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It took Scarab a while to orient himself in the darkness. Just because it was somewhat familiar now didn’t mean that it was in any way less intimidating or easy to navigate. His legs seemed to drag behind him as he walked. No amount of squaring his shoulders or purposefully striding through it seemed to affect how small he felt.
“ Again ?” Nightmo asked from nowhere and everywhere at once, sounding almost exasperated . “It isn’t very good revenge if you crave it this much.”
Scarab peered up at him. No matter how many times he stood before the monster of darkness, he found himself frozen, intimidated, even if just for a minute.
Some part of his mind was concerned that he would start associating the hazy dream-like state of sleep with the guilty pleasure of sex. A bigger part of him didn’t care.
“I don’t crave it,” Scarab dismissed.
“No,” Nightmo hummed. “You would never let yourself do that, would you? That’s the point. You sit all repressed and polite, completely ignoring that you want Prismo to take you. To make you his . You don’t crave having sex, you crave me taking it.”
Scarab swallowed involuntarily and then cursed himself. Cursed his body for his weakness . He could see in how Nightmo shifted that he noticed it as well, as quiet, as inaudible, as minor a movement as it was.
“That isn’t what’s happening here,” he replied, voice small.
“What is it, then?” Nightmo snapped. At some point, he had begun to grow, taking up the whole world with his twisting shape. He crouched, hands on the ground, sharp points digging into the ground a foot or so away from Scarab. He rested his head on the back of his hands, breathing out so air blew past Scarab, tilting his head down so piercing pink eyes stared through Scarab. “You need me, you vile little pest .”
“I don’t need anything. Much less this .”
“Then why come back?” The giant asked, licking its chops. “What do you call this?”
Scarab hesitated, trying to think . What did he call it, in the moments when he tried to justify it to himself? Thoughts were slippery, here. Whether it was because of the dream itself or Nightmo’s influence, he wasn’t sure. But everything was always so much harder to reach, harder to remember.
The second time Scarab had dreamt of this place, he hadn’t remembered Nightmo until afterward, and he had run until the other caught and had his way with him. This was… he couldn’t recall.
“And isn’t that just horrible?” Nightmo crooned. “You don’t even know how many times you’ve come crawling back to sleep with me.”
It had been too many, hadn’t it? Scarab didn’t need to sleep as often as he was, so his repeated coming back, his trek through the Time Room, shaking with something between fear and excitement before he found a secluded place to lay down to rest… that was desperation , wasn’t it?
Was that want ?
He was voluntarily dragging himself to Nightmo in his most vulnerable moments.
It hadn’t started that way. The first time had been a terrifying, torturous ordeal. Hadn’t it? Scarab had kept himself away for ages , had kept hands off of himself even as he squirmed, had watched Prismo move, too afraid, too aroused by his presence, by his words, by his ever-permeating scent, by the way Prismo smiled and tilted his projection of a head across the wall.
“Tell me, bug. What would you do if I didn’t do anything to you? Would you still wake up, panting, moaning, touching yourself ? Or would that finally make you ask for help?”
Scarab couldn’t find it in himself to answer, burning all over. Nightmo’s knife-like fingers brushing against him were almost a soothing balm to the nausea and guilt that he felt.
“Why do you keep coming back, you little slut?”
“ Stop talking .”
“That’s right,” Nightmo sighed. The hand wrapped around him, almost gently, this time. “You don’t come here for the conversation, do you?”
The idea of gentleness was immediately challenged by the way Nightmo enveloped Scarab in his palm, and squeezed , tightly curling fingers around him in a rib-breaking, carapace-straining hold that only seemed to continue growing tighter and tighter until Scarab thought he might be crushed entirely.
Just when he thought he might be bisected by the hold, the edges of the dark growing impossibly darker, Nightmo spread his palm, leaving Scarab lying in the center of it.
Scarab peered up dizzily and watched as Nightmo lowered fingers towards him, curling fingers around Scarab’s aching arms. He was plucked into the air, dangled by his limbs as Nightmo laid him in the darkness below.
“You don’t know it,” Nightmo snarled from above. “But you’re here because of Prismo . I want you to say you’re here for me .”
“I–”
Nightmo crouched, taking hold of each of Scarab’s legs in each of his hands. Immediately, Scarab spread them as wide as he possibly could, terrified of the consequences that he had experienced before.
“So you can be taught,” Nightmo mused. “I was wondering whether you could learn anything, though I suppose I did train you to come running here, didn’t I?”
Scarab burned with guilt, with shame, with a twisted desire for something that was going to hurt him. There was no good response to the questions that Nightmo was layering over each other.
“Let’s see if you can learn something else,” Nightmo brushed along the slit of Scarab’s carapace, encouraging more slick, but offering nowhere near enough stimulation to be satisfying. To his ever-present shame, Scarab realized that he was practically dripping . When Scarab squirmed, Nightmo merely held him down more firmly, all but crushing him. “Say you’re here for me . Tell me you want me to fuck you. Beg me for it.”
“I’m– I’m not going to,” Scarab wheezed his denial. “ Make me .”
“Gladly,” the nightmare responded.
Suddenly, his arms were pinned more firmly above him, until a small prick of pressure was pressed down below one of his wrists. He shifted, craning his neck to see what was happening, only to feel a jolt of very tangible fear spike through him when he saw the spike held in Nightmo’s hand. As the nightmare pressed harder, and as Scarab felt the ever-painful yet expected crunch of chitin beneath the point, he began to writhe in earnest.
Scarab kicked out, snarled curses, and twisted to try and mess up Nightmo’s concentration. Anything to keep him from pinning Scarab to the ground like that. Anything to keep Nightmo from actually breaking the soft, delicate membrane beneath his outer layer. While it hurt for his exoskeleton to be chipped away and cracked, Nightmo had yet to actually harm his soft underbelly.
But that point was angled to go through him.
With an annoyed noise, Nightmo let go of the needle and hoisted Scarab into the air. The beetle sagged with relief, before realizing his mistake.
“That really scared you, didn’t it?” Nightmo asked, awed. He freed one of Scarab’s arms from his hold, and tightly closed the rest of his hand against the rest of Scarab’s body, pinning his other arm to his torso. Delicately, Nightmo spread his freed arm. “You can attach this back at the joint if I pull it out cleanly, can’t you? What a perfect little doll you are.”
With that, before Scarab could get a terrified word out edgewise, Nightmo gripped his arm and pulled
And
It tore
From its socket
Out into
Nightmo cooed over him, cradling Scarab in his hands until he realized that that loud, horrible gasping noise was coming from him .
He was quick to quiet himself, reaching up to feel his empty socket. It had come out cleanly but without his usual release of it.
Similar to how lizards could choose to drop their tail, Scarab could lose several of his limbs without too much worry, besides the little panic that came with finding them again. Self-amputation was sometimes the best method of protecting oneself, particularly if one was between a rock and a hard place.
Regrowing such limbs was much more difficult, so he stuck to recollecting them whenever possible, lest he be left weakened. Lizards could regrow sections of their tail and tissue, and many mortal bugs had the ability to regenerate limbs when molting. However, neither of these methods worked well for Scarab, who was neither a reptile nor a normal bug who shedded often enough for that to be feasible. His indifferent attitude towards them when in an altercation meant that he often had to deal with the constant pain that came with being so nonchalant regarding the safety of his joints.
But it wasn’t usually so painful. Usually, it happened in fights, when Scarab was pumped up on adrenaline, or when he was passed out. Not when he was between horribly confusing sensations of pleasure and raking pain.
Sometimes he lost his arm in a fall.
Sometimes, the enemy yanked it out of him like a cruel child who cared nothing for the lives of pests beneath him.
“You’re okay,” Nightmo soothed, setting Scarab back on the ground. “Can you still feel it?”
“Pardon?” Scarab croaked, staring up at him.
Nightmo displayed Scarab’s arm in his grasp, manually bending it at the elbow.
“I… I don’t–”
“You don’t?” Nightmo asked, delighted.
“I do!” Scarab gasped, panicked. There was no telling what Nightmo might do if he thought Scarab wasn’t still connected to his arm. “I feel it.”
Of course, there was no telling what he would do once he knew the opposite.
Nightmo hummed, moving the arm around in his grasp as if considering something. “You should’ve just let me pin you down, then.”
“But…”
That would have been worse, wouldn’t it? If he had allowed himself to be painfully pinned down to the ground, held down. Unable to move, to sit up, to tear himself from the ground. Like he was nothing more than something on display . Of course, he would have fought against that.
Scarab felt sick. Skittish. “May I have my arm back?”
He could feel Nightmo’s full attention shifting back to him. “May you?”
“ Please ?”
“... you may,” Nightmo reached down, handing Scarab his arm.
Scarab was quick to reattach it to himself, pushing it back into place with a pop and rubbing along the joint until there was nothing but an ache left from how it had been ripped away.
Once he had rolled his shoulder a final time, Nightmo picked him up again, cradling him in the curled center of his palm as he brought Scarab close to his face. “You should let me pin you.”
Scarab reached to cling to Nightmo’s hand. “ Why would I do that?”
“Imagine,” Nightmo murmured to him. “Being pinned to the ground while I fuck you. Just by your arms. Can you imagine the sting?”
Scarab could, very vividly.
Nightmo shifted his hold on him, bringing him close to his mouth, so Scarab could feel the breath on him while the other spoke. “We could work our way up, little bug. If you stay still when I lay you down, like a good little doll, I have something that might hurt less.”
“I don’t have much of a choice,” Scarab pointed out, wary of the way Nightmo’s claws drifted closer to his mask. “Do I?”
“No,” Nightmo laid him out in the dark. “You don’t. Now stay calm . Stay perfectly still for me, just like that. Perfect . I have you right where I want you, pretty little thing .”
Despite his rational mind screaming at him not to listen, Scarab found his traitorous body going limp, relaxing at the tone, even though Scarab knew not to trust Nightmo. Something in him seemed to dull at Nightmo’s words, the world hazy around him.
He blinked.
Scarab’s trembling arms were raised above him again, his neck craned to watch the motions, to watch warily for a sign of Nightmo getting ready to drive a pin through him. Instead, he noted something shaped like a horseshoe, metal and spiked on the end. When he brought it down, it circled Scarab’s wrist and drove neatly into the ground.
Scarab moved his arm and found that he could not dislodge the half-ring as he may have been able to in dirt or any softer ground. Instead, they stayed stuck fast, securing him to the ground.
He blinked again.
Suddenly, Nightmo was sized down to an almost normal height. He was still quite large, but as he leaned over Scarab, somehow, he wasn’t as intimidating as usual. He pushed closer, kneeling in front of him and between his legs. Hands made of shadows curled around Scarab’s tie, yanking it tight.
It was odd to see. Rather than his hands blotting Scarab out, blending him into the background, Nightmo’s hands were outlined against the somewhat lighter color, highlighted by the difference.
He blinked .
“Don’t you look vulnerable like this?” Nightmo asked, suddenly close. Against his mask, teeth grazing the edge of it, tugging the tie tighter until Scarab craned himself up to relieve some of that pressure, pulling against where his hands were pinned down. Nightmo pressed something like a kiss to him.
Then he moved , snapping his hips forwards and piercing Scarab with his dick. Scarab arched his back, throwing his head back, choking himself against his tie, pulling against his restraints before Nightmo shoved him back down to the ground.
Scarab writhed beneath him, torn between chasing the pleasure and refusing it. If he fought , he wasn’t accepting it. Nightmo would have to take it by force.
As he fought, the nightmare slowed, as if cottoning onto the fact that Scarab wasn’t going to work with him.
“I told you,” Nightmo hissed against him, leaning down. Teeth grazed his mask again. What must have been a tongue squirmed through the plating of his mask, through the membranes and mandibles and the bandages that hid Scarab’s extra eyes and his soft, inner layer. When he continued, his voice was slightly muffled. “I told you to beg .”
Nightmo’s slow, deep thrusts were almost more intense than the quick pounding that Scarab had been expecting. Previous times, the ones that he remembered, anyway, Nightmo had moved rather quickly after he finished toying with Scarab. And each time Nightmo had orgasmed, Scarab had woken. As much as Scarab had anticipated hurt, he hadn’t considered that Nightmo might take his time, once it came to the actual fucking.
But there he was, moving slowly, raising to stare down at Scarab, his gaze freezing him in place. He ached to make the other move faster. At the moment, it felt like Nightmo was having sex with him, like he was making love , rather than–
“ Move ,” Scarab snarled, the closest thing to admittance that he would allow himself in the moment.
“Not yet,” Nightmo said, against him, moving at a languid pace.
In response, Scarab took advantage of the next time Nightmo leaned in, opening his mask into mandibles and grasping Nightmo’s face. He hooked the nightmare by the jaw and the dip of his neck, biting down with teen and talons. The other groaned faintly as he drew forth a dark, viscous substance that poured into Scarab’s mask in a syrupy, molasses-like fashion. It burned, somewhat, as it poured across his face. It was enough of a sting to note as he drew back from his frustrated bite to protectively mask his face again, but not too much for Scarab to tolerate the feeling of.
It didn’t make him speed up, though. Nightmo only seemed to slow, his grip shifting to Scarab’s shoulders and tightening. His grip was painful, of course, but not as much as Scarab had expected. It was almost…
“Shut up,” Nightmo demanded. He moved slowly, making sure Scarab felt every inch of his member as he impaled Scarab with the full length of his cock, thrusting deeply into him. Then he stayed there, sitting inside of him.
If Scarab were to move, he would practically be fucking himself on Nightmo. So he stayed still, freezing himself in place, clenching around Nightmo’s dick as he sat there, trying to will himself to get used to sitting at the edge, at that teetering point of pleasure. Then, Nightmo reached down and tugged lightly at Scarab’s length, ignored before that moment.
His dick, more of a tentacle than anything else, quickly curled around Nightmo’s hand, ignoring the freezing temperatures. Ignorant to the harm Nightmo could cause, if he were to squeeze claws into his dick, one of the softest parts of him.
Scarab could practically feel Nightmo considering it. The entity's fingers curled around him, firm, and then slowly softer, as he stroked Scarab.
But he still wasn’t moving, but Scarab remembered earlier, remembered how Nightmo had looked at him.
“Please move,” he gasped.
Just like before, his words caught the piercing attention of the nightmare above him. In an instant, Nightmo was moving again, rocking against him, curling over him.
Asking was the wrong decision because while Nightmo moved and touched him in tandem, he was far too aware of what Scarab was feeling.
Whenever Scarab's moans got a little too intense, his noises got a little too frequent, high-pitched, when his thoughts became too scattered, Nightmo drew back and refused to touch him until Scarab could almost control himself again. Then he went right back to it, carefully prying Scarab’s self-control apart with measured scrapes against his carapace, strokes of Scarab’s tentacle, and thrusts into his pussy.
And then, when Scarab got too worked up when he got too close to pleasure , Nightmo would stop. He would pull back again until he was just barely touching Scarab.
“Beg me,” Nightmo growled, around and over and in him, over and over again. Repeating the works until they were all Scarab could think of in his dazed pleasure and disappointment. “ Ask me. Say my name .”
“ Nightmo,” Scarab sobbed. Despite his desperate cry of the other’s name, lips curling around the syllables which rested on his tongue heavily afterward, he couldn’t make himself ask for more. Instead, he just repeated himself, his thoughts focused on the other, finally running into his words. “ Nightmo !”
Immediately, Nightmo began working faster. His grip softened on Scarab’s shoulder until the hold was almost tender. He worked Scarab’s dick with an intense focus, letting the member curl through his fingers, searching for a hole that wasn’t offered.
“That’s it,” the nightmare moaned, above him. “You’re here for me . Always me, you always come running. Only I can have you here. You’re mine , little bug.”
Scarab chased the growing feeling of an impending orgasm, arching up against Nightmo with a desperate ferocity as he tried to follow his burning arousal. As he tried to finish . However, the feeling only seemed to grow more intense with every second, hotter, burning, and almost painful . It was certainly overstimulating, although he hadn’t managed to cum yet.
Suddenly, he felt more out of his depth than usual. When was the pleasure–
When would he–?
“You’ll have to ask him for help, soon,” Nightmo said, his tone almost conversational as he pounded into Scarab. “You’ve only ever cum on your own, haven’t you? With your pretty dick curled around your wrist? With your fingers in your cunt? I can mark you. I can make you mine , but I can’t make you orgasm here.”
It took Scarab a moment to catch up with his words. But.
What?
Nightmo couldn’t make him cum? Then why–
Scarab had been built up and taken down enough times to bring tears to his eyes. Luckily, they had been hidden behind his mask, but the fact remained that he had–
For nothing ?
“ For me ,” Nightmo thrust into him deeply, harshly, and–
Scarab awoke with a keen and full-body shudder, his hips stuttering in minuscule motions against nothing.
Unlike other times, he couldn’t make himself sit up. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, trying to catch his breath, but every time he moved, he could feel where Nightmo had been fucking him. The pressure had made him oversensitive but hadn’t let him cum, because he wasn’t in the real world.
As he moaned to himself and desperately, weakly palmed at his dick, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. Something pink, slipping across the yellow of the Time Room.
Scarab froze in place. Slowly, he took on the arduous task of pushing himself halfway up into a sitting position, to stare across the hall at Prismo. He could tell from the depth of the shade that it wasn’t one of his copies. It was him , projected against the wall, watching Scarab in all of his debauchery.
Prismo looked surprised, and then guilty as Scarab sat up, like he had been caught with his hand in a pickle jar. Had he been watching ?
“You woke up faster than I thought,” the other murmured to himself, his volume control as bad as ever. Scarab had noted early on that Prismo was used to speaking only to himself in the Time Room. Louder, his voice tinged with anxiousness, Prismo went on. “I uh, didn’t mean to intrude, Scrabby. You can take care of that yourself, probably. I mean, everybody gets that sort of thing. Sometimes, when I look at my Old Man Prismo self, that cute old guy is humping his bed sheets. It’s like, human nature or something. Or whatever you are. I mean… I kind of thought you would tell me off by now. I’ll just…”
“ Don’t ,” Scarab pleaded, remembering Nightmo’s earlier words in a haze. He would have to ask…?
No, he couldn’t. But Prismo was looking back at him. His expression was so–
Please , Scarab wanted to cry, arching his back against the floor, spreading his knees to show his soaking cunt. However, when he reached for words, all he found was a mournful chittering noise that flowed its way out of him. It was something instinctual. Animal. Less a fragment of language and more a meaning , a desire.
Somehow, it seemed to work better than a ‘please’ might have, because Prismo was at his side in an instant, growing across the wall as he projected the main part of his body onto the roof. His hands stretched and found Scarab, crawling across his exoskeleton.
“Are you sure?” Prismo asked. His tone was more serious than Scarab had ever heard it before, which drew him slightly out of his fuzzy, unfocused mental state. “You want me to…?”
“Stop dithering ,” Scarab snapped, reaching to grasp at Prismo’s arms as if he could draw the projections into himself if he simply gripped at them hard enough.
Actually, there was some give to them. His laws hooked into the corners, as if he were peeling Prismo’s very form from the ground–
Prismo pulled from his grip and pressed his semi-tangible hands into Scarab’s cunt, causing him to throw his head back in ecstasy. He could feel them elongating, stretching to either side as they slid along his ridged walls.
“Like that?” Prismo asked gently.
Scarab still couldn’t find his words, managing a light trill as he scrambled for purchase, digging his claws into the bricks of the Time Room, prying into the floor to hold himself in place as Prismo moved.
The hands stilled inside of him. “Scarab?”
A mournful warble filled the room, and it took Scarab far too long to realize that the noise wasn’t coming from Prismo. How much had he been letting himself go, recently? He squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to ground himself, gouging his claws deeper. Why wasn’t Prismo moving?
No, after that moment, he was moving again, the wrong way. Hands and arms shrank, pulling from his cunt no matter how much Scarab tried clenching down on the now mostly intangible light.
“Did that hurt?” Prismo asked, concerned. His face was suddenly closer to Scarab’s, eye level with him as he turned to peer at the wall. “I thought that’s what you wanted, but you weren’t saying anything.”
Scarab wanted to kill Prismo. He wanted to tear the other to shreds, molecule by molecule, speck by speck of light until there was nothing left. He wanted to–
“How can I help you?”
Scarab thought that his dripping cunt and spread legs were enough of an invitation. He could see the desire on Prismo, in his face, in the way his eyes flitted towards Scarab’s nether region. If Prismo were physical, Scarab could have smelled the lust on it.
As it was, everything smelled of Prismo anyway. His presence and his eons of granting wishes had spread his scent throughout the entirety of the Time Room, overpowering and distracting in his moment of weakness.
Scarab needed something in him. He–
“ Please ,” he managed, trembling.
What was he doing? What was he asking for? Was he really going to give up so easily, over practically nothing? Prismo hadn’t done a thing to him, besides gently, genuinely offer his help. At least Nightmo had had to torture such words from him. He could have brought himself to his own pleasure using his hands again. While not as good, it served its purpose and helped him clear his head, so he could be over this nonsense.
No. He shouldn’t have been doing that, either.
Scarab shouldn’t have been as weak as he was. He shouldn’t have run off to dreams the moment things got difficult. After all, hadn’t he existed almost as long as time without caving to such base instincts? He had been able to ignore them, every other time that it had come up. They were nothing but an annoyance, something he had to be stronger then.
So why…?
“Please?” Prismo urged. His hand was warm as it climbed over Scarab’s exoskeleton. When it reached his neck, he tensed, well aware of the dangers this posed. But then it kept going until it rested on his mask. Scarab could feel his fingers curling, as if…
As if cupping his face.
Scarab sobbed, unable to catch up with what was happening. There was something hot welling up behind his mask. In his throat. Almost as bad as the burning desire in his core. Why was Prismo doing that to him?
It took everything Scarab had to gather his thoughts. He shoved down every sickening comment his mind snarled at him, trying desperately to focus on the good. On what he needed .
“ Please fuck me ,” Scarab cried, splaying himself out for the other.
As fast as light could travel, Scarab felt hands re-enter his cunt, expanding, stretching, growing, filling him to the brim with the warmth of starlight.
“I can do that,” Prismo said, back above him again. His tone was pleased. “I just wanted to make sure that’s what you wanted, Scrabby. I mean, if I was as worked up as you were when you woke up, I think I’d probably let anybody fuck me, at that rate. I was watching you, you know? You aren’t that sneaky when you go to have your wet dreams. You know I can basically see into every part of the Time Room, right? I wonder what you’re dreaming about. I hope it’s me .”
Scarab threw his head back, expecting to bang it into the ground beneath him as some measure to gain back control. To add some pain in so he could clear his head through the arousal, but his head met a pillow, instead, softening the blow. When had Prismo conjured that? As he had raised his head to look at him, just a moment before? Had he–
Prismo rocked into him with whatever amalgamation of crossing arms and hands and light he had filled Scarab with, effectively cutting off his thoughts.
Scarab trilled and chittered and chirruped and whimpered and whined while he rocked against the Wishmaster. When he managed words, trying to be more dignified, Prismo essentially fucked them back out of him, moving faster and faster with every gasp Scarab drew in.
It didn’t take long, with him already so aroused from his previous dream, for Scarab to arch his back and squirm into the pillow, crying out as he orgasmed.
Prismo moved a few more times, bucking against him until Scarab squirmed from overstimulation. Then he pulled out, slowly but surely. Scarab could feel the other’s eyes on him as he writhed from the feeling of Prismo’s overlapping light slowly dragging out of him.
Finally, the Wishmaster projected himself onto the wall next to Scarab’s face again. “Feeling better?”
With some effort, Scarab rolled onto his side to stare at him and more effectively curl in on himself.
“Aw,” Prismo said knowingly. “Tired?”
He was. But…
Scarab didn’t quite want to go to sleep. He knew what awaited him in dreams, and he wasn’t ready for something of that caliber yet. So, with effort, he pushed himself up onto an arm, working his jaw beneath his mask as he looked for a word with substance.
“You know,” Prismo said, sliding a hand up Scarab’s thigh. He waited for Prismo to slide it further, to tease him until it hurt. Scarab would have laid back for him, again, if he had. Instead, he just kept it there, like he was holding Scarab. “All you have to do is ask. I’m happy to help.”
“... that’s more difficult,” Scarab managed slowly. Carefully. “Than you might presume.”
Prismo made an exaggerated motion of a shrug, raising his hand along the wall. Idly, Scarab wondered how sanitary his hands were after exploring the depths of his cunt. Could one properly clean light? “I’m glad to help you figure out how to make it… easier? Sure, let’s go with that.”
Scarab swallowed thickly, and let himself lay back down. He wouldn’t sleep, but his body ached in all the best ways.
“Scrabby?”
“ What ?”
“You’re really hot when you scream in your sleep.”