Chapter 3: The Claiming
The med bay lights hummed at a frequency just low enough to feel like a headache. Ryland stood by the sealed door, his heart a frantic bird against his ribs. Behind that door lay the man from the blood ocean, the ghost they’d pulled from the abyss. Rocky stood beside him, a solid, crablike bulwark in the sterile glow, his claw resting on the door control.
“His suit had identification,” Rocky chittered, the translator rendering his words flat.“One word. Simon.Life signs are stable but neural activity is… chaotic. Deep sleep.”
Ryland pushed his glasses up his nose, a nervous tic.“Right.Simon.Okay. He’s just a person.A human person.Like me.We’re going to say hello. Like normal people do.”
He was talking to calm himself. The residual slickness from his heat cycle had returned the moment the submersible had docked, a traitorous dampness in his underwear. His chest ached, a dull throb of fullness. He hated this biology, this needy, secretive part of himself that thrummed at the mere idea of another human.Rocky opened the door.
The man lay on the med cot, clean. The blood ocean’s grime had been scrubbed away, revealing pale, scarred skin stretched taut over a frame that was still too lean, but hinted at formidable strength.Dark hair fell over his forehead. His face, even in repose, held a feral tension. A tattered patch from his suit lay on a side table, the name ‘SIMON’ stamped in faded block letters.Ryland couldn’t stop staring. He took a hesitant step closer, drawn in by the sheer, impossible humanity of him. This wasn’t a hologram or a memory.This was flesh. He leaned over the bed, one hand bracing on the edge, studying the lines of Simon’s face, the curve of his stubbled jaw.
Simon’s eyes snapped open.
They were dark, like the space between stars, and they held no recognition, only a primal, panicked alertness. He moved with the terrifying speed of a predator uncoiling. One hand shot out, not for Ryland, but past him, latching onto Rocky’s smooth carapace with a crack of impact.
“Get the fuck off!” Simon snarled, his voice a raw, disused rasp.
He yanked, attempting to fling the 200-kilogram Eridian across the room. Rocky skidded, his claws screeching on the metal floor, a discordant whistle of alarm blaring from his speaker. Simon was already rolling off the cot, muscles corded, his focus entirely on the alien he perceived as a threat.
“No, wait!” Ryland cried, his voice shrill with terror.
He lunged between them, his hands coming up uselessly. He grabbed Simon’s arm, the feel of warm, live human skin under his palm a seismic shock.“He’s a friend! He’s my friend!”
Simon froze, his head swiveling slowly from Rocky to Ryland. His dark eyes locked onto Ryland’s blue ones. The world narrowed to that point of contact, Ryland’s fingers on Simon’s forearm.A violent, electric shiver ran through them both.
Ryland smelled it first—alpha. Not the synthetic regulators he’d used for years, but the real, wild, intoxicating scent of a dominant male. It punched through his senses, a blunt, claiming force.His body responded instantly, catastrophically. A gush of slick soaked through his pants. A twin warmth bloomed across his chest, milk seeping through his shirt, the dark circles of his nipples staining the fabric.Simon’s nostrils flared. His pupils dilated, swallowing the iris. The confusion, the fear, the years of lonely horror in the blood ocean—all of it was swept away by a deeper, biological imperative. His gaze raked over Ryland’s leaking chest, down his trembling body.
“Omega,” Simon breathed, the word a reverent, hungry curse.Then he moved.
He flung himself at Ryland, a force of nature. They crashed to the floor, Ryland’s glasses flying off, skittering under a console.Simon’s hands were everywhere, tearing at his clothes. The soft cotton of Ryland’s shirt ripped down the middle with a sound like a scream.
“Please, don’t—” Ryland sobbed, but his body was arching up, his hands fisting in Simon’s dark hair, pulling him closer.
Simon’s mouth sealed over a nipple, sucking hard, and Ryland cried out as the pull shot straight to his cunt, a lance of pure, degrading pleasure. He drank, gulping the sweet milk, a low growl vibrating through his chest and into Ryland’s bones.
“Fuck, you’re perfect,” Simon muttered against his skin, his hands yanking Ryland’s pants and underwear down to his thighs.
Ryland caught a glimpse of Simon’s cock as it sprang free. It was obscenely huge, thick as Ryland’s own forearm, the head flushed a violent purple, veins standing in stark relief.A pearl of pre-cum beaded at the slit. Virgin terror seized Ryland’s heart.It wouldn’t fit.It would kill him.Simon didn’t care. He positioned himself, the broad, searing-hot crown of his cock pressing against Ryland’s soaked opening. Ryland was dripping, his body begging for it, but he was tight, impossibly tight.
“Wait, I’ve never—” Ryland begged, tears streaming down his temples into his hair.Simon silenced him with a brutal, claiming kiss, all teeth and tongue.Then he thrust.
The pain was white.It was a star going supernova behind Ryland’s eyes. It was a tearing, a splitting, a violation so complete it stole his breath. He screamed into Simon’s mouth, a raw, animal sound of agony. Simon swallowed it, driving deeper, the impossible thickness stretching Ryland wide open, filling him in a way that felt like his pelvis would crack.
“Shh, good girl, take it,” Simon grunted, his voice thick with lust. “Take your alpha’s cock.”
He pulled back and slammed home again.And again. The pain began to blur, to meld with something else. Ryland’s betrayed body welcomed the invasion, slick gushing around the relentless piston of Simon’s dick, his inner walls fluttering, trying to milk it.Each brutal thrust hammered a spot inside him that sparked blinding pleasure alongside the ruin. He was sobbing, snot and tears mingling on his face, but his hips were lifting, meeting each drive.“No! Ryland Friend!” Rocky’s translated voice was a distorted shout.He clattered forward, a claw reaching to grab Simon’s shoulder.
Simon didn’t even look. He backhanded the heavy claw away with a force that shouldn’t have been possible, a sharp crack echoing in the bay. Rocky staggered, his carapace ringing from the blow.
“Rocky, go!” Ryland choked out, the words torn from him between thrusts.He couldn’t bear for his friend to see this, to be hurt. “It’s… it’s okay… just go!”
The pleasure was cresting, a tsunami built from pain and slick and the raw, claiming scent of alpha. He was losing his mind with it. Rocky hesitated, his musical clicks frantic and confused, before retreating to the doorway, a silhouette of distress.
“That’s it, sweet thing,” Simon panted, his rhythm becoming even more punishing. He wrapped a hand in Ryland’s messy hair, yanking his head back to expose his throat.“Gonna breed this pretty cunt full. Gonna keep you full of me.”
His teeth found the swollen, tender gland on Ryland’s neck. He bit down.The claiming bite was the final circuit. Pleasure detonated through Ryland, violent and absolute.His scream this time was one of utter surrender. His channel clamped down on Simon’s cock in vicious, rippling spasms, his milk spraying in warm arcs across his own stomach and chest. He came, his vision dissolving into static, his entire existence reduced to the knot of pleasure-pain where they were joined.Simon roared, his hips stuttering. Ryland felt the terrifying bulge at the base of Simon’s cock—his knot—swell, inflating inside him, locking them together.It stretched him wider, a final, breathtaking fullness. Then Simon was coming, and it was unlike anything Ryland could have imagined. Hot, wet pulses, gallon after gallon of cum, flooding his womb, painting his insides. It felt endless, a claiming from the inside out, filling him until his stomach bloated slightly under the onslaught.
Simon collapsed on him, his weight a solid, heating press, their bodies glued together by sweat and milk and cum. He nuzzled into Ryland’s neck, lapping gently at the bleeding bite mark. The brutal pace slowed to nothing.They were tied.Knotted.One creature panting on the cold floor.
Then, a shift.
The wild, glazed intensity in Simon’s eyes began to recede, like a tide going out. He blinked, looking down at Ryland’s tear-streaked face, at the ripped clothes, at the blood smeared between them from Ryland’s torn virginity and the claiming bite.He felt the knot, locking him inside this sobbing, trembling man.
Horror dawned, cold and sickening.
“Oh, god,” Simon whispered, his voice now hollow, shattered. “No… no, I didn’t… I…”
He tried to pull away, a reflexive jerk, but the knot held fast, tugging a sharp gasp from Ryland. The movement made Simon’s still-half-hard cock shift inside the ravaged, sensitive channel, and Ryland whimpered, a sound of confused pleasure-pain.
“I’m sorry,” Simon choked out, tears welling in his own dark eyes.“I’m so fucking sorry. I didn’t mean to… I lost… I…”
Ryland couldn’t speak. The aftershocks of his orgasm still vibrated through him, his body thrumming with a satiated glow that felt filthy and wrong.The pain was a bright, specific ache between his legs. The fullness of the knot and the pool of seed inside him was a palpable, violating truth.
“You took it,” Ryland finally managed, his voice a broken whisper. He stared at the ceiling, unable to look at the man who was still physically joined to him. “My first… you just… took it.”
They lay there, tied together on the sterile floor, the hum of the ship the only sound.Two souls, shattered by loneliness, now fused by violence and biology. The rapturous, soul-deep recognition that had passed between them was now buried under a layer of shock and shame. Simon’s arms, which had been vise-like in their possession, now trembled as he tried to hold his weight off Ryland, his face a mask of anguished regret. Ryland’s tears slowed, leaving salt tracks on his skin, his mind a numb void.They were stuck. In every conceivable way, they were stuck.