Chapter 5: Power
The blackout was a mercy, a blanket thrown over a burning house. It didn’t last. Sensation returned first—a distant, rhythmic crushing, a vice around his lungs. Then sound, the murmur of voices receding, the scrape of chairs. Light pierced his eyelids in painful starbursts.
He was still at the table. His cheek was pressed against cool brocade. Cross’s hand was a heavy, warm weight on the back of his neck, thumb stroking absently over the damp hairline.
“...a mild syncopal episode. The new protocols can be taxing,” Cross was saying, his voice a calm, carrying instrument. “We’ll retire for the evening. Enjoy your desserts.”
Another contraction mounted, a deep, internal quake that made Ezra’s body jerk against the chair. A thin, desperate sound leaked from him.
“Shhh,” Cross murmured, low, for him alone. The public charm was gone from the tone, replaced by a possessive certainty. “I’ve got you.”
He stood, pulling Ezra up with him. Ezra’s legs were water. The world tipped and swam. The compressed mass of eggs inside him felt like a leaden counterweight, throwing his balance into chaos. He slumped against Cross’s side, his arm hooked around Cross’s neck for pathetic support. Each step through the mess hall was a monumental effort. The contractions had settled into a relentless, overlapping rhythm, one beginning before the last fully ebbed, leaving no valley of relief, only peaks and higher peaks. His vision was a fragmented mess of spotted grey, the edges nibbled away by his starved lungs. He couldn’t form words; breath was a currency he didn’t have.
The walk through the corridors was a blur of sterile light and echoing footsteps. Cross half-carried him, his grip firm and unyielding. “Almost there,” Cross whispered, his lips near Ezra’s ear. “You’re doing so well. Your body is fighting so beautifully. And losing.”
The door to Cross’s private suite hissed open. The familiar, oppressive luxury of the space offered no comfort. Cross guided him to the large, low sofa and let him collapse onto it. The impact sent a seismic shock through the stones. Ezra cried out, a raw, torn sound.
He lay on his side, curled instinctively around the monstrous, corseted mound of his stomach. The contractions were wildfire in his core, each one a brutal, squeezing fist that clamped down on the jagged stones, grinding them together, pushing them against the unyielding plug. The corset restricted the outward expansion, forcing all that terrible pressure inward. It was a contained detonation, over and over.
Cross stood over him, watching. He shrugged out of his uniform jacket, draped it neatly over a chair. He loosened his tie. “Look at you,” he said, his voice soft with a kind of awful reverence. “A perfect engine of futile effort. Your uterus
“A perfect engine of futile effort. Your uterus doesn’t know it’s fighting a geology lesson.” Cross knelt beside the sofa, his fingers tracing the rigid line of the corset’s top edge. “The myometrial contractions will continue. They’ll strengthen. Your body will exhaust itself trying to expel what cannot be expelled.”
He leaned close, his gray eyes capturing the fragmented light. “I think I’ll keep you like this for a week. Let the full cycle play out. Let you live in this beautiful, desperate state.”
A groan tore from Ezra’s throat, part pain, part protest. The idea was a vast, crushing horizon. His hand fluttered, searching, and found Cross’s wrist. He lacked the air for eloquence. “Touch,” he begged, the word a damp scrape. “Please. Just… touch me. Make it… different.”
Cross’s smile was a slow, private thing. “You need a distraction.” He stood, unfastening his trousers. His cock, already half-hard, sprung free. It looked obscenely normal, a flesh-and-blood answer to the stone torment inside him. “Use your mouth. Give yourself something else to focus on.”
Ezra pushed himself up on trembling elbows, the movement costing him dearly. A contraction peaked, whitening his vision. He gagged, waiting for it to pass, then dragged himself forward. He needed the anchor of Cross’s skin, the taste of something human. He took the head into his mouth, salt and musk flooding his senses.
His hands came up to stroke the shaft, a clumsy, needy rhythm. He sucked, hollowing his cheeks, trying to consume the reality of Cross. It was a frantic prayer. For a moment, the deep, grinding agony was secondary to the solid weight on his tongue, the velvet skin under his palm.
Then his body rebelled. A contraction, worse than the last, clenched like a fist around the stones. The pain was an ascendant star, blinding and total. His mind short-circuited. The world dissolved into static.
His grip went slack. His mouth fell open, Cross’s cock slipping from his lips as he pitched forward, his forehead resting against Cross’s thigh. He was gone for three seconds, five.
He came back gasping, disoriented, the pain a fresh discovery. “Fuck,” he slurred, drool on his chin.
Without hesitation, he dove back down, taking Cross deep. He sucked with a raw, hungry passion, his hand fisting the base, twisting. He needed to prove he could do this, that the pain hadn’t won. He worshiped the cock with a messy, ardent devotion, swallowing pre-come, moaning around the girth.
Another contraction slammed into him. The edges of the room fizzed into nothing. He blacked out again, his body slumping, his cheek pressing against Cross’s hip bone.
He revived to the feel of fingers in his hair. “Don’t stop,” Cross commanded, voice tight. “I didn’t say you could stop.”
Ezra obeyed, his movements becoming a fevered pattern: ardent, desperate sucking, interrupted by sudden, terrifying voids where his consciousness fled, then a passionate, guilty return to the task. It was a broken staccato of pleasure-seeking, punctuated by unconsciousness.
Cross watched it all, his breath shortening. He thrust shallowly into the wet, welcoming heat that kept disappearing and returning. “That’s it,” he gritted out. “Use the pain. Let it make you hungry for me.”
Ezra’s world narrowed to a tunnel. At one end, the catastrophic, grinding pressure of the stones. At the other, the demanding flesh in his mouth. He oscillated between them, a prisoner on a short leash. He sucked until he saw stars that weren’t from pain, then vanished into a black hole, then resurfaced to taste salt and sweat.
He was a ruin, diligently pleasuring his architect. His lips were swollen. His jaw ached. The contractions were a continuous drumroll in his core, but he rode them now, using the frantic energy they sparked to fuel his devotion.
Cross’s hand fisted in his hair, holding him steady during a particularly deep suck. “You look so good like this,” Cross panted. “Destroyed and dedicated. You’re going to make me come.”
The promise spurred Ezra on. He took him deeper, until the head nudged his throat. He ignored his gag reflex, ignored the way his lungs screamed for air the corset wouldn’t allow. He worked him with a single-minded fervor, a man trying to drink salvation from a poisoned well.
Cross’s hips stuttered. A low, gritted groan filled the room. “Take it. Swallow every fucking drop.”
The release was hot and abrupt, pulsing in thick stripes over Ezra’s tongue. He swallowed convulsively, the bitter taste another anchor in the storm. He didn’t stop until Cross gently pulled him back by the hair.
Ezra collapsed onto the sofa again, spent, his body still trapped in its relentless, clenching cycle. Cross tucked himself away, his expression one of satiated, deep contemplation. He looked at Ezra, who was shivering, tears cutting clean tracks through the sweat on his face.
“A week,” Cross repeated softly, wiping his thumb across Ezra’s wet bottom lip. “Just imagine how good you’ll be at that by day seven.”
Ezra’s laugh was a pained, wheezing cough. “Practiced at passing out with your dick in my mouth? I’ll win a fucking medal.”
The week unfolded as a seamless tapestry of agony. The stones were a permanent, grinding weather system inside him. The corset was his atmosphere, thin and suffocating. Mornings began with Cross’s hands on the laces, tightening them with a gentle, inexorable pull that stole the breath from Ezra’s lungs before he’d even found it.
He learned to move in a new, careful grammar. A step was a calculated risk. A deep breath was an impossibility. A sentence had to be parsed into economical fragments between the contractions that still came, relentless as tide cycles. “This is… fucking ridiculous,” he’d gasp, leaning against a doorway, his knuckles white on the frame as a particularly vicious clench made his vision pulse. “I look like a walked-out Victorian ghost… with shitty interior décor.”
Cross watched these performances with open fascination. He’d sip his coffee, his gaze tracking the tremor in Ezra’s hand, the sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “Your color is better today. The adaptation is remarkable.”
“It’s not adaptation,” Ezra snapped, pushing off the door and taking two swaying steps before another contraction locked his spine. He froze, jaw clenched, riding the wave until it subsided into a dull, omnipresent roar. “It’s Stockholm syndrome… of the uterine lining.”
He still showed up to meals in the officers’ mess, a spectacle of controlled ruin. His flirty defiance became a sharp, precious artifact. He’d catch Vex’s disapproving stare and wink, a gesture that cost him as a fresh spike of pain made his eyelid flutter. “Commander Vex,” he’d say, voice strained but light, “you’re staring. Want me to… draw you a diagram of the nutrient protocols?” He’d then have to grip the table’s edge, head bowed, as his body’s rebellion against the stones stole his air and spotted his vision.
“He’s deteriorating,” Rourke observed flatly one evening as Ezra, ghost-pale, slowly sawed at a piece of synth-protein.
“He’s evolving,” Cross corrected, not looking up from his own plate. His foot, under the table, pressed against Ezra’s trembling calf. A point of contact, a claim. “You’re mistaking process for decay.”
The true moments were in the private suite, after the doors sealed. Ezra would often simply fold, collapsing onto the floor the moment they were alone, his corseted belly a hard shelf that forced him onto his side. “Fuck,” he’d whisper, over and over, a mantra against the pain. Cross would kneel beside him, not to help him up, but to lay a cool cloth on his forehead or to run a thumb over the dark circles under his eyes.
“You don’t have to do the meals,” Cross said on the third night, his tone clinical, testing.
“Yes I do,” Ezra groaned, pushing himself up on an elbow. A dangerous move. He saw blackness for a second. “They want me to break. In private. Fuck that. I’ll break… in 4K high definition.” He looked up at Cross, his expression raw. “Besides. You enjoy it. Watching me… play the part for them.”
Cross didn’t deny it. He leaned down and kissed him, a slow, deep invasion that Ezra met with exhausted hunger. “I enjoy you,” Cross murmured against his mouth. “Every contradictory inch.”
The fifth night brought a fever. A deep, internal heat that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. The stones felt like they were burning him from the inside, the crystalline spikes branding his walls. Ezra shivered violently on the sofa, his skin clammy.
“Infection?” Cross’s voice was sharp, his hand on Ezra’s forehead.
“No,” Ezra chattered. “It’s the… the fucking geodes. Remember? They hum. They’re humming… in me now.” He was delirious, but right. The pulsing energy from the lab, from the very walls, was inside him, conducting a symphony of torment.
Cross’s concern dissolved into a look of profound, unsettling awe. He fetched a device, a smooth scanner, and ran it over Ezra’s swollen middle. A soft chime. “Fascinating. Your bio-rhythms are syncing with the resonant frequency of the crystal lattice. It’s a harmonic feedback loop.”
“You’re a fucking poet,” Ezra whimpered, curling tighter.
Cross stripped him of the corset that night. The sudden release of pressure was its own violence. Ezra’s stomach, freed, seemed to expand further, the skin taut and glowing with fever-heat. The outlines of the eggs were shockingly distinct, like a litter of malformed pups sleeping beneath a sheet. Cross didn’t remove the plug. He simply laid Ezra out and began to massage the distended flesh, his hands pressing, probing, feeling the alien geography he’d created.
Ezra cried, the tears hot and silent. It wasn’t the pain that broke him then; it was the terrifying intimacy of the care. “Why do you…?” he couldn’t finish.
“Because it’s mine,” Cross answered simply, his palm resting over the largest egg bulge. “And you let me. You fight everyone else, but you let me do this.” He leaned close. “You asked me once why I trusted you. This is why. You have seen the laboratory. You have taken the stones. And you are still here, telling me I’m a poet.”
On the seventh day, the change was seismic. The constant labor-like contractions mutated. They became sharper, localized, a series of vicious, clenching spasms that seemed to center directly on his cervix, as if the stones were now drilling downward. Ezra was on his knees in the bathroom, vomiting nothing but bile, when it hit him. A need so profound it overrode the pain. A hollow, screaming emptiness at his core that the sheer fullness couldn’t touch.
He crawled back into the main room. Cross was at his console, reviewing data streams. Ezra shuffled to him, his movements clumsy and animal. He pressed his fevered face against Cross’s thigh.
“Please,” he said, his voice ragged. “I need… I need you to fuck me. I need to feel something else. I can’t… I can’t think around it anymore.”
Cross looked down, his gray eyes calculating. “The plug is still in.”
“I don’t care.” Ezra’s fingers scrabbled at Cross’s trousers. “Fuck the plug. Fuck around it. I need your cock. I need you to ruin me properly.”
A slow smile spread across Cross’s face. He stood, pulling Ezra up with him. “Then get on the bed. On your hands and knees. Let me see what a week of my care has done.”
The position was an agony of its own. The weight of the stones pulled forward, a pendulum of pain. Cross removed the plug. The release was a shock, a sudden, gaping vulnerability. Cold air touched the battered entrance, making Ezra flinch. He heard the sound of Cross opening a lubricant capsule.
Then, the blunt, hot pressure of Cross’s cockhead, not at his entrance, but higher, probing the pucker of his ass.
Ezra jolted. “Wh—there?”
“You said you didn’t care,” Cross whispered, his voice a dark promise. “You’re packed full in front. This is what’s left. This is what I can ruin.” He spat, the wetness a crude contrast to the gel, and pressed.
The stretch was incendiary, a blinding white tear. Ezra screamed into the bedding. Cross didn’t pause. He pushed in with a single, relentless shearing thrust, burying himself to the hilt in the tight, virgin channel. He filled a space that had only ever been exit, turning it into a second prison.
“Oh, god,” Ezra sobbed, the fullness now complete, circumferential, a brutal halo of invasion. The stones in his cunt ground forward with the pressure. Cross’s cock in his ass speared him backward. He was impaled, front and back, a living sheath between two unyielding loads.
Cross began to move. Short, punishing drives that hammered the stones inside him with every inward slam. The friction was brutal, dry in spite of the spit, a searing scrape that felt like it was peeling him raw. “You feel that?” Cross grunted, his hands vise-locked on Ezra’s bony hips. “You feel how full you are? There’s nowhere for you to go. Nowhere to clench. I own every single hole.”
He fucked him like he was trying to break through to the other side, to reach the stones with his own flesh. The pace was brutal, mechanical. Each thrust jolted Ezra’s entire body, shaking a cry from him that was part sob, part shattered moan. The dual fullness was a form of madness. He could feel the separate textures—the jagged, unmoving mass in front, the thick, pistoning heat behind.
“You take it so well,” Cross snarled, his control fraying. “My proud, defiant thing. Reduced to a double-ended sleeve. You love this. You love being this used.”
Ezra couldn’t deny it. The pain had transmuted, twisting into a perverse, electric current that lit up his nerves. The overwhelming sensation short-circuited his defiance, leaving only a raw, needy truth. “Yes,” he gasped, the word punched out of him. “Yes, I do. I love it. I love your fucking cock splitting me open. Do it. Own it. Own all of it.”
The admission shattered Cross’s rhythm. He let out a guttural roar, slamming home and holding, his body shuddering as he emptied himself deep into Ezra’s ass, a final, scalding claim.
He collapsed forward, his sweat-slicked chest pressed to Ezra’s fevered back, his weight driving Ezra deeper into the mattress and onto the stones. They lay there, a tangled, ruined machine of flesh and want.
Later, as Ezra lay spent and trembling, Cross gently re-inserted the vaginal plug, sealing the stones inside once more. He did not re-lace the corset. Instead, he pulled Ezra against him, his large hand splayed possessively over the monstrous, egg-stuffed swell of Ezra’s belly.
Ezra, half-conscious, nuzzled into the hollow of Cross’s throat. “You’re a monster,” he mumbled, his voice thick with exhaustion and something dangerously close to affection.
Cross kissed his damp hair. “I know,” he said quietly. His hand stroked the taut skin, feeling the formidable, permanent shapes beneath. He felt Ezra’s breathing even out into a troubled sleep. The dependency was absolute. The defiance, now a token of that dependency, was more intoxicating than any obedience.
He stared at the ceiling, planning the next refinement. The week was over. The experiment was a staggering success. And Ezra, in his shattered, honest need, had just given him the blueprint for forever.
Cross watched the minute tremor in Ezra’s sleeping hand, the twitch of a muscle under his eye. The blueprint was not just psychological; it was biochemical, a roadmap written in fluttering pulses and sweat-salted skin. The dependency was a root system. He intended to water it with acid and light.
He waited until Ezra stirred, groaning as consciousness returned the stones to him as a fresh discovery. Cross was already at his laboratory console, preparing a hypospray. The vial within glowed a faint, malevolent yellow.
“Morning,” Cross said, his voice too cheerful for the dim room. He crossed to the sofa where Ezra lay marooned on the island of his own body. “We’re refining the process today.”
Ezra squinted, suspicion cutting through the pain-haze. “Refining.” His voice was gravel. “The stones aren’t… refined enough?”
“Your sensitivity is inconsistent. The pain is magnificent, but the nerve response is dulling. Adaptation.” Cross pressed the cool nozzle of the hypospray to Ezra’s carotid. “This will reset your baseline. Sharpen everything.”
A sharp hiss, a cold burn flooding his vein. For three seconds, nothing.
Then the world ignited.
It was as if someone had stripped the protective sheath from every nerve ending in his body, starting from his core and radiating outward in a shockwave. The stones, previously a deep, grinding agony, suddenly became a universe of distinct, microscopic tortures. He could feel the individual crystalline structure of each spike, the porous texture of the matrix absorbing his fluids, the minute expansion as they pressed against his straining cervix. It wasn’t just pain; it was information, a catastrophic data stream of violation.
“Oh, god,” Ezra choked, his back arching off the couch. “What did you do?”
“I opened the curtains,” Cross said, watching his eyes dilate. “Now, the main event.” The hypospray hissed again, this time against Ezra’s inner thigh, delivering a second, clear cocktail.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The deep, labor-like contractions, which had settled into a relentless rhythm, exploded. They were no longer waves but tectonic plates slamming together inside him, one after another, with no respite. Each contraction was a breath-stealing, vision-blurring vice that clamped down on the sensitized stones with such violence Ezra heard a high, thin ringing in his ears. His body bowed, a string pulled taut.
“Fuck! Fuck, Cross, they’re—I can’t—” He was sobbing, writhing, but the convulsions of pain were indistinguishable from the contractions. He was trapped in a feedback loop of his own ravaged biology.
“I know,” Cross said softly, almost lovingly. He lifted Ezra’s limp form. “Now, we dress for the day.” He fetched the brocade corset.
Lacing it over Ezra’s now hyper-sensitive skin was a new chapter of torment. Every brush of the stiff material was a scrape. As Cross planted a knee in the small of Ezra’s back for leverage and pulled the laces, the compression didn’t just restrict—it became a primary source of agony. The corset crushed the sensitized, egg-distended flesh, forcing the stones against each other and into his spine with unbearable pressure.
Cross pulled tighter.
Ezra’s screams were breathless, silent things, his mouth wide open but his lungs unable to draw air against the constriction. The corset, now tightened to an extreme degree, performed a perverse magic. It forced the monumental swelling inward and upward, compressing the visible evidence into a terrifyingly flat, rigid plane from his ribs to his hips. Outside, he looked cinched, sleek, almost normal. Inside, he was a supernova of compressed, grinding stone and crushing muscle spasm.
Cross stood him up. Ezra’s legs buckled immediately. Cross caught him, holding him upright like a doll. “Breathe shallow. In through the nose. It’s just pressure.”
It was not just pressure. It was a total systemic overthrow. Each seismic contraction, amplified by the drugs, combined with the corset’s stranglehold on his diaphragm, left him in a permanent state of near-asphyxiation. His vision swam with grey motes. He was weak, lightheaded, his muscles useless jelly. He could not have stood, could not have taken a single step, without Cross’s arm locked around his chest.
“Office day,” Cross said into his ear, guiding his shuffling, useless feet forward. “You’ll behave.”
The journey was a humiliating parade. Ezra, held upright by his commander, face pale and slack with breathless pain, legs dragging. Technicians averted their eyes. Cross nodded greetings, his grip the only thing preventing Ezra’s collapse into a gasping heap on the polished floor.
In the office, Cross lowered him onto the leather couch. Ezra lay on his side, curled fetally, each catastrophic contraction visibly trembling through his compressed form. A thin whine escaped his clenched teeth with every exhale.
Cross sat at his desk, the picture of bureaucratic focus. Screens filled with data scrolled beside him. He typed. He murmured into a comm. For twenty minutes, he was the model of efficiency.
Then, without looking up from a screen, he said, “You’re clenching.”
His hand left the keyboard and slid beneath the desk. From Ezra’s angle, he could only see Cross’s focused expression and the subtle movement of his arm. Then, fingers, slick with spit from Cross’s mouth, found the fever-hot nub of Ezra’s clit through the thin fabric of his trousers.
The touch was electric on his chemically-heightened nerves. A bolt of sharp, bright sensation shot through the ocean of deep, grinding pain. He jerked, a gasp finally finding air.
“Shhh,” Cross chided, still studying his screen. His fingers circled, slow and deliberate, a counterpoint to the violent spasms ripping through Ezra’s core. “Just a little distraction. Help you focus.”
It was madness. The pain was a constant, screaming backdrop. The pleasure was a focused, brilliant laser slicing through it. They didn’t blend; they warred, each sensation heightened to an unbearable extreme. Ezra’s hips pushed weakly into the touch, his body betraying him, seeking the sharp relief of that pinpoint stimulation even as his cunt, stuffed beyond reason, clenched fruitlessly around the unyielding plug. He could feel every desperate, internal spasm, a futile attempt to expel the stones that only served to grind them more viciously against his sensitized walls.
Cross alternated between work and torment with casual precision. He’d type a paragraph, then his fingers would return, rubbing faster, pinching lightly, pulling a choked sob from Ezra’s throat. He’d take a comm call, his voice calm and authoritative, while his thumb pressed hard circles that made Ezra’s toes curl.
During one particularly brutal contraction, Cross leaned over, his free hand splaying over Ezra’s corset-flattened stomach. He pressed down hard, intensifying the internal crush. “Feel that?” he whispered, his mouth close to Ezra’s ear as the other man writhed. “That’s your body begging. It’s so beautiful. It has no idea how trapped it is.”
He returned to his work. Ezra dissolved into the couch, a creature of pure sensation. Time lost meaning. There was only the rhythm imposed by Cross: the clash of agonizing contraction followed by the sharp, thrilling scrape of fingers on his clit, the desperate, silent clenching against the plug, the unbearable constriction of the corset. He was brought to his knees without moving, completely reliant on the man who was the source of both his suffering and his only solace.
Cross reveled in it. The power was not just in the infliction, but in the presentation. Ezra, sharp and defiant Ezra, reduced to a breathless, trembling thing on his couch, silently pleading with his body for a touch that only Cross would give. It was ownership written in nerve endings and stifled moans.
As the artificial daylight in the office began to soften into the amber of simulated evening, Cross finally saved his work and stood. He approached the couch. Ezra was soaked in sweat, eyes half-lidded, breathing in pathetic, shallow hitches. Cross knelt, his hand returning, not to his clit, but to cup his jaw, forcing his head up.
“Anything to say?” Cross asked, his thumb stroking Ezra’s cracked lower lip.
Ezra’s vision swam. The pain was a continent. The memory of pleasure was a receding lightning bolt. He had not begged. Not once. The words had been stolen by the corset, the sounds by the sheer effort of survival. He gathered the shattered fragments of his will, the same will that had carried him across the ravaged surface, and shaped them into an expression.
His lips, dry and cracked, curled. It was a weak, tremulous thing, but it was unmistakable. A smirk. Bloodless and pained, but reaching his glassy eyes. A silent, defiant fuck you that also said I see you. He was enjoying this. Not the pain, but the raw, unfiltered truth of Cross at his most monstrous, a truth he alone was allowed to witness and reflect back.
Cross’s breath caught. The gray eyes, usually so calculating, darkened with something primal and hungry. The smirk was a greater prize than any sob. It was complicity. It was the blueprint, signed in blood and pain.
He leaned in and kissed it off Ezra’s mouth, a hard, claiming press of lips. “Tomorrow,” he whispered against them, “we go deeper.”