Chapter Text
With all the Teeth
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There is no god, // so I move my own heaven.
— Andrés Cerpa, from 'Relapse'
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Chapter 1
The day was around him like any other. Warm light splatters in through the kitchen and warms Sam’s hands as he stirs his tea methodically.
Lost in the monotonicity, the clinking of the spoon against delicate china begins to make his skin itch, fighting against the urge to upend it and send pieces everywhere.
But if he were to shatter something in the emptiness, he would still struggle to not follow it with a flinch. It would feel good initially, the brutality in a little rampage, in messing things up on the outside because things on the inside were too sharp to feel.
But after each outburst, Sam knows he could still end up cowering into something hushed tight and trembling. Old habits die hard. Or they never die. They fossilize, grow formidable and permanent. Something that history and force sculpted until it sat on a shelf, residing in an empty home. Still heavy enough to bludgeon, sharp enough to wound.
Sam swallows solemnly and sits slumped over impolitely, a small rebellion. Just like the dirt under his nails, the screams he wants to wail out on quiet nights; muffled only by his own inability, resorting to holding clumps of flowers and green over his mouth like a muzzle.
He likes to sink his nails into the side of his cheeks and squeeze inwards like the prongs of a venus flytrap closing around a cricket. That slow, emotionless dread of watching something doomed be swallowed up, but also the excitement, and the shame. Because even as it repulsed him, Sam wanted to see it.
Sometimes he could press hard enough that it would embed nice little red parentheses all into his cheeks, a badge for how he could hurt himself good enough. And then he would be ambushed by the memory of his mother, of her hands around his face, squeezing and leaning down into his child-space to hiss, You know what you did.
Sam remembers the time he snuck a caramel candy from a classmate's coat pocket. And not even a petty theft. It had fallen clean through a snag in the bottom of the pocket and tumbled out like sugared destiny right in front of him. He hoarded it away in the side of his sneaker and come evening he popped it in his mouth to suck on happily, the secret of it making it all the sweeter. She found him like that, sitting at the bottom of the stairs with a small, private smile. She seemed to sense his contentment, his ease and freedom like floating in the ocean with the smallest knick of a papercut hidden beneath a sleeve. Her shark-like dispassion sensing the beacon and taking a bite before asking, wanting to know what tastes so damn good, and what has his sinful self done to deserve it.
She had clamped down on his cheeks that evening and squeezed the candy out of his slobbery mouth until it hit the wood floor. It had skittered away like a damp, sticky beetle. She hadn’t yelled, that wasn’t her style. She had leaned in very close and scratched away the tears pilling down the soreness of his face. And that’s why! That’s exactly why we don’t let you down until food is on the table. Otherwise you spoil your appetite with your impudence and greed! What a waste.
Sam had wanted to plead his case, blubber a bit and beg the inconsequence of such a small piece of sweetness. But he knew even back then, as a very young thing, that she didn’t want to hear it. Wouldn’t listen even if it was true and he should be absolved. She didn’t care, in her eyes, which were God’s eyes, he was guilty.
But Sam wasn’t ever certain whether it was merely his mistakes and transgressions against God which denoted his sin. What if it was his inherent nature that was unforgivable?
Even so, this quiet, nothingness of a morning tempts Sam like always.
He still wants to break things, but remains too tremulously apprehensive to interfere with the ghostlike cage the cottage is.
Even after all the years, the loneliness still anchored in him like a churning chasm. It lay beneath everything, especially the anger.
But there was nothing that felt safe to tamper with. Not when the punishment and the cleanup would have to be delivered by his own hand. The dustpan and bruises would have to be of his own accord because there was no one else.
He was getting closer to ruining some plates, tearing up a bed sheet or two. Something. Something that isn’t his own blood and grime and stewing, circulous thoughts. The way his mind wove around and around reminds him of this one picture he saw in the back of an art textbook.
Back in those shiny days, before his body betrayed him and got him locked all the way up, he could go to the schoolhouse with the small cluster of children from the nearby village. Town kids went to the fancier, more prestigious private school a 40 minute drive away.
Back then he could still go and gorge on books and play in paint and learn things with a voraciousness that was daunting to his teachers. The other kids thought he was peculiar at best, and gross and worthy of ostracization at worst. But even with the pressure of not sabotaging everything with his lack of social skills, school was some of the only happy times of his childhood, aside from when he was being babysat.
And still, the picture from the assignment that day still sticks in his mind like a leech, teeth sunk in deep.
The picture of the staircase featured grim, gray stones lining the narrow walls, and matching ones for the stairs. In the painting, it was lit by flickering torches planted periodically on the walls whilst following the spiral down. It was a barren, bleak sort of scene.
The task had been to imagine where the stairs led to. It could be anywhere, no matter how fantastical or impossible. Some kids thought of magical meadows. An underground aquarium. A pet shop spanning ceiling to floor with beasts from storybooks and mythology.
Sam couldn’t explain it at the time, but the whole thing made him nearly nauseous. Where could it lead? All the way down, into the near darkness, into the unknown?
He ended up just writing a quick paragraph about how it led home. How miraculously and reassuringly it led him right back home. But he didn’t disclose how the home he was envisioning wasn’t the secluded, cottage style dwelling he’d known all his life. The house he shared with strangers, the parents who looked at him like something contaminated that they keep procrastinating tossing out for good.
No, he had pictured that steep, harrowing descent down the enigmatic dungeon stairs led to salvation, led to home. But he couldn’t imagine what that would be like, what it would encompass. If it would hold him tight and snug forever. So he just imagined the word HOME in a dreamy font, like the one they sometimes use for the chapter titles in the books he loves but wasn’t allowed to read. He imagines HOME being very warm, but a comforting heat, swaddled and surrendering. He would hit the bottom stair and reach it. He would finally know it.
He wanted to reach the bottom, he was so tired of being alone. The loneliness of his condition. The wretched curse of what he is hangs around him like a shroud. Has been hanging for so much longer than when everyone vanished, since long before it seemed like he was stranded in his own time loop. The only measure of days slipping away with the sun each night were the different patterns dirt and dust made. The animals and their small milestones and tragedies. The seasons creeping up like a sneeze in your chest, until all at once, it explodes all around you.
Sam raises his spoon to chuck at the cabinet across the kitchen but then brings it back down mechanically.
And again he was back where his mind always took him. There was only ever him around to clean it up, to mend up any scrapes. To rot in the echoing silence that engulfs familiar corners, sunken in furniture, worn out ground from pacing the same course, a rocking horse off its rocker. Neigh neigh, Sam hums in tempo with the stirring. Nonsensical and detached, the flowers on the wallpaper looking thornier by the minute as he falls into the pattern for an eternity. That’s all he has, this eternity in this crypt that has been curated by his captors.
Time was everywhere, there was nothing but time. But consecutively, there wasn’t enough time to go too crazy, so Sam tries to hold tight.
And then-
Sam's life changes in an instant. He’s falling into the wallpaper in one moment, and the next, there’s an Alpha in the kitchen. He’s incredibly tall to Sam, who is small regardless, but especially now as he’s curled up in the chair. The man is silent and somber. The staggering presence of him makes Sam want to bolt immediately but he feels cemented in place.
They lock eyes in a brutal, heavy moment. The first eyes Sam has seen in so long; it burns. It hurts in his chest in a physical clench. It was the fear, the shock of it all, but also something else. The man smelled unspeakable. Sam literally didn’t have the words for it, it was unparalleled. He had been sequestered away and turned prisoner before he truly presented, so he has never encountered the full force of an Alpha like this, only in traces off of his parent’s coats. He feels as if he’s drowning in it, yearning to take greedy pulls of it.
Sam lowers his spoon before taking a delayed gasping, gulp. Even with the table between them and the stink of stress and filth permeating the room, Sam could detect the Alpha musk like it was right before him, as if it was sinking inside him.
It was as shocking as being dunked lungs first into frigid depths. A shaking hand involuntarily leapt up to clutch at his throat as a soundless, trembling whine whimpers out into the peripherals of this revelation. He has never been around someone who smells so strongly of virility and power. There’s a wriggling vine in Sam’s belly and he shifts anxiously on his seat, putting his feet down onto the floor. He brings his hands up to cup over his nose, trying to dilute the intensity of the hold this dangerous man was unfurling over him.
The Alpha was broad and intimidating, but not angry, despite the power wafting off him in great invisible sheets. But he also didn’t look apologetic or abashed. He looks shameless and in control, which panics Sam worse than if he had been frazzled and violent from the start. All his life he had heard of what gets done to sinners like him. The violence their bodies endured, the violence their bodies wrought simply by pumping blood and existing.
Sam’s shaking has progressed to full body convulsions as another clatter came from the living room. The strange man has a quizzical look in his eyes as he seems to bodily scope out the room without taking his eyes off of Sam. He readjusts the gun in his hand, and keeps it pointed at the quivering Omega in the chair. But it appears without true intent, more lofting it steady like a cat keeping a mouse under its paw, rather than opening its jaws for the kill.
He raises his brows almost casually in greeting as a stouter Beta man gracelessly stumbles in through the kitchen archway. He seems out of breath, and contrite. Maybe if not for the intrusion, then for his apparent lack of physical fortitude while committing the crime.
Sam’s mind was a skipping track, and his throat rattled, rusty and sharp from disuse, as angry, nervous yelpings made hoarse impersonations of Omegan distress from where he perches frozen. He feels like a fool, like every cruel caricature of a pathetic, bitch damsel his father ever painted in his tirades. He feels like the fainting, gullible flower ready to be plucked and pressed into petal dust. You’re walking sin. Sin incarnate, the doom of sacrifice for real lordly connection and divine truth. You will bring plunderers and murderers to our doorstep because they smell your temptation and treachery from leagues below and come hounding to lick you to the bone.
“Did you check upstairs?” The Alpha murmurs, a deep voice and a hand that holds the gun pointed straight. The Beta had no gun, but instead a stained sort of club, which he grasped clumsily and with an air of distaste.
“Not yet,” the Beta replies, staring at Sam and twisting his mouth sympathetically, or maybe in revulsion. Sam felt like he was on the verge of urinating all over himself from fright. A strange sort of hissing, like a punctured tire, filled the room, as fear reeked it up further. He realizes the petrified disruptions were all trembling out of him. A record player on the fritz, needle jumping and haywire, with every beat a pulse of distress.
“Charlie,” the Alpha snaps, and takes his eyes off Sam for the first time since careening into the kitchen. The other man, Charlie, smells too, but it’s not even comparable to the overwhelm and daze the Alpha incurs. The Beta smells mild and cleanish and has a full face and a patchy beard. He was broad shouldered too, but significantly shorter than his companion.
“I know we had a whole plan, but come on! We’ve been watching this kid for days. We know it's clear. He’s all alone,” the other man says, half an attempt at soothing, and half exhaustion leaking out.
Sam’s trembling reaches a shameful crescendo as he spills his bladder onto the kitchen tiles and covers his face further in his hands. The men smell so strongly and the day has been so irrevocably upended by unprecedented horrors. Sam was as scared as he was indignant. Interrupting my breakfast, spoiling my everyday’s everydayness. As numbing and tormenting as the emptiness had been, it was safer than the fear.
Sam was warm in all the worst ways now. His hidden face flaming red and his baggy pants sodden and shameful. But Sam sniffs and tries to let out a hiccupy growl even as he hides. Serves them right. If they want anything else from me, first they have to deal with my mess.
The Alpha didn’t look disgusted, but his unreadable expression and unphased demeanor put Sam on edge again. The Beta has his nose wrinkled and eyes averted, like it was some leak or car crash he was trying to give the dignity of not gawking at.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the Beta says in a low, calm voice. It was all fake, syrupy sweetness, and it sent Sam’s spine straight and teeth bared instantly. Eyes creeping over his fingers to glare blurrily at them. Anyone who’s said that has hurt me, they’re getting ready to draw blood. Without deliberating further than resorting to his base instincts, Sam reaches quickly and chucks the closest blunt object at the two men. The sugar saucer hits the wall behind their heads and sends grains scattering out like fireworks. Sam uses the diversion to make a break for the front door.