Chapter 21: Nightmare
The hospital room at night was a sensory deprivation tank with a single, terrible anchor: the ache in his leg. It was a constant, low-grade pulse, a metronome for his spiraling thoughts. Sleep was a polluted river he was terrified to wade into, but exhaustion was a heavier gravity, pulling him under despite the panic.
He drifted.
The dream began not with a jolt, but a suffocating weight. He was back in the main compound’s central hall, but it was ruined, smoke hazing the air, concrete dust gritting his teeth. A ceiling beam pinned his legs—both of them this time—its weight absolute, a promise of crushed bones and slow death. He screamed for help, his voice lost in the cavernous gloom.
Then the sound. Not footsteps.Impacts. Thud. Thud. THUD.
Through the dust haze, a colossal silhouette formed. It was Marcus, but not as Garrett, and not as he’d seen him last. It was Titan from the old news footage, thirty feet tall, skin like gray granite, eyes glowing with cold white light. The giant knelt, the floor groaning. Stone fingers, each as thick as Daniel’s torso, closed around the beam. With a sound like grinding mountains, he lifted it, then tossed it aside as if it were balsa wood.
The relief was instant, oceanic. Tears of gratitude blurred Daniel’s vision as he looked up at the impassive stone face. “Marcus… thank God. Thank you.”
The giant’s hand descended again, not to help, but to cover him completely. A single finger, wider than his chest, pressed him flat onto the rubble-strewn ground. The wind left his lungs. The white-glowing eyes bore down.
“Little whore,” the Titan’s voice boomed, a rockslide of sound. It vibrated through Daniel’s bones.
Before he could protest, the colossal form began to shrink, condensing, losing the stone texture but not the overwhelming mass. In moments, it was Marcus, his human size, but the power in him felt denser, more deliberately cruel. He loomed over Daniel, one heavy boot planted beside his hip.
“You trapped yourself,” Marcus sneered, his voice Garrett’s but twisted, stripped of all warmth. “Just sat there, waiting for me. Pathetic little slut.”
He dropped to his knees, his weight pressing Daniel deeper into the debris. A thick, hot tongue, animal-rough, licked a wet stripe from Daniel’s collarbone to his ear. Daniel froze, terror locking his joints. “Stop… Marcus, please, what are you doing?”
Marcus ignored him. Big hands ripped at Daniel’s scrubs—the hospital garb he wore in reality now mirrored here. The fabric tore like tissue, buttons pinging off concrete. The cold air hit Daniel’s skin, followed by the scorching heat of Marcus’s palms groping his chest, pinching a nipple hard enough to make him yelp.
“Begging already? You love it. You’re fucking dripping for it.” Marcus’s mouth was at his neck again, sucking a bruise into the skin, his teeth scraping. One hand shoved down Daniel’s torn pants, fingers roughly encircling his cock. To Daniel’s utter horror, he was half-hard, a traitorous response to the adrenaline, the dominance, the sick familiarity of the touch.
“See?” Marcus laughed, a coarse, ugly sound. “Your body knows what it is.A worthless hole. A convenient wet spot for me to use.”
“No! I love you!” Daniel sobbed, thrashing weakly. “Marcus, please, you love me too, I know you do!”
The laugh this time was deafening, contemptuous. Marcus reared back, looking down at him with pure, undiluted disdain. “Love? Fuck, you’re dumber than you look. Monsters don’t love, Danny. We conquer.We own. We break pretty things because we can.” He leaned close, his breath hot in Daniel’s ear. “You were never special. You were just available.”
He flipped Daniel onto his stomach with brutal efficiency. Daniel’s face ground into the dust and grit, his broken leg screaming in protest in the dream-logic where it was whole again but utterly vulnerable. He felt Marcus spit, a wet, crude gesture, then the blunt, immense pressure of his cock-head pushing against him. No preparation. No care.
“Please, no, you’ll tear me, please—” Daniel’s pleas were muffled by the floor.
“That’s the point,” Marcus grunted.
He shoved in.
It was a white-hot spike of pure agony, a violation so complete it emptied Daniel’s lungs. He couldn’t even scream. A high, keening whine was all he could manage as Marcus seated himself to the hilt, his pelvis slamming against Daniel’s ass. He was enormous, stretching Daniel to a burning, tearing brink.
“Fucking tight little whore,” Marcus growled, panting. He didn’t move for a second, letting Daniel feel the full, painful intrusion. Then he withdrew and slammed back in.
A rhythm began, hard and fast and punishing. Each thrust jolted Daniel forward, his chest scraping rubble, his cock, trapped against the cold ground, throbbed uncomfortably. Marcus gripped his hips, fingers digging in deep enough to bruise bone. The sounds were filthy—wet, slapping flesh, Marcus’s guttural grunts, the clatter of debris with each drive forward.
“Take it. You’re good for this. Only for this.” Marcus punctuated each word with a vicious thrust. “Such an easy lay. So eager. So fucking desperate.”
Daniel’s mind fractured. The pain was a bonfire, but beneath it, coiling in his gut, was a shameful, unstoppable thread of arousal. His body, conditioned by memory, was responding to the sheer physical intensity. He felt his own cock swell further, a damning betrayal that Marcus noticed immediately.
“Look at you,” Marcus sneered, reaching a hand around to jerk Daniel roughly. “Getting off on being used. Cum for me, you dirty slut. Cum while I wreck your insides.”
Orgasm ripped through Daniel, intense and humiliating, as Marcus continued to pound into him without pause. Pleasure and agony twisted together into a nauseating cord. He wept, spent and shattered, but Marcus was far from finished.
After he came inside Daniel with a final, grinding push and a roar, he pulled out, leaving Daniel feeling raw and empty. He allowed only seconds before he was hard again, rolling Daniel onto his back.
The next hours—or moments, dream-time was elastic—were a carousel of degrading poses. Marcus bent him over a broken console, his broken leg twisted awkwardly. He held him up against a shattered wall, Daniel’s feet barely touching the ground, taking his weight entirely on Marcus’s driving cock. Each position was engineered for Marcus’s access, for deeper penetration, with no regard for Daniel’s pain, his sobs, his repeated, broken whispers of “I love you,” which only ever earned more derisive laughter.
Finally, after Daniel was limp, sweat-slicked and sobbing quietly, Marcus pulled out. He stood over him, stroking himself with a brutish fist.
“Open your mouth, slut.”
Daniel, mind broken, obeyed. He tilted his head back, closing his eyes.
The first thick, hot pulse hit his cheek. The next hit his lips. Marcus aimed deliberately, painting his face with stripes of cum, heavy and copious, landing in his hair, on his eyelids, filling his mouth with a salty, bitter flood he was forced to swallow.
“There,” Marcus said, tucking himself away. He looked down at Daniel, a canvas of utter degradation. “That’s all you are. A cum rag. A used-up little bitch.”
He stood up, adjusting his clothes as if he’d just finished a mildly strenuous task. “My use for you is done. I’m leaving. Nadia’s waiting. The Siren. Now there’s a woman who knows how to fuck. Who can take everything I give and beg for more. You? You’re just a pathetic, fragile imitation. A practice toy.”
“Don’t go…” Daniel whispered, the plea a final, pathetic ember.
Marcus grinned. Then he began to grow.
Stone skin flowed back over him, limbs elongating, widening, his form blotting out the ruined ceiling. In seconds, the Titan loomed once more. He reached down, his fingers curling around Daniel’s entire body, lifting him as easily as a snail from a leaf.
Daniel dangled, naked and filthy, high above the cavernous floor, then higher, brought level with the Titan’s glowing white eye, vast as a searchlight. Then he was shifted, held over the gaping maw of the Titan’s mouth. A chasm of darkness and heat yawned beneath him.
“No! Marcus, PLEASE! I LOVE YOU!” Daniel screamed, his voice tiny.
The Titan’s laughter was the sound of continents splitting. He opened his fingers.
Daniel fell into the hot, dank darkness. He tumbled past teeth like stone pillars, into a throat that convulsed around him. The world was swallowed. Pressure.Heat. Absolute, final blackness.
He screamed.
He was screaming into his sterile hospital pillow, his body drenched in a cold sweat that soaked the sheets. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic bird in a cage. The cast on his leg was a comfort—a tether to reality, to the present pain, not the phantom, multifaceted agony of the dream.It was fake. A nightmare. A construction of his fear, his injury, his mother’s venom.
He repeated it like a mantra, gulping the cool, antiseptic air. Fake.Fake. Fake.
But the sensations clung. The feel of grit on his skin, the brutal stretch, the degrading wetness on his face, the overwhelming, consuming darkness. The words.
Whore.Slut. Easy lay. Practice toy.
His own body’s betrayal in the dream felt more real than the bleached walls around him. The line between Marcus’s contempt and Charlotte’s cold analysis dissolved in the lingering dream-fog. They’d said the same thing, in different languages. They’d reached the same terrible conclusion about what he was.
A sob hitched in his chest, then another. He clamped a hand over his mouth, biting into the heel of his palm to stifle the sound. He couldn’t let the night nurse hear. Couldn’t give Charlotte—or the ghost of Marcus—that satisfaction.
He curled onto his side, his body trembling uncontrollably. The echoes of the dream and the memory of his mother’s visit intertwined, a double helix of humiliation. He pressed his face into the pillow, trying to drown them out, but they only grew louder, chanting in unison, until he was just a shaking vessel filled with their awful, resonant truth.