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I.
Barney had known what was waiting for him when he signed on. He’d gone off to France with a gun in his hand, and he’d jeered at the conchies like everyone else. He was beginning to regret that, actually. He could see their point entirely now. It was one thing killing with a gun. He could steel himself against the recoil, the sight of a bullet tearing through flesh. He could barely see the aftermath, most battles, and in any case it was all for King and country.
Then King and country had gone and grafted these bloody things onto him, all for the greater good, and if experimenting on their own men could be justified away with that canard, perhaps Barney had been a bit too cavalier in rushing off to shoot the Krauts. And beyond all that, the killing had become harder to stomach, and Barney couldn’t even claim it was an awakening of conscience. No, it was the new additions. Shooting a man with your own gun, that you yourself had pulled the trigger on, that was one thing. A shadowy mass emerging from your chest to skewer a man right through, that was something else entirely. And Barney could feel every inch of it, the blood and guts and bones against the thing that was not of him but had become part of him, the satisfaction it felt when it sunk its claws into flesh.
No, he didn’t like it one bit. The worst part was the knowing that even if he weren’t being forced into battle after battle, prodded forward by the same scientists (warlocks?) who’d grafted the tentacles onto him, he might still be killing people. It wanted blood, and Barney hadn’t yet found a way to deny it. He was perversely grateful that his commanders had set him against an enemy he could kill with no remorse. (He wasn’t quite managing the ‘no remorse’, but that was a failure on his part, he could tell himself.) On his worst nights, Barney imagined going home and feeling the bloodlust rise up in his throat at a pub, on the streets, with Max. He couldn’t live with himself if -
No need to think about it. With any luck, this bloody war would kill him and he wouldn’t have to worry about it any longer.
When they’d been thrown unceremoniously back into their hospital room cum prison cell after their first battle, Barney had turned to Max and asked, “Did you feel it too?”, terrified that the answer would be no, that Barney was alone in his horrible desire to tear men limb from limb. But Max had whispered “Yes,” not even having to ask what it was, and Barney was once again overcome with gratitude that he wasn’t alone in this.
II.
The war ended, and Barney and Max were thrown out once again and then scooped up by someone who hated the government sorcerers (Barney still wasn’t sure what to call them, aside from ‘those bastards who’d ruined his life’) almost as much as Barney and Max did. Maybe Barney should have been more wary of another man with magic making him an offer, but Randolph’s hatred was convincing and it wasn’t like Barney had anyone to go home to. This way he had a room and the potential of controlling the thing inside him, and the wages didn’t hurt.
When Randolph showed them around the house, he offered Max and Barney a single room. He did it casually, with the option of a second should they so desire, and Barney reframed a few things about their employer in his mind.
They took the room together. Two beds for plausible deniability, empty floor between them to allow them to be pushed together. They kept them separate most nights now, neither of them wanting to hit the other during the nightmares.
It was six days into their freedom when Barney woke up to a tearing in his chest. His tentacles were whistling through the air, their hideous coldness seeping into his veins, and – oh God – Max was still asleep, inches from their arcs through the air.
Barney tried to scream, his voice still hoarse from sleep. He tried to run, but they didn’t want him to. A klaxon was sounding in the recesses of his mind, warning that there was an enemy. He could still see his dream in his mind’s eye, the German sniper who’d nearly killed him several months back.
Barney took a breath, remembering what Randolph had told them, and sent his focus down into his chest. He was safe, he didn’t need to protect himself, he wanted them to retreat. They were angry at that last part – and it would never stop being damned strange, arguing with a part of himself. He pictured them growing smaller, folding neatly into the cavern of his chest, and steadfastly shoved down the panic that had begun to well up in his throat. It wasn’t until he’d found himself again, tentacles safely tucked away, that Barney noticed Max had woken up. He was crouched beside his bed, hand reaching for the knife Barney knew he kept in his nightstand.
“Bad dream?” Max asked, uncurling from his crouch, his hand drifting back to his side.
“You had it worse than me, I think.” Barney sunk back down onto his mattress, fighting back exhaustion. “I could have hurt you.”
Max shrugged. “I can hold my own.”
“You were sleeping!”
“Bet you anything my own beastie would have woken up if it came to that.” Max grinned, no humor in it. “And tomorrow night it could be me going crazy in my sleep and you running. I say we take it as the price of survival.”
“Randolph did say it would get better,” Barney murmured. He’d been clinging to that like a lifeline – Randolph said the urges would grow less overwhelming, Randolph said they could learn to control it, Randolph said their lives weren’t over. “If I hurt you...”
“Let’s not pretend you’d win that fight.” Max’s grin was genuine that time.
During his next nightmare, Max tore down the door before he woke up, not to mention the damage to the beds. Randolph put a heavy bar on the door, and replaced the bedframes with metal ones that they bolted to the floor. The room felt less like home afterwards, but safer. Barney tried to remind himself that this building was safe, that it was nothing like the laboratory they’d left behind. Some nights he succeeded. Other nights he woke up feeling the ghost of shackles on his wrists, and only Max’s touch could remind him where he was. There were worse ways to chase away the night terrors, Barney supposed.
III.
Their weeks at Fetter Lane turned to months, and the cold angry outbursts became less frequent, and Barney began to feel almost normal again. Well, not quite normal, given his new job. More of a vocation, really. What else was one meant to do when life gave one eldritch powers, but put them to use against other eldritch beings?
Randolph had served as their guide to the world they’d been forcibly inducted into. It seemed that in addition to mucking about with soldiers like Barney and Max, the government had torn a rift in the very fabric of the world, letting all sorts of nasty things loose in England. Most of those with the training to combat those nasty things had died in the war (the majority by their own doing, according to Randolph, so Barney couldn’t feel too sorry for them), leaving the Fetter Lane skeleton crew to fend for themselves. Barney hadn’t felt so out of place since his first day at boarding school. Randolph and his partner Sam had a shared jargon and history that Barney and Max couldn’t hope to match, and there was little room for error. Still, it was something to have a purpose in life.
Mostly there were ghosts. Every castle and manor in the country seemed to be infested with the things, and even the seemingly mundane hauntings could and would turn deadly. Some of these, Barney learned, were normal hauntings, ghosts that had been present prior to the great calamity of the war. But the rift had given them more energy to draw off of, made them bolder. Some had been willed into existence, fueled only by residents’ belief that their chapel or hat shop or castle-turned-fine-hotel surely had a dark side. Those were the most dangerous, because they fed off of the fear of those who had inadvertently created them, a self-perpetuating loop of terror and violence.
Barney’s tentacles, they discovered, were part of the same realm where the ghosts resided, and as such could interact with them in a way his more human limbs couldn’t. As the other ways of interacting with the ghosts required supplies or onerous rituals, this came in quite useful. Barney had gained a modicum of control over the tentacles after facing what felt like hundreds of spirits, and Max was a veritable master. They worked together like a well-oiled machine, Sam or Randolph drawing the ghost out while Max or Barney waited to snare it. From there it was a simple matter of a banishment ritual, and holding onto control over the tentacles. Barney no longer feared every time he loosed them that they would consume him, but on some days he came perilously close to losing control. There were endless waves of disasters to fight, and only four of them.
On the worst days, Barney wished more of their fellow experiments had survived. An army of abominations (he used the word fondly) like Max and Barney, all of them setting out to save the unwitting population of England from spectral terrors...even one or two more compatriots would help to soothe the bone-deep weariness that had made a permanent home in Barney’s chest. But even as he daydreamed, the thought of inviting others into the sanctum that Fetter Lane had become terrified Barney. He and Max had never discussed their relationship with Sam and Randolph as such, but they hadn’t needed to. Randolph understood them in the way that like recognized like, and Sam had welcomed them with an easy companionship that left Barney perfectly at ease to, say, hook his ankle around Max’s while they were sharing drinks in the parlor after a hard day’s work.
Any new additions to their unit would ruin that quiet comfort. Not that new additions were anything more than an idle thought. Barney and Max were the only two left of their cohort, and it took a special sort of person to join the Green Men. So Barney pressed on, ignoring the chill that spread through him after too many exorcisms in a row and the dreams that followed any day he used his powers. It was like exercise, he told himself, with no idea if that was true. The pain was a sign of strengthening muscles.
Then came Bletchley Manor, and their well-oiled team nearly came apart at the seams. The house felt wrong as soon as Barney stepped through the door. It had a coldness at its heart that reached out for Barney, sinking its hooks into his chest. He was just tired, he told himself. This was nothing they hadn’t done before.
“It’s in the attic.” Barney hadn’t meant to say that. He wasn’t sure how he knew, just that going up to the attic filled him with dread – a sure sign in this line of work that it was the right thing to do.
Sam nodded. “Lead the way.”
There were no lights, of course. Heaven forbid a haunted manor possess any modern conveniences. Sam and Barney lit candles, but a cold gust of wind from the top of the stairs extinguished them each time they were lit. Darkness it was, then.
With each step up, the dread grew, until Barney could feel a physical pain in his chest so incapacitating that he wasn’t sure he could keep going. Then, it wasn’t him taking the steps anymore. Something was inside him, something cold and clammy and old, hooked deep within his ribcage. The thing led him up the stairs, and to a corner that was somehow even darker than the rest of the room. It lifted him off the ground and unfurled his tentacles, and spoke in a growling voice that tore at his throat like a winter wind.
“This one is mine.”
Thank the Lord Sam was with him. He reached into his pocket, never breaking eye contact with Barney. “You don’t want him. He’s a horrid driver, and he’ll steal all your whiskey.”
“He has been marked. He belongs to me.” A tentacle swung out at Sam, who only narrowly managed to dodge it. Not thrown off balance for long, Sam hurled a handful of salt at Barney. It sizzled against his skin, and through the pain, Barney had the thought that this must be what snails feel like when set upon by a salt-wielding gardener. He might have laughed had his throat not been frozen by the thing controlling him.
Sam shouted something that writhed in the air, dancing away from Barney’s comprehension. The icy hooks tore out of him, and he fell to the ground, knees cracking against the wood.
“What the hell was that?” Sam muttered, kneeling down beside Barney.
“It went right for me,” Barney said. “For these bloody things inside me.” He gestured to his chest.
“Well, it’s gone, in any case.” Now that the danger had passed, Sam had gone pale as a sheet, and his hands were shaking. “We’ll ask Randolph about protection wards.”
It wasn’t until he was lying in bed that night that it occurred to Barney to wonder what he’d been marked for. With his luck, eternal damnation. He resolved not to spend another moment thinking on it, ignoring the unease in his gut.
IV.
It wasn’t so easy to push their beds together any longer, but Barney and Max still made do. There was room for two on a single bed if they kept close, and Barney never minded keeping close. Barney couldn’t bring himself to share a bed for the night with Max, given the nightmares that still haunted both of them and the potential consequences of those nightmares for anyone close by, but that still left plenty of time to spend together.
Max took one look at Barney when he returned from Bletchley Manor, pale and ground down by the day, and pulled him into bed.
“You look horrible.”
“Just what a man wants to hear,” Barney laughed.
Max kissed him. “You know what I mean.”
And Barney did. He leaned back, letting Max kiss the worry from his face. Being with Max was easy, in a way Barney hadn’t experienced before him, especially here in their room, away from the rest of the world. They fit together like two parts of a whole, and they knew all of each other’s jagged edges and soft spots. Max slid his hand down Barney’s side, slow and gentle, and every inch of Max’s touch sent shivers running through him.
“I’m useless tonight,” Barney warned, the words coming out breathy.
“That’s all right.” Max nipped at Barney’s nipple as he slid his hand over Barney’s cock. “I can handle this for the night, darling.” The endearment really should have sounded outrageous, coming from him, but it never did.
It wasn’t going to take long tonight, Barney could tell. With anyone else, he’d be embarrassed about his lack of stamina. He shut his eyes, giving over to the sensations.
As he spent, something in his chest seized. Then his tentacles were slamming against the bedframe, without any conscious release, and Max was on the floor.
“Move,” Barney growled as he tried without success to restrain himself. “I don’t know what’s – I can’t – ”
“Take a breath,” Max said, already back against the far wall. “You’re all right. Just breathe.”
Then the door opened. Lord, just what Barney needed, more witnesses. Randolph and Sam ran into the room, both in their dressing gowns and ready to fight whatever had set Barney off. Randolph caught on first.
“Are you all right now, Barnaby?”
The embarrassment had shocked Barney out of whatever had caught hold of him. He curled his tentacles back in on themselves. “Quite all right, thank you.”
By now, Sam too had noticed Barney’s and Max’s state of disarray. “Rough day, I suppose. Well. We’ll leave you to it, won’t we?”
Barney buried his face in the pillows instead of watching them leave. The door clicked behind them, and then he felt Max’s hand on his back.
“They’ve seen you doing worse,” Max said.
“Don’t speak to me. I’m going to lie here until I die of shame.”
It had been the house. Even after he’d left it, Barney could feel something fraying inside of him. He fell asleep that night in Max’s arms, no matter how much he insisted that Max should distance himself for his own safety, and woke up without the pain in his chest that had been haunting him since his encounter. And thank the Lord for that – he didn’t want to live in a world where he couldn’t fuck his lover without staying constantly on guard.
+1.
Ever since the incident, Barney had been practicing. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how close he’d come to running Max through, and what was more, he couldn’t help but think of what he might do with his tentacles were he able to control them more reliably. Not just the lack of danger, but the potential for pleasure. He put his odds at half and half that Max would want nothing to do with the idea that hadn’t left him alone for weeks, but the control would help him regardless.
It was more difficult than he’d expected to work up the nerve to ask Max. Bringing this thing that had been done to them into their relationship...Barney wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. On the other hand, it was part of them already, woven into them with unbreakable bonds. The least they could do was make use of it. It took longer than it should have, but one night Barney’s courage coincided with a day of light work.
“I have an idea.” Barney leaned in closer to Max, taking a deep breath. “I’d thought...perhaps there are more uses for our extra appendages.”
Max raised an eyebrow, looking rather intrigued. “You’ll have to promise not to stab me.”
“I’ve been practicing, and I’m nearly confident there will be no stabbing.”
Max kissed him. “You can do anything you like to me.”
“Aside from stabbing, I assume.” Barney focused with everything he had, unfurling a tentacle to brush against Max’s face. Max turned to press a kiss to its tip, and oh, Barney could feel it. He hadn’t been sure what to expect, but Max’s lips were warm against him. Max parted his lips, sucking on the tentacle, and Barney moaned.
He slid another tentacle down Max’s side, curving around his arse and then slipping to toy at his hole. Max’s face went red, and he ground back into the tentacle.
It slid in without any resistance. “Not too cold?” Barney asked.
“No,” Max said, breathless. “Don’t stop!”
Keeping the limbs moving was easier than Barney had feared. Keeping his composure was much harder. He could feel the sensations on every tentacle as if they were his cock, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he would last. Barney wrapped a hand around Max’s cock (he wasn’t sure he could bear the pleasure of another tentacle) and began to stroke, movements sloppy.
Max didn’t seem to mind. He arched up into Barney’s hand, begging half-incoherent for more, harder, faster. Barney thrust a tentacle deeper into his arse, dragging it out slowly, and that was all it took to push Max over the edge. And thank the Lord for that, because Barney couldn’t have borne the embarrassment if he’d come untouched before getting Max off, and he wasn’t going to last long at all. Max sucked hard on the tentacle in his mouth, and that was it, Barney spending over Max’s stomach.
He fell forward onto the bed, face-down beside Max. “No stabbing,” he murmured, the words a bit slurred.
“We’re doing that again. Later, of course,” Max added, seeing the expression on Barney’s face. “Can’t believe we’ve gone this long without trying it.”
“Rather takes it out of you,” Barney said. “Next time, you’re fucking me.”
Max grinned. “I look forward to it.”