulled flesh back together, the transformation tore something deeper inside, and David clawed himself open again trying to follow it.
“GET IT OUT!”
The words should not have been possible.
They came anyway.
The sound that tore through his ruined throat was wet and broken at first, air and blood and a voice that barely existed. Then something else joined it.
A second frequency slipped beneath the first.
David froze.
Max did too.
The sound continued even as David stared at him, one bloody hand still pressed into the wound he’d made. His voice seemed to catch on itself and split, one scream becoming something layered and impossible, a sound he could feel vibrating through his sternum and jaw even while his throat was physically open beneath his fingers.
The glass in the cabinet rattled.
David’s eyes widened.
He clamped both hands over the wound as if he could hold the sound inside.
His body healed beneath them.
Skin pulled together against his palms. Torn muscle rejoined. The gaping wound narrowed until David’s bloody fingers were pushed outward by his own regeneration, and for one second his throat was whole.
Then something tore inside again.
David screamed and clawed it back open.
“No! No, get it out, get it the fuck out of me!”
His nails sank through newly healed flesh. Blood sprayed across his chest as he dragged downward, opening himself from beneath the jaw toward his collarbone, chasing a pain that remained maddeningly deeper than he could reach. His body closed the top of the wound while he was still tearing open the bottom.
Max caught his wrists.
David lost his mind.
He thrashed hard enough to drag Max forward, kicking and twisting on the floor while blood ran down his neck. “LET GO! It’s fucking in there, get it out, get it OUT!”
“There is nothing to remove.”
“YOU DON’T FUCKING KNOW THAT!”
David tore one hand free and went for his throat again.
Max caught it before his nails connected.
“David.”
“Let me fucking go!”
“You’re tearing your own throat apart.”
“BECAUSE SOMETHING ELSE IS DOING IT FIRST!”
That stopped Max.
For one moment they stared at each other, David writhing beneath his grip, Max holding both wrists away from his neck while vampire healing steadily erased the damage David had done. Blood remained everywhere, soaking what was left of his shirt and coating Max’s hands, but the wound itself contracted until there was nothing beneath David’s jaw except whole skin.
The pain inside continued.
David sobbed.
He hated that almost as much as the screaming.
“Make it stop.”
Max loosened his grip slightly, and David immediately tried to reach for his throat again. Max caught him before he could.
“Make it fucking stop!”
“I don’t know how.”
David stared at him.
There it was again.
The thing Max had admitted before putting the needle into him.
I don’t know.
David’s face crumpled with something far beyond pain. “You did this and you don’t even know how to make it stop.”
Max didn’t answer.
Another tear happened inside David’s throat.
His scream hit the room in layers.
This time Max heard it too.
David knew because the horror on his own face was reflected not by fear on Max’s, but by fascination.
The pain gradually changed. Tearing became pressure, pressure became a deep burning ache, and David felt his body settling around structures that hadn’t existed before tonight. His voice broke every time he made a sound, sometimes dropping lower than it should, sometimes carrying that impossible second resonance beneath it. He could still taste his own blood even though his throat had healed completely from everything he’d done to it.
“Fix it,” David whispered.
The whisper doubled at its edges.
Max stared.
“Fix my fucking voice.”
“Say something else.”
David looked at him.
Max’s eyes were bright.
Not afraid.
Not horrified by the blood covering David’s chest or the fact that he’d just watched David tear open his own throat because the pain inside it had been worse.
Interested.
David’s stomach turned.
“I’m going to fucking kill you.”
Something in kill resonated through the room.
The cabinet glass vibrated again.
Max smiled.
David lunged.
He barely got one foot underneath himself before another wave of pain took it away. He hit the floor hard on one shoulder, rolled and tried to rise again because lying there while Max looked at him felt unbearable. His legs worked for two staggering steps before his spine arched and he crashed against the side of the table, knocking the syringe to the floor.
Glass shattered.
David stared at it.
Empty.
Too late.
He slid down the table and landed among the broken pieces without caring whether they cut him. They did. His palm opened when he caught himself, then healed around fragments he had to wrench free before the flesh could close over them completely.
Max crouched several feet away, notebook forgotten for the moment.
“What do you hear?”
David laughed raggedly. “What?”
“Your ears. Has anything changed?”
“I don’t fucking-”
The clock ticked.
David’s head snapped toward it.
He had heard that clock every night he’d lived in this house. Every vampire could. There was nothing remarkable about being able to hear gears moving inside a quiet room.
But now he couldn’t stop hearing it.
Not louder, exactly.
Closer.
Separate.
The pipes shifted in the walls, water moving somewhere below them. Wind pressed along the side of the house. Max’s coat whispered when he moved. Something tiny scratched beneath the floorboards, and beneath all of it the Pacific rolled against the cliffs.
David squeezed his eyes shut.
Too much.
Not impossibly more than he’d been capable of hearing yesterday. That was almost worse. Everything he’d already heard had become harder to ignore, individual sounds pulling themselves free from the background and demanding attention.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I can hear you fucking breathing.”
Max’s expression sharpened.
David heard the change in his heartbeat.
He opened his eyes.
That wasn’t new either. Vampires could hear heartbeats. He’d heard Max’s before.
But right now he could pick the slight acceleration out from everything else.
“You’re excited.”
Max raised an eyebrow.
“Your heart.” David laughed, and his altered voice made the sound shimmer unpleasantly in his own ears. “It speeds up when something interesting happens.”
Max’s hand went almost unconsciously toward his chest.
David hated how satisfying that was.
Then the sides of his head began to hurt.
“Oh, fuck me.”
He reached for one ear.
Cartilage shifted beneath his fingers.
David jerked his hand away as if he’d burned himself, then immediately reached back because not knowing was worse. His fingers followed the curve upward and found the tip narrowing where it shouldn’t.
“No.”
He touched it again.
Subtle.
Definitely there.
“No, no, no.”
Max moved closer.
David scrambled backward across the floor until his shoulders hit the base of the chair. “Don’t.”
“I need to see.”
“You have eyes. Use them from there.”
“The angle-“
“I don’t give a fuck about the angle!”
Max stopped a few feet away.
David sat against the chair, one hand still cupped over his ear as though hiding it could undo anything. His shirt hung in bloody strips around him. Scales had spread farther across his ribs and disappeared around his back where he couldn’t see them, and every time he moved he felt fabric catch differently against their surface.
He wanted a mirror.
The thought was so absurd he nearly laughed.
He hadn’t needed one in years.
Now he would have given almost anything to see his own face.
Instead he had Max.
“Tell me what I look like.”
The words came out before David decided whether he wanted to ask.
Max’s expression changed.
David hated himself for needing the answer.
“Your ears have elongated slightly at the tips. Your teeth appear sharper beyond the primary fangs. The scales extend along your sides and toward your back, with some beginning higher across your chest. Your eyes appear unchanged.”
“Appear.”
“I would need to look more closely.”
“No.”
Max’s gaze moved over him anyway.
David pulled the ruined shirt closed.
It hid almost nothing.
The ocean crashed against the cliffs.
David’s head turned.
He couldn’t help it.
For the first time since the pain began, every other sensation seemed to fall behind something else.
The Pacific.
Not the sound.
The place.
David knew where it was.
Of course he knew where the ocean was; he’d lived beside it. That wasn’t what frightened him. This was an awareness that didn’t seem to belong to hearing or smell or sight. Something inside his body oriented toward the water with the same unquestioning certainty that hunger oriented him toward blood.
David stared toward the curtained window.
Max noticed.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“David.”
The ocean pulled.
David’s vampire instincts recoiled.
Running water.
He had learned that rule quickly. Every vampire did. Water moving under its own current was pain, weakness and eventually death. The Pacific was not simply dangerous; it was the largest possible version of something his body knew to fear.
Something else inside him wanted it anyway.
Ocean.
Death.
Home.
Death.
The contradiction hit hard enough to make him gag.
David curled forward and pressed one bloody hand to his mouth.
“What do you feel?” Max asked, moving closer again. “Is it the water?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Can you sense it?”
“Max.”
“Is it attraction? Hunger?”
“SHUT UP!”
The words tore out of him with something underneath them.
Max went silent.
David remained curled over for several seconds before realizing what had happened.
He looked up.
Max’s mouth was open.
Nothing came out.
David stared.
Max tried again.
Silence.
The command broke a moment later, apparently weakened by David’s lack of control, and Max inhaled sharply.
Then he smiled.
“There it is.”
David’s stomach dropped.
“What?”
“The voice.”
“Don’t.”
“Not simply influence. Compulsion.”
“Stop.”
Max came closer.
“Vampire influence depends heavily on attention and eye contact, but this appears to bypass-”
“I said stop.”
“-which means the siren accounts may have been more literal than-”
“Stop talking about me like I’m not fucking here!”
Max crouched in front of him.
David pushed himself backward, but the chair was already against his spine.
“Open your mouth.”
“No.”
“I need to see your teeth.”
“No, you fucking don’t.”
Max reached for his jaw.
David slapped his hand away.
Max caught David’s wrist.
“Let go.”
“Hold still.”
David froze.
The sire command dropped through him like a stone.
His body stopped fighting.
Max took his jaw in one hand.
David’s eyes burned with fury while Max turned his face toward the light and pressed his thumb against his lower lip.
“Open.”
David’s mouth opened.
Humiliation burned hotter than any of the pain.
Max leaned close enough that David could smell him, examining the altered teeth while David sat rigid beneath his hands. His tongue was still healing tiny cuts every time it moved wrong against the unfamiliar edges.
“Interesting. The secondary teeth have changed as well.”
David made a broken sound in the back of his throat.
Max released his jaw.
David’s mouth snapped shut.
“Fuck you.”
“And your ears-”
“Don’t.”
Max’s hand rose.
David couldn’t move.
“Don’t touch them.”
Max touched one anyway.
David’s whole body tried to recoil and got nowhere.
“The cartilage is stable. No continued change that I can see.”
“Max.”
His fingers moved behind David’s ear, tilting his head toward the light.
“Stop.”
Max kept looking.
“Stop touching me.”
“The change is more subtle than the scales.”
“Please.”
That word did what anger hadn’t.
Max paused.
David hated the relief that came with it, hated that some part of him was still waiting for Max to remember he loved him.
Then Max’s hand moved from his ear to his throat.
David broke.
“Dad.”
Max stopped.
The word hung between them.
David hadn’t meant to say it. He hadn’t planned anything beyond getting Max’s hand off him, but once the word existed he couldn’t pull it back, and suddenly he was exhausted enough not to care. Pain was still moving through him in smaller waves, his throat hurt, his body felt unfamiliar everywhere he touched it, and Max was the person who had always claimed that word whether David gave it freely or not.
So David grabbed for him the second Max released enough of the command to let him move.
“Dad, please.”
His fist closed around Max’s sleeve.
“It hurts.” His voice fractured, another frequency slipping beneath the first. David swallowed against the pain and pulled Max closer. “Dad, make it stop. Please help me.”
Max crouched.
Relief hit David so hard his eyes closed.
For one second he thought he’d finally reached him.
Max’s hand settled against his side.
David leaned toward it.
Then Max’s thumb moved over the scales.
Not comforting.
Testing.
He pressed gently along one edge, watching the way it shifted beneath the light.
“Fascinating.”
David opened his eyes.
Max wasn’t looking at him.
He was looking at the scales.
David’s fingers slowly loosened from his sleeve.
Whatever had made him reach for that word disappeared so completely that David knew, even then, he would never find it again.
Max continued examining the patch, apparently unaware that anything important had happened. “They’re fully integrated into the skin. Your regeneration seems to be treating them as native tissue now.”
David stared at the side of his face.
He didn’t call him Dad again.
The transformation went on.
Later, David would have trouble remembering exactly how long. Pain distorted time until there was only the floor beneath him and the next thing his body decided to change. Sometimes he managed to stand, only to fold over the table when his ribs seized again. Sometimes he crawled because getting his feet underneath him required more coordination than he had left. Once he made it halfway toward the doorway before another wave hit his spine and dropped him so hard his chin struck the floor.
Max watched all of it.
At some point he retrieved a notebook.
The scratch of the pen became one more sound David couldn’t quite ignore.
“What does the pain feel like now?” Max asked while David lay curled on his side, one arm wrapped around his ribs.
“Fuck you.”
“Sharp? Burning? Pressure?”
“Fuck you.”
“Has the auditory change stabilized?”
David opened one eye. “I think ninety percent of what I’m saying is the word fuck and somehow you’re still not getting the fucking message.”
Max wrote something down.
David laughed weakly. “Did you fucking write that?”
Max did not answer.
“Unbelievable.”
The scales eventually stopped emerging.
David didn’t trust them.
He lay still for several minutes after the last wave passed, waiting for another patch to split his skin open, but nothing happened. When he finally touched his side again, he was careful without consciously deciding to be, fingers following the direction the scales lay rather than catching beneath them.
Smooth.
His.
The thought frightened him almost as much as everything else.
Max moved closer.
David’s hand snapped away from his side.
“I want to examine your throat.”
“No.”
“David, if the vocal changes are complete-”
“No.”
Max reached.
David’s body tensed.
The hand came closer.
David remembered fingers against his jaw and ears, Max’s thumb moving over the scales while David begged him to help. He remembered the chair holding him in place because Max’s voice had told his body that obedience mattered more than terror.
Something shifted beneath David’s own voice.
He felt it this time.
Not another involuntary fracture.
A place.
A note underneath the note.
Max’s fingers were inches from his throat.
David reached for it.
“Stop.”
Max froze.
Not hesitated.
Not reconsidered.
Froze.
His hand remained suspended in the air.
David stared at it.
Then at Max’s face.
Max’s eyes moved.
Nothing else did.
For several seconds David didn’t breathe.
“Move your hand.”
Max’s arm dropped to his side.
David’s mouth parted.
Max looked down at his own hand.
David pushed himself slowly upright against the table.
His legs shook beneath him, but he didn’t care.
“Stay there.”
Max went still again.
Something wild and almost hysterical rose in David’s chest.
He laughed.
The sound came out strange, layered at the edges, but for the first time all night the wrongness didn’t frighten him.
“Holy shit.”
Max’s jaw tightened.
David could hear his heartbeat speed up.
“You can’t fucking touch me.”
The satisfaction lasted exactly until Max’s expression changed.
Not fear.
Not anger.
Pride.
“There you are,” Max said when David’s concentration slipped enough to loosen the command.
David’s smile vanished.
Max looked at him the way he’d looked at every new scale, every changed tooth, every impossible note in his voice. “My son.”
David felt suddenly, profoundly tired.
Max could call him that forever if he wanted.
It wasn’t the same as David calling him Dad.
Not anymore.
David looked down at himself instead. Blood had dried across skin that was already whole beneath it. His shirt was destroyed. Iridescence moved along his ribs when he breathed, blue becoming green becoming violet and almost black in the lamplight.
Beautiful.
The thought came uninvited.
David hated it.
Then he hated Max for making him hate it.
“You wanted to know what happened,” David said, his voice rough but steadier now. “Now you know.”
“There may still be additional changes.”
“Then I’ll find them.”
“You don’t know what to look for.”
David looked at him. “Neither did you.”
Max’s mouth tightened.
That almost made David smile.
“You should remain here tonight,” Max said. “Until we’re certain you’re stable.”
David looked around the room: the ruined chair, the scales he’d torn from himself scattered across the floor, the shattered syringe, the notebook filled with observations about a body Max had never asked permission to change. There was blood everywhere, most of it his, dried dark across the floor and smeared over his chest and throat even though every wound beneath it had already healed. The evidence of what he’d done to himself remained after his body had erased the injuries, and somehow that made the room feel even more obscene.
Then he looked at Max. “No.”
“David.”
“No.” There was no magic in the word this time, no strange second note beneath it forcing Max’s body into obedience, and David found that he preferred it that way. He pushed away from the table, nearly lost his balance when his legs failed to cooperate, and caught himself before Max could reach for him. “Don’t.”
Max’s hand stopped halfway between them.
David watched it until Max lowered it.
Every movement felt wrong when David started toward the door. His ruined shirt dragged across scales that hadn’t existed a few hours ago, his tongue kept finding unfamiliar edges behind his lips, and his throat ached despite having completely healed from the wounds he’d torn into it with his own hands. Somewhere beyond the walls, the ocean kept moving against the cliffs, and something inside David kept answering it in a language he didn’t understand.
“David.” Max’s voice followed him across the room. “There may still be further changes.”
David stopped in the doorway, one bloody hand curling around the frame.
For a moment Max might have mistaken the pause for uncertainty. David looked back at the man standing among the scattered pieces of him, beside the notebook documenting every scream and every change, and remembered his own fist twisted desperately into Max’s sleeve.
Dad, please. It hurts. Dad, make it stop. Please help me.
Max had touched the scales instead.
“Then I guess I’ll find out.”
He walked away.
Max would call him son again. David knew that with the same certainty he knew Max would keep the notebook, keep the observations, keep telling himself that curiosity and creation gave him some right to what he’d done. He would call David my son as though the words still described something shared between them.
David couldn’t stop him.
But Max had already heard the last Dad he would ever get.