Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12203193.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Fantastic_Beasts_and_Where_to_Find_Them_(Movies)
  Relationship:
      Credence_Barebone/Original_Percival_Graves
  Character:
      Credence_Barebone, Original_Percival_Graves, Queenie_Goldstein, Sam_the
      Obliviator, Newt_Scamander
  Additional Tags:
      Alpha/Beta/Omega_Dynamics, Incest, Credence_is_Grave's_son, mpreg
      mention, Pining, Runaway_attempt, Homophobic_Language, Child_Abuse, alpha
      graves, Omega_Credence, cop_graves, Mpreg
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-09-27 Completed: 2017-11-06 Chapters: 2/2 Words: 14276
****** Bambi ******
by brittlelimbs
Summary
     Credence's body is refusing to fill out into the alpha Dad wants,
     though his bones hurt with the effort of trying.
Notes
     FUCK. never writing over 10k again but here it is. heed the warnings!
     thank u so much to liv, betty, amy, van, and everyone else who gave
     me love/support while writing this! you guys stuck through my endless
     bitching, u rock
     title is taken from jidenna's song of the same name
See the end of the work for more notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
Today has been unkind to Credence. He sways a little as he tries to pull his
phone out of his back pocket and walk his bike down the student lot at the same
time. Things have been going downhill since second period geometry; his fingers
are clumsy with sweat and his head pounds with the tick of the spokes,
handlebars twisting in his one-handed grip like the head of some unbroken
horse.
dont feel good, he types. The little name at the top of the conversation reads
‘Dad.’ going home. will tell chastity to take out trash
He tucks his phone away into his beat-up canvas satchel and swings his leg over
the seat, unsteady, pushing off the lot. Gravel flies, scree and scrabble.
Fucking fever.
Credence pumps the pedals homewards and wonders how he earned it. Maybe
something spit-swapped, sucked from a drinking fountain, his own fingertips,
the straw of the watered-down lemonade he shared with another freshman soprano
in choir to slake the heat of the poorly-ventilated classroom. Or was it
forgetting to wash his hands after using the bathroom during European Lit,
anxious to return to Titus Andronicus? His palms prickle where they’re wrapped
around the rubber grips, suddenly anallyaware of every grody thing he’s touched
this week. It’s April, after all, breeding time for sickness, slobbery kisses
over germ-fertile, dirty held hands and runny noses. Sandpaper itch-throat.
Allergies and illnesses. No kisses or hand holding for Credence, of course,
but—this was doomed to happen. He scratches at the skin of his face while he
bikes, hand darting up quick to scrub his scalp beneath the silver of his
helmet. He can feel the brush of his button-up and khakis against him like a
rash, now, strap of his messenger bag burning heavily across his shoulder, the
narrow pale of his back.
The seat of his bike is throbbing between his legs by the time he reaches the
Tuckers’ field, skirts it, slips the crick in the fence to cut the muddy corner
with his wide treads. The barley is just nubbled, shorn stalks by this early in
the season, prickly as Credence’s head when Dad shaved his hair short his 6th
grade summer: This’ll teach ‘em to call you names like that, huh, big, tough
hands cradling and squeezing Credence’s skull while he wept, fat chunks of
shoulder-length hair fluffing all over the kitchen linoleum as they fell heavy;
Credence gulped down his tears wondered—
Fag.
The buzz of the razor jarred his teeth and did not help. Not an inch.
He’d hated Dad that whole sun-licked, three-month stretch, so badly that his
head hurt with it and his tongue was bitten puffy and painful all the time,
blood in his mouth. Loving Dad—Daddy still, back then—so deeply, and hating him
just as deep, hard enough it took his breath away, dirge of puberty come ugly
and early. Licking his palm and jacking off after another lecture while a
feeling in his stomach coiled sick and hot and angry, Dad ambling to the living
room and watching Dateline one thin wall away. Maybe hearing, maybe not. Never
barging in for reasons Credence could not explain.
He was angry enough to go alpha, Credence secretly thought, sometimes, deep in
the hot pit of his room at night. Sexual aggression is a sign, too; he tried
jerking off over Chastity’s stuff, once or twice, laying claim on her sheets
and with his scent in the grossest way possible. He felt guilt over
masturbating, but knew that alphas were supposed to do this, because being
alpha meant your orgasms were sanctioned under God himself. Meant to procreate,
sow your seed deep, enriching the flock of the Lord, et cetera.
The marking did nothing, other than force him to do some emergency loads of
laundry in their clunky old washer. Nothing smelled much different. None of the
local slut omegas made him pop a stiffy, not even when they passed him in their
short-shorts and clinging tops, or accidentally stood too close to him in
vegetable aisle.  
Credence’s mood cycled in a daily arc accordingly, tumbling through hopeful,
frustrated, sad, resigned. His body was refusing to fill out into the alpha Dad
wanted, though Credence’s bones hurt with the effort of trying.
Dad’s presence grew hard to bear, then harder still; he was always off work,
that summer. The heat wave, he grunted, when Credence hazarded the question of
it once over dinner. Crime, as it turns out, is as lazy-slow in hundred-plus
temps as anyone else—as any kid like you, Credence,clink of fork and gulp of
water—and that’s precisely what they were. Lolling shamelessly in the
irrigation ditches trenched through with trash on the outskirts of town,
supposedly, lurking in between the teeth of the Gas-n-Go strip-mall quasi-
ruralness of life. Lazing somewhere unchecked: Dad’s cruiser was in their paved
drive more often than not, transmission crotchety for lack of use. Credence
imagined him doing busts at half-speed in the heat, arrests in slow motion.
Percival Graves, looking mean and cool and bad as a movie while he unholstered
his glock the way someone pulls a brush through thick paint, five-o’clock-
shadowed bums oozing across the pavement before him, made of molasses.
The beautiful slo-mo left behind not-good space in its wake.  
Dad, barbeques on cop buddy’s suburban patios, one grip on the neck of a Bud
and another on Credence’s shoulder to show him off like the proud young man he
wasn’t. Bullying all up on him, bottle after bottle, aggressively proud.
Talking to him while he was really talking to Mr. Ray-Bans, or whatever:
Credence is gonna be in high school pretty soon now. Gonna be an Alpha, too, I
can smell it—isn’t that something, slugger? Champ? Man? Just plain old man,
like Dad and him were real cozied-up to each other, grinning, all buddy-buddy.
Credence sulking a half smile and shaking big cop guy hands, pretending he
wasn’t just some dud beta. That he likedhis Dad.
Even worse was in the shaded aside, Dad showing him the seamed, seedy
underbelly of the world. The same way fathers show their sons how to fly-fish,
catch baseballs, pop open the hood and make ‘er hum real sweet, that old
jargon. Dad was fixated on this, the showing, as if it was suddenly his god-
given responsibility to pry open the middle school Sex-Ed curriculum and reveal
a weird, tacit unpleasantness:
Omegas. Boy ones.
The Scamander kid went into heat that June. He was the oldest son of the family
of eccentrics two doors down and a friend from playground days; Credence
watched his rape. It was a scary quiet thing. He and Papa and Chastity’d been
heading back home from the little cinder block church in town, good Sunday folk
(Credence believing in that shit, an old holdover of Ma, Dad only on the by-
and-by), and nearly tripped over a group of young men in the penny-slot alley
behind the local Laundromat. Credence, too caught up in God-thoughts, Dad-
thoughts, daydreams, something, was first overcome by the smell. Like overripe
fruit, or steak with the blood still clinging to it. A scent unnamable but
brazenly off-putting, so strong that Credence covered his nose and mouth with
the back of his arm as he swung his head to find where it was coming from. He
gave his sister the mother of all flat-tires as he did, in the tradition of
little brothers. Flip-flop of painful rubber sole on oxford heel.
“Credence,” Chastity hissed.
There must have been six of them. Raunchy boys. Feral boys. Some he knew from
class, faces squashed and hungry and malcontent, dicks literally out, or
straining to be, sticking rudely heavenward from the unzipped flies of their
blue jeans torn into cutoffs for summer. Credence choked on his own spit. Some
were men, older, with names he didn’t know too well, even in a town that beat
in his heart like his own blood. A shady bunch, and he knew it. It took
Credence a moment to breathe again, then to decipher Newt’s familiarity among
them, crushed against the moldy brick in this armpit between buildings, red
hair and bowed legs.
Beside him, Dad took the Lord’s name, though they were no longer in church;
there was something wrong with this boy, sickness that even Credence could
read, they all could read, just by looks. Newt curled, cowered, flipped so his
hands were tucked up between his chest and the wall and did an odd little roll
of his hips.
There was a wet spot on the back of his dorky cords the size of a silver
dollar.
Chastity gasped while Dad hissed in a breath through his teeth. Credence bit
his tongue, face growing explosively hot in an instant; the boy had pissed
himself. Of all junior high’s schooltime nightmares, wetting your pants might
be one of the worst, and his heart thudded with the secondhand embarrassment of
it. There was a growl, and Chastity gasped. Wait. Some of the young men were
scuffling a little, now, each vying to be closer to Newt under some veneer of
common decency that was slipping like his history teacher’s cake-face on a
sweltering September afternoon. Credence could feel—no, he knew, from the weird
thing boiling between all of them, from the strange, pungent smell, that this
was something hormonal. Biological. A-B-O stamped, like the projection slides
they shuttered through a few months back, room dimmed down and secret.
Each one of these characters was two inches from bad news, hands primed out
from their sides, ready to claw and tear the trembling boy or call the devil
home from the cornfields, either, both. Credence tamped down the urge to cross
himself. Before him, Newt keened, thrust his hips out wantonly further, and he
knew exactly what sort of terrible this was.
He wasn’t stupid.
There was a growl and a guy, a big dumb-looking one wearing a ski jacket in the
sweltering weather, hence the dumb, made a move. Credence looked away, tucking
chin to shoulder, overwhelmed at the idea of knowing who knew was as a Newt.
Knowing how his hands felt when they were tacky with fake grape flavoring, the
gist of his freckles. How his hair stood up from the static of the big red
plastic slide at the local park, and how he used to let Credence hold his palm
over the crown of his head to the feel the tickle.
He nuzzled into his starched shirt and wished for the sanctity of the Church,
performing a quiet prayer for Newt in his head.
“No. You watch,” Dad said, and then his hand was there, grabbing Credence by
the jaw and wrenching his eyes forwards once more. Credence half wanted to cry
out but couldn’t, Dad’s hand gripped far too strong, lips pooching out between
out between squeezing fingers, arms pinning puny biceps to sides.
“I don’ wanna,” he tried, but it didn’t come out right. Nothing would, to Dad,
not when he was like this.
Ski-jacket ripped open Newt’s pants with the awful, high-pitched squeal of
tearing fabric, and the smell doubled down. It was nearly unbearable, now. The
slap of flesh on flesh; several of the alphas had begun to touch themselves
openly, awkwardly half-crouched to give room for their pumping hands.
Credence could hear Dad breathing in sharp snorts through his nose above his
ear, smell the musk of his sweat and aftershave. Feel the hard, metallic press
of his belt buckle digging into the small of Credence’s back, then beneath
it—heat. Hardness.
The man pushed his red cock into Newt, who let out a sound that was neither
human nor animal. And there it was.
That was that.
“Male omega,” Dad whispered, mostly hot breath. “Just not right.”
The tears came, boiling and fast, as Credence began to cry.
Later, he stood outside his father’s bedroom door and listened, hearing the
grunts and the wet, thick filth as Dad sated himself. Indulgently finished what
Newt, split open, began.
He’s full-on dizzy by the time he turns onto his street and coasts on down the
familiar swell of their hill. The spare key is tucked beneath one of Chastity’s
bedraggled peonies, which he’s careful to slide back into place once he’s moved
it. He hides the silver flatness of the key in his sweaty palm and unlocks the
little door beside the garage, thuds it open with a shoulder, wheels his bike
inside. The air is warm and silty and he nearly chokes on it, but there’s no
cruiser parked in the darkness. A good sign. Dad’s irritation saved for a
little later, then.
Helmet, unclipped; shoes, kicked off; bag, clumsily stowed. He stumbles towards
the kitchen, feeling ready to crawl from his own ill-fitting skin and ten
million miles away from the schoolwork waiting in his satchel.
The hallway is starting to warp in interesting ways when he glances in a
window, sees that his hair is flattened and slicked to his head, like the time
Langdon flushed his face in a toilet after gym. He feels relieved that Chastity
isn’t home to make fun of him for it; her Home Ec club will keep her away until
four or five, hours from now.
He jerks the fridge door open with a jingle. Credence’s hands shake as he tries
to pour himself a chilled glass of orange juice, something sweet to quell his
ache. Maybe some weird tenant of the sparse care Dad gave him as a kid on sick
days, a firm believer in the suburban cure-all of Vitamin C. He ends up
pressing the carton to his forehead instead, closing his eyes and feeling
sweaty drops of condensation roll down into his eyebrows. Breathing does
nothing to steady him, and he starts to mentally thumb through a list of
medication Dad probably keep in the house.
Advil. They must have Advil, at least. He sways and the orange juice beats a
sloshing tide against his temple .
He remembers the time, years ago, that Dad let him stroke over the sticky,
ridged gash of his stitched-up hand. Hospital-fresh, iodine still smeared all
around so it stained the pads of Credence’s fingers.
Sonbitch tried to glass me with a beer bottle, Dad had laughed, kite-high on
pain meds, hoisting his shoulder into a shrug and mouth into a rare grin. He
had drawn Credence closer under his arm, shoved his hand closer still, like he
was trying to inch all up in his son’s grill on purpose.
The night nurse cooed at the two of them, your papa this or that, and took the
claw away to reapply its dressings. Too late. Credence was terrified: Don’t
swear, Daddy, shying away from God’s inevitable punishment, the image of flesh
split like an insect wriggling from its wet cocoon—
Credence feels his gorge rise and skitters to the bathroom, slippy-footed in
socks, nearly clocking himself on the doorjamb as he wings around a corner. The
edge of the sink is there to catch him, thank God, and he hangs on so tightly
his knuckles lose all color. For a moment, everything spins, gut bubbling
unhappily, but after a few moments, his lunch makes no move to high-tail it
into the basin.
He looks in the mirror and immediately wishes he hadn’t: he looks half-dead,
flossing-spittle all dried in flecks on the surface around him like some weird
halo, face flushed and hair lank, eyes sunken.
The medicine cabinet squeals when it opens as he starts pilfering through
store-brand white bottles and boxes until he finds some Motrin. Fever aid.
Greedily, he pops out three of the little orange tablets. The blister pack
rattles in his hands. He should be able to keep these down. Pain relief, too,
he needs pain relief, his body is starting to ache in earnest now—he squints at
the labels, hazily shakes out a few blue liquigels, some pink pressed pills
that look like tiny teeth in his palm, and squeezes his hand shut around the
precious pile.
They go down with difficulty. His throat feels bruised and tight, afterwards,
but he’s too focused on getting the whole hot mess of himself in bed to care.
What is happening to him. His room is a silent, dark blessing, full of home-
smell, sparse but comforting. Credence flops onto the mattress and tries to
wrangle his way out of his shirt with sharp, jerking fingers, wishing God would
damn all the buttons—then apologizes just as quick. He manages to wriggle out
of his khakis, too, stiff fabric burning as it peels past his over sensitive
hipbones, joining his shirt on the floor, leaving him in his Y-fronts. He
wilts, feeling like his bones are made of so much melting slag, and prays that
Chastity doesn’t come in while he’s like this. Compartmentalizing her on a day
to day basis is difficult enough, as is.
 
In the final clutches of consciousness, his sister’s face still sneering at him
with distaste, he decides to set an alarm on his phone. The effort of fishing
it out of the pile of his clothes is incredible; his stomach twists again and
some deep and secret part of him is terrified that this is mono, or worse—
One hour. He’ll be up in one hour, he thinks, blinking stinging drops of sweat
out of his eyes. Before she gets back, decently refreshed and fine, not mostly
naked. She might even take pity on him and play nurse, like she did once, back
when they were little, duvet tucked to his chin. He might like that. He thinks
he hits the right buttons; the room is so dim, and his fingers feel thick, and
he can’t quite be sure, but now there are numbers on his phone, counting
something down.
That’s enough.
Unconsciousness comes in a big, soft wave.
He’s having one of those dreams where the people and the places are demarcated
only by vague titles and nothing else. Credence blinks, and knows he’s in the
barley field, even though he’s neck deep in the thickest corn you ever saw
despite being entirely the wrong season for it. There’s a thing in a wife
beater posted up right there in front of him and he knows that’s his dad, even
though there’s something off about it that says otherwise. Could be that the
quality of light that speaks of late August, not March, high noon. Credence,
the Dad-thing says, swaying limply in the sun, tired looking as a piece of two-
day trampled newsprint. It’s all hands, for some reason.
It moves forward, no strides, like it resides two holy inches off the ground,
and presses Credence into the dirt with those hands so the corn stalks rattle.
Credence is worried about getting earth on his clothes until he realizes that
he isn’t wearing any at all. Shame blossoms in his chest as he realizes,
surely, the thing is here to humiliate him.
Time cracks its back. The thing is Dad when Credence was thirteen, then nine,
then four, limbs tree-trunking and chest widening: it’s massive. The sun is
eclipsed. It starts licking Credence’s face, huge tongue working from the point
of his chin up to the cleft above his upper lip. Swiping in hot, gooey circles
around his mouth, then against the grille of his teeth when he clenches them,
sussing in between his lips. It seems very concerned with getting its spit into
Credence’s mouth, so finally, he lets it. Their lips slip and mash against each
other. It occurs to Credence, at once, that the thing—that his Dad—is kissing
him.
 
Because then it is just Dad, mouth curling around a huffed, sexy laugh, like
he’s pleasantly surprised to be kissing Credence. Squeezing his son’s biceps,
as if just finding them in his grip and reveling at their heft.
Credence feels his arousal pulsate everything pink in one giddy instant; it’s
twilight, now, and everything’s gone sherbet colored and twice as sweet. His
cock rises unrestricted from his leg as the kiss deepens further, further
still, and there is absolutely no shame to this. Dad lets him up for a moment
so he can get a grip down between them, and his hand is massive, looks
cartoonishly huge as it engulfs his son’s puny, needy prick. Credence whines
and ruts. He feels full of Dad’s spit (Dad’s blood), but knows he needs his
piss, his come, for everything to be wet with it all, drenched, absolutely
soaked to the skin--
 
“Credence!”
Half jumbled, something about, was that, the claggy tang of someone else’s
spit, corn—his throat clicks as he swallows down the appetizing lump of his
dream. What he thinks might be the sun is just bare bulb of his bedside lamp,
glaring directly into his eyes like an interrogation tactic, and the
disorientation is so abrupt it’s dizzying. It takes him a moment to peel his
cheek from his tacky pillow.
“Huzzat?” Credence tries, just as his body begins screaming at him from what
feels like each conceivable piece of itself.  
“You look horrible.”
His sister’s hair is whisping out of its bun in a way Credence knows she hates.
She’s kind of terrible as a sister, on principle, which is a truth he’s still
struggling to come to terms with. Two years older and always making sure
Credence knows it, ever since the low, hot days when they were young, as if she
has to widen her distance ahead of him perpetually. Ever just a little cruel,
ever just a little indifferent, hot then cold, unpredictable. Embarrassed of
him, even. He remembers playing Pack with her and the neighbors when he was
barely old enough to grasp at the straws of making memory, home address still a
wobbly trace-around of letters and numbers—always assigned as a boring Beta. He
wanted to be an O, he said, once, O-me-ga, a too-heavy set of syllables for his
tiny mouth as he trembled in the rear of the group. Because there were O’s and
A’s, and you could only ever be one; A’s were rough n’ tumble fighters, and O’s
were always the ones that got to be the prizes. Two perfectly corresponding
halves. He had lots of fantasies about sitting on the curb next to the
tittering girls, his scuffed-up knees leaned daintily together while the bigger
tougher kids got to fight, allegedly, for him. Making little leaf and spit
compresses for the alphas when they got scrapes and cuts in battle. He liked
that, his stomach going warm in some base, secret way he would soon learn to
forget.
Wanna be O. He remembers how Chastity poured the slushy remains of her snow
cone all over his head, square in front of the others. Sticky, cherry red all
cold and in his eyes, his ears, the collar of his polo shirt. O is not for
boys, stupid.
He still hates the taste of cherry, despises that phony-slutty-fruit flavor,
though he’d never tell her that.
Now, she still looks like old-school, old-testament God’s bolt of misfortune
embodied, as always, struck down to the lingering heaven of his waking mind.
He’s still trying to figure out how he slept through his alarm while she stands
in the middle of the carpet, staring at Credence like he’s got two heads, and
it takes him a second to catch up.
“What’s wrong with you?” She asks, picking at her cuticles with her sharp
little bird hands. Her eyes are darting around the room. “Dad said you weren’t
picking up your phone.”  
Credence’s head pounds; all at once, his dream comes back in a blood-hot surge,
like his body, his cock, has been plugged straight into to a live socket: Dad
with his tongue in his mouth, Dad jacking him off. Dad, Dad—
Credence moans aloud at the sick squelch of wetness between his legs, the
feeling of a molten trickle pushed out to run down the intimate crux of his
inner thigh. His stomach flips over in absolute horror as it dawns on him that
he just—he had a wet dream about his own dad and his body seems to love it.
Something weighty and dread-low moves in his gut.
“What’s that smell?” Chastity asks, nose wrinkled. She looks nothing like their
father and he’s desperately thankful for it.
Oh, no.
He peels back the covers, horror movie slow. Beneath them, his cock is bursting
against his belly, and the space at his hips has become a soggy pit, a dark,
wet cave, dripping with the same smell he knew, years back. Rotten fruit-scent.
It’s everywhere between his legs, like he gave birth to something hot and slimy
and terrible while he slept:
Omega.
Chastity gags at the reek. Her eyes are wide as saucers; she’s not stupid,
either.
“Chastity, listen, it’s not what you think—” It’s entirely every awful bit of
what you think—Credence’s vision fuzzes out in a wave of static as he gets up,
awkward around the stiff heaviness of his cock, and for a second, he’s worried
he’ll pass out. He’s simultaneously beyond disgusted and maniacally thrilled,
and the two sit poorly together in his stomach. The laminated wood of his
bedside table feels cool on his palm as he clumsily steadies himself, phone
skittering somewhere across the floor.
“Oh God, oh God,” she keeps saying, muffled around her hands that’re clutched
up to her mouth like her guts are about to be upchucked onto her shoes.
Credence can feel droplets of slick rolling unabashedly down his legs and into
the soft spaces behind his knees. He tries to get a grip on her shoulder.
“Get away from me!” She darts out to knock away his wrist, and it hurts worse
than the time she slapped him for swearing. All the little pinches she’d give
him for other pedantic, ordinary sins. Spoiled milk. Untied shoelaces. He
staggers away.
Credence now has become a sin on principle, wholly and fully. Presenting as a
junior in high school; what kind of freak even does that? Whose body would hate
them that much? Going O out of nowhere, hormones boiling up quick like a bad
vendetta, years late, uncomfy, fit wrong for his lankiness.
“Please, Chastity.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, doesn’t know what he
canask for.
Chastity just gulps and fumbles into her pocket, and then her phone is in her
hand. Two quick swipes and it’s dialing, and Credence doesn’t have to see the
screen but for two seconds to know where her call is headed.
His terror is doubled down, weighing in his lungs like the kind of panic you
get when you breathe water down the wrong tube; Dad can’t know. He can’t. The
simple idea of the object of his worship and fear and—Lord, deliver
him—lust,discovering that he begat a male omega is abhorrent to the point of
nausea. Things are reframed, rapidly, and this is no longer some deeply shamed
wish fulfillment. He starts to choke.
“Chastity. I’m begging you.” He’ll kill me. He can imagine it now, that self-
same pistol, that glock, that Sig Sauer, his bare hands on Credence’s pale
throat in a blistering chokehold that makes him even wetter just to think
about, Christ.  
He can hear the brrrr of the dial tone cease as the call goes through. His
sister shakes her head as he watches in horror, lip bitten, snot streaming down
her cleft. “‘Not right,” she mouths, then her eyes go to a spot two feet above
Credence’s head, and lets her voice crack. “Dad, oh God, it’s Credence—”
Credence doesn’t recognize what he’s doing until after the fact, because
biology is the quickest and meanest motherfucker there is.
His breath rattles in his chest and time goes in a weird pinged-back reverse
order for a moment: blood on carpet, Chastity on carpet, Chastity’s head
connecting to the bedside table with a God-reviled crack—
“Fuck,” Credence whispers, hollow. His sister lets out a long, low moan,
curling up into herself, hands to battered head.
“Chastity? Baby?” Dad’s voice is tinny from the freshly cracked carapace of her
phone, dropped like a stone to the hardwood.
She sounds like Newt, Credence thinks, absently, and then he finally, finally
empties all the churning bile in his stomach. Sounds like Newt when that big
alpha fucked him.
He remembers once, when he was little. One of the turquoise-days, so named for
the particular color of the water in the neighborhood pool where the white
concrete burned the bottoms of his tender feet. Another scorching summer, not
too long after Ma had passed, Dad still fresh at fatherhood and doing a pretty
lousy job of it. He’d looked a picture in his dark sunglasses and swim trunks,
lounging poolside, hot local stud alpha cop, a grab-bag of titles Credence was
too young to understand. He just knew it meant a world where kids were only
peripheral to something brighter and more interesting. A summer of sunscreen
layered too thickly on his back by heavy hands, dripping into Credence’s eyes
so it stung and twisted him. Hair tugged too roughly, wrists squeezed just a
little too tightly when he wouldn’t peel himself from the shadow of the shake
shack to meet Miss So-and-so.
He remembers, that summer, trying to run away. He had a tiny backpack with
peanut butter sandwiches in it, and a head full of the idea that life with
Daddy was no good.
He’d only gotten as far as the end of their block to the T-intersection before
the sidewalk was suddenly stretching to oblivion and the cars were too fast and
Mrs. Piquery’s Great Dane was barking much too loudly for his little boy ears.
He wasn’t made to run away, even from things that hurt. Didn’t have the
backbone for it.
Coming home was one of the few times Dad had ever really laid a hand on him.
Never again, boy. Don’t you dare run away from me,dark shape in the stairwell
and a new lock on his door. Credence had hurt and hurt and hurt for weeks, face
all screwed up and red with his tears, and swore up and down he wouldn’t,
never.
“Hello? Hell—”
He pounds the little red terminate call button so hard that the phone jumps
across the floor.
The world is just as oversized and scary but there’s no skittering back now,
this is it, hand folded, check cashed. Credence doesn’t know what he’s doing,
not at all, but he’s doing it fast. His school satchel, repurposed; things are
going quicker than he can really understand, bag empty from where all his
school stuff has been spilled all over the kitchen floor like his barf in the
bedroom. A banana. His wallet. Extra underwear. He doubles up on hoodies and
track pants, like he might be able to keep the smell contained if he puts
enough layers between himself and the world. Deodorant. No socks, no time; he’s
got to get to the bus stop and get the fuck out of Dodge.
He wraps one of his shirts around Chastity’s head as best he can before he
goes, blood beginning to mat down bits of her curly hair in odd, dark patches.
After a thought, he slips a pillow underneath it, too. Her grey eyes are
blinking slowly, slowly at the drywall.
He dials 9-1-1 with her phone, and his voice trembles on the line as he
explains there’s a girl here and—she’s hurt, she’s hurt real bad. It’s unclear
how much time he has, because in a small town some EMT’s bound to realize
that’s Sheriff Graves’ address, and the girl in question is probably his.
Chastity, ain’t it? He cradles her stooped neck. He’s still hard, so he has to
tuck his dick into the waistband of his underwear with one hand while the
operator confirms the ambulance. Please hurry, he says.
The Gas n’ Go is as far as he makes it before his body really gives it to him.
It had been extraordinarily tough going, anyways, seeing as he had to stand on
the pedals the whole way there: his ass wouldn’t stand for the seat, already on
fire and mostly leaked through his fresh pair of underwear. The heat’s riding
the back of his neck like a brand, leaking down into his belly and hole and
cock. Feeling one hundred million light years worse than the prickle-itch of
the trip home from school, feeling like a criminal, he pulls his bike over
across the paved lot to where the pumps stand empty. He leaves it there,
leaning against a poster for ninety-nine cent hot dogs, because if he doesn’t
get off soon, he is going to die.
He pushes past the fluorescent aisles of Funyuns and candy bars, hood up,
suspicious as hell, ducking between the big cases of bottled water and hard
liquor and Red Bull. It seems like some sort of dizzy, road-grimed hell,
complete with beer-gutted specters wheeling through the aisles in their
afterlife. Ghosts from the interstate, passing through Credence’s tiny town
with a three-state-long stride. He puts his head down and pretends he’s just
headed into to the bathroom and not going to blow his brains out his dick like
some perv.
There’s lewd graffiti carved into the mirror over the sink, and a single bare
light overhead that makes everything look wet and a funky chlorine-green. Two
stalls, both empty. He locks himself in the left one and fuck fuck fuck
struggles his cock out of his flies immediately to relieve some of the ache.
It’s red, chafing and burning in his hand, hilariously wrong for what he needs.
Right, okay, secondary sex organ now, or something, second prize to his
monstrous hole. He’s never had anything up his ass in his life but the fever of
his heat’s pitched levy-busting high. He had some vague sex ed about this, and
something deeper, baser, is compelling him in sick new ways; one dubiously
clean hand snakes down the back of his layered sweats and shorts and undies,
because he just needs to touch it, needs to…
It feels gooey and unequivocally exciting. Just one fingertip and he’s already
gone. He takes it up to the first knuckle and the gross wrongness of having
something in his body for the first time is immediately boxed out and replaced
by an obsession. His ass is velvet-soft and warm, squeezing tight. Like the
inside of a girl might feel like, he thinks, if he’d ever been lucky enough to
slip his fingers into one. It’s almost perfect. No wonder alphas go ballistic.
Credence is immediately pairing up another finger to make it two, then three.
He spreads his legs a little wider so he can get some sweeter, more intimate
access, leaning up against the side of the stall, backpack lost somewhere below
him at his feet. In a moment of inspiration he pulls out and presses in again
from beneath his cock, instead, a different attack strategy, so he can curl and
reach his fingers to find a hotspot he’d read about in textbooks, neatly
labeled. Hone in on the unspeakable Helvetica letters of it with sharp little
jabs. It makes the feeling hotter, somehow; rubbing, gasping, masturbating like
some weirdo in the filthy bathroom of a dirty truck stop, the kind that has
cheap condoms in a tin machine right next to where you wash your hands.
His glazed eyes catch on the little blurb carved above the toilet tank,
scratched out with straight lines, a relic left by someone’s car key: YUNG
OMEGA SLUTS CALL --
He averts his gaze from his lewd, glaring future. Scissors his fingers out and
fucks them in. Tries to care about the sucker-in-cheek squelching sound his
body’s making but he can’t, not when it’s this satiating. He starts flicking
over the little ridge of muscle just inside the rim that he didn't know he had,
and the friction is making him wetter, swampier. Four fingers and he can’t get
enough. Needs more. Need Daddy, he thinks, some murky wriggle of fear-pleasure
making his cheeks go hot. Need his big alpha dick inside you. And the idea of
it, something so big and thick spearing him full, like he’s a ripe fruit tapped
to gush, is too much. He whines and goes all over the cold metal of the stall,
thick dribblets of slick falling to the floor while his cock jumps and shoots,
untouched. Comes like he didn’t just concuss his sister, run away from home,
and jack off in a dirty rest stop bathroom, in that short order.
He pulls his fingers from his ass with a slurp and knows, the way he knows the
height of corn in June, or knows the texture of Dad’s rage, that this isn’t
nearly enough to sate his heat; if there is a cellar beneath the lowest circle
of Hell, he’d gladly crawl to it now.
The slick is terrible and stubborn. He does what he can in the little sink to
scrub it off his right hand, this incriminating thing with the four fingers he
fucked himself on, but the tender webbing stays slimy. Kinda like nature
designed it to be this difficult. He looks up to the mirror: the animal there
is something he recognizes. Spit-wet mouth plopped open, cheeks and chin all
fiery with this whorish red-pink flush, toked up, sluggishly high on a fresh
influx of hormones. His eyes are drooped and glittering with something
absolutely feral, the boundlessness of which terrifies Credence to no end. He
holds his breath, waiting for the angle of light that turns them all reflective
red, the way cats’ do with flash photography; some truth there, basally
ancient, the kind you’d get the bends trying to swim up from, or dirt under
your fingernails trying to dig free.
Fucking omega. As if an alpha had to smell the heat on him to know. Seeing him
is enough. He stuffs the hand in his pocket and moves to bust the hell out of
there.   
“Hey!”
Tling tling goes the little automated chime of the door, Credence’s clean hand
still on the handle, the parking lot a stalwart expanse just beyond. For a
second he half-heartedly hopes it’s the manager yelling at him for trying to
steal something. Pissed at this sketchy looking kid sneaking out behind the
porno mags, theoretical beef jerky sticks stuffed under his jacket. He doesn’t
turn around. Something that would’ve made him shit his pants this morning; it’s
nothing, now. He keeps going, jogging his backpack high up on his back as he
sets a brisk pace over to his waiting bike.
The threat prickles on the back of his neck before it has a chance to fully
touch him, like he has some sort of sixth sense for it. Maybe all omegas do,
and they don’t tell you that in school.  
“Hey, you, uh—“ There’s a huge hand on Credence’s shoulder and he’s being spun
around to face a hulking man in a Carhartt jacket and Levis. Alpha, in a
heartbeat, every inch of him musked with it, seeping from each follicle on his
bearded face and the crinkles around his eyes, the little bits of tobacco stain
peeking out from his teeth when he bares them to whisper Jesus as he regards
the Omega in his hands fully for the first time. His eyes are not unkind,
Credence thinks, shoulder trying to ripple back, and he looks old enough to
have kids his age. Probably does; he and Chastity were lucky Dad didn’t snag a
bitch after Ma died, like most Alphas would’ve. He imagines it, for a moment:
Dad with some young boy or girl, no older than his own kids, hanging around the
house to get nailed when he came home from work. A weird quasi step-parent,
shuffling around in daisy dukes and too-tight tank tops, popping out babies
while Credence worked his way through middle and high school. He might’ve had
little brothers and sisters, he thinks, aghast. New strange faces crowding up
his life, part Dad and part poor, knot-addicted slut struggling to get their
GED in this piece of sad-sack small town America.
Hands (mechanic hands, or steel belt factory hands, can’t guess which but he
can tell something about them by the thickness) start gentling him all over,
and far away from here Credence’s throat closes at the idea of those children
Dad might have had. There’s a verklempt moment, somewhere, in which Credence
just lets himself bask in the sweet relief of their non-existence.
If he hurts, at least he knows he deserves to.
The man keeps rubbing him all up and down, sliding hands down the rounded slope
of his shoulders, then long arms, then hips, putting his scent all over him,
quashing Credence’s trickle of desire to run. His eyes flick down; beer gut
straining at worn flannel. Paunch flopped over a big, brassy belt buckle. Stiff
denim fly, wide hips.
“Smell so, so, good, baby.”
Credence starts to choke on his own spit a little bit, protests cut back before
they can climb out his throat. “Is this your first one?” First heat? Credence,
eyes closing, nods meekly, taking his destiny like a coward. The alpha growls,
probably at whatever knothead was stupid enough to let this meal out of bolt
and key while he was at his most vulnerable. He’s got a grip on Credence’s
biceps and is pushing him towards—oh, that’s the smooth flank of a car bumping
against the backs of his thighs, and his arms shoot out to steady himself. His
eyes squeeze shut even tighter in anticipation of being torn to shreds, fight
or flight on full bore but unable to do either.
And then, apropos nothing, they settle. All at once, he can hear the hum of the
gas station’s generator over the buzzing in his blood, and he glances up in
surprise. “I can—” the alpha bows his head, nodding at something Credence
doesn’t understand, still clutching at him.
“What?”
“I can make it good. For you.” Judging by the knee pushing between Credence’s
trembling legs and the arms pinning him bodily to the car, he figures this
isn’t what the man really means.
“Wh—”
“Hotel. A bed. Something,” the man grunts, his massive head dipping to nearly
rest on Credence’s shoulder, where he can smell the chewing tobacco on his
breath, curling around the collar of his sweatshirt. “Your first time, Christ.”
His voice sounds strained and secret. Credence feels a distant rush of
sweetness towards the man and his misplaced sense of propriety, or pity.
Offering to fuck him in privacy instead of the bald glare of the parking lot,
for some reason, slurpee banner and onlookers be damned.
“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t deserve”—a swallow, a whisper—
The feeling of being scruffed is a deeply unsettling one, like when you tweak
out just at the edge of falling asleep and wake up in a cold sweat: the man
goes for his neck and Credence jolts as all his muscles lock, and then slumps
neatly into waiting, heavy arms. He couldn’t lift a finger if he tried; all his
strength bound up in the thick thumb and forefinger pinching his nape, which
feels hot and sore and strange all at once. He can smell the tang of the guy’s
BO, and the heft of flannel shirt feels soft and worn against his face and his
slack jaw, getting spit and fiber all mixed up on his tongue.
“C’mere,” the alpha grunts as he scoops him close. His feet tangle and swing,
sway, so small and high up off the ground like this. “That’s it.” Like he’s
just helping Credence into his arms, instead of holding him prisoner by his own
stupid, soft biology.
The man’s car is an ancient Chevy pickup, powder blue, a few hundred thousand
miles worse for wear but still lovingly maintained. Some real elbow grease in
that machine, along with a few yards of rope and a tackle box in the bed.
Plates read Montana; out of state. Gravel and paper cups crunch beneath the
man’s feet as he approaches it, this pale behemoth, and Credence is terrified
to the point of numbness. The man opens the door, one armed, squealand bang,
and sets Credence down so he can shakily crawl in like a wet rat, feeling like
tiny and weak as all hell, hardly daring to look around to wonder who might
see. Maybe there’s a damp spot on the seat of his pants, like Newt had.
“Thank you,” he mumbles.
The man simply slams the door closed before lumbering around the front bumper
to the driver’s seat, and the cab rocks down on its elderly shocks as he loads
himself in with a grunt. The new-leather-scent tree freshener sways generously
from the rearview mirror, and the thunkathunkathunk of the engine pipes up as
they peel out of the lot. The man turns the window crank by his knee, gives
them a crack of brisk air, and it feels like suddenly being able to breathe
again, necessary respite from the slurry of hormones and slick scent between
them. The wind whistles out a silence of some kind; comfy, uncomfy, Credence
can’t tell, doesn’t care. He spares one glance to his companion, his captor,
and lays his head against the cool, vibrating window, thinking and thinking
with his freshly cleansed head about Dad and the foothills that lie around his
town. Gentle and rolling, precursors of some impending peak, never reached. The
Midwest. His father. The park, streaking by. The strip mall. The high school
(his prison). His father. The auto body place and the pool, closed for the
blustery spring. Fields and fields and fields: the loins of America, still left
crawling out of the brutal, flat press of winter, like him. All barley. He
leaks slick onto the seat and thinks about his town in the way that only he
knows the place, and cries.
If the alpha notices, he doesn’t say anything about it.
Ultimately, they make it the ten straight-shot miles west to a motel, one of
the shitty Super-8s on the outskirts of town that Credence has never had the
displeasure of staying at. Highway trash, sign teetering on top of a mile high
pole so its yellow light can beckon worshippers from the road towards mecca
from all directions. He’s clutching his little backpack so hard that the straps
leave red imprints on his palms when he lets go to get out.
The lady working the front office looks like she might have been beautiful in a
more flattering light, curly, blonde hair all piled on top of her head and
exhaustion ringed around her eyes. Queenie, reads the nametag pinned to the
front of her pink polo shirt. A bloated old TV blares from a mount behind her
head; Credence recognizes a local news anchor.
“How can I help ya, hon?” she says without looking up from her magazine, a
worn-out kind of hospitality about her. Cut of her accent says back east but
the slump to her shoulders says middle of nowhere. The man grunts and grumbles
something along the lines of single room with a king and shuffles a beat up
wallet out of one of his many pockets. The TV screen shivers as a line of
static passes up the signal while Queenie’s fussing with the card, and suddenly
that’s—that’s Credence’s house on the screen, even though it takes him a second
to recognize it with all the caution tape. Same little yard out front, window
box with all of Chastity’s ugly peonies lined up in a row. LOCAL GIRL FOUND
INJURED IN VALDASOTA HOMEin a bright red banner at the bottom, little shadowy
people running back and forth to the horror scene inside. The volume’s on low,
all cirrus-y whispers, but the block letter subtitles start spelling out a
gristly little domestic drama, a battered girl, a culprit gone missing, little
brother absent from the local school since noon and if you’ve seen him please
call the tip hotline at this number—
Credence doesn’t know where they pulled that picture from. Must’ve been some
school event, accidental-candid, the background of someone else’s smiling
snapshot, all grainy-sized up and zoomed in; nobody usually ever thinks to ask
for photos of him. The thing’s a few years aged as evidenced by the dumb safety
goggles from first block freshman chemistry perched on top of his head. Yikes.
He looks like a ghost with sleepy sloe eyes, washed out nearly to the point of
oblivion, jaw set as he glares at something long forgotten. Credence blinks.
There’s a picture of him on TV with MISSING printed in block letters beside it,
blaring across every TV set in the county as he wakes and breathes.
He yelps as the man—Sam, says the fine print on his credit card—squeezes him
closer to his side with one big hand.
Queenie’s eyes flick up, then, and Credence’s heart stands stock-still, for a
moment, afraid that she might somehow recognize him. The spooky premonition of
knowing a criminal when you see one pinging her radar. He feels the hair stand
up on the back of his neck. For a moment, there’s only the fizz of the TV and
the thwapof her gum as she snaps it.
“You okay, sugar?” she asks, finally, brow crumpling. Credence vaguely
remembers that he probably looks a mess, hair pasted down to his skull in a
sick way that speaks of one foot in the grave and one in a half-life haze, a
far cry from the photo she could only see with eyes in the back of her head,
anyways. He’s probably sick enough to be pitting through his sweatshirt at this
point.
“He’s alright,” Sam says, knowing or not knowing, starting to tuck him out of
view underneath his coat, like Credence doesn’t nearly level him in height and
has to stoop awkwardly to fit.
Queenie sniffs, and then her expression folds a little inward, mouth going into
a hard, flat line. Credence knows this face, the twisted one that betas make
when they smell omegan arousal.
“Mmm,” she hums, enough to imply: got it. “Room six.” Her acrylic claws extend
to offer a spangly key, which Sam promptly snags in his massive meatfist. The
other hand goes to the small of Credence’s back, wheeling him around and
leading him back towards the parking lot.
“Holler if you need anything, sweetie!” Queenie yells, voice just slipping
through the door before it swings shut, leaving the evidence of Credence’s
crime playing on a loop locked inside.
Credence is unceremoniously paraded towards the room at the apex of the the U-
shaped block where the little brass six nailed to the door has slipped and
twisted down to become a nine. Everything is all painted cement and glowing
pale yellow in the twilight; it’s getting dark now. While Sam is jingling with
the keys some woman, ageless, too aged, beneath heavy makeup and a cloud of
cigarette smoke, emerges out of the room next door and treats him to the up-
down hard, lingering on the alpha next to him. She meets his eyes and gives him
the oh, honeyface, before taking a draw and clipping past in her maneater
pumps. Sam jerks him closer by the forearm.  
And then they’re in. Two strangers in a room together, a space that could be in
the Oklahoma panhandle, or the Bakersfield-armpit of California, just as easily
as it could be here. There’s an ugly pale-pink thing going on that mimics
Queenie’s uniform, coverlet coordinating with the laminated desktop
coordinating with the drapes. The bed is lumpy but serviceable, and the salmon-
covered carpet is so bald and clean that it might as well have been nuked to
oblivion. Everything smells like astringent cleaner and the ghostly waft of
cigarettes.
“Um,” Credence says, the weight of it all suddenly dropping down on top of him
like a ton of fucking bricks, making his knees feel like they’re about to
buckle without an ounce of grace at all.
But Sam is there, crowding him awkwardly, insistent about getting his hands on
all over everything right this minute. Gonna start this courtship dance
somehow, even with both of their left feet mismatched and badly sized. There’s
some inhuman sounding whimpering and it takes Credence a second to realize that
it’s coming from him. “Shhh,” Sam shushes, all father, and Credence can feel
his heart rate dip with the sound of it. Hot breath on his face, in, out, his
body performing some weird strange autopilot thing that he has no control over,
opening his eyes and making him turn to present his ass. The edge of the bed
dips under the press of his hands as he cranes over and spreads his legs.
Disgusting. He’s welling up with slick again, fever trembling at the pushed-
over edge of his consciousness, threatening to pull him under again like his
dirty orgasm in the restroom a little while back meant peanuts. This guy smells
like sweat and tobacco and want and it’s making Credence crazy.
Sam, who’s suddenly showing off his experience real casual-like, gets down on
his knees with a groan. Starts nosing around the back of Credence’s sweatpants,
yanking them down right there, right freakingthere, and his brain shorts out.
He should be mortified but isn’t, too hung up on the feeling of the face
pressing itself to his exposed, soaked undies. His hips roll back on instinct.
He’s never even—the thought of someone with their face there, against the most
base part of him, makes his stomach turn inside out.
This goes on, and on, and on, for years, and when Sam pulls down his Y-fronts
to get skin on skin contact, Credence’s jelly arms eventually lower him onto
the comforter, unable to carry him any longer. Sam just follows him down, still
lapping in thirsty stripes across his hungry hole.
He growls again, long and low, slurping at the wetness of his ass. He’s passing
out of vocal capacity now, and so is Credence, pheromones and hot breath
packing the air too tightly to talk. There is neither carpet nor bed, up nor
down; the blunt, wet push of tongue disappears and Credence looks back, mouth
hanging slack and stupid, to see the man standing, one hand jingling on that
big belt, the other kneading Credence’s asscheek. He’s nearly frothing at the
mouth, glassy eyes squinted hard, words seeming nearly too big and ungainly to
speak them, all glutton before a feast:
“Knot’s gonna—ngh—make it better, gonna make it good.“
Sam’s zipper groans as it opens wide.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he mutters lowly, groin an imminent, massive heat against
Credence’s ass, voice still loud as a firecracker over the white noise of the
heater. Credence feels like his legs are about to collapse.
Sam trails a thick finger through the slick that’s run down to the top of
Credence’s thigh, swirling it around. “Who the fuck let you out like this?” he
asks, absently.
My daddy, Credence mumbles, somewhere in the turbid soup of his brain. Snatches
of denim jacket, stubbled skin, dark hair and clinging hands, masculinity and
alpha-ness tumbling together and together. Every bitter, rough-edged piece that
bound his wounds with spite and malcontent.  
In this memory, which is a slip only just tucked in the back pocket of his
brain, Dad’s knees sit above his ears like two dark mountains against the blue-
black sky, hedging him in. Credence’s heels sit on the downward curve of the
cruiser’s hood, little Velcro shoes on his feet tapping together as Dad shows
him: stars. It’s the tail-end of a winter so cold that trees split like
gunshots, negative fifty-plus, but Dad’s January weathered coat is big and he’s
warm beneath it. A comforting cape draped over the world, which is only the vee
of his father’s lap and the low-hanging clouds of their breath in the glow of
the headlights.
Dad points to a star, blinking down from directly overhead, and names it. Then
another one from low over the horizon, which is blackened by the trees of
forest around them. And then another. Names Credence has long since lost, but
can still remember the shape of, carved out by the burr of Dad’s voice rumbling
against his back; constellations his father learned in his own boyhood, which
in this dark dream-time Credence wobbly, dutifully repeats. Then Dad does a
funny little jerk of his wrist complete with sound effect, click-clickof the
load, and then he is no longer pointing but aiming, thumb raised like a hammer
and finger poised to shoot. His hand is large enough to engulf Credence’s
entire head if he wanted, grab the moon and crush it. He settles his gun-hand
into the pommel of his left one.
Bang.Credence remembers the sound of that.
Dad fires it off over and over and over, potshots into the sky, so Credence can
peer between his arms and catch the points of light as they cascade down, dead.
Percival Graves. His daddy. He’s the one who did this.
“Don’t!—”
He’s rising, twisting. The first blow catches Sam by surprise. Strikes him so
fucking dumb that his slack jaw ripples where Credence’s puny fist hits his
face, hand poised like he’s still about to sink himself into wet, tight omega
heat. The world is swooping and buckling, all the pinks of the room starting to
blend together in a pastiche of flesh, Credence’s head pounding with the sudden
realization that nothing about this is right. He’s been stripped down to his
skivvies but he’s just that level of gone where he’ll run out in the parking
lot in them, anyways, and will not stop running until he’s….Until he’s.
Credence gasps and splutters on his own spit, not knowing where he needs to be,
except for not here. The carpet burns under his feet. Wrong wrong wrong, his
skin shrunk three sizes too small, this is not your alpha and you gotta get the
fuck out of Dodge, boy, where’s your daddy, boy—
He gets about two steps toward the door before Sam’s on him like a three-
hundred-pound steel trap. Credence’s vision goes white as his face smashes
against that self-same awful carpet, stubble of it all in his mouth, head
ringing.
“The fuck!” Sam growls, cock still a hard length against Credence’s bare leg
even as he’s absolutely crushing the shit out of him. Angerscent and adrenaline
and arousal make the air heavy, hard to breathe, and as his head clears,
Credence’s body remembers: there’s this. The flipswitch thing now hardwired at
the base of his brain, the thing that omegas do, because once they were the
feral creatures old explorers spelunked for in caves. The things found by
trembling torchlight in the black pockets between trees at night, light
bringing to bear this ugliness, this cracked genetic code. He twists up to hiss
at Sam and there are too many teeth in his mouth, he knows there are, terribly,
or maybe that’s just some echo in his system. A couple thousand years’ worth of
evolving later, through decades worth of thick, generational layers, he can
still hear it.
A snarl rips out of him. Pure omegan defense instinct. He’s flying with it. Sam
lunges at him again and Credence rakes a hand across his flabby face, blunted
nails catching just below the divot of his eye and scoring down. He wants to
rip out the throbbing vein in Sam’s clammy neck with his teeth, and tries to,
mostly gets more flannel for his trouble. The alpha roars, pawing around
Credence’s neck as he tries to scruff him, not messing around any more, gonna
fuck this omega with everything he’s got; he gets Credence by the tender nape
again with his fingers and squeezes punishingly hard.
Thudda-thud-thud.Three raps on the door. Sam freezes, then wraps one big hand
around Credence’s mouth, who swallows down the blood in his teeth from where he
bit his cheek.
“Sam Thompson?” The voice is distinctly female and authoritative, fuzzed out
behind the steel door. Sam makes no move, either to reply or stop crushing
Credence beneath him, who’s finding it harder and harder to breathe. There’s
some movement flickering behind the drapes, big shadows passing over the side
of Credence’s rug-burned face as they eclipse back and forth.
“Mr. Thompson, please open up. We have reason to suspect that the young man
with you is involved with an assault committed earlier today in this area.”
The Credence this morning would’ve shit his pants at the sound of that, at
every part of this whole nightmare, honestly—but now his blood boils, cycling
through his frozen body like the flakes in the snow globe he and Chastity had
as kids, all shook up and trapped. The thudding and the talking goes on until
it suddenly stops, a grace period of silence filling the motel room.
Sam seems to be caught between letting Credence up to go investigate and making
a break for it when the door flies open with a bang so loud that it nearly
rattles the tacky flower watercolors from their homes on the wallpaper. Sam
shouts; Credence emits a muffled groan of terror.
In the doorframe stands Sheriff Piquery. Head bitch in charge, as Dad says it,
looking miles tall as she stands there in the doorway, hands hovering out at
her sides, not fucking around in the slightest. Small town law. Behind her:
Queenie, hunched sad and nervous, too pink for all the navy uniform drudgery
happening around her.
And behind her, chest still heaving with the evidence of the freshly knocked-
open door: Dad. It’s Dad. He’s wearing his full bad-guy-busting kit, which
includes his denim jacket over top the navy pressed shirt, a beast with a
shearling collar, the kind of artifact that childhoods can be hid all up
inside, just by the smell. The epitome of Dad. He’s got a pistol up, braced
across his left forearm, and Credence can see it trembling a little bit in the
glinting twilight.
He’s frozen—the scent of it, the sight. Credence blinks his one eye up from
where his face is smashed and twisted wishes he was with it enough to feel
afraid. Mortified, even; anything but this bitter, black anger. Sam’s crushing
weight suddenly seems hilariously inconsequential. For a moment, the entire
county stands still, with them, leaving only the rustling of the barley, the
fizz of the police radios, and the distant drone of the interstate’s tar-beat
rhythm, up n’ down n’ back across America forever.
“Credence Percival Graves, what the everloving fuck,” Dad hisses.
Credence shivers at the sound of his name, which is his father’s name,
nearly—he wonders if that’s where his Dad went wrong; only owned him partially,
never entirely. Percy Junior, Credence is not.
Then his melting brain realizes that he has only heard the gun-clicking sound
in movies, truly. It sounds heavier in real life, a loud metal-on-metal
situation. Sam’s grunting has stopped. Dad’s—here.
“Step the fuck off, sir.” Credence has heard sub-zero January cold snaps that
sound warmer than that voice. Pipe busting, finger stealing. The ‘sir’ is
hissed like Dad’s caught lockjaw right quick and it takes the other alpha a
moment to even find speech.
“Th’ fuck…Man, you can’t—”
“Can and will. You have five seconds.”
It’s only when the hot presence at his back dissipates and Credence is free
enough to turn around that he sees the exquisite effort in Dad’s trembling
upper lip, angle all distorted as he towers over him and Sam. The sweat,
rolling down his forehead and into his dark, steepled brows, down even further
and into the collar of his uniform shirt. The gun is still trembling in his
hand as he nudges Sam with it, and Credence gasps in a huge involuntary breath
as he gets up and the pressure of his weight dissipates. The man is pushed
toward the door, arms up and his red, angry dick flapping from the denim fly of
his jeans like some sort of sick prank.
“Piquery,” Dad grits.
Another droplet tracks across his temple as she comes to collect Sam, who
Credence’s omega still pines for, even as it wants to lick Dad’s sweat on
principle. There’s another alpha here, it says, soothing him gently over as Dad
comes enticingly closer, holstering his gun, slick and beguiling in the pit of
his loins, damping the fire. In that moment, Credence despises omegas. All of
them. Believes every sexist urban legend about their born-bred nymphomania and
sluttiness and winking, manipulative cunning.
“Daddy?” He whimpers again, confused, disoriented, split right down the middle.
The blow to the side of Credence’s head makes his vision white out for a moment
and rocks him back on his butt, was halfway up but now knocked back down. Dad
hit him. The suddenness of this disorients him more than being assaulted in the
parking lot, or the dream. Dad’s there at once, smelling overwhelmingly like
home as he manhandles him, and Credence squeals at the two fingers, overbig,
that are roughly jammed into his hole. They wriggle, for a moment, as if
testing the durability of him, and then are yanked out. A sniff.
“Fuck,” Dad moans again, a gravelly sound like he’s taken a goon’s rabbit punch
to the gut one time too many that goes so fast to Credence’s groin it’s a
wonder he doesn’t come right there on the ground. Credence is shocked to the
point of speechlessness. Dad lowers down further to look between his spread
legs, witness the evidence of his son’s loathsome debauchery.
“You—” Dad chokes. “You little slut, Jesus Christ.”
Credence has got precisely enough fight left in him for one thing, which he
does: knee Dad squarely in the face.
The ripe, melon-splittingpopof his nose busting, kneecap to tender cartilage,
satisfies Credence on a bone-deep level; he’ll never forget that sound. And
then Dad is howling and the blood is coursing down his chin and Piquery’s back,
engulfing the doorframe, asking if she needs to call for backup.
“NO!” Dad roars, the cleft above his upper lip stained red, monstrous with his
pain. “He’s mine!” He’s glorious when he’s this angry, already hustling to put
Credence in an excruciating hold that twists his arm high behind his back like
the cop-sense runs right in his blood, knee-jerk cruelty. Credence gives a tiny
smile even through the hurt, pumping out slick and sorryscent for everything
he’s worth, the pennant crook caught red-handed; omegas’ bodies are well-versed
in the kind of coming punishment. Already prepped for the other shoe, poised to
drop.
Piquery is shouting things into her walkie-talkie and slamming the door shut,
leaving the two of them alone; nothing but Credence, his father, and all the
fresh blood on the carpet. Dad gasps, blinking his eyes hard and trying to
figure out how to breathe through his mouth without hurting his swollen,
gushing nose. He’s got his son deep in the hold now but Credence doesn’t care;
the sound of Dad’s agony replays over and over, orgasm-satisfying. Every ounce
of resentment, packed tight into the uncomfortable confines of sixteen years,
released all at once by the snake-strike of his white, bare leg. For once in
his life, Credence’s chest prickles with a low warmth, and it takes him a
minute to recognize the feeling as pride.
“Dad?” he asks, quietly, tired of having his face pressed into the carpet for
the second time tonight but feeling weirdly triumphant; every piece of him
that’s touching his father sings with the rightness of it. He can already feel
Dad softening, warming up to the heady scents in the air and beginning, slowly,
to backpedal at the revulsion of hurting an omega in estrus. An omega that is
his, that smells right, and they both know this rightness.
The sick way they fit together wins.
Dad yanks him forward with one arm until he’s nearly sitting in his lap, and a
sort of euphoria is breaking in waves across Credence’s battered mind; his
father hasn’t been so close to him in months. Years. Just dancing around each
other, hardly even home at the same time these days as Dad takes later shifts
and Credence rises early for school, waking into the blue morning for zero
period. Shoulder squeezes and hand touches becoming less and less common as he
became less and less relevant with each passing summer. Not alpha. So, so far
from alpha.
“’ow could you,” Dad whispers, touching him almost tenderly, cradling him,
little droplets of blood pattering down onto his black jersey hoodie. Credence
doesn’t know which one of his many shortcomings he’s talking about, too wrapped
up in the fine crinkles around Dad’s mouth when he speaks, the shape of the
stubble on his jaw. He realizes he hasn’t been close enough to Dad’s face to
see it so well in so long; the omega in him wants to reach up and paw at it, to
ask if he’s been getting enough sleep, nurture him, press his fingers into the
hollows of his father’s cheeks to feel the diamond-hardness of his teeth
beneath. To apologize for his nose. To index him, in any way he can (to map: is
this the place where I got my brows from, is this the sacred site from which
the shape of my mouth originated, where, on you, can I find my cheekbones and
the color of my hair).
“I—” Credence tries. “I don’t know.”
“Shut up,” Dad says, mashing Credence’s face between his hands—a twisted
recreation of that time so long ago in the alley, no choice here once again—and
when he leans close he doesn’t kiss him, exactly, just. Spits. There is no
other way to describe this, the way he puts his saliva, his blood, into his
son’s mouth, smearing it all over his lips with the pads of his thumbs. It
tastes hot and sweet, the underlying genetics of Dad making Credence thirsty
for whatever he can get, even the gross stuff; he swoons and humps his hips up
in little thrusts, over-ready to be knotted, the taste of Dad’s spit too close
to the taste of the dream not to get set off about it. This is courtship of the
most base kind, getting Dad ready to take and Credence ready to be owned heart
and head and slutty, hungry hole like two parallel systems, two binary stars,
locked in to converge.
Dad grunts and slides Credence off him, arm’s length a pining-worthy distance
already at this point in their joining, and strips off his standard issue
slacks with clumsy efficiency. Credence is overwhelmed by the sight of his
thighs, thick with muscle and covered in dark, wiry hair. The dorky dad briefs,
plain white but translucent-thin with overuse, nothing sexy about them but that
somehow that makes it—better. Hotter.
Without a word he pushes his son’s knee to his chest and rolls him over, flips
him by the hips like he worth so much as corn husks. Back on his belly again,
Credence is left to hear the whush of fabric down Dad’s thighs and fantasize:
how much has Dad’s dick changed since he saw it as a boy, when he was first
discovering his own privates at bath time and was equally fascinated by the
glimpse of his father’s? Is everything of Dad’s still so much thicker and
hairier and more masculine than his own?
For a moment, they tremble together at the precipice. Credence goes face down,
ass up automatically, displaying himself, and Dad mutters something to the
effect of, I despise you, but the words aren’t quite legible; Credence already
knows this, anyways, and empathizes. The wireless modem blinks at them
judgmentally from the desk, somebody’s football game blares from next door, and
they breathe together.
The groan that comes from Credence as the head of Dad’s dick slips inside him
is born from somewhere deep down in his gut, some dark place that’s laid
previously untouched. The feeling isn’t like anything he’s ever encountered.
Like getting high for the first time after a lifetime of drinking; different
bodily systems, different weird inflections of sensation. But instinct knows
how. Credence presses up higher into the lordosis and gets another dose of the
unbearably thick stretch for his trouble. The slick is pumping out of him in a
great gush, now, getting the backs of his thighs all wet, and it makes it all
so easy to take that Credence almost wishes it hurt instead. Dad growls and
starts to load in the inches, excruciating and slow, even as he aids his way
with impatient little fucks of his hips. Credence bears the brutality as best
he can, leaving tooth marks in his fist with the effort of not screaming.
Dad’s in me. Dad’s in me Dad’s in me. The mantra doesn’t stop, and then—he’s
there. Dad’s hips are pressed flush to Credence’s ass, and he realizes: his
body is far too small a vessel for the bounds of this thing between them.
There’s just not enough room in his body to encompass all the hate and ugliness
and fucked up obsession to make it out alive. He’s gonna die and he’s more
alive than he’s ever fucking been, his pink gums and finger webbing and even
the space behind his eyes pulsing with that aliveness, like Dad is squeezing it
out of him—
Credence comes, dick spitting onto the carpet and hole clenching with more
pleasure than all his years of guilty jacking off combined. He can hardly
breathe, it’s so good, so fucking good, fuck. Dad throbs inside him, starting
the aching pullback into the first brutal, wild thrust, and fucks him right
through it; doesn’t know—doesn’t care—he’s just eclipsed God in his son’s life
in the most base way possible. Credence will never wander back into His light
again, soiled irrevocably. He’d weep for it, if he could do anything other than
ride the waves of Dad’s jackrabbiting thrusts, contort his body to the crushing
grip of Dad’s huge hands at his shoulder and hip.
When Credence can finally see straight again he tries to wriggle his ass
enticingly, but maybe it’s awkward, he can’t tell, all the fight leaked right
out of him and onto the ground; he’s leaking from his hole and his dick only
makes it worse, dribbling precum everywhere again already and staining the ugly
carpet dark. “Yeah, yeah,” Dad pants, congested with blood and spit, totally
gone with it, and the sounds brings Credence even lower under the weight of his
lust. His body knows what comes after; he was made to populate the earth, ass
tightening in sweet anticipation. He doesn’t want just one. He wants three.
Six. He imagines them, the wonderful converse of the half-siblings he never
had: three quarters Dad and all the more perfect for it, dark-haired and dark-
eyed, nearly eldritch in their beautify. Just as born of the Midwest as Dad,
with Credence’s simpering ineptitude bred right out. He pants and reaches back
to feel where Dad is pushing into him, because these are the spells of the
omega; oracles, fever-dreamers, conditioned to push come back inside their
fucked out cunts with whispered prayers of hope.
Dad’s still fucking him and fucking him because he’s greedy for orgasm and
they’re just two animals at this point, that’s what alphas and omegas are,
really, if you cut to the bone of it, if you want to be honest. Credence keens
as that sweet spot in him, just scraped by the tips of his own greedy fingers,
is nailed over and over, starbursts behind his eyes. The names, he remembers
them now! Cassius, he wants to scream as he’s boosted forwards again, again.
The Pleiades.Each cold-burn point that Dad shot out of the sky for him, so long
ago. Credence feels a giggle rising up out of him and soon it’s too much; he
drops forward onto his forearms, hangs his head low, and Dad growls at the
sight but doesn’t stop. Just rises up to squat over over him and keeps going,
primal and deep, instinct and cruelty guiding his hips.
They’re close now, and Credence’s fevered thoughts go in a frenetic, pinged-out
scatter: weird self-swallowing musings of his own conception, how it looked and
felt and differed from this. He wonders if he’s a better lay than his mom. He
wonders if he’s a better lay than Chastity would be, even. At the bottom of it
all, like subterranean creatures exposed and writhing beneath an upturned rock,
the dreg-memories of his first arousal: just Dad. It was just Dad, always, and
Credence realizes the sick, unspeakable horror that even if they weren’t—that
he still might—
He comes again, eyes squeezed shut and ashamed, absolutely. Dad tips over the
edge with a roar soon after, knot ballooning up fat as a grapefruit as Credence
is thrust forwards with one epic, final heave, hoodie rucked up past his back
and toward his bright red ears. Credence keeps coming, pathetically, around the
swell of Dad’s knot, internal muscles locking him tight forever and for ever.
The shitty motel room smells like sex and sweat. He’s gathered up as Dad
smushes him into his body, sinks his teeth deep into the nape of Credence’s
neck in that ancient, primordial bite, and there’s red everywhere, but it’s
both of theirs now. Blood of his blood, irrevocably. Dad laps the wound, still
giving little thrusts even as he’s stuck, pressing their sweaty pleasure-wrung
bodies so close together that it’s like he’s trying to make them one person,
and Credence wants to laugh and say: but we already are.
 
 
***** Epilogue *****
Chapter Notes
     unbeta-d and written in one day here ya go
     (also my first mpreg WUT)
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Credence stares at the jar of tomato sauce in his hand. He’s in the middle of
the condiments aisle at the local grocery store, trying hard to remember what
brand Dad likes with his spaghetti and meatballs because that’s what he said he
wanted for dinner tonight. He contemplates it. Puts it down, picks up another.
Credence is learning, slowly. How to make stuff that’s halfway decent; how to
get the coffee percolator up and going in the mornings while also getting Dad’s
kit ready while also making sure he doesn’t burn the eggs—two, scrambled, with
green peppers, the way Dad likes. Life revolves around Dad in a way it always
has, but just a little more explicitly, now that Credence’s world has been
molded and narrowed: when to feed Dad, when to clean up after him, when to run
his household and when to take his cock. No more school. No more church.
There’s an even cadence to this agnostic, domestic life that Credence enjoys,
or maybe Credence’s omegaenjoys, that seems to beat on at a steady pace: spring
had become summer and summer had become fall and now fall is stilling itself
into winter, all the trees gone dead and brown, the leaves stomped into
skeletal mush beneath snow boots pulled out to fight the early frost. No need
to learn anything except how to take his mother’s place, no desire to worship
anything but his alpha’s dick and come, which he imbibes more regularly than he
ever took communion.
 
He’d blinked and it was November; seven months in an instant.
 
Credence weighs the jar, glassed and heavy. His other hand falls absently to
cup the rounded slope of his belly, peeping out from between the open zipper-
teeth of his down jacket, stretching the front of his hoodie. It’s beyond
undeniable, now: Dad, struck deep, staked into him. He was rabid with it, when
Credence first began to show at the turn of his third month, circling around
his son hungrily when he walked through their June-hot, too-small house,
grabbing, sometimes, or just watching. Once, Credence was laid out in their
shared bed like a fresh-slain doe, waiting for his alpha’s cock, and Dad simply
looked at his stomach and stated: that’s mine. I made that. Pumped his dick
vigorously to the words; Credence’s pregnancy has made Dad simultaneously
hornier and colder than he’s ever been, ignoring Credence for days on end
before descending on him in a frenzy, lust spurred by weird, base things that
neither of them have any control over. Little morsels, like the way Credence’s
ankles are beginning to swell, and how the band of his sweatpants starts to
stretch when he pulls them on in the silvery light of their bedroom, intimate
in the grave hours of the morning when he rises first. The sheer fact that he
can’t fit into his khakis anymore. Above all, the ripening of his scent (like
milk and blood, or something, Dad tries to explain at some point when they’re
fucking, spit out all fevered like the world’s grossest dirty talk), the tang
of which is carried in his baggy, ugly clothes, his piss. Every achy, hormonal
inch of his terrible new body.
 
Chastity is thoroughly disgusted by all of it, spending as much time as she can
away from the house, but also seems relieved: Credence is legally no longer son
nor brother. She doesn’t have to care about her Dad’s teenaged omega slut, no
relation, any more than she’d have to care about a needy pet, or a particularly
persistent houseguest.
Credence Graves has become irrelevant, and that seems to suit everyone just
fine.
 
“Mommy!”
 
Credence jolts: a toddler in a huge red puffer jacket is standing by the end
display, running their hands over all the smooth plastic bottles of chocolate
syrup. They’re still at that stage where their limbs are too thick and too
ungainly to bend right; they have to grab the edge of the shelf for balance,
and Credence can’t tell if it’s a little boy or a little girl, yet, too
swaddled up. He’s not sure if he should—is he supposed to try and coo at it,
interact somehow? Ask where its mommy is? He starts to panic, searching around
in his gut and finding nothing, mothering instincts ugly and stunted.
 
The toddler shrieks again.
 
“Sweetheart?”
 
Credence watches as a young man—boy, even—comes out from around the aisle, and
suddenly: that’s Newt Scamander. Wait. Credence doesn’t know what his new last
name is; it’s probably something brutish and Scandinavian sounding, now. His
hair grown out a little longer over the past few years, dressed in the weird
androgynous mish-mash of leggings and sweaters like Credence is, distinctly
soft and omegan. He’s even taller than he was when they last saw each other,
probably still growing, and has developed a slight hunch to compensate for it.
Credence’s neck and shoulders ache in sympathy. He suddenly wants to go over
and lean close to scent Newt; rediscover all those missing years at the crook
of his neck. If he’s pregnant again, when he last had sex, if he’s happy or sad
or scared of his life, which is now Credence’s own to experience.
 
“Mommy, chocolate,” the toddler says, pointedly.
 
Newt swoops in and picks them up, deftly shifting the weight of their tiny body
onto one hip, and stares at Credence. Another child peers out from around
Newt’s elbow. She can’t be older than three or four, brown hair brushed into
pigtails, eyes squinted and tiny and dull. The alpha might have had brown hair.
Credence can’t remember. Abruptly, he wants to tell the child that his entire
family was probably there for her conception, describe to her the way her daddy
made her mommy cry and cry.
 
“Is it a boy or—a girl?” Newt barks, awkward. It’s weird to hear his voice so
deep and even, a few years down the line from the pitchy crackling of puberty.
 
“Uh,” Credence balks. “Boy.”
 
“Congratulations.”
 
“Thank you.”
 
“Mama?” The toddler asks, starting to paw at Newt’s face, tug on his long,
curling hair while the two of them just sort of look at each other, like
fluorescent tumbleweeds should be rolling in between them down the aisle.
Credence blinks and sweats. He isn’t sure if this domestic showdown is a show
of disgust, or indifference, or a cry for help. Maybe just the simple kinship
of shared exhaustion; a sense of me, too. He doesn’t know.
 
But then Newt nods politely and hustles his children down towards frozen foods
and Credence remembers that he isn’t popular with the other young mothers.
Never gets invited to book clubs or recipe swap meets, or even gets to share
the gossip. The weight of his stomach is leaden and sickening. He puts the jar
down on the shelf and dutifully leans down to pick up his little plastic
shopping basket, groaning as it puts pressure on his swollen stomach.
 
On the way out of the registers he passes the pharmacy, and thinks about life
with an empty stomach and a fake ID—and stops. Doesn’t think about buying heat
suppressants. Doesn’t think about Newt, his babies.
 
Credence feels his own alien-child, stirring angrily in his womb, and goes
home. 
Chapter End Notes
     you know where i'll be... second-salemite.tumblr.com folks
End Notes
     aaaand a potential epilogue is also in the works!
     if i haven't scared you away yet come find me on tumblr @second-
     salemite <3
     (also brownie points to anyone that can guess where Credence's
     mugshot image came from ;) )
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