Chapter Text
He’s extra pissy today, and doesn’t know why, and doesn’t much care.
He knows his stomach hurts, has been hurting more all day, and that it’s definitely Boyd’s fault. It’s everything he can do not to spit on the man as he comes in with lunch. He does bite him particularly hard at one point, which is extra painful for Boyd and extra pleasant for Raylan, as he hadn’t done it in several days.
“Is something hurting you?” Boyd finally asks, casting a critical eye over Raylan.
Raylan is naturally reluctant to share his pain. But something in him has him confessing it. Freaky-deaky savage people mind control, probably, he thinks distantly in the eternal sulk he always has going on anymore in the back of his mind.
“It’s my stomach,” he grinds out. “Low down. It aches.”
Boyd’s face flashes with that mixture of sympathy and smug excitement Raylan has learned pretty much always means something related to the omega bullshit was coming, and he braces himself.
“It sounds like it’s your womb developing.”
Aaand there it was.
That was a big one to handle, braced or not, and Raylan struggles to control his lurching emotions.
It doesn’t matter. It’s happening anyway. Just take what good he’ll give you. Keep yourself together at any cost.
That was more or less his new mantra. This was happening to him regardless of his will. While that was terrible, it meant that he wasn’t responsible for the shameful things his body, and by extension he himself, was doing. And it meant he deserved every bit of creature comfort he could stand that Boyd would give him.
And it turned out Boyd would give him a lot, if directed appropriately.
Like now, when he starts massaging Raylan’s stomach. The circular pressure helps, melts enough of the pain to make him quiet, meditative.
Boyd keeps it up for literally hours, switching hands, only stopping when Raylan asks for food.
Raylan’s still cranky as all fuck, though.
“If you love me, why do you keep me here against my will, making me something I don’t wanna be?” he says that evening, mostly taunting, looking to hurt.
Boyd hesitates, looking torn. “The things I feel for you are complicated and deep. Devotion and compassion and lust, to name a few. But in truth Raylan, I don’t know if you can quite call it love in the way you mean, just yet. It’ll get there in its own natural time. Of that, I have no doubt. It just needs time for us both to grow together. For the trust to grow.“
Raylan might hate that this actually surprises him (hurts him, though he refuses to think that word) but it does, regardless.
Boyd’s eyes telegraph he’s been given away, either by his face, or by that damned psychic link he still doesn’t really believe in, doesn’t want to believe in.
”Oh, Raylan,” he says like his heart is melting, and Raylan hates it, hates the look on his face, hates the very way his flare of hatred makes Boyd’s eyes sparkle with amusement, hates the way he reaches out and touches Raylan to soothe him, how he reassures him verbally that he’s Boyd’s entire world, the golden sun he spins around.
Above all he hates that it works, and he finds himself calming.
Boyd touches him all the time, has from the beginning, but every day it’s more and more. A brush against his arm here, a supportive squeeze of his leg there, the fingers in his hair. The massaging of his aching limbs when they’re unbound; and more and more they’re left that way, Raylan being left alone with only his wrists tying him to the bed, on a rope that’s long enough to strangle himself with if he really wanted to.
He doesn’t. Plus, Boyd would only come running the moment he sensed something was wrong. He does that anyway, will even put the leg restraints back on if he feels Raylan is particularly unsettled before one of their ‘sessions’. He still says it’s to help Raylan keep calm. All Raylan knows is it’s increasingly difficult to work up the willpower to actually harm Boyd.
All Raylan knows is sometimes his protective fog of slow acceptance (it’s surely depression) lifts a bit from sexual pleasure, sometimes it lifts from fear and anger, and sometimes, most rarely, it lifts from something soft and warm, that has something to do with Boyd’s mere presence.
He most keenly appreciates this when he is denied that presence. Boyd had warned him:
“Raylan I’m gonna have to be gone most of the day, today, I’m afraid. Won’t be back till evening. I’m gon’ tie your hands to the bed, because it’s a long time to go without boredom getting oneself into trouble.” He flashes Raylan a knowing smirk that Raylan merely quirks an eyebrow at. “I can leave you a sandwich and a book. Want a stop at the bathroom first?”
Raylan grumbles a cantankerous assent.
Then, startlingly quickly, it seems, he is left alone.
It takes him little over an hour to realize his true upset. An hour, for reference, is about the longest Boyd ever leaves him by himself, these days.
By hour three he can’t even pretend to read the book. The sandwich seems profoundly unappetizing. He knows he’s upset because he wants Boyd. He reminds himself he can’t help this, and it’s no more his choice to feel this way than it is a bird’s to crave flight. It’s his nature now. It still fucking rankles.
It still burns to realize he doesn’t want the sandwich because he wants Boyd to feed it to him by hand, misses the sparks against his lips as Boyds fingers brush against them, wants his approving smile to whet his appetite.
By hour four his asshole is leaking, brought on by too many obsessive thoughts about Boyd. He shivers with mental discomfort, but in the endless minutes alone it shifts to shivering just with lust. The rope isn’t long enough to get his hands between his legs and touch himself, he thinks for the very first time, too horny to even be shocked at himself.
Then he’s mad, because Boyd made him this way and now he’s not even here, he’s left Raylan to make him suffer in his need and embarrassment, the way he’d promised not to.
The door to the bedroom fairly crashes open and Raylan jumps, startled massively.
It’s Boyd, of course, red-faced and panting and disheveled. Raylan stares at him in fairly naked awe. “Did you fuckin’ run here from Harlan?”
“Naw, just from the car,” Boyd says, grinning. He continues to catch his breath, looking at Raylan admiringly. “I could hear you clear across town, you know.”
“I need you.”
It just slips out before he can prevent it, and his eyes widen at Boyd’s as he blinks at himself. He lets himself get stuck in those eyes rather than think about what he’s just said, stuck like a fly in the warm, thick, syrupy flow of them over him.
He’s wet between his legs; they glisten with it as Boyd pulls them apart, puts his fingers where they belong, gives Raylan what he needs. Not just his fingers inside him, stimulating and relieving that monster that just grows and grows each time. He gives him his hands soothing his flesh, too. His voice soothing his mind. His breath and the devoted presses of his lips to Raylan’s flesh, warming the very center of him.
He doesn’t leave the room again the rest of the night, except to get more food that he feeds to Raylan, of course.
For a strangely long chunk of time, Raylan is nearly fog-less, but also nearly at ease, and it feels almost like what he imagines contentment could feel like.
The fact that it still makes him ashamed to acknowledge it, feels increasingly irrelevant to the reality of the situation.
One day Boyd leaves him completely untied when he leaves to go get breakfast.
Raylan at first just blanks with the suddenness of the opportunity, rather overwhelmed. Should he get ready to hit Boyd with a chair? Should he hide behind the door?
Instead, he does nothing. He doesn’t even try the goddamn doorknob.
When Boyd comes back, he has a bagel with cream cheese. Both halves are prepared, side-by-side on the plate.
Raylan looks down at them and hesitates. He hasn’t fed himself in days. Maybe weeks. He looks at Boyd with something like uncertainty.
Then he picks up one of the bagel halves, brings it to his mouth, and takes a bite.
It tastes rather melancholic, actually. It’s hard to make himself swallow.
It helps when he picks up the other half and more-or-less shoves it at Boyd face. Boyd takes it from him with a smile and begins to eat.
Fucking Christ.
He gets another chance when Boyd leaves later on to prepare lunch.
The only thing he does with it is go to the bathroom.
He gets the luxury of wiping his own ass. But before that, he has the novel experience of removing the plug from himself.
It comes out with a consistent tug, making him gasp a little as he stretches around it like a sped up timelapse of an opening and closing bloom. Elastic and easy.
Then he goggles at it. It’s ridiculously large. The widest part has got to be three inches across, though it tapers dramatically to a neck less than an inch.
There’s no goddamn way this is the plug Boyd put in him at the beginning. It would have torn him in two, surely. He must’ve been sizing up along the way. Sneaky bastard.
Raylan can’t fathom how comfortably he’s been wearing it inside him.
He does his business and then stares down at the plug he left on the bathroom floor.
Fuck that. He can’t believe he was even considering putting it back in. That’s a bridge too far.
He gets a shower, a sweet glorious shower. All by himself like a grown up.
He almost hopes Boyd will say something about the plug’s absence during the evening fuck session.
He does raise an eyebrow and look at him with a little smile, which isn’t much, but something.
“Problem?” Raylan pushes.
Boyd’s smile widens. “No, Raylan. You’re free to wear or not wear a plug as you choose. It shouldn’t matter much by now. My cum is just to help keep things going smoothly, you don’t need much anymore.”
Raylan frowns, not particularly satisfied by this, all things taken as a whole. He feels unsettled, more so than usual. He lets out a deep breath, not wanting Boyd to go tying him up.
Laying on his back in their usual position feels wrong, he decides is part of the problem.
He’s free to move now, free to position himself as he chooses.
He chooses his hands and knees, baring his ass to Boyd of his own free will. He doesn’t realize how heavy a psychological import this choice has on him until he’s already done it, and by then it’s too terribly right-feeling to back out of.
His face is against the soft linens of the bed. His ass drools, helplessly. He can feel the coolness of the air against it.
Boyd lets out a shuddering moan, kept behind his teeth like he’s pained, or trying not to come in his pants. “Fuck, Raylan,” he says, worshipful.
Raylan rolls his eyes behind his closed lids. Boyd better get a move on. He sort of hopes he’ll put his cock in him, he realizes with a shivery jolt.
Boyd doesn’t, and Raylan tells himself he’s not at all disappointed, that having half of Boyd’s hand stuffed in him is bad enough, good enough.
It does feel good. Absolutely. Boyd even touches his cock, some, which is nice and hard and tingly between his legs. And when he comes it’s like being drowned in a wave of warm light.
But he still has the thought that he could’ve, should’ve taken more. It’s unnerving.
More unnerving is his inability to settle for the rest of the day, feeling a nagging sense that something is wrong, something is missing. He feels like he’s waiting for an attack to come. Or something.
His ass feels… strange.
At this point Raylan is just more aggravated by it all than anything, surely, this constant game of watching new weird shit pop up from within himself.
“What is it?” He asks this of Boyd with flat irritation, in the evening.
“I’m sorry?” Boyd puts down his book and looks at him.
Raylan gestures at himself with a vague, agitated wave. “What fresh bullshit is this? What’s wrong with me? Why am I anxious?”
“What does it feel like is wrong with you?”
“Ain't you supposed to be able to tell me?”
Boyd huffs at him. “I get your emotions, not your thoughts. I ain’t literally a mind reader. I just know you’re agitated, and it’s not cuz you’re afraid or hungry, or hurting. You’re…” He pauses and gets a thoughtful look, brows furrowing. “It’s almost like lonely? Not quite. I don’ know. It’s not like a label pops up. I gotta learn this shit as I go.”
Raylan frowns. Not quite lonely, indeed, he realizes.
Empty.
He, or his body, rather, is missing that goddamn plug.
His frustration and shame flare with the realization. As does the ache in his ass.
“Get the plug,” he grinds out before Boyd can ask, eyes furiously glued to the bed.
Boyd hastens to obey without a word.
He comes back with it, the one Raylan had discarded. He sits down on the bed with it and then there’s an awkward moment where they both just look at it.
Raylan isn’t sure if he’s offering it to him, to put up his own ass. He’s not sure if he even wants to, if it’s better or worse to do it to himself, or have Boyd do it for him.
“Can I?” Boyd asks quietly.
That old adage about ‘can I versus may I’ pops up and actually seems particularly relevant to their situation, honestly, but he has no time for it, no space for witticisms in his physical and mental discomfort. He just nods, near-grateful.
He turns quickly on his hands and knees and actually is grateful for the way Boyd just pushes it inside him, no fanfare or flowery words. His hand lingers on the skin of his asscheek for a warm second or two, and that’s it, and Raylan can breathe again.
He subsides to ruminate on this, as he always can’t help but do, and Boyd goes back to his book, and shortly, they go to bed.
Boyd can feel his lingering shame, and of course can’t help but try to ineffectively talk him out of it, crooning over his shoulder like the literal monkey on his back.
“Raylan, this is incredibly common, particularly for nighttime. They make them to be soothing, you know. They’re designed for this exact purpose.“
“Why do omegas need so much goddamn soothing?” Raylan snaps with embarrassment, staring sulkily at the wall.
Boyd seems taken a bit aback by the question. “I suppose they have a bit of a reputation for high-strung-edness. But personally, I think a fair amount of it is just because folk like taking care of them.”
Boyd would think that.
It’s not long after his womb finishes growing in that he gives up one of the final pieces he has left. One of the only pieces he has ever had, in fact.
Boyd’s touching him and by now, it’s routine for Raylan to be on his hands and knees for it; it just feels the most satisfying and pleasurable for him that way. It’s also routine for him to stay completely unbound. What was the point of physically fighting Boyd during sex? He’s not sure he even could. And this is the last time in the world he’d want to, these days.
For all intents and purposes he surely belongs to Boyd, by now. Sexually, psycho-mumbo-jumbo-y. Maybe even legally? He isn’t sure- has heard dodgy rumors about such things being allowed, that there could be special ‘allowances’ for alpha/omega couples. It might as well be true. God, what if it is? Don’t think about it.
Really, he just doesnt have much fight left in him, for this particular activity, at least. It feels too good, is by far the brightest thing in his existence, not just right now, but increasingly seeming like it might eclipse every sexual experience that had ever come before.
It’s very good, to say the least. Too good to allow room for self-reproach while it was happening, though afterwards as he lay alone in this room was still fair game, unfortunately.
He rocks back and forth on Boyd’s three fingers. Or maybe it was four. Maybe Boyd was going to put his whole fucking hand in him today. Maybe Raylan needed it.
He needs something. The fingers aren't enough. He’s whining, high in his throat, and drooling a mess from his ass, a helpless gross wet spot growing on the bed between his legs, running down his thighs endlessly as Boyd fucks him harder and harder with his fingers. The smell of it is noticeably sweet.
Boyd bends over; Raylan can feel him close to his ear. He whines again, not knowing why the fact of Boyd’s proximity forces it out of him.
“I know what you need, Raylan,” he says quietly, compassionately in Raylan’s ear. “You know it, too. I’m very glad to give it to you, to make you feel better. You just need to let me know you want it.”
Raylan tries, God help him, he tries to make his mouth say the words. He can’t quite do it. He turns his head to meet Boyd’s eye for a second, then swings it back around and buries it in the bed. His ass is so needy, on fire with it. It’s spread to his whole body, so he feels almost ready to jump out of his skin if it’s not relieved immediately. He still can’t say it.
“Raylan.” And here’s Boyd, taking pity on him, finally. Raylan feels relief start to trickle in already.
“Do you want me to put my cock in you?” Comes the careful words, tiptoeing into Raylan’s ear, past his defenses.
Raylan’s breath catches. He can hardly see through his desire.
“Yesss,” he half hisses, half moans, breaking entirely.
He feels the blunt head of Boyd’s cock against him. The floodgates of relief are already opening, turn by turn.
Boyd’s cock slides in him so slickly and sweetly, every fraction of an inch sending such an explosion of golden tingles through him to burst behind his eyelids, that he doesn’t even realize he’s making noise. He has no idea he’s shouting, nearly crying his profound relief as the gates crash open, as it goes deeper and deeper, as deep as he’s always needed it, as deep as he’s been waiting his life for.
He realizes he’s crying, actual tears coming from his eyes. It’s outside his control, so he lets it go, accepts it as just another part of the surreal fever dream his life is, now.
Boyd is holding onto him, with both his hands alternately caressing and squeezing whatever bit of him they find.
“My God, Raylan. My God,” he keeps saying, and his voice sounds shaken, like he might be crying, too. Raylan could almost laugh wryly at the sound; that psychic connection did him right in, by the appearance of things.
He’s far too distracted by the pleasure he’s drowning in to do things like laugh, though. And the strangled sound Boyd makes as he finally starts to actually thrust heavily implies he’s drowning, too.
They cling to each other, and sink together.
Raylan’s pleasure builds and builds like a swelling ball in his gut. Speaking of, there seems to literally be an actual ball, beginning to swell, not in his gut, but in his asshole. He gasps with a little fear. He knows what that is- everyone knows what that is. Everyone has heard about the knot, that particular sordid detail, if nothing else about alphas and omegas.
Before he can work up more than his initial fear, Boyd is pulling back quickly, with a jolting “pop” that leaves Raylan writhing with stimulation, but does no damage besides.
Raylan is confused, so near orgasm, and near tears again for how it’s being denied to him.
“It’s okay,” Boyd reassures him quickly, and it is more okay, once his cock is back in Raylan, that is. The wide part at the base, the swelling knot is outside him, so it can’t go as deep as it had been.
It’s still almost the most satisfying thing Raylan’s ever felt. Second only to the blissful time when the whole thing had been in him.
He whines a little, not really meaning to. It’s just apparently how he instinctively communicates in this mode, which is a touch embarrassing.
Boyd doesn’t mind a bit, clearly.
He rubs his hand soothingly on Raylan’s back, the other one curled around the base of his cock, keeping it from pushing back inside Raylan.
“Oh my Raylan, I wanna give you it all, everything you desire. My heart can barely stand the sight of you like this, it’s so fucking beautiful, a living dream. I’m worried we went too soon, though, love.” His voice drops from soaring and lofty to warm and concerned. “You’re not quite done. And I’d sooner die than hurt you. So for right now I gotta keep my knot out of you. The rest of me is plenty.”
Raylan is shocked at the loudness of the whimper that comes out of him at this pronouncement. Suddenly, the notion that Boyd might not cram that fat ball up his ass tonight is nigh-unbearable. He has no idea who he is, anymore. It doesn’t matter.
“God, how you tempt me,” Boyd laughs. “You are absolutely terrible. I should have expected.”
Raylan isn’t about to argue who’s more terrible. He doesn’t want to argue about anything other than getting that really full feeling back inside him, needing the satisfaction of the stretch Boyd has planted the seed of in his mind.
He rocks insistently back against Boyd’s hand covering his knot, beginning to growl. He’s going to get his full satisfaction if he has to hurt both of them to do it.
“Alright, Raylan, alright! Jesus.” Boyd laughs in defeat. “How about my fist, instead? Will that satisfy you for tonight?”
Raylan freezes, stunned. He looks back at Boyd with alarm.
“Don’t look like that! That knot you’re clamoring for is a damned sight bigger than my fist, once it gets going. If you’re craving it so badly, you should definitely be able to take my fist, no problem.”
Raylan is torn between feeling indignant that Boyd is rude enough to accuse him of something as classless as craving his knot (even if it was true), and amazed that they’re having this discussion while Boyd is still fucking him. And while he’s holding his end up using mostly non-verbal whimpers.
Raylan nods his agreement, eager to have his satisfaction however he can get it. He has the presence of mind to turn around and look at Boyd cock as he’s withdrawing. He’s never actually seen it before, he’s now realizing. He’s felt it against him in the nights and mornings, feeling vaguely large beyond belief. But generally Boyd has been almost coy with letting him get a peek. How funny is that?
Well, maybe not funny ‘haha’. More like shocking. His first hint is the way it comes out of him for a decent two or three seconds, for all that the base of it started outside him.
For Boyd’s cock is truly massive. Raylan should have expected this; it’s one of the things alphas are notorious for, after all. It has to be a good eleven inches long, at least, it’s difficult to be sure. It’s much wider than the average cock, too; the head is as thick as his wrist. The bulge at the base is truly obscene- far bigger than an average man’s fist, as Boyd had said.
He’s amazed that it was in him, flabbergasted that it felt so comfortable, profoundly so. It doesn’t even make sense, he thinks dizzily.
Boyd somehow knows exactly what he’s thinking, per usual.
“Your body is capable of amazing things, Raylan. Give it just a little longer and it’ll be more than capable of taking all of this. It probably is now; I’m just too cautious. And anyway,” he says as he’s leaning back over him, hand rubbing at his sloppily wet, begging hole, “You’re more than ready for this.”
And he pushes his pointed hand right into Raylan’s asshole.
It just goes right in, and the widest part of it against his rim is nothing so much as the feeling of that first stretch of the day, right at that peak moment when the muscles burn with such tender pleasantness.
And then it’s all in him, and he’s clenching in greedy, blissful relief at Boyd’s wrist. And now Boyd’s curling his hand up into a fist inside him, beginning to move like he’s slowly punching Raylan from the inside. Carving his tender way through him.
Raylan can do nothing but let his feet writhe and his eyes roll, and witness his body turn itself into a literal glove of pleasure, wrapped around Boyd’s hand.
And the fact that it doesn’t hurt, that it hasn’t hurt at all, is a fucking magic trick, and honestly Raylan won’t be surprised or care much if Boyd pulls a goddamn rabbit out of there, so long as he pulls an orgasm from him, too.
In the end, and it doesn’t take hardly any time to get to that end, it’s an orgasm that erupts from him, muscles clenching around Boyd’s fist, a lowing sound coming from Raylan like the livestock he basically goddamn is now.
The thought just makes him come harder, even as it makes his stomach clench.
The next morning- absolute calamity.
Raylan looks down at his cock and gasps with horror. Then he begins loudly cursing Boyd.
His ruckus soon brings Boyd to the room. “Ahh, awake at last I see. What has you in such a state this morning, sweet thing?”
The way he says it tells Raylan he knows exactly what Raylan is about to say. The fucker knew this would happen. Raylan grits his teeth. He can hardly speak for his shame and agitation. “My- it’s…what the fuck have you done to me, you fucking asshole.”
His voice is shot through with near despair. His cock, his ever-loving cock has been diminished greatly. It lays between his legs, scarcely half it’s original size, both in length and width. His testicles are also terribly small-looking, again, maybe half their normal size.
Boyd’s squinting, patronizing look infuriates him. “Aww, now, that is one of the less fortunate side effects of what we’re doing here, I’m afraid. Omegas just don’t have a need for a big, penetrative dick. Their bodies invest in… other areas to receive their pleasure, as I am sure you well understand. You’ll still get hard, but it won’t be enough to get off from, most likely.”
Raylan chokes back the moan of misery that wants out, unwilling to let Boyd see the depths of his upset.
Regardless, he winces, looking at Raylan as if the sight gives him a migraine, then coming to sit on the bed by him.
Raylan covers himself with a sheet, and then burns with embarrassment at his actions. Talk about pointless.
“I imagine it got sped up a bit by yesterday's activities, but in truth it’s been shrinking gradually for some time. You just haven’t noticed. And truly, Raylan, you look amazing. Before just… didn’t quite fit you right.”
These quiet words and his sympathetic lust-tinged look are the least comforting things Raylan has ever experienced. His despair is mostly tempered by a shimmering, nearly comical hysteria. His cock. They even took his goddamn good ole cock and balls from him.
He’s torn between laughing and crying, now, and wants to do neither. God, does he even have sperm? He’s afraid to ask.
“Now, darlin’ I hate to see you so distraught.” Boyd slithers closer to Raylan and inserts his head between his no-longer-forcibly spread thighs. They just spread all on their own, these days.
Raylan can't help the reaction of his body to his heightened proximity, cock twitching with interest despite or even partly because of his shame and anger. He’s surely helpless to prevent it, as he was helpless to prevent everything else that had happened to him, as Boyd puts his mouth around him, and begins to suck.
Raylan’s shame deepens as he realizes how easily he fits in his mouth, even as he hardens further.
Boyd can take all of him, his tongue seeming almost as big as Raylan’s whole cock. Which is still incredibly sensitive, one tiny plus, perhaps even more so than before. The lappings of Boyd’s tongue have him practically convulsing.
They also have him leaking soon, of course, a trickle of wetness starting up in him, already tickling at the outside of his hole. It immediately begins to take priority.
He withstands it for all of five minutes before getting impatient. He pushes Boyd off of him and gets on his hands and knees.
“Put your cock in me,” he demands. “I don’t care if you put the goddamn knot in me or not. Just do it.”
Boyd makes a near-babbling sound of sudden flustered lust that could almost make Raylan laugh out loud if he wasn’t so fucking mad.
He doesn’t quite shove his cock into Raylan, but it’s a near thing.
The sex is phenomenal, even without the knot, which Boyd still stubbornly keeps outside Raylan.
After he comes (and it still looks like regular semen, he sees in a relieved glance), he realizes Boyd hasn’t, not that he’s ever cared about such things before, and has a sudden, intense desire he has no choice but to verbalize:
“Come in me.”
Boyd groans, and thrusts a little harder, one hand still clutching his knot. Raylan can feel his knuckles tapping against him over and over again.
He's ashamed of his needy desire for Boyd’s cum, straight from the source. It’s particularly fucked of him given it’s the source of his transformation, of all his woes. Even more fucked, that might be partly why he wants it so bad, the perverse turn on of self-destructiveness.
Boyd obliges him in short order. Raylan gasps as he feels him throb inside him. It goes on for ages, Boyd huffing loudly, body making short thrusts in time to the pulses of his cock. Raylan’s never seen him come, and the thought that he’s finally feeling it makes him moan.
He can feel what might be cups of semen being pumped into him, on and on, painting his insides. God, it feels amazing. It's so intensely arousing he feels himself quiver in his entire body, and wonders wildly for a second if he’ll orgasm again.
Boyd finally begins to pull out, and as he does, Raylan can feel everything start to pour out of him. Unacceptable.
“The plug!” He gasps tremorously, in too deep at the moment for shame.
Boyd quickly slips it inside him and Raylan subsides with relief, apparently finally satisfying the bizarre impulses within himself he can barely interpret.
“You are by far the hottest creature I have ever known,” Boyd tells him seriously, shaking himself like a dog, and it does actually surprise a snort from Raylan.
“Yeah, well, your opinion is pretty fucked, as we’ve established.”
He realizes he profoundly enjoys Boyd’s actual touch, the theoretically platonic sort, with a calmness over the matter that surely approaches insensibility. He hardly feels anything, anymore, it sometimes feels like.
Except he feels so much.
He feels too big to be contained in his own body. Surely he should be feeling smaller than ever?
Instead he feels a thousand miles wide when Boyd holds him, a dispelled, tingling thing, only held together by his fingers in his hair, by the smell of him, like metal and clay, weighing him back down.
He smells so damn good.
Raylan could stay still, cradled in Boyd’s arms, for hours like this. He feels sheltered from the turmoil of his life, able to drift within himself.
And sometimes they do stay for hours, and Boyd says nothing at all, keeping his kind silence going even when Raylan starts to wet through to his lap.
Ignoring it, mercifully.
For what it’s worth, Boyd’s cock is hard against Raylan pretty much the whole time he sits in Boyd’s lap. Quiet, unmoving iron pressing against him. Through his pants, that is, for Boyd is always covered unless they’re having sex. Raylan has no idea whether it’s because of consideration, or desire to dominate, or some odd shame about his body. That would be ironic.
Raylan will never be able to properly verbalize how feeling Boyd’s erection somehow comforts the hurt in him- that they are both slaves to their biology, and yet simultaneously obviously both not slaves to their biology. They can just have a small sliver of calmness and stillness in the world, if only for a little while.
And then, inevitably, they use their biology on one another.
”Why’d it take so long for you to put your cock in me? Why all the fingers stuff?” He was fairly sure Boyd was just a disgustingly kinky fuck.
“I told you, I was just waiting for you to ask for it,” Boyd says, and it would be reasonable in a normal relationship, maybe.
“Pretty absurd thing for you to bank on. What if I never asked for it?” Raylan lifts an eyebrow.
“Raylan…” Boyd’s voice is cautious in a way it hasn’t been before- a dire warning, if there ever was one. “This succeeded because we both put energy into making it so. That’s how any bond’s made, even without the extra steps to ours.”
There is much inflammatory bullshit to sort through with that, but the horrible slight emphasis on ‘both’ particularly sticks out.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“See, Raylan, I told you there were parameters to this succeeding. You didn’t ask then, and I didn’t say, but a lot of those parameters depended on you, Raylan. Your bodily pleasure, and your emotional acceptance. And the fact that we shared a bond already, a regular sort, definitely helped. It wouldn’t have happened without you wanting it to, on some level.”
Raylan goes rigid, denial and horror clawing in him. He tries to figure out how to get his pained words in order, how being tricked into thinking there was no consequences to trying to eke enjoyment from his continuous sexual assault wasn’t the same as fucking acceptance. Boyd is beyond contemptible if he can truly think otherwise.
“Raylan, Raylan, baby, I know. I know, it was underhanded and mean of me. I’m sorry. If I had thought it would have worked another way, I’d have done it. And if you would’ve asked me, I’d have told you. But you didn’t, so I didn’t.”
That’s rather cold comfort, given that Raylan has apparently unwittingly sold his personhood away, one orgasm at a time, and he tells Boyd as much.
Boyd looks pained, and like he’s choosing his words with care.
“Raylan, we belong to each other. It goes both ways. You-“
“Oh, fuck right the hell off,” Raylan snarls, rather relieved to find he still can, God damn it all. “You won’t have fuckin’ heats, now. You can’t be zombified with a touch. You can’t get goddamn pregnant, Boyd! You own me, now. You tied me to you like human fucking cattle, and just because it worked don’t mean you can pretend it’s something other than what it is!”
He feels very close to panic now. He has the urge to guard his neck. Boyd does grab him, but it’s a slow and gentle one, as he rolls Raylan closer to him on the bed and holds him, and Raylan knows he could do something about it, shove him at least. He doesn’t, he never does.
“It is obvious that you don’t know very much about how alpha and omega dynamics actually work, and for that I sincerely apologize, for it was my duty to see to your education once I undertook this, and I clearly haven’t done enough.”
God, Boyd is really a pretentious dick. He pauses after this bit to apparently gather his thoughts.
“It’s true I hold power over you. I can calm your body, and your mind. But you have immense power of your own. No one’s tied to no one, not like you mean.”
Raylan snorts bitterly, as his body is currently kept in a state of more-or-less enforced passivity just by Boyd’s heavy arm on him, cradling him to the man. It just feels so nice, God damn it all.
“Raylan, I have your ever-loving emotions beaming straight into my head, clamoring at me to do stuff, to make things how you want them. Don’t you think that’s a fairly compelling reason for you to have a leg up over me? You can ignore my pain. I literally cannot ignore yours.”
Raylan shifts, unsatisfied by this. He doesn’t want to be some helpless nagging housewife in Boyd’s head.
“What is it you want that you think you can’t have?” Boyd asks him with a helpless shrug of his arms.
“How ’bout a life of my own?” There’s real venom in his voice with that, he’s glad to hear.
“You can see me as little as once every few months, once this is done. I’ll fuck you silly, or straight, rather, and be on my way, if that’s what you really want. And the bond is a hard gift to reject, but it can be done. You could leave me entirely.” Boyd’s face is earnest, solemn- a perfect picture of a martyr.
Raykan frowns at his lies. Obvious ones, surely. “You’d let me actually leave you, for real, just see you for heats, or just piss right off?” After everything Boyd’d invested in getting his prize, he’d surely keep it.
“I'd trot right off back to a jail cell, if you asked it of me, Raylan. If it would truly make you happy,” Boyd says with impossible to believe intensity. “Such is the control you have over me anymore. That is how it works, how it has to work for any decent alpha, regardless of what some seedy website says about our kind.”
Raylan knows that can’t be perfectly true, or else poor, chronically beaten omegas like Ava wouldn’t exist. Though he supposed she managed to get her way, in the brutal end. He's extremely tempted to ask Boyd to trot off to a jail cell, but doesn’t, knowing the man would just claim he thought Raylan wouldn’t really be happy, or similar bullshit. That’s surely why.
“What about my job?”
“Keep it if you want it. It’s a lie that omega are weaker, physically or emotionally. Or easily distracted, or whatever you’re thinking. Only time you’re more vulnerable than any man is a few days leading up to and during heats, because that does tend to be very distracting. Alphas’ll be able to smell what you are, but none would ever touch you with my scent on you. It just ain’t done. I meant it when I said you’d be safer now than you’ve ever been.”
Great. He can have an olfactory sign around his neck that says ‘Fragile. Property of Boyd Crowder. Do Not Touch’. Just what he wanted in life.
“You also said you were gonna keep me barefoot in the kitchen the rest of my days, if I recall correctly.”
“I can get a little loose with my words in the throes of passion.” Boyd shrugs this off.
“Is that what this is, then?” He points out drily.
“No, this is a promise.”
Raylan rolls his eyes this time at Boyd’s rather cheesy intensity. The man just can’t help himself, obviously.
“You still did this to me without my consent. You changed who I am, what I am, to suit your whims. You made me an addict, to you. That’s even worse than you do to other folks with your filthy drugs. That’s beyond fucked up. There ain’t no way around it.”
And there isn’t, he’s almost sad to realize. How can he ever possibly forgive Boyd?
Then he’s rather shocked at himself for even considering that he might hypothetically want to forgive him, some day. What kind of justice is that?
But then, who wants to live mad at someone, every day for the rest of their life?
While he’s ruminating on this rather startling question, Boyd continues solemnly.
“I will spend every day of my life making it up to you, Raylan, however you want me to.”
And then he leaves Raylan locked in his bedroom prison while he fixes dinner.
Such is the comedic tragedy of life.
Raylan is tired of waking up different. Today, he wakes up hot.
Boyd comments on it first. “You’re burning up,” he says with mildly concerned interest, cool hand on Raylan’s forehead.
Raylan leans into it, and the twin chorus of comfort and self-consternation in his head start up for the day as always, though dampened by whatever extra is wrong with him today.
“What is it, Boyd?” he asks miserably.
“I’m not sure. What does it feel like?”
“Hot,” Raylan mumbles, closing his eyes, trying to concentrate. “Restless. Dizzy. There’s an a-.” He stumbles over verbalizing the need he has become conscious of, roaring fiery in his lower gut. In his ass.
“Horny,” he finishes shortly.
Boyd’s nose inserts itself against his neck, inhales deeply, lustily. They both shiver.
“It sounds like a heat.”
Raylan’s heart lurches, fear blooming in him.
“I don’t think a real one,” Boyd soothes him. “They tend to build over a few days, not just turn up all of a sudden, like. I think this is just everything clicking into place inside, and your body going for a test drive, of sorts.” He presses lightly on Raylan’s lower stomach with his hand as he talks, hand spread wide over his navel, and it’s like it pushes a wave of arousal, metaphorical and literal, through him into his, ahem, erogenous zone.
“Oh, fuck,” he gasps, eyes blown wide. He presses himself back against Boyd and even the mere stretch of his back muscles, the simple press of his ass against the man’s body, is enough to make him shake with pleasurable want.
“Oh, Raylan,” Boyd’s look is all sultry, eager excitement, a naughty child left alone in a candy shop. “This is gonna be a fun day.”
It is a fun day.
Raylan can’t deny it to himself, though he will if Boyd dares ask him.
Before they even make it out of bed in the morning, Boyd licks around the plug inside him with perverted focus, all tongue and lips and nose and even his teeth, scraping lightly at the join between flesh and toy like some kind of invasive animal, and Raylan nearly squeals with how much he loves and hates it, how it makes the fire in him roar so very hotly.
He growls at Boyd to get a move on, put his hand in him or something. He’s fairly infuriated when the man shockingly disobeys him for once, instead backing away from him. Raylan sits back down with an angry growl and pretends he isn’t using the heel of his foot to press against the base of the plug. He shoots Boyd a look that demands explanation and receives a sheepishly pleased one in return.
“It might, ah, set you off. If I put something big in you. You’re just gonna get madder if it’s not my knot.” He smiles stupidly at his own verbal rhyming. “Which I’m happy to do. I just thought we might want breakfast, first.”
His amusement doesn’t lessen Raylan’s determination. “Well, you damn well should have thought of that before you started this up,” he retorts. “Fuck breakfast.”
Boyd snorts a laugh. “Hell yeah, then.”
He pulls out the plug to an unsurprising flood of fluid from a profoundly aroused Raylan, lines himself up, and then hesitates, absolutely maddeningly.
“You good, Raylan?” And his voice is absurdly soft, hesitant, even, and it almost makes Raylan mad in and of itself.
“Boyd,” he says as evenly, as patiently as he can. “How the hell should I know? Just put your goddamn cock in me, already.”
And so Boyd does.
It sinks in, all the way in, right to the very aching, sobbing core of him. He can only gasp, rigid with sensation. And then, as he feels Boyd’s testicles coming to rest against the outside of him, he goes limp with it instead, with the blissful easing of that painful, throbbing, clamoring need.
Every exhale he makes is a panting ‘hah’ that his cock jerks to, and Boyd isn’t even moving yet. He’s just panting right along behind him, forehead curled on to his middle back, as if in synchronous relief.
But he’s panting harder, the longer he stays in Raylan. His hips are starting to jerk a little, and then with a sudden, sure movement that leaves them both gasping, he pulls back and slams forward into Raylan, not hesitant at all but hard, forceful, and absolutely wonderful.
Raylan practically shouts his satisfaction, his wordless immediate demand for more. And Boyd obeys.
He fucks Raylan in long, driving strokes that seem endless, that drag along every feverish inch of his insides, making his nerves shout. That rub against that spot in him that feels so present and sensitive. Is it bigger? He doesn’t want to know.
He pushes himself back against Boyd, seeking his own pleasure as much as it’s given to him, and he knows that if someone walked in right now they’d see what looked like a picture of two perfect lovers, in joyful abandon together and the thought occurs to him well where is the lie and it would make him mad if he wasn’t so pleasure-soaked, so he shoves it away instead and gladly refocuses on how Boyd’s cock is sweetly rubbing out every bad sensation his body has ever felt.
He feels something new, something swelling in him. His heart stutters. “Don’t you dare pull out,” he says fiercely.
“I won’t, Raylan, I won’t,” comes Boyd’s gasping voice. “I can’t anyway, I-“
And they both groan at the sudden expansion, and Boyd’s still fucking him, still driving forward and back as far as he can without dislodging the softball expanding in Raylan’s gut, and it’s so good, and it just keeps growing more and more, pressing him more and more. He feels the first thing approaching an actual, too-much stretch to his rectum and the breathlessness of it just hones the pleasure, all sensation getting dumped together into the bucket of want that is Raylan right now.
The intense pressure seems like it practically presses his orgasm out of him, he hardly realizes it’s happening until Boyd’s touching him and crooning at him because he’s making strange, loud sounds, and his anus is convulsing wildly around Boyd’s knot, every spasm pushing cum from his cock like a little water pump. He can’t do a thing, doesn’t want to do a thing, just jerks, wondering if his heart can explode from sexual pleasure, helplessly waiting out the passions of his body.
And then, it dies back.
And then, of course, there is still Boyd’s giant goddamn knot, sitting inside his anus.
It only takes a few seconds to become absurd.
“Um…” Raylan begins, and has to swallow down a very startling urge to laugh. He can’t keep from an insistent smile that he hides from Boyd in the mattress as he says “What now?”
Boyd just outright giggles at that, little unashamed laughs that shake Raylan slightly, ridiculously. “What, did you forget? We’re buckled in for the long haul, baby.”
And then he laughs more and Raylan refuses to let himself join in, though it is ludicrous. He had sort of forgotten, or had blocked it out. He and Boyd were literally stuck together like-
“Like a dog,” Boyd says with unabashed satisfaction. Raylan shudders from the grossness, and also arousal.
“Did you come?” he asks with some confusion. If so, he had missed it.
Boyd laughs again. “Holy shit, yes, Raylan. During your three-minute-long orgasm I could hardly not.”
Raylan rolls his eyes. There’s no way it was more than forty seconds or so, which is still insane.
“Well, shit,” he says, feeling oddly light. “Did you bring a book?”
He can hear the smirk in Boyd’s voice. “I think we can find something more interestin’ than that to fill our time.”
And then he starts moving again, shifting that great fat ball against Raylan’s sensitive insides, jostling him. Insistently, rhythmically rocking, in what feels like every direction inside him.
“Shit, what are you doing?” Raylan says, breathless at the sparks Boyd’s movements are setting off in him again.
“Well, you see,” Boyd’s voice is devilish. “I can’t come again for a while. But you can.”
“What?” Raylan’s in disbelief until it happens so fast, another orgasm shuddering it's delicious, bubbling way out of him less than a minute after Boyd begins moving his knot inside him.
By the end of it he’s gasping, and then, near-laughing, somehow. Hysteria?
“Holy fuck, Boyd, how many times can I do that?”
“As many as you want. Till I go down, at least. Which won’t be damn near a half hour.” Boyd’s voice is smugness itself, and somehow Raylan doesn’t even mind. It feels shared.
He actually laughs, then, and the surrealness that he’s laughing with Boyd’s massive cock lodged inside him makes it worse.
“You couldn’t have led with that? The goddamn multiple orgasms?” He can’t believe he’s joking about this. Must be hormonal or something. Maybe he’s just getting tired of always feeling like a mopey sack of shit all day, a practical voice whispers.
He turns his head to look over his shoulder at Boyd, who snorts quietly.
“If only I had held the wisdom I do now.”
His eyes are half-lidded with a dopey sort of pleasure as he looks back at Raylan. It’s a look Raylan’s never seen on him. Loose, almost drugged, in a vulnerable sort of way. He smiles lazily down at Raylan.
“Want another?” he drawls.
Raylan does.
The rest of the day is a haze of sex and Boyd feeding him by hand, Raylan too lost in sensate pleasure to begin to protest, or even really notice until it’s well underway.
He’s missed Boyd feeding him so much, anyway.
It feels good, it all feels so good and safe and enticing, not just the sex but all of it; is it really so terrible to give in? To let himself actually enjoy it? To surrender himself, to Boyd?
He shivers around Boyd’s cock again in the afternoon, and again in the evening, and each round soothes a little more of not just the hungry fire in him, but feels like it’s soothing all of him, the very fire of his soul, leaving nothing behind but sweetly searing warmth. And he only feels gladness, not just while it’s happening, but even after the sex, in the hours between, the feeling of unflappable peace lingers like a heavy blanket.
And he wonders what it is he thinks he has left to surrender.
“So… when is the process done?” This had been weighing on Raylan for a while, if not the entire time.
Boyd smiles with surprised humor. “It is, Raylan. You’re an omega. My omega. You’ve been done changing for a few days now. I imagine your first true heat will be in several months, though it might take them a while to steady out.”
Raylan absorbs all this, feeling a slowly mounting confusion (and also a small throb of arousal at Boyd calling him ‘his omega’, embarrassingly cliché as it is, and regardless of how his own response still rankles him).
“But… what about the submissiveness? The… servitude,” he blurts for lack of a better word, then finds it. “The bond! You’re supposed to dominate me in all things. I'm supposed to want you to. That never happened,” he tells Boyd rather warningly. He can stand to beat up Boyd right now, actually, if he’s given enough impetus.
Boyd bursts out laughing. “Well I’d be pretty damned shocked if it did. Kinda freaked out, honestly. I mean, I dominate you in bed, which is fairly typical, but I wouldn’t hardly expect you to want it in all things.” He stares at Raylan, quizzical humor melting into something far sadder and sympathetic.
“Good Lord, you thought that was gonna happen to you. Some kinda hypnosis slavery nightmare, this whole time. Jesus Christ.” His eyes are so pained on Raylan’s apparent behalf. “No wonder you were always so sad and afraid all the time. Raylan, none of that porno shit is real. I’m sorry. I really should have sat you down at the beginning and told you what was gonna happen to you, and what wasn’t, as plainly as I knew. It would have been far kinder and more responsible of me. I think I thought it would make you sadder to talk about it.”
Raylan doesn’t know how to feel about any of this. He’s not sure he even understands properly. He doesn’t particularly want to have a ‘my changing body’ talk with fucking Boyd, so he cuts to the most important bit. ”So… I’m done? This is it, no more changing for me, mentally or physically.”
It's hard to comprehend, if true. He feels surprisingly like himself. Confusingly like himself. The biggest change to him seems to be that he wants Boyd’s company more than he has since childhood. Plus a chronic itch to have sex with him. But he’d still sooner kick Boyd’s ass than actually kiss it. Probably. Excepting rare circumstances, perhaps.
“Pretty much. It’s essentially puberty you’re going through, so things’ll sorta taper off, I imagine. But nothing new should be goin’ on with you, from here on out. Again, aside from heats, but those are temporary. And lots of fun, besides,” he adds with a wink. “There will be another change of life for you, maybe twenty or so years from now. Male omegas are fertile till about sixty, give or take.”
Raylan squirms at this bit and Boyd gives him a fond smile, making it worse.
“I don’t want kids,” he says with no small amount of anxiety.
“There’s drugs you can take during heats to keep that from happening. And if you ever start feelin’ differently we can talk about it.”
That was never going to fucking happen.
Well, then. Raylan casts around in his mind for remaining fuel for his unrest, his latent discomfort. It still lingers.
“This is really it? I’m not gonna… start obeying you, wanting to wash your feet? You won’t, I don’t know, lock me in some house or boss me around and I’m gonna let you because I’ve been fucked in the ass till I’m all stupid and meek-” His voice is picking up, becoming frantic again. This is the future he has been preparing himself for- if not be condemned to, to be eternally vulnerable to, beholden on Boyd’s good will to avoid. He’s invested a lot of energy thinking about it.
“No, Raylan. No. None of that is possible. None of it ever was. You are who you are, and that wasn’t ever gon’ change. This just… added a few extra things, to help us work things out between us.”
That was essentially what it felt like. Like he had new things on him, but was essentially the same person. He doesn’t know if he can trust it, but God, how he wants to. He’s been so afraid to lose himself, nauseous anticipating his decline to mindlessness. That’s what he assumed was happening to him, as he felt these ties growing between himself and Boyd. If that’s not that they are, what are they?
“For what it’s worth, I can calm you down pretty effectively when you’re a little mad, but it’s far more effective on other negative emotions, and far more effective when I’m not the recipient,” Boyd explains with a quirked smile. “If you’re real mad, there ain’t shit I can do but run like everyone else. I’m an alpha, not a wizard. And I wouldn’t want you to be like that, anyway. Your soul is your own to captain, Raylan.”
His eyes soften, and Raylan can sense more poetry coming, God help them both.
“For me, our bond means nothing more or less than there being a house for you, inside my chest. There’s a home in me that I tend for you with every breath, and can’t help but do so. And nothing makes me happier than when you deign to reside there, if you do. But I will tend to your home, regardless, forever. I’m fairly sure it’s love. I love you, and I was foolish to think the feeling depended on mutual exchange. It’s as helpless as living.”
Lord, the wordiness of Boyd. He beams his affection, his love, apparently, at Raylan, who squirms under it and his own almost frightening lack of internal negativity, feeling like he rather has no idea what to do with himself if the fight is over, and neither of them have clearly lost.
“Can I have some goddamned clothes?”
He looks at Boyd with a plaintive, unimpressed expression. Boyd laughs.
“Absolutely. And I’ll do you one better. Let’s say I bring you some clothes, and we get the fuck out of this room afterwards. And then we can go anywhere you want.”
“Or,” he adds with an obvious swallow. “I can drop you off at your house. Or your office.”
The offer hangs in the air, a heavy cluster of grapes Raylan can reach out and take as he pleases.
He pauses and absorbs the moment, heady with the power of it. He enjoys it.
For the first time, he leans forward and touches Boyd’s face, his own expression even. Boyd’s eyes flutter closed, and he leans into Raylan’s hand on his cheek so tenderly, so hopefully. His fingers tingle with the touch, pleasure coursing through his hand. He snorts. Of course that would happen.
Raylan drops his hand and Boyd stares at him with those wide eyes.
He knows that he will surely forgive Boyd one day, if things keep up the way they are. The thought bothers him, and he knows that whenever the thought stops bothering him will be shortly before it ends up happening.
That’s how these things work, after all. It’s a kindness to them both he’s not sure he can afford.
Fuck it.
“Let’s go home.”
“You know, my job involves catching criminals, which is nominally what you are, currently, correct?”
It’s hard to talk evenly with Boyd’s cock filling him so deliciously, so smoothly, but Raylan’s up to the challenge, he feels. He pants with his face down on the bed, body flushed red with want.
“Then I guess you’ll have to catch me,” Boyd says, smooth as his fucking. Raylan flushes a little more, with annoyance, now.
“I don’t particularly relish the drama, Boyd. You really ain’t gonna meet me halfway, here?”
Boyd picks him up, and it’s a mystery and a delight how Raylan’s always lighter in his arms, more able to be moved. He shudders with arousal as Boyd arranges him back on his cock, upright now, his chest to Raylan’s back. His breath tickles his ear, making him shiver anew.
“You know I will, Raylan. I’ll meet you anywhere, go with you anywhere. Just tell me what you need from me and it’s yours.”
His murmurs are sincere and shockingly sane, against all reasonable expectation. Here they are, after all, living proof of the mad genius of Boyd Crowder.
Raylan can almost believe him. If he lets himself. If he wants to.
“I have more questions?”
“Ask away, darlin’.”
Raylan lets the pet name go with nothing more than a side-eye, too satisfied with the novelty of eating cereal at a goddamned table like a human. Boyd’s house was a definite step up from that godawful room. And Raylan’s hotel room, in all fairness.
“What is the bond? What does it mean? I know you’ve said some…,” he clears his throat with embarrassment, “Poetic stuff about it before. But what actually does it entail?” Some of it he knows: Boyd can sense his emotions, Boyd can soothe him rather forcibly. But what about Raylan? He feels like he can’t know which bits of him are assuredly him, until he knows which bits have been added to his thoughts.
“That’s a fair question, Raylan. And unfortunately, perhaps far more philosophical than you realize. It’s different between every pair. Some things are more or less set in stone- I can hear your feelings, and you can take peace from my touch to your neck. The rest gets rapidly more up for debate. What’s metaphysical paranormal pseudo-religious bond, and what’s just plain ordinary bonding, the sort that suits ninety percent of everyone just fine?”
This is, essentially, Raylan’s concern, he supposes.
“The sex,” he prods, only a little abashed. That was certainly not like anything he had experienced, prior.
Boyd nods in agreement. “Though even that’s more debated than you’d think. I tend to think abso-fucking-lutely. Sex with you is literally a different universe for me from sex with any other omega I’ve ever had. And it’s a statistical fact that I will make your heats easier on your body and faster, just by being mated to you. So that suggests something extra. Folks that argue otherwise on that stuff are just being devoted to materialism to the extent of blindness, in my opinion.”
Whatever the hell that meant. And Raylan is far too preoccupied by something much more upsetting.
“How many other omegas?” He asks sharply, and is annoyed at Boyd’s amused look.
“Six, and all were years ago, and I had actual commited relationships with none of them. See? I’d argue that’s part of it, too. That feeling of jealous rage, that possessiveness. It's keener than even you’re used to, I bet. Our folk are notorious for it. My type gets all the news, but omegas are known to get straight vicious if scorned. Saw one stab his mate and his foolish paramour to death with the heel of the bitch’s shoe, once. Walked right in on him and just started going. Didn’t make a sound, neither. Some of the scariest shit I’ve seen.”
Raylan shifts, tales of rage-filled, animalistic omegas running around stabbing their cheating mates not exactly filling him with a sense of his own autonomy.
Boyd can tell.
“But what’s nurture and what’s nature? How much do folks act a certain way because they think it’s expected of them? Point is- there’s no invisible fences on you or me. Nothing forces our behavior. Nothing that can’t be explained away as just a particularly strong, regular connection, and some quirks of our biology, maybe taken up a notch. We take pleasure and comfort in each other. We live our lives as we see fit. It’s as simple and hard as any relationship. Though the feelings are rather heightened, good and bad. I imagine particularly for us, both being rather tumultuous people.”
He gives Raylan a wry look.
“But others are different. Every bond manifests different. Maybe some of the crazier shit is real, and I’ve just never seen it. You’d really have to talk to other folks. Other omegas, in particular.”
Raylan feels a throb of unease. He doesn’t currently relish the thought of discoursing with other omegas about this, doesn’t really relate to them, for obvious reasons.
“Is what you… did to me common? Will others…” He can’t quite verbalize his dread at being considered a freak, from all sides. But why should he care if a community he never asks for accepts him?
Boyd looks like he wants to leap across the table and take Raylan into his arms. Raylan would probably let him. How shameful, he thinks rather boredly.
“I’ve heard of two others,” Boyd says quietly, instead. “One pair we can meet some time, if you like. I’m sure they’d be glad to talk to us. The other I don’t know where they ended up, never met them. But no, it’s not common. What I’ve done…” he hesitates, looking oddly small. “There are folk amongst our kind who would condemn me harshly for it. Formally. And fairly, too. I’ve been aware of that from the beginning.”
He looks at Raylan more firmly. “But they're my problem if they’re gon’ be a problem, not yours. And no one can know for sure you weren’t born this way unless you tell them. And even if they do find out.” He winces, oddly. “Our folk also have their share of stereotypes they tend to lazily lean on, too. They’d hardly be inclined to assign any ire or blame to you. More likely to want to feed you.”
They’d see Raylan as a victim; he knows this is what Boyd means, though he doesn’t want to say.
“Great,” he says sarcastically.
Then something occurs to him. A very satisfying idea, and one that will let him see how full of shit Boyd is, potentially.
“Stand up,” he orders, and Boyd obeys him. Raylan looks him up and down.
Then he punches Boyd in the face.
The contact is shocking, the pain on his knuckles as well as the way Boyd’s head snaps back, fully absorbing the blow. He lets out an “oof!” as he stumbles back, but keeps his feet.
Raylan resists the urge to rub his knuckles. When was the last time he had caused himself pain? It feels jarringly foreign. But he didn’t mind hurting Boyd, really. Not much at all.
Boyd’s just blinking stupidly at him, so Raylan does it again.
Boyd falls this time, hands catching himself on the floor. It’s the first they’ve moved. He pants, looks at Raylan with glinting eyes.
“Get up!” Raylan barks.
Boyd does, wipes his nose, stands looking at Raylan. His hands are still infuriatingly by his sides.
Raylan punches him twice more, a moderate one to get his head lined up, then a solid one right on his chin. He snarls at the fact that he’s done it so easily.
“Boyd, if you don’t square up and fight me like a man I’m literally going to kick the shit out of you,” he promises. Boyd nods shortly, eyes narrowed.
Boyd’s swing is so telegraphed, it makes Raylan mad, madder, even, as he realizes that Boyd hadn’t even been bothering to try and dodge his hits, forget about returning them.
He lets Boyd’s blow land for the sake of experimentation. It’s pitiful. It doesn’t even register as actual pain, hardly.
“The fuck was that?” Raylan yells, incensed, and hits Boyd a few more times before the fire abruptly goes out. He drops his fists. “You're really not gonna to fight back, are you?” he says dully.
Boyd grimaces behind his swelling lip. “Sorry, Raylan. I just don’t have it in me these days.”
Raylan sighs. “Do you understand how infuriatin’ that is?”
Boyd snickers a little. “Trust you to be mad that I won’t hit you.” Now that they’re done he’s wincing and touching at his sore spots, and it’s still pretty gratifying to see, Raylan isn’t afraid to say.
But even Raylan can’t help but laugh, a little, at his words. It feels very good to laugh.
“So are you stronger than me?”
He says it casually. It’s easier to just ask the questions now that he’s beaten up Boyd, somehow. Not the craziest thing he’s thought, recently, in fairness.
“What, physically? No. Not ’cuz you’re an omega. Only thing I got on you is the neck thing. You’re strong as anyone.”
“Can other alphas order me around?”
“Raylan, I can’t even order you around. Would you like to witness the comedy of me trying?”
Raylan shakes his head impatiently. “No the- the patience. I don’t know. I let you do all kinds of shit to me. Is that an alpha-omega thing?”
“Have you ever considered that maybe you just like me, just a lil’?” Boyd laughs, eyebrows raised. “I almost wish some strange alpha would try to touch you, just to watch you break his arm.”
Raylan just looks at him, unimpressed.
“Don’t know what to tell you, Raylan,” he says with a smiling shrug. “I haven’t tied you up in ages.”
What a prick.
“Even before that, then. I desire your company far more than I would ever ordinarily desire a partner’s company,” he says plainly, tired of the verbal games. “Is that ‘cuz of the bond?”
Boyd looks at him evenly. “I believe that’s part of the form our bond takes. I know I feel different. We draw strength from each other's presence, so desire it. Miss it when it’s not fulfilled. It’s an extremely normal thing for our kind. Your perspective is unique, so I honestly can’t say how much of what you feel is ‘bond’ and what is just the natural… intensification our kind seem to have in their romantic relationships, compared to betas.”
“What else do you suspect might be part of our bond? Literal things, not poetry.”
“Typical expressions are comfort from smell, touch, improved sense of smell and taste, being able to identify by smell and taste.” He begins reciting what seems to be memorized textbook material.
“Desire for contact, disinclination for violence, ahh, what else… the great sex, obviously. General heightened satisfaction from taking care of each other, and being taken care of, though again that starts becoming so vague as to be rather suspect. We might be able to track each other, like through the woods, that could be fun to figure out. That’s about all I can think of that I think might apply to us, aside from the stuff I know you know about already.”
Raylan runs through this list as he says it and finds it technically plausible, but again almost unbelievably normal-sounding, compared to the actual experience he is having. Intensification, indeed.
“What happens if I leave you? Like for good? Will it make us sick or something?”
“It’ll make me real sad. And probably you too, a bit. It’s called being heartsick. Like being depressed over a breakup meets the flu. Loss of appetite, nausea, tiredness, insomnia. It can give you fevers, if it’s bad enough. Some folk are more susceptible than others. I don’t rightly know, but I suspect I’m the sort that’s inclined to get it bad,” he admits with a self-deprecating smile. “But it passes, and it don’t kill but rarely. Very rarely. And who’s to say those folk weren’t just sickly?”
Raylan ponders some more. Then asks one that’s been concerning him for ages. It’s hideously mortifying. “My…” he gestures backwards vaguely with his hand, blushing furiously. “Is it always gonna be like this? It’s really not fun, Boyd. It’s fuckin annoyin’, always feeling… not dry.” God, his life. He can feel it now, and talking about it is making it worse, he realizes, and would blush harder if he could.
Boyd can’t keep his grin from his face, nor did Raylan really expect him to. “I don’t know, honestly. I can’t deny I find it incredibly flattering. And arousing.” His eyes narrow a little, and Raylan’s problem does not improve. “I imagine it’ll ease up as your hormones settle, though. Or maybe you just find me that sexy,” he teases.
Raylan ignores him. “I hope it winds down. Not sure how I’ll wear pants, otherwise,” he half-jokes rather nervously, still a bit concerned the answer might be ‘you won’t’. As it stands, he gets by with humiliating stops to the bathroom to dab at himself and paranoidly check and make sure he hasn’t wet his pants to the point of publicly shaming himself. Not that he’s in public, yet, precisely. Which is another nearly insurmountably huge thought he can’t deal with quite yet.
“There’s products to help omegas with that exact issue. Either way, don’t worry.”
Raylan frowns. He doesn’t want to imagine such ‘products’. And there’s more things he knows he should know about his new biology, but it’s all too much to ask from him, really. He’ll read a goddamn book.
“Just to knock down some of the lies and legends I’m now realizing you quite possibly believe,” Boyd says with his odd kinda-mindreading he insists doesn’t exist.
“There’s no such thing as an ‘omega thrall’, least not to my fairly broad knowledge. Never met no hypnotists, just a lot of mutually happy and horny folk. We won’t die together, one draggin’ the other into the grave all dramatic. No one’s growing fur,” he says with great amusement. “Jesus, there’s so much weird shit they say about us.”
The truth is weird enough, Raylan doesn’t have to say, as Boyd reads it on his face and laughs.
Maybe to prove a point to himself, he doesn’t immediately have sex to relieve the itch inside him. He lets it build and swell, tries to accept the throbs and the lingering wetness around his asshole, doesn’t react emotionally to it slowly coming out of him. And in a little while it stops, dies back. His body resets on its own, and that fact feels like its own sort of bizarre accomplishment.
Though all it takes is meeting Boyd’s eyes a beat too long to get it going again. If this doesn’t ease up, he definitely is going to need something to help manage. Maybe it won’t be so bad.
It’s hard to not feel good when Boyd is nearby. He really has to concentrate to manage to hold onto his negativity. Anymore, his days are one long melting dream of hedonism and companionship. One stubborn hallucination that’s increasingly hard not to believe in.
After a thorough fucking, they end up napping on the couch together, in the lazy, warm afternoon.
The materialists, whoever they are, and possibly Boyd himself, are wrong. They have to be.
Nothing this utterly peace-inducing could have ever naturally formed for Raylan, without the help of mystical ties of influence.
He is a thrall to something extra.
The story ends as backwardly as it begins.
Raylan realizes one day, not so long after he’s moved into Boyd’s house, that there’s something very basic they’ve neglected to do. He doesn’t know why and he’s not inclined to stand for it.
He walks into the kitchen and grabs Boyd’s head, pulls it to himself into a kiss.
It’s as fantastic as he knew it would be, sparks and stars and a warm rush through him, like water, like fire. Boyd’s lips match his own perfectly. And his pleased little groans, the way his eyelashes flutter and his hands go slack as Raylan’s tongue plunders his mouth, is just this side of heaven. He feels like he’s conquered the globe.
He won’t say it, can’t say the words yet and completely mean them; the hurt and betrayal is still too raw. But he will one day, he knows, and lets the thought do nothing but warm him.
Boyd has come fully back to life, kissing him, grabbing him, passionate and needy and triumphant as only he ever is.
“I always knew there was a type buried inside you, just desperate for that push to come out. It could have gone either way, alpha or omega, but I’m so glad it worked out for the best,” Boyd mumbles possessively, lips to his hair.
Raylan sighs with many things, and thinks to himself that he agrees.