A/N: I know I'm in the middle of "Loving You Slowly," but I had this one-shot idea at work today and wanted to write it while it was fresh. Consider it a present for waiting so long for the start of Day Six in my ongoing story. This is more angsty than my usual stuff, but once it was in my head I needed it out. It was written quick and rough in just a few hours, but has since been edited some. Enough, I hope!
"Hey, Max." Fang's tenor voice echoed down the hallway, punctuated by the slam of the apartment door swinging shut. Max took a calming breath and stepped out of the kitchen. She watched Fang hook his keys up on the wall and drop his leather messenger bag underneath the console table, like usual. He turned and caught her eye, lips twisting infinitesimally in a quiet smirk.
"I was hoping you'd get home early."
Fang loped towards her with gleaming eyes. "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah. I've got a night out planned with Nudge and Ange, but I wanted to catch you first." She pulled the string-bound manila folder from behind her back and Fang stopped. He glanced at the Itex logo on the envelope questioningly. "Dave called. Said they found something that we- you might be interested in." Max pursed her lips, watching Fang carefully. His features quickly rearranged into their usual poker face, interrupted by the uncertainty in his gaze. Max sighed and pulled her thin lips into what she hoped was an encouraging smile and moved to go sit on the couch. Fang followed, as she knew he would.
"They found this at one of the Itex sites." She fingered the bent edge of the folder before handing it to him and pulling her legs up onto the couch. "Dave said they're only just getting to the files at the Scranton location, even ten years later." She chuckled grimly. "Itex sure left a heckuva lot of dirt to dig through."
Fang's brows creased. "We were never involved with the Scranton location."
Max hesitated. "Well….not directly, anyway." She watched the little muscle between Fang's jaw and his left ear clench and unclench before he unwound the string and slid the sheaf of papers out of their home. Imposing, red-inked words like 'CONFIDENTIAL' and 'PRIORITY' and 'CRITICAL' headed each page. "Dave said he called as soon as he realized what they'd found."
Fang's dark eyes bore into hers. "Did you look?"
Max frowned and shook her head. "I just know that it's for you. That's all."
Fang's nostrils flared but his face remained impassive as he looked back down at the papers in his hands. Max sidled over to sit next to him, thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, watching his deft fingers scan line after line of text in the report.
Max mouthed the few significant details that popped out at her with softly clicking lips and tongue. "Experiment 6508a...uninformed donor...Nadya Walker...pre-natal implantation of avian..." She looked up worriedly at Fang while his finger hovered over his experiment number, the same as the one branded in a barcode under the cleft of his right wing. Her reverent whisper washed over him. "Fang, they're talking about your mom!"
Fang didn't answer, instead flipping to the next page. Both pairs of eyes widened and Max gasped at the explicit images of baby-Fang, blood-crusted face twisted in a silent scream as disembodied latex hands held his tiny wings outstretched, while boy-Fang staring darkly from the bottom of the page, curled into corner of his cage, baring a crooked snarl full of baby teeth and the gaps they left behind. Fang flipped the page and a flurry of newspaper clippings scattered to the floor in front of the couch. Max bent to retrieve them while Fang stared at still more images, headed with the foreboding 'Experiment 6508b - Terminated.' This time, there was a little girl with wispy black curls and fear stamped across her tear-stained face as a headless white coat held her naked, fur-covered body outstretched against a height-marker on the wall.
Max was busy scanning the newspaper clippings as fast as she could read them when Fang whispered beside her, "I had a sister."
Max sat still for a moment, letting his quiet words roll around her brain and merge with the news in front of her, before wrapping one hand around his wrist and turning to look him in the face. He stared blankly down at the documents in his hands and she gingerly placed her stack of clippings on top of them. "It says your mom looked for you. For a long time, it sounds like." She watched Fang's eyes glaze over. He sat still as stone. "And when...when her little girl," Max's throat closed up and she coughed angrily before trying again. "When her daughter went missing, too, she kind of lost it. That was before the ca-" She cleared her throat. "Uh, the car accident."
Fang sat still with closed eyes for what seemed like ages with Max looking on. She didn't need Fang's words to know his mind was being blown right now. When they'd dealt the final blow to Itex 10 years ago, it rattled a lot of skeletons in the closet. Most of the documents concerning the Flock, including their experimental history and their origins, had been unearthed pretty quickly. Fang was the only one who was still missing an actual birth certificate or donor name or anything actually informative. The deconstruction of the Itex infrastructure and excavation of disturbing secrets had been an ongoing process ever since, but the flow of documents concerning the Flock had ceased at least half a decade ago. They'd all but given up. Until Dave called Max that morning, saying he was bringing by something she needed to see.
Max startled when Fang's eyes snapped open with a harsh breath. His long fingers felt around the sheaf of papers and drew out an unmarked DVD in a flimsy clear envelope. He blinked once and turned to Max. "I'm going to watch this."
Max's lips drew back in trepidation. "You sure you want to? You don't know what's on there."
Fang nodded resolutely and stood up. He strode over to the second-hand entertainment center with the 30" TV and the battered DVD player whirred to life. Max's knee bounced frantically in agitation and she stood up, too, inching toward the kitchen. "I'm hungry. Are you hungry? I can throw a frozen pizza in the oven."
Fang grunted, hunched over the uncooperative equipment. "You've got dinner plans."
Max bit her lip and winced. "Oh. Yeah. What about you? Are you hungry? Want pizza?"
Fang's silence was the only answer she got. She pursed her lips thoughtfully and swung around the corner into the kitchen. She stared, unseeing, into the misting freezer for a full minute before shaking her head and pulling out her phone to make a quick call. She grabbed a DiGiorno at the top of the stack and clamped her phone to her ear while wrestling with the cardboard tab. She growled at the shredded tab, box still sealed, when someone picked up on the other end.
"Hey, hey Ange. Yeah, listen, I need a rain check for tonight." She chewed on her tongue and dug her fingernails into the box flaps, nearly dropping the phone when the pizza flew out of the tear and onto the countertop. "What? Oh, no, just….something came up at home. I can't leave." She shoved the pizza in the oven and let the door fall shut. She sighed heavily. "Fang needs me. Yeah, I'll let you know. Kay. Love you. Bye."
She pocketed the phone and took another breath for confidence before venturing back out into the living room. Fang was slumped over on the couch, head in hands, while news clips filled with anguished pleas and unimpassioned reports flickered over their flatscreen.
I just want to find my baby!
The search is ongoing for Nadya Walker's missing child...
She approached the lumpy sofa and looked down at Fang. "I cancelled my thing." He didn't move, so she eased herself down over the arm of the couch to sit next to him.
You remember the Walker case just 3 short years ago, right, Mike? Today, tragic news...
"Hey, you hear me? I'm here." She placed one hand on his shoulder. His muscles were pulled taught across his lean frame. She rubbed her thumb across him soothingly before ambling awkwardly behind him, perching on the back of the couch and pressing her bare feet into his hips.
Another heartbreaking development in the ongoing story of Nadya Walker. After a devastating pileup on the 428...
Max glided her hands across the ridge of Fang's wings, slowly coaxing them to open. Her methodical fingers worked their way through each of his feathers, straightening and cleaning and plucking the stray ones out. She smiled sadly when Fang sighed and let his hands fall between his knees, feeling him beginning to relax beneath her. Her soothing breaths washed over him and he mutely pressed the 'Power' button on the remote. The room rang silent before Fang's haggard breaths and Max's calming ones came into focus.
Fang's lips parted with a sticky click of his thick tongue and he breathed, "Max."
"I'm here. I'm right here." She slid down the back of the couch to sit flush against him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek into the starched black cotton of the collared shirt that he'd worn to work at least 3 times this week.
They sat there like that, just breathing together, until Max's heartbeat matched Fang's beat for beat.
Fang shifted beneath her. "You've gotta go."
Max's face crinkled and she only hugged him tighter, fiercely defending her place by his side. "I'm staying right here."
"You've got that dinner thing."
Max shook her head and slipped from behind him and off the couch, maneuvering herself onto her knees in front of him and looking up into his shell-shocked face. "Didn't you hear me? I cancelled it. I'm all yours."
He blinked and his eyes filled with some sort of desperation and he turned to look her in the face. He blinked again when her soft hand came up to cradle his cheek and her thumb chucked his chin. "I'm here for you, Baby. I'm right here."
Fang's eyes pinched shut and he groaned and all of a sudden he brought his lips crashing down to hers, inhaling her lips and her tongue and claiming her as his own. Max drew up on her knees and Fang pulled her the rest of the way until she was straddling his lap. She gasped as she felt his hands all over her, hungrily groping and seeking out every curve and every dip in her lithe body. He paused and grasped her face, searching her gaze for whatever he had just lost.
Max's heart just about collapsed. The last pieces of Little-Boy-Fang, hiding all this time inside the now-grown man she was perched upon, was just told with absolute certainty that his mommy was gone for good. The last little bit of hope in the unknown, hope for a certain kind of future and latent possibility, had been crushed. Max looked back at him in earnest and reassured him the only way she knew how. "I'm right here, Baby. All night. I'm right here."
Fang's lips drew down in thinly-veiled anguish as he looked at his wife. And then his face crushed against hers again in desperation. Her arms flew up when he yanked her shirt over her head before he bent down to meet the supple flesh of her breasts with his ravenous lips. Max arched and groaned and stared at the ceiling, overwhelmed by Fang's frenzied possession of her body. He hummed softly, mournfully, into her soft bosom, clutching her ribs and nuzzling his face into her flesh. She reached back to unhook her bra and shrugged out of the straps. She slid her thumb beneath Fang's chin to pull the cups off her front and he responded blindly by taking one nipple into his mouth, then the other, pressing her closer to him with one hand between her wings.
Max clutched him around the ears and bent over his unruly mop of hair as he laved and gnawed gently across her pebbling flesh. Fang's harsh breaths washed across her sternum as he kneaded her flesh with his stubbly jaw and his strong nose and his probing lips. Max collected herself as best she could and settled for running her fingers through his hair the way that he liked, over and over with slow, pressing strokes.
Fang's hungry hands were on the move again, grasping at the base of Max's wings and running across her ribs and then pressing insistently against the waist of Max's jeans. He released her breast from his lips with a pop and rested his forehead against her chest, breathing heavily. He ran his thumb under her jeans across the crease of her thigh and she trembled beneath him.
He moaned against her. "I need you."
"I know, Baby. I know. I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
And his lips were on hers again, searching and straining and claiming. He wedged his hands between them, beneath her thighs, and stood up with a grunt, taking her with him. She clamped onto his waist and held herself to him as he shuffled down the hallway.
They were halfway past the kitchen when Max's eyes widened and she slithered out of his grasp with a curse. The oven door was yanked open and Max blinked at the still-frozen pizza. She let out a half-laugh, heart pumping. "I thought I burned it for sure. I didn't even turn the damn thing on."
"Leave it." The plea in Fang's request made Max's heart clench again and she returned to her husband, grabbing his hand in hers and pulling him towards the bedroom.
"C'mon." She shoved open the doorway to their bedroom and pulled him towards the bed. She pushed him down by his shoulders and set to work unbuttoning his shirt while he watched.
When he finally spoke, it was quiet and wavering. "It's not a big deal. I never even knew them."
Max's big brown eyes flashed up to meet his, fire blazing behind them. "Don't you dare. You know it matters. It always mattered."
Fang stared pointedly at Max's left eyebrow, refusing to make eye contact. She watched him with furrowed brows before continuing with his buttons. She leaned forward to kiss the center of his chest before pushing the stiff shirt over his shoulders and extricating his massive wings from the tailored slits.
As soon as his arms were free, he was on her again, pressing his naked torso to hers, shifting so she was lying on the bed and he was hovering over her and they were beginning that undulating dance that started the slow burn that he wanted so desperately to quench his pain.
Max let out a throaty moan and rolled her shoulders to extend her wings beneath her. Fang's sinewy arms ensconced her ribcage to hold her captive as he sucked and licked and kissed and nipped over every inch of exposed flesh. When he reached one puckered nipple, he bit down, eliciting an indignant cry from Max.
"Hey, watchit!" Deep emotional distress be damned, that hurt!
Fang growled. "Fuck Itex. They can all go to hell." He nibbled on her other nipple, more gently this time, before suckling as much of her into his mouth as he could. His ministrations grew desperate as he attempted to inhale the very skin from Max's body. Max writhed beneath him, grasping his shoulders and stroking the base of his wings and feeling her underwear grow damp with her arousal.
With Fang's urgent embrace holding her captive, Max couldn't reach down to undo his fly. She groaned and pushed against his shoulders fruitlessly before locking her thighs around his waist and forcing them up into a seated position with a snap of her wings. Fang barely paused before taking her other breast deep into his hot mouth and Max couldn't help the tremble and the breathy moan that escaped her before she remembered her goal.
Quick fingers slipped the industrial button through its hole and pulled the zipper wide open. At that, Fang sat back to catch his breath, arms still draped around Max's waist as she coaxed his butt off his heels so she could slide his jeans off of it. She managed to wriggle him out of his pants before moving to do the same for herself. Max looked up with a shimmy of her hips and watched Fang carefully as she pulled her jeans off of her legs.
"You're really staying with me?"
"I'm all yours, Baby."
Fang looked far, far away for a moment before his dark eyes met hers and pierced her soul with his anguish. "What if we got away from the school sooner? Before...?" Max's brows drew together as she watched him warily. "What if we actually asked Jeb about our parents, instead of scouring dirty New York for scraps of useless information and wasting all that time?"
The urgency in his eyes made Max wilt, but she couldn't quell the whisper that hissed through her lips. "Stop that." She gripped his face between her hands and stroked his cheekbones with her thumbs. "We were just kids, Fang. Just kids when we got out. We barely won the war at 15. We would've been useless to everyone if we had started earlier." She kissed his chin firmly. "You know that, right?"
Fang gazed down at his wife in wonder before pressing his lips hard, right between her eyes. She sighed under his embrace and reached down to slide his boxer-briefs over his hips. He rose up on his knees and curled over her, shifting out of his last garment with her help before pressing the soft body beneath him into the covers. His chaste lips remembered their hunger in a heartbeat and he pursued her earnestly.
Max was still trying to wrestle her panties over her hips when Fang reached down to help. They got halfway down her thighs before he pressed the throbbing tip of his cock against her restrained entrance. There was a collective pause, hitched breaths in tandem, before Fang eased his impossibly smooth member into Max's core. Max's body melted beneath him in pleasure and he began to rock his hips, thrusting into her fully and wasting no time in quickening his pace.
Max's forehead creased in a mixture of pleasure and pain as Fang pounded into her. Each stroke rubbed mercilessly against her thighs and her nether lips and her clit and her rigid inner walls. His soft growls became grunts and his grunts became increasingly anguished as he fought to merge his body with hers. Max managed to work her underwear off of her legs and spread her knees, inviting Fang to come in further. He jack hammered into her, breaking off their kisses to brace himself over her on his forearms and pinching his eyes shut. He worked on her feverishly.
She nearly cried out at the slow throb of her sex made when he came to an abrupt halt, sheathed inside of her. Max listened to Fang's uneven breathing in a daze. She was lost in the heady heat of her tightness wrapped around Fang's warm cock, smooth and twitching and impaling her in the very best way. She barely noticed when his ragged breaths turned shallow and irregular, catching half-way in his throat, as he held himself tense over her. So when the warm drop fell on the bridge of her nose, she startled.
Her first thought was that Fang was so into it that he was drooling. Which is ridiculous, because surely she would have known by now if Fang had a habit as nasty as that. But it paled in comparison to the ludicrous thought of Fang crying, which she quickly realized was the case. She stared up at him in wonder as he sobbed silently, open-mouthed, foreign moisture soaking his curling eyelashes and running rivulets through his 5 o'clock shadow and pausing at the corners of his parted lips before falling to land on her face.
Max had been forced into many roles in her 26 years, many unasked for. She'd been a thing for far too long before she was ever a child, and a child for a deplorably short period of time before she was a leader and a mother. Then a daughter, and a savior of the world. Eventually, she was a girlfriend, then a fiancée, and now, a wife. Max was who she needed to be, when she needed to be it.
And crushed Little-Boy-Fang, sobbing above her with his softening member still encased safely inside his wife, needed his mommy.
"Shh, Baby, I'm here. I'm right here, Baby." Max reached up to wrap her arms around Fang and pulled him down, feeling his weight crush her satisfyingly against the sheets. She stroked his wings gently and massaged his outstretched calves with her toes and kissed the side of his face, nuzzling into him and breathing the earthy musk of skin and sweat and sex. He clutched her desperately.
She breathed slowly, deeply, and when he began to calm, he breathed with her. She nuzzled gently against the side of his face and peppered him with light kisses. Her thumbs drew soothing circles underneath the joints of his wings.
Just when Max was wondering if Fang had fallen asleep, he propped himself back up and gave a mighty, phlegmy sniff and went right back to what he was doing.
"Fang? Fang what..."
Max sighed as his soft dick slipped from her and flopped ridiculously between her thighs. Fang just kept pumping. He looked at her imploringly and choked out in a hoarse whisper, "I need you." Max captured his rocking lips in hers and reached down to stroke him in time with his thrusts. As soon as he had a semi, she lifted her hips to take him in again. Fang renewed his efforts and Max moaned. She could feel him hardening inside of her, lengthening and thickening and filling her to the brim.
Fang worked away, pushing himself to the hilt again and again, tightening balls slapping against Max's wet folds. He pulled her leg up to his shoulder and grasped her knee for leverage as he pumped in and out of her, anxiously striving to release his anguish together with his seed. She gasped and groaned and her breaths began to come in short little pants that gave way to a quiet keening. It only stoked his fire.
His fingertips feathered across her bouncing breasts as they rutted, feeling the sheen of sweat covering the softness of flesh. He lowered her leg from his shoulder and bent back down over her to suckle her bosom, rolling the pebbled flesh between his lips. Max's hands flew to his hair and held him to her, her keening cries deepening. Dark wings snapped out above them in ecstasy. Fang grunted with each thrust and willed himself to move faster, to spurn his pain and earn his freedom. They relished in the burning friction between them.
Fang murmured, "I'm about to cum," and searched for Max's gaze amidst forceful thrusts. "Come with me. I need you."
She regarded him through heavy lids and whined, "I need a little more."
Fang's hand flew down between them, stroking her furiously in a rapid-fire rhythm that offered the perfect counterpoint to his steady pounding. It made Max clench and burn and gasp for air as the heat waves washed across her face and rippled to her toes and made her muscles tense. "Ah, ah, ah, ah," she keened through the rush and Fang moved to grip her hip with his massaging hand, groaning when her pussy clenched around his throbbing cock.
The white haze was dissipating from Max's vision when she felt Fang's own release inside of her, pulsing in time with the aftershocks of her orgasm and filling her with his warm, runny essence. He breathed heavily above her with shaking elbows before grasping her shoulders and rolling them onto their sides. He pulled her tightly to him, wrapping her in a full-body bear hug. Max kissed his shoulder where it was pressed against her face and whispered to him again.
"I'm here, Baby. I'm right here."
One leg wrapped around Fang's thigh and held their hips together. Max could feel the slow run of sex leftovers trying to escape her core but she wasn't ready to relinquish the feeling of Fang stopping her up. She kissed him softly, sweetly, nipping at his upper lip and the tip of his nose and the angular planes of his cheekbones.
Fang let out a shuddering sigh and buried his face into Max's neck. "I love you."
Max smiled and ran her thumb around the contour of his ear. "I know." And then added, quietly, "Tomorrow will be better."
Fang nodded against her and kissed her neck, smacking softly, before renewing his grip and lying still.
Let me know what you think? I aim to please, but I don't know whether I'm pleasing you without words!