Chapter 2: A Splintered God, A Bloodied Guardian
Consciousness returned as a solid, painful thing. It started as a low, rhythmic throb behind his eyes, then sharpened into a specific, sickening ache at the back of his skull where it had met the desk. Nemo groaned, the sound trapped in his dry throat. He was on his back on the floor of his room. The single bulb overhead was still on, a dull dagger of light stabbing his vision.
He pushed himself up on his elbows. The world tilted, spun, then settled into a nauseating wobble. He blinked, trying to clear the fog. Something was wrong. More wrong than the pain. The air had a new thickness, a copper-honey sweetness that coated the back of his tongue and made him gag.
Blood. A lot of it.
He looked at his hands. They were clean. He patted his own body, his chest where Viktor’s knee had been. Nothing. No wound.
His gaze traveled upwards, to the walls of his tiny dorm room.
They were painted. Not with paint. Great, arcing swatches of crimson, flung with such force they had speckled the ceiling. Drips ran in long, deliberate tears down the posters of Nietzsche and Camus, obscuring their grim eyes. The pattern was violent, expressive, like a child’s furious finger-painting done in arterial red. The source wasn’t here, but the evidence was everywhere.
A cold, silent terror, deeper than any panic, locked his joints. He couldn’t breathe. The coppery smell was inside him now, filling his lungs.
For a long minute, he just sat there on the floor, a small figure in a room baptized in violence. The philosophy was useless. Kant offered no categories for this. Descartes’ certainty evaporated. There was only the smell, the paint, the throbbing in his head.
He had to move. The thought was mechanical, a basic program initiating. He got to his knees, then, using the desk for support, to his feet. The floor felt unstable beneath him. He shuffled to his door, which stood slightly ajar. From the crack, a wider vista of crimson was visible on the common room wall.
He pushed it open.
The common area was a slaughterhouse still-life. It was quiet, save for the relentless buzz of the flickering overhead light. Viktor lay on his back in the center of the linoleum floor. Or, part of him did.
He had been opened. Not dissected—that implied clinical precision. This was a bisection turned inside out. He was split from sternum to pelvis, a yawning cavity of glistening red and purple and white. His organs were not removed, but they were exposed, a terrible geography under the fluorescent glare. His face, however, was untouched, his eyes wide and staring at the ceiling with an expression of pure, childish surprise. His wild hair fanned out around his head like a dark halo.
Nemo didn’t scream. The horror was too absolute for sound. He simply stood, one hand on the doorframe, his body shaking in tiny, uncontrollable tremors. His mind tried to parse it, to find a reason, a how. The cuts weren’t clean. They looked… torn. Like something had used immense, careless strength to simply pry him apart.
A trail led away from the terrible centerpiece. Not footprints, but smudges. Black, greasy smudges, like ash mixed with oil, and within them, the occasional perfect imprint of a massive, bare foot. The trail moved past the shredded sofa, past the small kitchenette where a single Petri dish of green mold now sported a crack through its center, and ended at the dark, open maw of Viktor’s bedroom door.
Nemo’s eyes followed the trail. The silence was worse than any noise. It was a held breath. The door to Viktor’s room was broken, hanging from one hinge, the wood around the lock splintered inward. From within that darkness, no sound emerged, but Nemo new something lurked in their.
He should run. The front door of the suite was right there. He should sprint into the hall, down the stairs, into the sane, rain-washed night. But his feet moved forward, tracing the trail of smudges. It was the same morbid instinct that makes people stare at car crashes. He had to see. He had to know what grammar of being Viktor had finally spoken into existence.
The doorway exhaled a breath of chemicals and blood and something else, something dark and organic, like damp soil and hot metal. Nemo stepped over the splintered threshold.
Viktor’s room had always been a chaotic lab. Now it was a storm’s aftermath. Shattered glass from beakers and monitors crunched underfoot. Torn notebooks, their pages filled with frantic, looping diagrams of nervous systems and splice points, were strewn like autumn leaves. On the large metal dissection table was a man, a massive man.
It was a mountain of tense, pale muscle under the broken room’s single working bulb. It was naked. The skin was a map of seams, a geography of brutal, black stitches holding together plains of flawless, porcelain flesh. The shoulders were impossibly broad, tapering to a narrow waist, then flaring again into powerful thighs. Every cord of muscle was defined, a anatomy model brought to obscene, breathing life.
As Nemo stood frozen, a floorboard creaked under his weight.
The creature was perfectly still.
As Nemo walked closer, a profile emerged. A stark, beautiful jawline. A straight nose. Short, tousled black hair.
Nemo’s breath caught.
Viktor had not created a monster. Not in the way he’d expected. The face was heartbreakingly perfect, like a classical statue. The lips were full, the cheekbones high and sharp. So beautiful.
So beautiful. The word echoed, empty and inadequate, in the silent chamber of Nemo’s mind. He moved without sound, drawn across the glass-littered floor by a compulsion he could not name. The creature’s stillness was absolute, a suspension more profound than sleep.
He stood beside the metal table, his own shallow breathing the only noise. His hand, moved by a curiosity that drowned out the screams from the common room, lifted. His fingertips, still stained with blue highlighter ink, brushed the cold skin of a bulging bicep. The muscle was granite wrapped in silk, impossibly dense. He traced the curve of a round, voluminous pectoral, then down the rigid, cobbled landscape of an eight-pack abdomen. Each suture line was a raised ridge under his touch, a story of brutal assembly.
His gaze trailed lower. The creature’s cock lay against its thigh, a heavy, silent fact of its existence. It was monstrously proportioned, over a foot-long testament to Viktor’s grotesque ambition, yet possessed of a strange, aesthetic perfection. Mesmerized and horrified, Nemo reached out. He needed to understand its reality. Both his hands encircled the shaft, lifting its weight. It was warm. Unnaturally, alive-ly warm.
He made his way back up the monumental torso to the beautiful, still face. He leaned closer, studying the seamlessness of the lips, the arch of the eyebrows. The pitch-black eyes opened.
They were not human. They were pools of obsidian, absorbing the scant light and reflecting nothing. Nemo froze, his own breath catching in his throat. A sharp, animal sound escaped him. He started inching backward, his shoes scraping on glass.
The creature moved. It was not a jerk, but a smooth, terrifyingly fluid uncoiling of power. It sat up on the dissection table, the metal groaning in protest. Then it swung its legs over the side and stood, rising to its full, massive height, towering over Nemo. It placed its huge hands on Nemo’s shoulders. The weight was immense, anchoring, stopping his retreat utterly. It was not a violent grip, but one of absolute, inescapable finality.
Nemo stared up into the void of its eyes. He was shaking.
The creature’s voice, when it came, was a low, resonant rumble, like stones grinding deep in the earth. It was fragmented, but painfully clear.
“You… read Kant,” it said. The black eyes scanned Nemo’s face. “By the window. You argued with the text. You whispered.”
Nemo could only nod, a tiny, frantic motion.
“You are kind,” the creature continued, its head tilting. “You moved the spider. From the sink. Outside.” A massive hand lifted from Nemo’s shoulder, the fingers hovering near Nemo’s cheek but not touching. “He never saw me. Only his work. You… you saw the rabbit.”
A single, hot tear traced a path through the blood-fleck grime on Nemo’s cheek. This was the gaze he had felt. This beautiful, assembled thing, watching him from the dark.
“I terminated him,” the creature said, the words dropping like stones. It looked toward the shattered doorway, toward the common room. “He was going to fragment you. For optimal study. I… redirected the signal.”
It looked back at Nemo, its expression one of profound, weary confusion. The hands on his shoulders tightened, just for a second, not to hurt, but as if to confirm his solidity. “I am Frank. He did not give me that. I took it. What do I do now?”
The question hung in the chemical air. Frank’s hands were still on his shoulders, a weight as definitive as a sentence. Nemo’s mind, trained for debate and deconstruction, whirred uselessly. He saw the blood on the walls, the startling beauty of the face before him, the monstrous truth of the body. He saw Viktor, surprised and emptied on the linoleum.
“I… I don’t…” Nemo stammered, the words clicking in his dry throat. His eyes darted to the broken door, to the hallway that led to the world. Frank’s black eyes followed the glance, and his grip tightened almost imperceptibly. A warning. A plea. Nemo understood the calculus instantly. Refusal was a return to the common room floor. He swallowed, the taste of copper and bile thick on his tongue. “I’ll help. We have to… we have to figure this out.”
Frank smiled. It transformed his face, a sudden radiant warmth that was immediately undercut by the reality of his teeth. They were a brilliant, pristine white, but each one came to a subtle, precise point. It was the smile of a predator who’d just received a gift, beautiful and unnerving.
Then he moved. The massive form descended, his knee bending with a soft creak of tendon and suture until he knelt on the glass-strewn floor. The motion brought him closer to Nemo’s height, but the sheer scale of him was even more overwhelming up close. As he knelt, his heavy cock swung down, a thick pendulum that brushed the dusty floorboards between his feet.
Before Nemo could react, Frank pulled him forward into an embrace. Nemo’s face was pressed into the solid, warm plain of Frank’s pec, the skin smooth and cool despite the heat radiating from within. The arms that wrapped around him were like pillars of warm marble, encircling him completely, one hand splayed against his back, the other cradling the base of his skull with terrifying gentleness. Frank rested his chin on top of Nemo’s head, a deep, shuddering sigh vibrating through his colossal frame.
Nemo stood stiffly for a second, trapped in a monument of muscle and need. Then, slowly, he lifted his own arms. They couldn’t reach around the broad expanse of Frank’s back; his fingers only just brushed the ridges of the lat muscles on the other side. He hugged what he could, a small, desperate gesture against the impossible reality holding him. He felt the chill of the stitches under his fingertips, the awesome power held in check. He was hugging a catastrophe. He was hugging a miracle. He was, he realized, probably hugging the only thing that stood between him and being charged with murder.
The embrace lasted for a long, silent minute. Nemo could feel the powerful, double-time rhythm of Frank’s heart against his own frantic pulse. It was a sound of terrible, engineered life. Frank finally loosened his arms and leaned back, his black eyes searching Nemo’s face.
“You are damaged,” Frank said, his large thumb gently touching the swollen, tender spot at the back of Nemo’s skull where the desk had met it.
Nemo flinched. “It’s nothing. It’s just a bump.” His voice sounded terribly small.
“It is injury. He caused it.” Frank’s gaze drifted past Nemo, toward the common room, and his expression hardened into something Nemo could not read. “The signal is terminated. But the consequence remains. We must… manage the consequence.”
The word ‘manage’ sounded so clinical, so Viktor-like, coming from that beautiful mouth. It chilled Nemo more than the blood. “Manage? Viktor is… in pieces, Frank. You can’t manage that.”
“The material can be dissolved,” Frank stated, his tone flat and factual. “The nitrate solution in the third cabinet is sufficient. The organic traces will require lye.
Frank stood in one smooth, powerful motion. The difference in their heights became absurd again, a cliff of pale, stitched muscle. “We analyze. We clean, then we relocate.” He looked at Nemo’s legs, which were visibly trembling. “You are in systemic shock. Your mobility is compromised. Efficiency is required.”
Before Nemo could process the statement, Frank moved. It wasn’t a savage grab, but a decisive, fluid collection. One massive arm slid behind Nemo’s knees, the other wrapped around his back, just beneath his arms.
“What are you—“
Nemo was lifted as if he weighed nothing more than one of Viktor’s textbooks. The world tilted, his stomach lurching as he was cradled against the solid, shocking warmth of Frank’s chest. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. He could see the intricate network of black stitches where Frank’s neck met his shoulder, each one a perfect, surgical knot.
“Put me down! I can walk!” Nemo protested, his voice cracking with a humiliated kind of fear. He pushed weakly against the unyielding pectoral.
Frank ignored him. He took two strides toward the shattered doorway, then paused, his head turning to survey the ruined room. His eyes lingered on the dissection table, on the scattered notebooks. “The foundational texts,” he murmured, more to himself than to Nemo.
He leaned, without putting Nemo down, and snatched a thick, leather-bound journal from the floor with his free hand. He tucked it between his own side and the arm that held Nemo. The pressure was firm, confining.
Held aloft, Nemo had a panoramic view of the common room as Frank carried him through it. He saw the full, ghastly sprawl of Viktor’s remains from this new, helpless angle. He saw the arc of blood on the ceiling he’d missed from the floor. He closed his eyes, burying his face against Frank’s skin to block it out, inhaling that scent of soil and hot metal and underlying clean sweat.
He carried Nemo past the horror on the floor without a glance, as if Viktor's remains were merely inconvenient debris. His bare feet made soft, sticky sounds on the linoleum. Frank shouldered open the door to the suite’s small, tiled bathroom and set Nemo down with surprising care on the closed toilet lid.
Nemo’s legs buckled immediately; he gripped the sink to steady himself. His reflection was a pale ghost smeared with rust-colored flecks. Frank filled the doorway, blocking the light and the view of everything beyond.
“We have time,” Nemo whispered, more to convince himself. He looked up at Frank’s inscrutable face. “No one else would have been nearby. No one will come to check. Viktor never went to class. He had no friends. Our dorm… it’s just us two. It’s isolated.”
Frank processed this, his head tilting slightly. “No witnesses. No routine checks.” A statement, not a question. “The probability of immediate discovery is low.” He said it like he was commenting on a lab result. Then his focus shifted entirely to Nemo. “You are contaminated.”
He reached past Nemo and turned on the shower taps. A spray of icy water hissed, then began to steam. Frank’s movements were efficient, his large hands testing the temperature. He didn’t ask. He simply hooked his fingers in the collar of Nemo’s t-shirt and pulled, the fabric tearing like paper with a soft rip.
“Hey—!” Nemo started, but the protest died. The shirt was already ruined, speckled brown with dried blood that wasn't his. Frank balled it and tossed it into the corner. He then undid the button of Nemo’s jeans, his fingers surprisingly deft.
Nemo shivered, but not from cold. He was being handled, processed. He stepped out of his jeans and boxers when Frank nudged him, feeling acutely vulnerable under that unwavering black gaze. Frank guided him into the shower stall. The hot water hit his skin, a shocking return to physical sensation. It ran in pink rivulets down his chest and legs, pooling at the drain.
Frank watched for a moment, then picked up a bar of soap. He stepped into the shower, his massive body making the stall impossibly small. The water plastered his short black hair to his scalp and streamed over the ridges of his stitches. He began to wash Nemo’s back, his touch firm and thorough, scrubbing away phantom gore. Nemo stood perfectly still, his forehead resting against the cool tiles. Being cleaned by the creature that had just dismantled his tormentor was a surreal kind of baptism.
“Your turn,” Nemo mumbled into the tile, his voice nearly drowned by the water.
The scrubbing stopped. Frank went still behind him.
Nemo turned around. He took the soap from Frank’s hand. He started on the colossal arms, working the lather over the cold, perfect skin, tracing the raised wires of the black sutures that ran from wrist to shoulder. Nemo’s hand didn’t wrap around his massive biceps let alone his thick forearms. He washed the broad chest, the muscle massive beneath his grasping hand, the powerful neck. He knelt, awkward in the confined space, and cleaned the muscular legs and those massive feet. The water sluiced the last of the blood and chemical grime from Frank’s form, revealing the sheer, awful beauty of the construction.
Finally, Nemo looked up. Frank was staring down at him, his expression unreadable. Water droplets clung to his eyelashes. Nemo’s gaze traveled, inevitably, downward. He saw the thick, coiled vein along the darkening shaft. The heavy knot of the head. The soap was slick in his hand.
He didn’t know what he was doing. He reached out, his smaller hand closing around the lower third of the shaft. The skin was hot and smooth, like heated marble. He began to wash it, his motions slow and methodical, cleaning what had already been pristine. Frank inhaled sharply, a ragged sound that wasn't human. A tremor ran through the whole towering structure of him, a seismic shift of contained force. One of his hands came up and braced against the shower wall with a low thud.
Nemo kept washing, his own breath quickening. He was cleaning a weapon. He was performing an intimate ritual. He was making a choice. He looked up again and met Frank’s eyes. The black pools seemed deeper, hungry, a void seeking light.
Frank’s free hand moved from the wall and cupped the back of Nemo’s head, not forcing, just holding. The thumb stroked a slow arc behind Nemo’s ear. The shower pounded down, steam fogging the glass, enclosing them in a white, roaring world.
“Nemo,” Frank rumbled, the word vibrating from his chest. It was the first time he’d said the name.
The water began to run clear.
The water began to run clear. Frank’s hand remained on the back of Nemo’s head, the touch now less a hold and more a tremor. The giant was shaking. Nemo turned off the taps. The sudden silence was a physical presence, broken only by the drip of water and the raw, unsteady sound of Frank’s breathing.
“What is this?” Frank whispered. He looked down at his own body, at Nemo’s hand still resting on him, then back at Nemo’s face. His beautiful features were knotted with a pained, intellectual confusion. “This feeling. It is not in the design. It is… a system overload. A positive feedback loop.” He said the terms, but his voice cracked.
“It’s okay,” Nemo said softly, his own voice barely audible. He rose from his knees, water sluicing from his skin. He placed his other hand on Frank’s chest, over the steady, powerful drum of his heart. “It’s just a feeling. It’s not a flaw.”
“It is overwhelming the operational parameters,” Frank insisted, but he leaned into Nemo’s touch. His obsidian eyes were wide, searching. “I have no… protocol for this.”
“You don’t need one,” Nemo murmured.
He leaned forward, pressing his lips gently against the smooth, cold skin over Frank’s pectoral. It was a kiss of reassurance, of benediction. A connection.
A sharp, static inhale.
Frank’s body reacted instantly, a cascade of biological responses Viktor had wired but never witnessed. The thick shaft in Nemo’s hand twitched, then began to expand with a terrifying, swift inevitability. It wasn’t mere arousal; it was an engineered transformation, dense tissue engorging with a low, hydraulic pressure.
“Nemo—” Frank’s warning was a strained rumble.
The growth forced Nemo’s fingers apart. He grabbed it with both hands, trying to gentle the surge, but it was like trying to hold back rising lava. The massive head swelled, pushing insistently against Nemo’s stomach, then his chest. The sheer, inexorable force of it drove Nemo backward until his shoulder blades hit the cool, wet tiles of the shower wall.
Frank growled, a sound of pure animal feedback, and slammed his palms flat against the wall on either side of Nemo’s head, caging him. His arms were pillars, trembling with the effort of control. “I cannot… inhibit the signal.”
“It’s alright,” Nemo gasped, the air pressed from his lungs. He kept moving his hands, rubbing up and down the monstrous length, trying to soothe the frantic, twitching muscle beneath the skin. “I’ve got you. Just… just feel it.”
The cock grew past Nemo’s chin, blotting out his view of Frank’s agonized face. It pushed against his throat, a hot, smooth pressure, then continued upward, its tip brushing his damp hair. It was now a obscene monument between them, over a foot and a half of straining, veined flesh that curved slightly under its own weight. Frank’s whole body was corded steel, every suture line pulled taut.
With a sudden, decisive motion, Frank pushed off the wall. One arm swept under Nemo’s legs again, the other around his back. He carried him from the shower, water shedding from them both onto the bathroom floor, then through the dim common room—a blur of bloody linoleum Nemo shut his eyes against—and into his own bedroom.
He laid Nemo on the narrow dorm bed, the springs groaning in protest. Frank loomed over him for a heartbeat, his form a dark silhouette against the light from the hallway. Then he climbed onto the bed, his weight causing the frame to shriek and settle dramatically. He sat back against the headboard, pulling Nemo onto his lap.
“Here,” Frank commanded, his voice ragged. He guided Nemo to straddle his thighs, the smaller man facing him. The sheer scale of Frank’s body made Nemo feel like a child. Then Frank took Nemo’s hands and wrapped them around the base of his cock, where it rose from his spotless muscular torso. He covered Nemo’s hands with his own, engulfing them completely. “You regulate the input.”
Nemo nodded, breathless. He began to move his hands, aided and guided by Frank’s, up and down the impossible girth. Frank’s head fell back against the wall with a soft thud, his eyes closed, every muscle in his neck standing in stark relief. His breathing became a series of deep, shuddering draws.
“The positive feedback,” he choked out, his hips giving a minute, involuntary jerk. “It is… exponential.”
“Let it be,” Nemo whispered, leaning forward until his forehead rested against Frank’s sternum. He matched the rhythm of his hands to the frantic, double-time beat of the giant’s heart beneath his skin. “Just let it be.”