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cream1111 · 1 day ago

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the yearning, the angst, the desperation, the obsession. everything about this is perfect.

Supernova | ao3 | masterlist

Summary: Caleb's POV of the events of the previous part. Non-canon compliant, as I started this fic before he was released, and it turns out Caleb and mc were in the shelter together after the chronorift catastrophe, whereas I have them meeting at their gran's house for the first time in this fic. I also wrote Caleb and mc only being one year apart, unlike in the game, where they seem to be 3 or 4 years apart. Otherwise, I've tried to incorporate everything we've learned about him so far into this fic. This story contains: obsessive, possessive, jealous behavior. codependency. angst. yearning, mutual pining. some sexual fantasy on Caleb's part. I lean fully into the yandere Caleb that infold gifted us with. i hope it's enjoyable!

He is a star, just on the edge of going supernova. His rage at his lack of control, the voice in his head predicting he’ll become as destructive as a black hole someday, the mass of his emptiness and the twinned want for it to be filled—always on the verge of crushing his soul.

You are his twin, his other, his only, in his binary system, anchoring him with your gravity—your pull, the defiance of physics, as your force on him prevents him both from careening out alone in the dark and from imploding into himself, collapsing into the black hole he knows his truest form to be.

He is an endless hole of voracious destruction, and you are the only thing that fills him.

When it becomes too much. When the feelings inside him feel too big for his skin. You have always been there, a steadying force, a constant companion as he burns through the universe, through life. He is shaped, contained, filled by you, as you are carved, eroded, sculpted by him.

One bright day, Gran brings you home. Introduces you to your new big brother. You look—naked. Exposed. All of your feelings, right on your face. Your fear, hesitation, pain, all clear as the bright sunny day for him to read in your big, bright, sad eyes. He doesn’t know why, but it hurts his heart, to see how scared you are of his reaction to your presence in his home, now yours.

He smiles wider, offers you his hand.

The moment you reach for him, big eyes never leaving his, and he feels your soft skin against his palm, he somehow knows it’s over, and just beginning.

Perhaps it’s his evol. The fact that he can bend, control, subdue gravity, gravity which is so closely linked to time. Because the moment that you touch his hand contracts and expands, stretches—everything narrows to his skin against yours, to this point in time. Perhaps his evol allows his future, past, parallel selves to infuse him with knowledge, because he somehow knows he will never escape you, the pull of you, no matter what the rest of the world says, from this moment onward, suspended in time—your hand in his, a butterfly smothered in sap, hardened into amber. Amber that he carries in his hand, when yours isn’t there to fill it.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Something in him, recognizing something in you. Your fear. Your hollow eyes. The anger, underneath the fear. You’re so, so pretty. Like a living doll.

You take his offered hand, despite your fear, the pain in your eyes, and Caleb feels for the first time like he has a purpose. Value. Something he can control, in a life that has spun out of his control more times than he can count. He’s not just a threatening black hole. He can look after you. Keep you safe. Remove that fear from your eyes. He can nurture, instead of only destroy.

He’s a boy, offering a gentle hand to a scared girl, who needs him. And in the offering, and her acceptance, his own need comes into existence, a bright flash in his dark universe.

He shows you around, friendly, earnest for the first time in a long time, chattering about anything he can think of to keep your eyes on him, you listening to him, your attention on him. It feels so, so good.

But he has to go to school. He has to leave you behind, during the day. He spends his days lying, pretending to listen attentively, pretending to be interested in the same things his friends are interested in. He mimics the laughter of his friends, smiles his empty, useful smile, as he thinks of all the ways he can alleviate the pain, the fear in your eyes. As he imagines your hand in his.

He finds you in closets, curled up on yourself, a tightly furled flower. He doesn’t want to pluck you from where you feel safe.

He just wants to change what makes you feel safe. A gardener, repotting a rose. A rose he knows that has thorns as deadly as his own.

He squeezes in next to you, in the dark. Puts his arm around you. Chatters again, telling you stupid stories, making stuff up, anything to help you relax, distract you from what haunts you, melt into his side. You eventually let him lead you from the dark, into the light. You curl up next to him, as he puts together a model airplane. Your eyes watch his hands as he fits the pieces together, as he carefully glues them.

He pauses, holds one hand up. When you just stare at him in confusion, he gently takes your wrist, and pulls your palm to his.

Already, his hands are bigger than yours.

I’m bigger than you. So I’ll always be able to protect you.

He gently sets your palm back into your lap. You snuggle closer to him.

He feels so, so good.

But there’s something wrong with you. Gran sits him down at the kitchen table, looks earnestly at him. She tells him about your heart.

It’s our job to take care of her. Can you help me?

He knows what she is asking.

He knows about her migraines. How hard she works. He doesn’t know why, or what she’s doing.

He just knows that she’s telling him what he already knew, from that first moment. He needs to look after you.

But she didn’t even have to ask. He has already been doing this, from the moment you took his hand. It is easy for him to nod in response to Gran’s question. Of course.

For the first time in his life, he has something of his very own, giving him purpose. He can nurture, instead of destroy. Is it selfish, if it gives him so much pleasure? Seeing you slowly unfurl, and come to depend on him.

You start seeing your doctor, taking the pills to stabilize your heart. You always come home exhausted, drained, from your appointments. He sits with you, sharing a thick blanket in his room with the big bay window, and reads to you. Books from Gran’s library. You rest your head on his shoulder, and he feels like he’s flying, like he’s finally not alone, for the first time in his life. The more time you spend reading together, the more you begin to speak, giving him your thoughts on what you are reading.

You give him the gift of seeing the world not only through his own eyes, but through yours.

The medication is horrible for you.

He understands what Gran was asking, the first time you choke on the pills. The first time he finds you vomiting, huddled over the toilet.

It feels like a part of himself is in pain, watching you in pain. He hates it.

He hates it, but he loves it.

Soothing you. Comforting you. Watching your face, drawn in a frown of pain, relax under the wet cloth in his hand, as you manage to swallow, under his palm on your throat.

As he cares for you, carries you to bed in his gangly, too long arms, he isn’t a black hle, destroying anything, everything. He’s nurturing. And he also doesn’t have to control his face, hide his feelings, pretend to be normal and interested in normal-people things. He’s just himself, taking care of what’s his.

Slowly, slowly, the medication is adjusted, you’re no longer sick all the time. He’s happy to see you regain strength, color in your face.

He takes you for walks, out in the sunshine, under the open sky, in the fields of wildflowers beyond Gran’s house. You cling to him, complain of vertigo, staring up into endless blue. There were no skies, in the labs where you lived for so long.

His heart aches. He thinks of lifting you into the air, letting you experience flight, the flight he yearns for, the only time in his life he ever feels free. Before you came. But now, having you at his side, feels like flying.

But he doesn’t want to scare you. He pulls you down with him, to the earth, surrounded by so many living things, so different from the lab that kept you caged for so long. He thinks such a lovely rose deserves the soil, the fireflies, all the growing things as companions.

He pulls you down into the wildflowers, and he tells you about his dreams of flying. He wants to share this part of himself with you. He holds your hand in his, index finger pointing, and names the types of airplanes that fly overhead.

Later, you’ll ask him to make you fly, and he will. Your body weightless, in a field of flowers, as you laugh, one of the few times you actually ever smile. A smile only he sees. A laugh, and a smile, that belong to him, only to him. In a world where he’s never had anything to call his own before, he now has your smile, and your laugh.

One night, he comes to check on you, as he often does when you’re sleeping. But you’re not huddled in your bed, long lashes sweeping across your soft cheek. The window is open, curtains whispering in the chill breeze. He finds you on the roof, shivering. He doesn’t know why you didn’t bring a coat. He just knows that you are cold, and he is big, and his body is warm, and already what’s his, is yours. He wraps himself around you, feels you melt against his chest.

He tells you about the stars. Again, he holds your hand in his, index finger pointing, and names the constellations, the bright planets that look like stars.

The night you begin dreaming about flying, high in the sky, amidst the stars, he begins to dream about you. His anchor. His north star. The point around which he revolves.

When you finally start school, he’s so excited. Helps you pick out your backpack, your school supplies at the corner store. But he can tell, from the moment you walk into the crowded hallways, how overwhelmed you are. You revert to that strange frozen stiffness you had, when Gran brought you home. He hates it. He looks around. Finds a quiet classroom. He uses his size, his presence, to wrap you in safety, resting his elbows on either side of you against the classroom wall.

Look at me. Look only at me.

So what, if what he wants is selfish, and gives him what he wants, if it helps you too? If its primary purpose is to calm you, soothe you, help you at school, in every aspect of your life?

Caleb is hungry, selfish. He knows this. As long as he can control it, it’s okay. As long as his selfishness aligns with helping you, it’ll be okay, right?

You calm down, as he tells you to look for him, anytime you’re overwhelmed. That he’ll be there. A promise he’ll always keep, forever.

He sees how the other kids respond to you. They see your unsmiling face, your quiet, ever-vigilant stillness, and they immediately recognize you as different. Strange. Their base animal instincts are to distrust anything that’s other.

Caleb is a star, the rage fueling his core, boiling. He still smiles. Charms. Draws people in with his wholesome apple boy mask. He learned this, long ago—to get what you want, to control what happens to you, means controlling other peoples’ perceptions of you.

He wears a mask, like he wears his school uniform. As easy as breathing, most of the time.

When he sees people bothering you, he flies to you. Smiling. Putting his arm around you, guiding you away. He will protect you from the entire world, including other children—they were simple props before. An unavoidable reality, to charm, neutralize, recruit to his side so ease his path to the future, his path to escaping this school and this youth where he has so little control. But now, he considers them hardly more than animals, as he watches them scent you, and begin to growl.

Are you his sister? Why do you walk home together all the time? What’s wrong with you?

He intervenes. Draws you into his side, pulls you close. No, she’s not my sister.

Despite how much he already loves you, how close he feels to you, he balks at the idea of you being his sister.

He crushes the soda can in his hand, no evol necessary, the first time it occurs to him that if he accepts that you’re his sister, like the adoption papers say, like Gran says, like the kids at school say, then one day he won’t be the most important person in your life. He’ll just be your brother.

He can’t stand it.

He has friends at school with siblings. They complain about their annoying little sisters, their jerk older brothers. They joke and laugh and pester each other, and also defend each other when someone else is doing the bullying.

Caleb could never, ever complain about you. He has never found you annoying. He already knows that he is prepared to crush anyone who would dare look at you strangely, let alone bully you.

He wants to spend all of his time with you. He wants to keep helping you grow. He wants to be the soil in which you flourish.

Even as a boy, he knows that he’s not satisfied with being just your brother. He wants to be everything, if it’s to you.

He knows that he hurts you, every time he denies that you’re his sister.

But you’re more. He can’t explain it yet, or claim it yet. He tells himself: he’ll tell you, when you’re older. When he has more control of his own life, and can do even more than just making sure your life is as easy as possible, as he cooks for you, cleans for you. As he helps you wash, care for your hair, his rose, his doll.

He hopes you can forgive him, in the end, for carving out this future for the both of you, where he’s not just your brother, and you’re not just his sister. Brothers and sisters part ways. Move into their own houses. Marry other people.

He tells himself that he’ll make up for every grievance you have against him, every time he hurts you when he denies you as his sister, when you’re both older, when he can actually do something about what he knows is his fundamental truth.

You’re not his sister. He’s not your brother.

You’re just his, and he is yours.

Time passes. Each day, he gets to walk with you to school, holding an umbrella over your head when it’s raining. Handing you his aviator sunglasses when it’s too bright. He gets to see you in the halls, across the meaningless crowds.

Holding your hand through it all.

One spring day, as you’re walking home from school together, you find a cat, mewling pathetically from the bushes. It has crawled underneath, hiding in the thick foliage in an effort to protect itself.

It’s hurt. Caleb is sympathetic, but he would have kept walking. He has his own injured creature to care for, after all. But you—you’re absolutely distraught. You beg him to pick it up, carry it home wrapped in his jacket.

You never need to beg. But he doesn’t mind when you do.

As he lifts up the scruffy cat, which doesn’t scratch or bite, seemingly resigned to its fate or too scared to resist, it reminds him of you, the first day you came home. Your pain, and your fear. Your rage, banked for fear of retribution.

He carries the cat home, wrapped in his jacket.

You consult Gran on how to care for it. You do so, diligently, getting up at all hours in the night to check on it. Which is the only reason it doesn’t manage to escape.

Finally, Caleb gets fed up with the ridiculous thing trying to slink away while it’s injured. Trying to avoid the care you’re so faithfully offering it. Foolishly rejecting what’s best for it.

He buys a collar with his allowance, and a bell. Slips it around the shivering thing’s fragile neck.

It occurs to him how pretty you’d look, with something similar.

He’d hear you, wherever you were. In the night, crawling onto the roof alone. Vomiting at the toilet, alone.

Walking in the halls at school, surrounded by so many people in the world who do not matter. Who simply present a barrier, when he’s trying to maneuver through their mass of bodies to get to you when he can see you freezing, withdrawing into yourself. When he knows you need him.

He wants to put a pretty collar with a bell on you, and listen to the tinkling, meant for his ears, and his ears alone.

Thanks to the bell, the cat heals. As it frolics away, free at last, Caleb watches it go, a twisting, painful sensation in his belly. He turns, looks at you. You’re not smiling, but your face is shining, your eyes bright. He can see that you’re happy with the work you both did for the cat.

He hates himself, for the feelings inside of him.

He wants to reach over, put his big hand around your neck. Loosely. Just to feel your heartbeat in your throat under his palm. To reassure himself that you’re still here. That you still need him. That you’re not going anywhere, and that you won’t be leaving him alone, anytime soon.

He’s so, so selfish. He is an endless hole of voracious destruction, and you are the only thing that fills him.

Time passes.

One morning, he finds you thrashing in bed, breathing heavily, an animal panic choking your lungs. He thinks it’s a normal panic attack for you, is prepared to help you breathe, to walk you through it, as he always does, but then he sees the blood in the sheets.

He’s read about this. He paid attention in health class. He needs to know everything about you, your body, how it’s different from his, and how to care for it, if he’s to look after you properly.

Gran isn’t always around. In fact, she’s away more often than not.

In her bedroom, with a migraine. Or working so hard, on something she can’t talk about.

You’ve had your first period.

He’s heard boys talking, joking, jeering at school. It disgusts him, how they talk about girls, as if girls aren’t people too. He looks at you, and all he sees is a person—pretty as a doll, but full of life. Of fear and dreams and the longer you’re with him, you feel safe enough to demand anything, everything of him. He hates how the guys at school talk about girls. Because you’re a girl, and you have a whole universe inside of you, one that he’s so happy to discover every time you open your mouth. Every time you discover something new that you like, or hate, or annoys you.

How can you, as a girl, and your body, experiencing something outside of your control, be fodder for a joke?

He strides into your bedroom, grabs your wrists. Look at me. Don’t look at the blood.

Your breathing calms, as your big, bright eyes stare into his own.

It feels so, so good, as you relax. As you look to him, for help, for comfort, for soothing all of your fears. He wants, needs you to know how good it feels for him, to be able to do this to you, with you. You’re so, so good.

Good girl.

Your face does something funny, when he says these words. He thinks that the look on your face right now mirrors the feeling in his chest, when you listen to him, rely on him, let him open the pickle jar, let him smooth the way of any obstacles you have. When you smile for him, and no one else. When you allow him to nurture, instead of just destroy.

He helps you with the laundry. Finds himself regretting dumping the stain remover on your blood, stuffing the sheets in the washer. Your blood is a part of you, as much as your beautiful hair, your soft skin, the sharp tongue in your mouth.

Caleb thinks there might be something wrong with him, with how much he wants to keep your sheets, just as they are, tucked away somewhere in his closet.

He resists the urge, just barely.

Later, after he’s bought you pads with his allowance. After you walk around the house with a strange gait, like you can’t stand to bring your legs together, he teases you. You throw the apple at him, eyes bright—defiant, annoyed. He enjoys watching you take the bite, because he told you to. He loves it, every time he tells you to do something, and you do it, no questions asked.

Proof of how much you trust him. How much you need him.

Just like he needs you.

Later, at school, he catalogues the boys who make jokes about girls, and periods. He watches, listens. Lies through his teeth, chummy and just a normal teenage boy himself, of course. He notes the worst offenders.

It’s unfortunate, how they trip. Down the stairs. On nothing. Rumors start going around the school that there’s a ghost haunting a particular flight of stairs, right outside of Caleb’s homeroom.

He loves you so much, it hurts. He enjoys passing the pain along, to others who also deserve it.

He is an endless hole of voracious destruction, and you are the only thing that fills him.

Years pass.

You become accustomed to the confined chaos of school, interacting with so many people. You seem calmer, in the busy hallways. You snort, joke, even if you don’t smile at school, when he has to leave you for awhile, so he can continue his wholesome apple boy lie. Student council president, captain of the basketball team, MVP for the football team, medal winner in track and field. He lifts weights after school, is diligent about his diet, his protein intake, each week new gains bulking out his already tall body. He must do everything possible to lay the foundations for his future success, so he can provide for you. Be a constant pillar of strength for you. Continue giving you everything you need.

You come to him, when you’re upset. When everyone, everything begins to overwhelm you. He holds you. He jokes with you. He tells you stupid stories. He cooks for you. He feels satisfaction, deep in his blood.

And then, somehow, maybe while he wasn’t looking—although he’s always looking, so when would that even have been? He hasn’t stopped looking at you, from the first moment you came home.

But from one day to the next, you are a girl—pretty, cute, still, solemn.

And then—you are still all those things, but you are also beautiful.

Beautiful in a way that turns his brain into mush. A pretty living doll, but one that he wants. Not just to care for her hair, feed her, rock her to sleep. He wants all that, and more.

His heart races when you come close, when he can smell the scent of your skin, your shampoo, your sweat, your breath. You’re so beautiful, it hurts.

For the first time, he wants more than to hold you in his arms.

He wants to put his mouth on you.

He wants to put his hands all over you, not to check to see where it hurts, but to check where you feel good. Where you like to be touched the most.

The size of his want terrifies him.

He tries to control it. To laugh, and joke, to pat your head, mess up your hair. He wears a new mask, over his old one.

Wholesome apple boy, who has never once imagined putting his tongue in his sister’s mouth.

And then, one night, you have your first nightmare. About what, you never say. You tell him you don’t remember. He doesn’t know if he believes you. It drives him insane, not knowing.

He hears you, your hoarse cry, in his sleep. He jolts up in bed, hears it again. Gran will sleep through it, as she always slept through the side effects of the pills, slept through when you had the flu.

It’s up to him, to go to you.

He stands in the doorway of your room, and feels so big. A looming monster, his shadow stretching across your bedroom floor, blanketing your small body. You’ve always been small, but this time, the first time you reach for him in the night, body and nightclothes wet with sweat, you feel so fragile to him, in his big arms. He could crush you.

It terrifies him.

It turns him on.

He’s a liar, and he’s so, so selfish.

He is an endless hole of voracious destruction, and you are the only thing that fills him.

He clutches you to him, makes another selfish decision. Instead of stripping your bed, helping you put on new sheets, tucking you back in, he takes you to his own bed. Pulls you close against his body, under the covers. Blanketing you with his own smell, his own arms. His.

You fall asleep like that. He stays awake, his body aching painfully with want. If you notice how hard he is in the morning, tucked against your back, your ass, you never say anything.

Your worst nights are his favorite nights.

He’s so, so selfish.

After so many years together, you have fully come out of your shell, when you’re with him. Not only do you turn to him for comfort, reveal your smile, only to him, you also show him the full spectrum of your inner world, your feelings. From sorrow, fear, need—to frustration, rage. You hold it in at school, carefully blank, until you get home, and then you explode.

He loves it.

It’s a fireworks show that only he ever gets to see. He’s relieved that you have so much fire inside of you, after spending so long being afraid to express it.

He feels a sense of accomplishment, for being the soil in which you could flourish in all of your explosive colors.

Only he gets the privilege of watching your face, watching you throw things, screaming about your stupid schoolmates, your stupid teachers, the shit you hear people still saying about you.

He notes names. He catches the plates, the glasses, the vases. He absorbs it all, a gravity field pulling everything into him, into the hungry black hole at the heart of him. Whatever you have to give, he’ll take. He’s strong enough for the both of you.

After you seem to lose steam, he pulls you into his arms. I wish I could create a world with just the two of us. He savors how you melt into him, let him get so close to you, when you don’t even seem to be aware of anyone else in the world unless they draw your attention to them by being mean to you. You’re perfect just the way you are.

It occurs to him that he doesn’t like the fact that your attention is drawn to the people who say things about you.

So he’ll fix it. For you. And for him. He wants you to pay attention only to him.

He’s so, so selfish.

Do you feel better? He’ll ask, as your breathing slows, your heart rate lowers. You nod into his big chest, and it feels so, so good.

Sometimes, he pulls you to him too quickly, before you’re done exploding. You’ve bitten him, more than once.

The first time, you bit so hard that the mark lasted for weeks. Deep red marks from your cute, sharp teeth, buried in the meat between his thumb and forefinger.

He jerked himself with that hand, multiple times, every night, until the marks faded. Each time, he couldn’t take his eyes off the proof of your teeth in his flesh.

He wants to mark you in turn.

The size of his want terrifies him.

He is a black hole, and he is hungry. And you are the only thing that can fill him.

The kids at school who made the unfortunate decision of shit-talking you, of pulling your attention away from him, find items of contraband in their lockers that they never put there. They find themselves being accused of plagiarizing on extra credit papers that they never turned in. Their boyfriends, or girlfriends, break up with them, claiming they have a crush on someone new. Someone really popular, who unexpectedly paid so much attention to them that they felt like they were the only people in the world.

Sad really, that once they had broken up with their partner, he seemed to lose complete interest in them.

He is selfish, and he is a black hole, and he is hungry.

But once people learn not to fuck with you because of his efforts, your fits of fury become less frequent.

He misses them.

He wants you to explode all over him, like you used to.

He begins to intentionally provoke you, telling himself it’s healthy for you to be challenged, pestered, to face adversity, feel all your big feelings, and then safely let them go, into his gravity well, the deep well of his want.

When he eats your ice cream, he ends up hurting you much more than he intended. Denying you as his sister, again.

He hates it. He hates that he hurts you, every time.

He has to hope that you’ll forgive him, someday. That someday, you’ll understand why.

For now, he tries to soothe you with all of your favorite ice cream. A plan he already had in mind when he ate the last of the old stuff. You let him make you feel a little better, at least. He has to hope that someday, you’ll understand why he can’t fully make it up to you yet, because he has no idea what he’ll do if you don’t.

If you were to drift away, pull away from him, spin off into the universe without him, he would explode, collapse. The mass of his emotions—fear, anger, guilt, love, want, so much want—would implode, collapse, compound into the ever hungry black hole of his soul.

He would be lost without you anchoring him.

He’s so selfish. He hates himself. He can’t stop himself.

He is no longer satisfied, with you simply coming to him when you’re upset. Hugging him when you’re scared, and overwhelmed, recharging yourself like he’s a battery pack and you’re an empty little triple A.

He wants you to come to him when you’re happy. Because you’re as drawn to him as he is to you.

He always finds a reason to be in the bathroom at the same time you are, before school, or getting ready for bed. He brushes his teeth while you shower. He watches your blurry form in the mirror, and barely resists the urge to throw open the curtain, every time. To climb in with you, clothes on, and kiss your wet mouth. Get on his knees, and see where else you’re wet.

He hates himself. He can’t stop himself.

When he does pushups, he asks for your help. Your light weight on his back does nothing for his workout, but feeling your hands on his sweat-slick skin keeps him up at night in the same way your bite marks do.

He brings you the tiger balm, feeling so transparent, so pathetically obvious, insisting you help him apply it to his back.

He stares at your face in the mirror. Your little frown of concentration. The color in your cheeks again. He can feel your heartbeat in your fingertips along his skin. He wants to pull your hands from his back, place them on his chest, his big pecs. He wants to guide your hands lower, lower, past the hair beginning at his navel, down below the band of his basketball shorts. He wants you to take your hot little hands and wrap them around his big dick, tiger balm at all, make it sting for him, as he burns under your touch.

He is so, so selfish, and he hates himself.

He is an endless hole of voracious destruction, and you are the only thing that fills him.

He knows you’re isolated, that he’s all you’ve ever really had to fulfill any, every role for you. He knows you want him, that you watch him, that the color rises in your cheeks now when he’s close, but he’s so scared that it’s just a result of your isolation, of your dependence on him.

He’s so selfish, and he’s a coward. He’s so scared that if he acts, he’ll somehow be hurting you, exploiting you.

If you accept him, he’ll never know for sure if you love him for him or simply because he was the only one there. But you never show interest in anyone else.

He’s afraid that if you reject him, you’ll also end up hating him, and you’ll spin away from him into the dark velvet night.

He has to wait. Until you’re older, until you’ve seen more of the world. So that you’re sure you want him, after experiencing other things and people.

The idea makes him want to go supernova.

But no matter how selfish he is, he has to offer you the opportunity to know more than just him. And he needs to know your feelings for him are real. Maybe that’s a form of selfishness too, as he watches in satisfaction as your want for him, his big body, makes you pant, lean toward him as if pulled by gravity, as your brow furrows, and the yearning on your face is obvious for only him to read as your frustration grows when he doesn’t act.

It turns him on, seeing how much you want him.

It infuriates him, seeing how much people want you.

And you can feel it. He can see how your body tenses, how you begin to freeze, being the object of so many gazes.

It’s the worst at track practice, when you’re wearing those tiny as fuck running shorts. It boggles his mind, how they’re part of the standard track uniform for the girl’s team.

His teammates, the other guys, openly gawk at your long, beautiful, naked legs. At your easy, graceful gate around the track.

He wants to use his evol to yank their eyes right out of their skulls.

Instead, he focuses on your needs first.

Jogs over you, blocks your view of their leering.

You look up at him, your big bright eyes calming as he looks down into them. He lets his hands wander, like they always want to do. Fingering the hem of the shorts. Touching you, where no one else can. Where no one else will ever be able to.

Just because he wants to let you experience the world, does not mean the world gets to touch you. He’ll make sure of it.

You agree to put on his compression shorts.

His dick is rock hard in his own shorts, as he helps you change, as you lift your legs, one by one, as his barbell-roughened hands drift along your soft thighs, clutching the slippery material in his fingers, as he inhales the scent of your body, as you stare down into his eyes with your desire filling them like unshed tears. Tears he wants to make you cry.

You’re so fucking sweet. He loves you when you’re furious, spitting and biting. And he loves you when you’re like this, trusting him with your body, your needs, pliant and docile.

All for him. Only for him.

After, you seem calm, comfortable in your own skin again. You run so fast, your hair a flag behind you, as if you’re declaring war.

He turns to the guys who were ogling you, endures their stupid fucking jokes and sleazy comments. He bides his time. Waits until practice is over, and they’re in the boy’s locker room.

He pulls an apple from his duffle, floats it in the air.

Hey.

His voice is low, serious in a way it rarely is. It echoes through the mostly empty locker room, bouncing between the metal lockers, the tiled floor. It pulls their attention, the jarring disparity between his current tone and how he normally sounds.

Their eyes widen as they see evidence of his evol for the first time. Everyone knows he has it. But he doesn’t use it at school. He doesn’t need it to stand out. He saves its tricks, its delights, for you, and you alone.

About the bullshit you were spouting on the track. She’s not my sister. And you don’t look at her.

They glance nervously at each other, the obvious, imperious order rankling their juvenile egos.

One of them pipes up. What’s the big deal? If she’s not your sister, why do you care who looks at her?

This asshole isn’t entitled to an answer from him. Doesn’t matter. You just don’t fucking look at her. He forces calm authority into his voice. Forces himself to smile, to wear the lower part of the mask, the part that doesn’t reach his eyes.

One of the guys, the one who always says the most disgusting shit about girls, about guys he doesn’t think are masculine enough, scoffs. What’re you gonna do to us, huh? You gonna chew my ass, like you chew your dumbass apples?

The other guys exchange nervous glances, nervous chuckles.

I’m not interested in your ass, bro. He grins. It probably looks wrong, based on their reactions. I’ll just… he begins, casually. He flicks his wrist.

The apple explodes, as if crushed by hammer—the pieces of the fruit spatter the faces and chests of the guys standing around him with wet, fleshy impacts. The pieces that would have hit him fall to the ground with heavy-sounding splats.

He smiles cheerfully into the ringing silence. We good?

The fuckhead still doesn’t seem to have quite gotten the memo. He swats the apple sticking to his face, sneers. You’re so full of shit. A golden boy like you with your entire future ahead of you wouldn’t commit murder over a piece of ass.

Caleb sighs. Leans back. Shrugs. True. Killing your dumbass outright isn’t worth being sent to prison. But you know, he says thoughtfully. He spreads his legs wide on the bench. Talks like he’s just shooting the shit, waves his hand leisurely. Accidents happen, all the time. You’re throwing a baseball, and suddenly something snaps in your shoulder. It would be a shame, if you could never throw a ball again. Or say, you’re about to cross the finish line, and you step funny, you know? And you never do walk right, after that. Or you’re playing basketball, and suddenly, poof—burst aneurysm, bleeding out, right in your brain. That shit can happen to even the healthiest of athletes. Just, bad luck, man. The human body is so fragile. As fragile as the skin of an apple.

The guys stare at him in silence. A droplet of water drips from a showerhead, splashes onto the floor. Even the biggest idiot seems to be at a loss for words.

He smiles, smiles, smiles.

Don’t look at her ever again, and you won’t have to worry about all that. He gets to his feet, slings his duffel over his shoulder. Puts his hands in his pockets. Whistles, as he meanders out of the locker room.

Later, he’s doing the household’s laundry. He’s lifting dirty clothes out of the combined dirty clothes basket from the bathroom, and your little slippery running shorts fall out of the handful he’s trying to stuff into the washer.

He stares at them on the floor. Slowly puts the stuff in his hand in the machine, thinking.

He’s a black hole, and he’s so fucking hungry.

He squats down, lifts the shorts. They’re tiny, in his big hands. He sits quietly, listening. You’re upstairs in his room, doing homework. Gran’s at work. He’ll hear you, if you come down. You tromp through the house like an elephant. It’s adorable.

He lifts the shorts to his face, shoves his nose in them. Inhales.

He’s squatting at your feet again, in the locked bathroom at school. He’s looking up at you, your chest rising and falling with your rapid breath. He can smell you, the intensity of your excitement at the proximity of his face to where you want him the most. As he opens his mouth, as he extends his tongue to the built-in underwear of the little slip of fabric, he imagines that he’s back in that bathroom, leaning forward, bringing the flat of his tongue between your legs. He imagines that you thread your pretty hands in his hair and pull him closer, urging his tongue deeper into you. He imagines, as he fills his mouth with as much of the fabric as he can, breathing through his nose, that you come on his face, with your soft noises of pleasure echoing through the tiled bathroom.

He comes in his pants.

He hates himself, as he pulls your shorts out of his mouth. As he places them gently into the washer. He hates himself, but he can’t stop himself. He knows he’ll do this again, and again, until he can have the real thing.

That was towards the end, of everything.

Even as he was packing his bags, he didn’t see it coming.

He made you so many promises that he, in all of his youthful hubris, believed he could keep. About how often he’d be home. About how often he could be in touch. About how close he’d still be able to stay to you, through time and distance.

He lifted you with his evol in a field of wildflowers, watched your lovely hair float around your beautiful face, and he came so close to losing control, and kissing your soft lips.

He made you so many promises, and he broke one the first day he was gone.

Because when he arrived for basic training, they took his phone away, and didn’t give it back for six weeks. Something about fostering camaraderie with his fellow cadets. Bullshit.

It got worse from there. Basic training. Specialized training. Combat missions. Flight missions. He was either out of range, or the op required radio silence. He was determined to reach the highest ranks. To be able to best provide for you. But that required confidentiality, restricted security clearances. More and more things he couldn’t talk about. More and more important holidays and events he was forced to miss.

And then one day he came home, after having been away on a longer-than-usual undercover mission, and instead of his still, quiet girl with the serious face, who only smiled for him, who crawled all over him, and treated him like her personal servant, who blew up at him, bit him, screamed, threw shit at him, and was the sweetest little thing, soft and pliant in his arms, only for him, waiting for him, he found…

You. Wearing a mask so obvious that he could see its ribbon tied through your lovely hair.

By the time he finally made it home again, he had already lost you.

You smiled at him, and it didn’t reach your eyes. You smiled at Gran. You smiled at the checkout boy at the corner store. You smiled at random fucking strangers on the street.

You smiled, smiled, smiled.

You smiled, and it looked wrong on your lovely face. Not the smile of when you’re flying, when he would make you fly.

Something artificial, and empty. Your smile was a pot, filled with a plastic flower instead of a living rose.

You talked about your friends at school. Your sudden, numerous extra-curricular activities.

You smiled at him so politely, with such empty eyes, he wanted to flip the fucking table.

You treated him like a stranger.

No matter what he did, no matter how much he poked you, teased you, tried to corner you and interrogate you about your sudden change, you slipped away, with a false, cheerful laugh.

He wanted to crush his own eardrums, instead of hear that fucking fake laugh again.

And then he had to go back to the DAA.

He had to keep leaving you, and the visits in between became fewer, and fewer, as his training intensified, as he failed psych eval after psych eval, despite his perfect marks in everything else, his perfect mask that drew people to him like flowers to the sun.

You stop responding to his calls, his texts.

He can’t get you to respond, but he can use his newly acquired hacking skills, his new security clearances, to keep track of you even if you won’t even say hello.

When he gets back from one particularly grueling, strange mission in the Deepspace Tunnel, he reconstructs your movements of the past few weeks based on your phone’s location, your socials. He sees that your phone spent the night at an unfamiliar address. It’s not one of your new friend’s places. You’ve never done that before. You stay at your dorm. You stay at friends’. You stay at Gran’s.

He breaks so many security regulations, civil rights laws, identifying the person who lives there.

Some random guy, who is built just like Caleb. Big, tall. Handsome, dark hair.

Caleb sits on his bunk, his hand over his mouth.

He feels like he needs to vomit.

He has never vomited after the highest g-force training required by the DAA, but he needs to vomit imagining you letting someone else touch you, exposing your most vulnerable self to him, while wearing your fucking mask.

Caleb wanted your first time to be soaked in pure, overwhelming love. To be with someone who’d watch every single fleeting expression on your beautiful face, who would kill himself to make you feel cherished, to make you feel as good as physically possible. To feel safe enough to wear your real face, the whole time, safe enough to tell him what you want, so he can give you everything you deserve.

And Caleb knows that he is the only person in the universe who could give you that, in the way that you deserve. He was built to protect you. His purpose is to love you. You are his anchor, his twin star, the only thing keeping him from exploding into blinding supernova light, collapsing into his own devouring dark. He knows you best. He knows everything about you, and he would use that knowledge to make you feel like you were flying as he made love to you.

What if that fucker hurt you? What if he made you cry?

Caleb rushes to the toilet, vomits for the first time in years.

While Caleb was hallucinating about the past, present, future, lifetimes that haven’t happened yet, reliving strange memories of being in a lab, observed through glass, as he was adrift in deep space during his last mission that so quickly went sideways, dying from oxygen deprivation, you were having your first one-night stand.

You fucked a guy that looked just like him.

The only thing that prevents that motherfucker from suffering a terrible, unfortunate accident, is the fact that you ghost him, after.

Caleb knows, because he tracks every fucking thing you do, after that, every time he is within range in Skyhaven.

He forces himself to check, to look at your socials, to see who’s posing in pictures with you. He forces himself to know, when your phone starts to spend time at random peoples’ places, almost every weekend.

Each time, a different guy. Each time, they look like Caleb.

Each time, their lives are spared because you ghost them.

He tells himself that there’s still time, a chance, to salvage things. To make up for every single grievance you have against him. To make up for every promise he didn’t mean to break.

Your fake smile tells him that he is no longer your safe space. But he can rebuild himself for you, turn himself into what you need to feel safe, protected, cared for, cherished. He did it once, when you came home for the first time.

He just has to do it again.

You’re an adult now. You’re a Hunter now.

He comes home on a break. You politely pour him water. He smiles at you with his mask, and you smile at him with its twin on your face. He did this to you. But he will make it right.

He’s going to tell you. This visit. Before he goes back to Skyhaven. He’s going to tell you, how much he loves you, not as a brother, but as a man, and always has. How he’s finally in a place to care for you, as an adult, without the restrictions of childhood, of societal expectations. He’s going to tell Gran about how he has never felt like you were his sister.

He almost loses his shit, when he sees the scratch on your arm, when you insist on sending him to the store instead of letting him back you up while you investigate the alert on your Hunter’s watch. So desperate to show him how much you don’t need him anymore.

He breathes deeply. Says something stupid, out of frustration, about hiding your bloodied sleeve from Gran.

You say something biting to him in return, your own mask slipping a little, as your genuine frustration, your anger at him slips through. He cherishes it, feels triumph rise in him.

Yeah, he’s gonna make things right. He’s going to tell you that he loves you, and that he’s yours, and always has been. He’ll beg, if he has to, for you to say that you are his in return.

He goes into the house first.

On a bright, sunny day, filled with determined hope for the future, Caleb Xia dies in the bright, supernova flash he always knew had been waiting for him.

#mc fucking guys that look like caleb is the cherry on top #also the threatening scene in the locker room ???#so perfect just perfect no notes #ill def be rereading this over and over #my music was on shuffle when listening to this and towards the end show me the real you by moodring started playing and it fit so well #best fic reading experience ive had in a while #fav #fic recs #caleb #lads

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