Work Text:
I’m unsure whether it’s raining or if the sky is always this wet in his part of the city. The moon is full, smothered by bruised clouds, and everything—cobblestones, roof tiles, the edges of my sleeves—is slick and shining like spilt oil. My lungs are raw, throat burned from running, but my hands don’t shake. I can’t let them. Not yet. They’re tight around the hilt, white-knuckled, steady. The sword is heavy, and the plan is nonsense, but anger feels like reason tonight.
I see him before he sees me—at least, that’s what I tell myself. Dark suit, dark hair, the sort of beauty you’d expect carved from marble for a god’s tomb, not walking the filth of nighttime streets. He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t hide. The kind of arrogance only monsters or royalty have.
I dart from shadow to shadow. My breath fogs, every inhale thick with rotting leaves and the bitter tang of rain on old blood. He pauses beneath a streetlamp, hands clasped behind his back. Not a ripple of tension. No awareness. My heart sours with hatred. I grip the sword so hard my wrist aches.
I lunge. The blade flashes. I’m not fast enough, never was, but I scream as I do it, half battle cry, half denial.
He’s gone. The world twists sideways. Something cold circles my throat, careful but absolute. My feet leave the ground. Light explodes behind my eyes.
A voice, silk and rot:
“Bold. But clumsy.”
My sword hits the cobblestones with a hollow clatter. The rain soaks through my collar. His grip tightens—he holds me one-handed, like I’m a flower stem or a dead mouse, and his face is inches from mine. Red eyes, too bright. I try to spit in his face, but saliva won’t come; my mouth is all ash.
“Did you think,” he murmurs, not quite smiling, “that courage could make up for incompetence? Or is it grief that makes you this foolish?”
His head tilts, studying. I catch the faintest shadow of amusement in the cruel curve of his lips.
I want to scream, to claw at him, but my arms are frozen by fear, or perhaps by something else that’s his doing, something colder than rain. I try to snarl instead. “Fuck you. You’re—”
He hushes me with a finger to my lips, gentle as a lover. His skin is ice.
“Such ugly words. For such a small, breakable creature.” He draws me closer, breathing me in, eyes never leaving mine.
I smell lilies, blood, something sharp and chemical. His gaze flickers down my face—cataloguing flaws, tallying imperfections.
“You wear your hatred like armour, but all I see is flesh. Imperfect, mortal. Weak.” His voice is almost kind, but I feel the malice, the hunger under every syllable.
The street vanishes behind him; there is only Muzan, only that flawless face, the gleam of his nails, the black of his coat like a shadow thrown by the moon itself. His hand slides from my throat to my chin, tilting my face up, and my vision tunnels in around his eyes.
“Look at me,” he commands, and I do. I can’t not.
My anger dies all at once.
There’s nothing left but fear.
He smiles, small and bloodless.
“I could kill you,” he whispers, “but you’re much more interesting like this.”
His fingers slide to my collar, undoing buttons with surgical precision. Rain slips beneath my clothes, cool on my feverish skin. I want to fight. But I can’t move—his presence is all around me, suffocating, inescapable.
“You’ll serve me better this way. A pet, not a pest.”
He forces my mouth open with his thumb, tracing my bottom lip, watching the shiver that races through me with delighted contempt.
“So responsive. Even now. Fear does such wonderful things to the body. Do you feel that? The heat? The shaking? That’s your body betraying you—reminding you of your place beneath me.”
My head is filled with static, the sound of blood rushing, the taste of salt. I try to look away, but he tightens his grip, holding my gaze steady.
“No. You will not hide from me. You’ll see me—see perfection, see eternity, see what you could never become, even in your bravest dreams.”
He presses me against the cold stone of the alley, coat sweeping around us like a closing curtain.
His voice is lower, intimate, made of smoke and winter: “Humans decay. I do not. Everything about you will fade—except for this. This moment. The way you’ll remember my hands. The sound of your heart breaking.”
His nails scrape my thigh, parting my clothes. I want to scream, but the sound is locked in my throat, fear calcified into a hard stone deep inside. My mind floats away for a second, weightless, watching him from somewhere far above. I see the gleam of his smile, the way his pupils dilate as he drinks in my terror.
I am an object. A plaything. A vessel for his cruelty and nothing else.
He leans in, lips brushing my ear.
“You’ll thank me before I’m finished...”
My body shakes—anger, humiliation, the horror of being seen so completely and judged unworthy. The city is gone. The rain is gone. There is only Muzan, perfect and pitiless, and I am nothing at all.
My skin is ice, soaked through, pressed so hard to the stone that I know I’ll bruise. His hands are everywhere—gloved fingers tracing my throat, my ribs, my trembling stomach. I can’t feel where he’s touching and where the rain begins. His scent—lilies gone rotten, something ancient and sickening—floods my mouth and nose until I can’t breathe.
He moves with slow, surgical care, unwrapping me inch by inch, peeling away the last barriers between us. I flinch as my clothing tears, shame prickling hot through the fog of fear. His lips brush my jaw, his tongue cold and inhumanly smooth as it glides along the bone.
He laughs—a soft, dead thing, nothing like a human laugh at all.
“Look at how you shake for me. Still, you try to hide your face.” His hands tighten at my jaw, forcing my head up, making me stare straight into those impossible eyes. “No hiding. No mercy. Not for you.”
His mouth is against mine before I can gasp—claiming, devouring, no pretence of tenderness. His tongue invades, cold and strange, filling my mouth until I choke on it. I try to twist away, but his grip is absolute. He breaks the kiss only when I’m gasping for air, my lungs screaming.
He licks the tears from my cheek, a cold mockery of comfort.
“Imperfection,” he murmurs. “So obvious. So human.” He trails his nails down my body, catching on every quiver and shudder. “Your terror is honest, at least. That’s rare. Most of you try to bargain, to beg. I like you better this way. Broken and silent.”
I feel myself floating, eyes blurring at the edges. I’m not here, not really. Reality narrows to just his hands, his voice, the distant echo of my own heartbeat pounding too fast. I hear myself whimper—small, animal.
He purrs, pleased.
“There it is. The sound of surrender. Don’t fight it. You were never meant to be anything else.”
He forces my thighs apart, gloved hand cold and merciless as steel. My muscles won’t answer. My brain pleads, run, but my body has given up, limp, useless in his grasp.
He leans in, his breath whispering over my skin. “If you survive this, you’ll remember me forever. You’ll dream of this—of being chosen, even for a moment, by something eternal.”
His coat remains, a shroud of darkness that blots out the world. Gone. Even my name is lost. There is only Muzan—his mouth, his hands, his cruel voice whispering about eternity and perfection as he takes everything I am and grinds it beneath his heel.
I want to beg. I want to disappear. My body shakes with cold and shame, every nerve screaming, my mind splintered under the weight of it. Everything that makes me human is stripped away in an instant as he presses inside me.
While he moves, his words echo inside me, endless: “You’re nothing. You’re mine. Remember this.”
His movements grow harder, relentless, until I feel him seize and shudder above me—a sudden rush of cold, monstrous satisfaction that stains me.
There’s nothing left to fight. I am emptied, used, discarded, the rain already washing away the blood and the shame as he leaves me in the dark.
His last words hang in the air, soft as a promise: “I’ll return when I wish. Don’t disappoint me, little failure.”
I stay there, unable to move, staring at the gleaming cobblestones, the city silent but for the rain.
The horror lingers, thick and inescapable. The violation deep inside—that final, awful claiming, cold and alien.
I’m nobody, nothing—just a vessel for the marks he’s left behind.