Archive of Our Own

Only YOU Can Prevent Xenogenic Infection!

Remember CLEAN:

C - Cleanse yourself thoroughly after any sexual activity before leaving the biolodge

Hell began with a makeshift dildo.

Javi had nicked one of the bigger test tubes from the lab the day before, stashed it in his boot, and spent all his evening quiet time pretending to be asleep while he fucked himself senseless. It wasn't exactly ideal—the glass was way harder than silicone, and it was perfectly straight with no give whatsoever. But it was long and thick, and after six months on a year-long mission he was desperate for anything that could fill him more than his own fingers.

He probably could've brought an actual dildo with him, but he'd assumed he wouldn't want one on a mission like this. There was no privacy. The biolodge had only four rooms: the sleeping quarters, the kitchen, the lab, and the showers—communal, of course. None of the doors locked. And going outside to jerk off was obviously off the table.

The thing was... testosterone made him horny. Really horny. Really, unbelievably, impossibly horny. His assumption that he wouldn't want a dildo while crammed into this shitty tin can with seven other people had been based on previous experience almost a decade ago. In other words, before second puberty.

Which was what led to him nearly sobbing with relief when he could finally burrow under his covers, his legs spread, and tease himself with the blunt end of the tube. He had to be careful—too much movement would alert the others to what was going on. It wasn't like nobody ever did this, but it was still fucking embarrassing to get caught out, especially with the goddamn lab equipment.

He was going to wash it thoroughly before he put it back, alright?

It took longer than usual to ease it inside. Javi had lost practice with taking something this thick, and it felt way different than a normal dildo. Cold, and smooth, and very hard. But he kept smearing slick all over it, and rubbed it against his cunt until his body relaxed. The moment the widest part of the tube breached him, resistance evaporated—before he could adjust the pressure of his thrust, it sank to the hilt with silky, sensual ease.

Javi clamped his teeth down on his pillow to keep from groaning. After all this time, the sensation of being filled was intoxicating. He couldn't do what he wanted, then—namely, sit up and ride that fucking thing until his eyes crossed, or pound himself from behind as fast and hard as he could. (Maybe for the best. It was easy to forget his body's limits when he was this pent up.)

Instead, he pinched one of his nipples in his free hand and imagined there was a woman groping him from behind, whispering in his ear, telling him to be a good boy and stay nice and still while she took care of him. He would beg and whine, and she'd laugh and keep on fucking him deep and slow with her strap...

It didn't take long for Javi to come. When he did, he lay still for a little while to let the oversensitivity die down, leaving the test tube in all the while. Then he fucked himself again, and again, and eventually he gave up on feeling fully satisfied and fell asleep. He just couldn't be as rough as he liked and still stay quiet and still.

In all honesty? This whole situation could have been way less of a pain in the ass. Another crewmate had even suggested scheduling daily "private time" for each crewmember in the bunkroom, but nobody had taken the suggestion very seriously. Probably because it was Cortez who'd made it. That was definitely why Javi hadn't wanted to implement it—the last thing he wanted was for there to be an actual paper schedule taped to the fucking wall, telling Cortez exactly when and where to walk in on him jerking off.

It wasn't that Javi didn't like Cortez. It was just, well...

"Guess it's time for our shower. I know it's hard, but try not to stare too much!"

He fucking hated him, actually.

There was never anything overt. Nothing he could report to mission command. Just a lot of joke-flirting, peppered with the occasional offer to meet up after the mission ended, that he always passed off as either kidding or platonic when Javi told him no. It wasn't just his imagination, either—he'd shared a lot of significant looks with Soto and Alvarez about it. Pity they couldn't talk about how much of a dick he was without Cortez overhearing.

Javi had tried being blunt. Told him flat-out that he was flattered, but straight. Cortez got sulky and called him full of himself, and said that he was just trying to be nice. He had not stopped sneaking peeks at his ass whenever they were in the same room.

After seven years, Javi was proud of his body. His night-black eyes, his full brows, the newfound angles of his cheeks and jaw. His patchy goatee. The scars on his chest and abdomen, from top surgery and a hysterectomy respectively, tracing across his skin like tawny ribbons. The dark, coarse hair that covered his chest and stomach. Even the slight bulge of his dick, enlarged solely by testosterone, because he'd never had enough bottom dysphoria to overcome his instinctive aversion to knives near his genitals.

He liked the way he looked. But even so, just the idea of walking into the communal shower right now, trying to wash himself while hyper-alert for any sign that Cortez was staring... no thanks.

Yes, it was procedure to always shower before a mission. But washing was just a precaution, since they always wore airtight LIFE gear whenever they left the lodge, and it wasn't technically required unless you'd had sex or masturbated since the last time you showered. Which, obviously, Javi had. But Cortez didn't know that.

L - LIFE gear must never be removed outside the biolodge

Missions with Cortez always fucking sucked. Javi wasn't paired up with him often, because Alvarez knew he hated him, but mission control insisted on rotating the pairs around every so often for "team cohesion." She gave him a sympathetic look when it came time to split the group, but from there he was on his own.

They were only out here to get a few soil samples, which normally wouldn't take too long. Unfortunately, the soil in question was due north of the biolodge, where the terrain was all steep mountains and deep ravines. Each sample was meant to be taken about a kilometer apart, to gather data on a large area. And up north, walking a kilometer took a long-ass time.

Javi made a game out of counting how many times Cortez "joked" about having sex in the lodge. Then the game got more sad than fun, and he gave up. It had all faded into an unpleasant background noise when Cortez, annoyed by the lack of reaction, took a step further.

"You know, you're lucky you got to go on a long assignment like this. You'd be way less hot in the sphere with other options around." Cortez grinned at him. "Is that why you keep signing up? Because nobody in the sphere wants that pussy?"

An angry flush burned the tips of Javi's ears. His lack of dating life wasn't much of an issue for him now—but someone saying that to him even five years ago? It would have destroyed what little confidence he'd had. And it was because of assholes like this that he'd spent so much time in that place.

"Just because you can't see past all the people who don't want to fuck you," Javi snapped, "doesn't mean we're all that pathetic."

Cortez' expression contorted for several seconds, before finally settling on a thunderous scowl. "Fucking bitch. It's not my fault you can't take a joke."

Javi rolled his eyes. "Whatever. I'm going to take a piss, I'll meet you at the first sample site."

He walked off before Cortez could say anything, and ignored the, "We're supposed to stay together until the rendezvous point!" belatedly shouted at his back. Leave it to Cortez to remember that regulations exist just in time for them to come in handy forcing his company on someone.

Fuck it, and fuck this. Javi didn't care about the rules anymore. He was going to report this to command, even though they weren't going to do shit about it. And if he was assigned Cortez as a partner again, he was ignoring it. He wasn't going to scrub from the mission just because of some asshole. He'd spent way too long working his ass off to get approved for field work like this, and a scrub this early outside of a medical emergency was a black mark that would ensure he never got another chance.

Instead of going off to piss, he input the final sample site into his suit's navigator and started walking. He'd meet Cortez in the middle, and then there would only be the walk back to the rendezvous to deal with.

His plan worked brilliantly for the first few hours. But at some point, Cortez must have complained to Alvarez—she messaged him over the comms, telling him in no uncertain terms that she was sympathetic to his situation but also the whole point of the buddy system was so that nobody fell into a ravine and died. So. Maybe he should just get his ass to the rendezvous and she could assign him a different partner.

I'm not working with him again, he sent back.

I know. We'll talk about it when we get back to the lodge.

So Javi put the rendezvous into his navigator, and started hiking up and down ridges and skirting around ravines, and then he put his foot on the wrong rock and part of the mountain fell off.

It was that fucking abrupt. One minute everything was fine, he was walking across a perfectly normal-looking ridge, and the next he was sliding uncontrollably and there was nothing solid to grab onto. By the time he understood what was happening, the bright sunlight had turned to shadowy gloom and he was buried to the waist in a mud pit.

His first instinct, drilled into him by years of training, was to send a distress beacon. But the thing about this planet: there was a lot of lead in its crust. Enough that the bottom of a ravine might as well be Earth for all that a radio signal would care. Navigation, comms, even the location tracker that told Alvarez where he was, all of it was useless down here. She'd be able to see where he'd been at his most recent ping, but pings only happened every half hour or so. If he was lucky, she might know exactly where his signal had vanished. If he wasn't... it would take weeks to search every crevice within a half hour's walk from wherever the tracker had last picked him up.

Also, he was sinking.

"Fuck," he blurted, when he looked down and found that the muck had risen to his chest. "Fuck, fuck—"

There were a lot of pits like this on the planet, too. They weren't really quicksand—the closest Earth equivalent would probably be muskeg, but they had a uniquely horrible mineral and water composition that made them both quick to sink into and really, really sticky. Some pits were shallow enough for a human to stand in. Some... weren't.

His LIFE gear had no oxygen tanks. The planet's atmosphere was breathable for humans, which was why it had been chosen for colonization in the first place. The suit just filtered out any airborne biological contaminants and sent each breath right on through to his helmet. Nobody even bothered using them closer to the biosphere, where the wildlife wasn't dangerous.

So hypothetically, if Javi were to sink twenty feet deep in a mud pit, the suit would have nothing to filter. At which point it would keep recirculating his air until he suffocated on his own carbon dioxide. Also, if he sank twenty feet deep in a mud pit, the average time it would take to find him would go from weeks to thousands of years. He'd be lucky if his bones ever got to see the sun again.

Fortunately—there were lots of trees growing at the edge of the pit, and lots of parasitic vines growing on the trees. One was hanging well within his reach. Javi grabbed it in both arms, and heaved.

Nothing happened.

Wait, no, scratch that. He sank a little deeper.

"Fuck. Shit. Fuck."

There was nothing for it. The rest of the crew wouldn't find him before he sank under the surface of the pit, and he couldn't just sit here hoping his feet would eventually hit the bottom. He could never pull the suit free of the mud.

So, he unsealed his helmet.

The suits were bulky fuckers, mostly because they were a modified version of the kind used on planets with either toxic or nonexistent atmospheres. You got in mostly by climbing through the top of the suit, and then sealing the helmet over your head. With a bit of squirming, he could lever himself out without the mud getting a good grip on his clothes. From there it was flashbacks to high school gym class, climbing straight up the vine like a rope, and finally clinging to one of the tree's upper branches while he watched his LIFE gear disappear beneath the muck.

Good news: he was no longer in imminent danger of death.

Bad news: he was wandering around outside the biolodge without a suit.

The air wasn't dangerous. Even if he did happen to stumble across a viral pathogen or spore or something, none of the nearby microbiome was so toxic to humans that Soto couldn't treat him back at the lodge. No, the reason you were never supposed to leave the biolodge without a suit wasn't a microscopic one. It was the fauna.

This area—and most of the planet, beyond the surroundings of the biodome where they had been driven to local extinction—had reported sightings of Vectors for Xenogenic Infection, called vezis by anyone not actively taking a biology exam. They were parasitic life forms that reproduced using other fauna as hosts. Humans weren't naturally part of this life cycle, but it turned out the little shits were so adaptable that it only took a few hundred years for them to start infecting people.

(That might sound like a long time, but on an evolutionary scale it was fucking absurd. Most biologists blamed the atmosphere and abundant liquid water, which were so like Earth's that there was probably a lot of convergent evolution going on that made human brains more similar to their usual prey than they had any right to be.)

The xenogenic infection they were named for had two stages—one where a vezi infected a human, and one where an infected human went on to infect someone else. The second stage was uncomfortable but not dangerous, so long as you had basic medical care. (Actually, you could handle that kind of infection with tweezers and a sturdy boot if necessary, it just sucked a lot more that way.)

The first stage, also known as "the direct stage" and "the stage you might contract by wandering around outside the biolodge without a suit," caused permanent brain damage. So, you know. Javi was feeling a little bit jumpy.

He scanned the tree he'd climbed into, his eyes straining against the gloom. It wasn't high noon, and the ravine was fairly deep, so everything was cast in deep shadow. And to make this even more fun, vezis were basically ambush predators—with camouflage and venom to match. They just didn't eat their prey.

Once Javi was as certain as he could get that there was nothing nearby waiting to pounce, he climbed down. His "shoes", which were not meant to be worn outside the heavier boots built into the suit, sank into an inch-thick carpet of moss. There were flowers blooming all around the edge of the pit—the mud had a lot of nitrogen in it, so plants loved it enough to grow even where there wasn't much sun. An avian landed in the tree overhead and started to trill.

On Earth, this scene would be pristinely beautiful. Peaceful.

Javi saw the avian as a flash of motion, and leaped back with his heart in his throat. The flowers were only foliage for a parasitic monster to hide in. The moss deadened any sound it might make on its approach.

He made a beeline for the nearest wall of the ravine. It was steep, but the face was pretty jagged—he could climb up easily. The only problem were the deep cracks that ran through the stone. They might have been ideal for getting out of here, but they also made the perfect hiding place.

"Hey!" Javi screamed, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Hey, down here!"

His voice echoed off the walls of the ravine. The avian took off, squawking in alarm. Nothing else moved. No one shouted back.

If he were a biologist, Javi might know if it was safer to wait here, or to climb out. He'd be exposing himself to more immediate danger if he climbed—but the longer he stayed in this ravine, the more time he'd spend unprotected.

In the end, it was terror that made the choice for him. He couldn't stand being stuck like this, constantly swiveling to look in every direction, flinching at every imagined flash of motion. The area above the ravine was all barren rock. He would be relatively safe in ten minutes if he moved.

Javi took the path with the fewest suspicious gaps, rather than the easiest one. It meant a lot of sweating and swearing and backtracking, but he spent most of his climb with nothing but solid rock in front of him... until the final ten feet. There was a seam that ran almost all the way across this side of the ravine. No way around it without picking a route with even more gaps. Peering inside, he could see nothing but darkness. It could be six inches deep, or six feet, and he wouldn't know the difference.

Nothing for it. He scrambled upward as quickly as he could, grabbing the seam and reaching for the next handhold—

His hand erupted with a sharp, stinging pain.

Javi yanked it away and clawed for the top of the ravine, running on momentum and pure, animal panic. At first he told himself it was probably just an insect. Really, it could have been anything that had bit him! But then the effects of the bite started to overwhelm the adrenaline. The pain vanished, replaced with a hot prickling sensation, and strength drained from him so fast that he nearly fell. He was left clinging to the rock face, less than five feet from the top, faced with the horrible certainty that he had just been poisoned.

It was exhausting just to lift his head. He was so close—he just had to make it a little higher, and he could escape and call for help. His hand clutched at an outcropping of rock. It took all the strength in his body, both his arms and his legs, just to pull himself those two inches higher, and find another foothold. Then again. Again, and again, until he could feel sunlight on his fingertips.

With a final surge of will, Javi crawled up over the lip of the ravine. His arms and legs were trembling with exertion. Before he could try to drag himself further away from the sheer drop, he had already flopped to the ground, limp and panting. Everything was spinning.

Something was crawling on his legs.

Javi didn't even have the energy to scream. He rolled onto his side, his head lolling uselessly, struggling to get his arms back under him. It was no use. He couldn't lift his own weight. All he could do was stare at the ground as the creature crawled up his back, towards his head. He was crying by the time it reached his shoulder.

The monster dismounted gently onto the rocky ground, and scuttled into his line of sight.

It was all limbs. Spindly, elongated limbs, that moved with no sensible pattern at all. They just reached and grabbed in every direction, as if feeling their surroundings. As he stared, one of them happened to graze his cheek, and suddenly they were all concentrated there, groping at his face.

The creature had no discernible eyes. Only a pair of venomous fangs at one end, and at the other...

At the other was its ovipositor. Six inches long, thin and tapered, iridescent black like the shell of a beetle.

One of its legs found his right ear. Javi moaned in terror, and struggled with all his might to move away. All he managed to do was roll over. It took another moment to find his ear again, but now it was clinging to him while it searched, impossible to dislodge.

The worst part was that he wasn't paralyzed. He could move just fine—could, once panic overcame his exhaustion, reach up and grab the creature's thorax in both hands. But he was so weak from the venom, and it was so strong, all his might could do nothing to stop it from lining itself up with its target.

He could feel everything, too. There was no pain when it pierced his eardrum, or even through the inner ear beneath to reach the hole in his skull. But he could sense that same hot prickling he'd felt in his hand, growing more intense the deeper it thrust, until it peaked and the thorax pressed flush against his cheek.

The head of the ovipositor, which was now buried inches deep in his brain, he could not feel. There weren't any nociceptors in there. But there was a pulsing in the narrow tube that passed through his ear canal, flexing and bulging against his skin, and he knew exactly what it meant. Thousands of microscopic eggs were flowing through that thin tube, seeping between the folds of his brain and rooting themselves there.

Four times, Javi thought the monster was finished.

Four times, it pulled out its ovipositor only to plunge it back inside, taking a slightly different angle, seeking a slightly different depth.

By the fifth time, the hot prickling sensation of penetration had spread throughout his entire body. He caught himself squirming, not to escape but to rub his thighs together, and felt sick with himself. Knowing it was the eggs releasing chemicals that made him feel that way didn't help. It only brought back the crushing reality of his situation, the knowledge that for the rest of his life, this filthy heat would only get worse.

At last, the creature deemed its work finished and scuttled away, leaving Javi in a pathetic heap on the ground. Dimly, he noticed that half the ambient sounds of wind and aviansong was gone. Of course—his right ear had just been impaled by a six-inch ovipositor. He'd never hear out of it again.

Reaching up, he groped at it, grimacing at the lack of feedback. He couldn't hear the hush of skin on skin. But he could feel blood, and wiped it away as best he could. There was less than he'd expected.

The venom wore off in minutes. Soon he could stand up, even run—but he didn't. He just sat there, hunched into a ball with his arms around his knees. It took all his energy just to keep his hands from wandering between his legs. He'd thought he was horny when he smuggled a test tube into his bunk—ancients, that was nothing compared to this. The ache was already unbearable.

He would have to bear it anyway. The eggs drew energy from the neural response to sexual stimulation—in other words, they would feed off his orgasms. Every time he came, they would get a little bigger. Release more of the chemicals that made him need to be touched. And if he fed them too much, if they grew large enough to hatch...

Then they would devour him from the inside, and leave only a shell to carry out the next stage of their mating cycle.

E - Examine those around you for sudden changes in libido or sexual behavior

By the time the rest of the crew found him, Javi had four fingers buried in his cunt.

He hadn't meant to. But he'd been worrying about the growing wetness between his legs—a physical response he was helpless to stop, which would produce more of the same smells that had drawn the first vezi. Could they sense when someone was already infected? Would they care? Or would the scent of his first violation draw another?

And then he was picturing it, another of those monsters sinking its fangs into his flesh, leaving him weak and pliant while it bred him. Maybe it would take his other ear this time. Maybe it would draw more, and more, and the others would find him squirming beneath a swarm of them filling him through every hole in his face—

He hadn't even noticed he was touching himself until he realized he was on the brink of an orgasm. Snatching his hands away, he'd fought to keep his thoughts from straying again, but it was no use. Eventually he accepted that not masturbating was impossible—and focused all his efforts, instead, on not letting himself come.

After ancients knew how long spent riding the edge, he was so delirious that it was a small miracle he heard the others' approach. He snatched his hand out of his pants the moment he registered the distant shouts, stuffing it in his pocket before he called back.

When she saw him standing there, without his LIFE gear, Alvarez nearly shattered her faceplate with the force of her yelling. Javi hunched his shoulders, and said nothing. She wasn't wrong. And he was just about to tell her that, when Cortez spoke up from the back of the group.

"Probably just got desperate for some action."

Alvarez snapped her head around. "The fuck is wrong with you?!"

It wasn't the kind of thing you joked about. Not to someone's face, anyway. And faced with explaining to everyone there that actually, Cortez was right—he had gotten himself fucked by an alien parasite. He was pathetic, and desperate, and ruined...

Javi pointed out the mud pit, and explained to Alvarez that he'd needed to abandon his suit to keep from drowning.

She stopped yelling at him after that. Instead she and Soto walked him back to the biolodge, and the medical suite was retrieved from storage and set up in the sleeping quarters. He explained about the deafness in his right ear—half hoping and half dreading that they would realize what had happened. He had to tell them. This was the part where he was supposed to tell them.

Soto said the hearing loss might be from hitting his head on the way down. They had him do a bunch of tests, where he was supposed to remember numbers and track their fingers in his peripheral vision, to see if there was any other loss of cognitive function. There wasn't.

He started crying halfway through the exam. Soto assured him that was normal, that he would probably have very unstable moods for a while while his brain recovered from the concussion. They said his hearing would probably improve, but to check in again in a few days if it hadn't.

Javi's hearing did not improve. He didn't check in again.

A formal complaint was filed with command, signed by both Javi and Alvarez. They, predictably, didn't do shit. Cortez received a stern warning that he completely ignored. After a three-day sulk, he was right back to his usual joke-flirting.

Alvarez was true to her word, at least, so Javi didn't have to deal with being paired up with him in the field anymore. (He was pretty sure she was falsifying some records to make it happen, since command sure as fuck hadn't approved it.) But there was no avoiding him in the biolodge.

"Got a new data drop in yesterday," he said, leaning on the doorway into the showers and blocking Javi's way out. "Some good TV, if you wanted to watch sometime." And all the while Javi was agonizingly aware of the towel he'd wrapped around his waist, and how thin it was, and the ravenous ache that had been tormenting him since that fucking mission.

It was hard enough to keep from jerking off. Sometimes he woke in a cold sweat, his heart pounding with the realization that he'd been humping his mattress in his sleep. That he'd almost—

So much harder, to have it dangled in his face over and over and over again. He felt sick with it. He didn't even like men, and he hated this one, but the parasites didn't care. And every time, it was a little harder to say no.

Maybe Cortez could sense it. Maybe he was just being his usual asshole self. But there came a night when Serrano broke his ankle, and he and Soto and Alvarez were all busy in the bunks-turned-medical-suite, and everyone else was busy in the lab. Javi wanted to be busy somewhere too, but his focus was shot. All he could think about was that stupid test tube and how badly he wanted to squat down and just—

Cortez found him loitering in the hallway, chewing on his lip in a feeble attempt at distracting himself. It was the same old shit—"If you're that bored, maybe we should have some fun,"—which just made it that much worse when Javi finally crumbled.

He couldn't bear to agree to it out loud. But he walked into the showers, and didn't leave when Cortez followed him in there, and didn't try to stop him when he went to grab his ass.

"Knew you'd get over yourself eventually."

Javi wished, in that moment, that the parasites in his brain would just get on with it. He wished he was too delirious to understand what Cortez was saying. But he wasn't. His mind was on fire, boiling with need that he couldn't ignore any longer—but it was perfectly clear. He knew exactly what it meant to let this man shove him against the wall of the showers and yank his pants down. He knew exactly how pathetic it was, to mewl like an animal in heat at the first brush of Cortez' cock against his slit. Knew it, and hated it, and was powerless to stop it.

Cortez laughed, and Javi wished he'd sunk to the bottom of that mud pit with his LIFE gear. And then he started bucking his hips, slapping his dick lewdly against Javi's cunt, and there was no more room in him to wish for anything else.

"Just put it in," he gritted out, pressing his forehead against the cool tiles.

"I would've if you'd been honest from the start. But you played hard to get, so now I think you have to say please."

At least Cortez couldn't see the tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. "Please."

"Please what?"

A lump rose in the back of his throat, and he swallowed it. "Please fuck me."

"Slut," Cortez said, and laughed, and yanked Javi onto his cock.

He squealed as it breached him, and bit his tongue to keep from doing it again as Cortez started to pump his hips. And the bastard was preening like it was something he did, even though it wasn't—he would've been a horrible fuck in any other circumstance. No foreplay, just shoving it in and pounding away. But the sheer fact of penetration lit up every single egg embedded into Javi's brain like a sky full of fireworks, transforming each lackluster thrust into a burst of blinding pleasure, until he was moaning on this asshole's cock like it was the best thing he'd ever felt... because it was.

Javi felt his oncoming orgasm like a fuse burning down. He sobbed and wriggled in Cortez' grip, desperate need and mind-numbing terror warring inside of him. It was only when he sensed detonation just instants away that he finally regained enough control of himself to gasp, "Wait, wait—!"

Cortez didn't wait. He leaned forward, lips brushing Javi's good ear as he whispered, "Come for me like a good little bitch." Then his calloused fingers wrapped around Javi's dick, and with one playful tug they shattered him.

He hardly registered the wet flush of Cortez emptying himself inside him, or his self-satisfied groan, or even the filth he whispered into Javi's ringing ear. None of it mattered. There was only the white-hot pleasure searing itself into every cell in his body, and the sense of some tiny piece of himself burning to ash in its wake. Gone forever.

It wasn't possible... but Javi imagined he could feel the pressure of the eggs swelling within his skull. Imagined his thoughts getting thicker, his life and his future shrinking away into a feverish blur.

He did not imagine the aching want returning, sharper than ever, the moment the afterglow began to fade.

From then on, it only got harder and harder to resist. The poison oozing into his brain grew more and more potent, and Cortez got bolder and bolder, now that he had what he saw as proof that Javi had only been playing hard to get all this time. He seemed to find nothing suspicious about the man who had until now been disgusted at the thought of sleeping with him becoming so overcome with lust that he wanted to fuck whenever they had the opportunity, and would do just about anything to make it happen. That was only the obvious and natural endpoint of his constant harassment.

Of course, just because he didn't see anything strange about it, didn't mean he hadn't still noticed.

"What do we say?" he said, in a simpering tone that made Javi want to punch him. That made Javi squirm with the heat that rushed between his legs, because everything made him hot and needy these days.

"I'm a dumb slut," Javi recited obediently, unable to tear his eyes from Cortez' naked cock.

"And what else?"

After all this time, he was too numb to cry as he said the words. "I'm dirty and pathetic and nobody should want me. I don't deserve such a big thick cock, I'm sorry, please fuck me anyway."

Cortez pretended to think. "I don't know... if I'm going to do you a favor like that, I think I should get something out of it."

Javi wished the eggs would hatch. He wished he didn't have to think, didn't have to feel anything except this horrible ache, didn't have to know exactly what was happening to him. He wished he'd killed Cortez before it got so bad that he couldn't bring himself to give up riding his cock.

"You could spit on me, master," Javi told his knees, which were splayed out on the floor of the sleeping quarters.

Cortez did. It struck his cheek, drying there alongside a streak of come from earlier. Then he laughed and said, "I don't think that's enough motivation, bitch."

Javi knew what he was getting at. He'd been trying to hold out for weeks now, to cling to this last piece of dignity—this last part of his body Cortez didn't get to own.

"Please master," he begged. Because Cortez could be persuaded—the eggs' ravenous appetite could not. Not anymore. "You can slap me, you can spank me, you can choke me with your big fat cock..."

Cortez did all of those things, with unabashed glee. And when he was finished, he put on another frown, and said, "I still don't feel like fucking such a slutty used-up cunt."

Javi hung his head, defeated. "Please master, please fuck me, if my cunt isn't good enough—" He choked on a small sob. "You can fuck my asshole instead."

The gleam in Cortez' eyes made him sick. But it made him want, too, so viscerally that he got on his hands and knees and presented his ass. He begged him to prep it first, to use the slick dripping from his pussy and finger it into his hole as lube. Cortez made him spread his cheeks open with his hands, and did as he'd asked as if it was a generous gift, grinding his hardening cock between his legs all the while.

Javi wanted to hate the way it felt. But the eggs inside his skull didn't care that Cortez was a scumbag, didn't care that he didn't like being fucked in this hole. They made his eyes roll back in bliss at the intrusion, made him pant and moan and squeal, made him come with a broken whine and swell them even larger.

He stopped trying to negotiate, after that. Just fucked Cortez however he wanted, whenever he could, and waited for the day when he would finally stop feeling how humiliating it was.

Four weeks from the end of the mission, Javi was still himself enough to feel shame. To weep with it, shaking and keening in a heap on the floor of the showers, after Alvarez walked in on him sucking Cortez off in the lab.

She set up a meeting with him, after. Asked if he was okay. If Cortez had forced him into anything. If, in other words, there was a reason he was acting like such a pathetic fucking slut.

Javi said no, and left.

They took their final samples. It was the worst work of his life—he couldn't focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, except for his throbbing dick and aching cunt. Sometimes he realized halfway through noting down the elemental breakdown of a sample that he'd been writing numbers at random while his free hand rubbed his dick through his pants. Sometimes he could read back through his observations, and count how many times he'd fed the infestation in his brain by the unsteady squiggles produced by his convulsing body.

They packed up their gear. Alvarez tried to have another meeting with him, and promised that his lack of focus wouldn't be reported back to command due to "extenuating circumstances." She probably still thought Cortez was raping him. He thanked her, even though it wouldn't matter, because the worst work of his life would also be the last. It was hard to care about that. Hard to care about anything at all, now, through the stuffed-up cottony feeling that pervaded his every thought.

They broke down the biodome, and loaded up the trucks, and set off towards the sphere. Everyone was in high spirits, celebrating their return home—talking about all the city comforts they'd missed, the friends and partners they'd get to see again, the food they'd eat now that they weren't on freeze-dried rations anymore.

Javi should have been ecstatic. In less than a day, he'd be safe at home and he'd never have to see Cortez again. This should have been the part where he got to throw his hands up and shout at the sky that it was finally over.

Cortez gave him his number on the trucks. Less than half an hour after he got home, Javi called it.

A - Alert the proper authorities before an infection reaches stage two

"You know," Cortez panted, "I always knew you were a bit of a freak, but I never thought you'd be this kinky."

Javi felt fuzzy. "More," was all he could say. "More, please, master..."

"You'd say anything just to get pipe, wouldn't you?"

He wrapped his arms around broad shoulders, to give himself more leverage as he bounced frantically in his lap. He'd had two orgasms already, and couldn't think beyond getting the next one.

"Tell me you love me."

He'd been in love exactly once before, with a woman who'd moved to another sphere, following her dream job. Up until recently, the day she'd kissed him goodbye had been the worst day of his life.

"I love you," he told the man he hated, and felt another part of himself die.

It was a familiar feeling, by now.

"Fucking hell," Cortez said, sounding a bit annoyed. "Are you faking it?"

"Mmh?" Javi slurred. He was too busy convulsing, his legs splayed out on either side of Cortez' waist, calloused hands on his ass jerking him up and down even faster.

"Are you taking the piss or something? I've barely even started."

He whimpered, missing the demanding pace Cortez had set. "No, please, don't stop—"

Cortez made an irritated huffing sound, and started to fuck him again. Javi shrieked at the sheer euphoric thrill of a thick cock bottoming out inside him. His legs resumed their shuddering dance.

"You seriously expect me to believe—"

A wave of pleasure crested over him, and the thick pounding in his head redoubled. It should hurt, and did when there was nothing inside him, but the rush of endorphins made it feel almost pleasant. Like walking bowlegged with a sore cunt after a good, hard—

"Oh!" The wave rolled out, and Cortez' cock thrust in, and Javi's head fell back with the force of another swell. Every time he came, the eggs filled him with so much concentrated ecstasy that it took only the barest touch to send him tumbling back under.

"—that you're coming every time I clap your slutty ass?"

"I don't care if you believe me," Javi said. It was a sick parody of self-respect, more whiny than defiant, and evaporated the instant Cortez slowed his thrusts again. "Don't! I'm sorry, I'll do whatever you want, please don't stop!"

He was so close. Not close to orgasm, but... but it felt like that, even as each individual wave began to blur into an ocean of sensation, a never-ending high that rolled his eyes back into his head and slackened his jaw. Another kind of climax was building in the steady throbbing of his skull. And even knowing what it meant, even as his sobs of pleasure transformed into sobs of terror, there was simply no strength left in him to fight it.

"Oh god," he whimpered into the uncaring chest of a man he'd once sworn to himself would never touch him. "Make it stop, please, I can't..."

And then the dull ache erupted into white-hot agony. Not in his head, where something was slithering through folds of tissue that had no sensation of their own... but throughout his entire body. Every nerve that traced under his skin all fed back to that same place, where the signals they'd actually sent were obliterated. Scrambled into searing static by a foreign touch.

Javi had always imagined, when he read those warning pamphlets that made him shudder, that the eggs would hatch all at once. A switch flipping, a person there and then gone with no time to realize what was happening.

Even as he could sense the first larvae burrowing through his brain, Javi was still humping desperately against Cortez' cock, one hand on his dick and the other fingering his asshole. The need was so absolute, he couldn't stop. Even as he screamed and convulsed and decayed, he had to keep feeding them, keep hatching more and more until he couldn't see or hear or even feel the orgasms anymore. For that one fleeting instant, the only sensation in the world was the feeling of being devoured alive.

When his vision blinked back into focus, he was lying on the floor, near the door of the bedroom. Cortez was making angry noises. They were muffled at first, coming slowly back into focus. "—trying to infect me, you freak! I'm going to fucking kill you!"

He hurt all over. Dry. It was too dry. He needed water.

Javi stumbled out the door. He could hear Cortez chasing after him and ran faster, sprinting out the door of his house and into the cool night air, and didn't slow down for an instant. The pain was getting worse. Worse and worse and worse and he knew how to fix it, knew in the very core of him that if he could just find water—!

Cortez' neighbor had a koi pond. Javi hauled himself over the fence and leaped, like a man on fire, into its murky depths. In the instant before his skin touched the water, the pain hit a peak, and then—

Then it was pleasure instead, just as blinding and searing as before, thrashing and writhing and coming as the larvae flooded him with their thanks. They squirmed through the folds of his mind, tickling every pleasure center at once as they journeyed outward. He got some of the water up his nose and it didn't matter, because the newborn larvae had found his punctured ear and were winding their way free of him, and he was too distressed at the loss to care about his own body.

But they didn't leave him for long. They brushed across his skin, seeking, searching, until one of them found his pussy. A moan of delight billowed from his mouth as a stream of bubbles. And then, as though the first had led the way, more and more began to crawl back inside of him. A few strayed into his asshole instead, and soon there was a steady flow of perfect, sinuous bodies into his warm and welcoming holes.

He didn't notice he was drowning until the very last of them had found its home inside him. Javi kicked off the muddy bottom of the pond, bursting through the surface and coughing out a lungful of water. He felt... good. Better than he could remember ever feeling before. His memory was a fog of half-forgotten faces, but he knew he had never been so complete before. And yet...

There was something missing. Something he needed. A painful emptiness, the sharp ache of two holes writhing with life and still far too empty. There were people out there who could fill them—he just needed to find them.

Javi crawled out of the pond. He pushed himself to his feet, wobbling a little as he took his first steps, and staggered off into the night.

N - Never engage in risky sexual behaviors

The doctor found him early the next morning.

Javi was naked—had been naked since before the pond, and hadn't noticed until people started pointing and staring and hurrying away from him in the street. Nobody had wanted to fill him, even when he bent over and offered. So he'd kept walking, until he got to a place with lots of dirty alleyways, and then a couple of men led him into one and gave him what he needed.

Or... almost what he needed. Somehow it didn't feel right.

("Just make sure you wrap your dick," said one to the other. "You don't want something crawling up it.")

Anyway, then some of the people who didn't want to fill him started looking worried and making phone calls, and the doctor showed up in a white van. He said Javi should get in it so he could help him. One of the worried people said he was supposed to have an ambulance. The doctor told them to mind their own business, and beckoned to Javi, and Javi followed him into the van.

There was another man in the back of the van. The doctor told Javi to go sit in his lap, and the man filled him a few times while they drove, which felt very good but still not quite right. Then the doctor took him into a room to be examined, and filled Javi with his fingers which also felt good but not right. He wrote some things and talked to an assistant about how Javi was healthy enough to last and pretty enough to sell. The assistant left, and the doctor filled Javi again, this time with his dick, and told him that if he was good he could keep getting filled all he wanted. So Javi went with him to a small room with a bed and some dildos the doctor told him he could play with while he was waiting.

Filling himself didn't feel right either. It felt so not right that it kind of hurt, but not doing it hurt even worse. So Javi put dildos in both of his holes even though it made him cry a little. He was glad when the doctor came back into the room, and much gladder when he told him, "This nice man is going to fuck you now."

The man did turn out to be very nice. He told Javi he had a tight pussy, and that the larvae squirming around inside it felt fucking incredible. Then he made a groaning sound that meant he was done, and took off something he called a rubber, tossed it in the trash and left.

The larvae in his pussy and his asshole grew bigger every day. At first it was nice, because they moved around and tickled him inside and sometimes made him come even when the nice men didn't. Sometimes, there would be a nice man the doctor called an extra special client, and Javi wasn't sure what that meant but when those nice men fucked him they didn't use the rubbers. And while their bare cocks pumped inside him, one of the larvae would squirm into position and crawl inside.

The special nice men always made screwed up faces and moaned a lot while it happened, which made sense to Javi because he did the same thing, sometimes weeping from how good it felt. He thought maybe the larvae were rewarding him with more happy chemicals, because he'd found them a new home. But most of the nice men weren't the special kind, and the larvae couldn't travel through the rubbers. So he would feel good but only in the normal way, and afterward he would feel how thick and heavy and squirmy they were, and wonder if maybe they weren't supposed to all stay stuck inside him like this.

Then they got even bigger, and he knew it was true. Knew because they made him feel painfully full all the time, and sometimes they would crawl out of him without any special nice men to crawl into, and die on the floor. The more they grew the more they squirmed, and the more they squirmed the more they made him come. At first he liked it but then it wouldn't stop, every time he came they would writhe around and make his pussy and his ass bulge around them until he came again and then his holes and his dick would start to hurt. And then they'd make him come again again again until all he could do was lie in his bed and cry and beg the doctor to make it stop.

Nobody made it stop. But one by one the larvae crawled out of him and died, or died inside of him and got fucked out by one of the nice men, and eventually the horrible too-much-feeling faded away. In its place was a new feeling. A feeling like there was something bad that he couldn't see, because it kept moving every time he tried to look at it. He told the doctor about it. The doctor said it was time for a procedure, and the procedure would make that feeling go away.

They took him to a clean white room with a chair. Javi sat in the chair, and they strapped his arms and his legs down, and swabbed his right ear with something cold and sharp-smelling. Then a machine opened up out of the wall, with a long arm that extended towards his head. At the end of the arm was a cage. Inside the cage was a weird thing made out of legs and a big long needle, and looking at it made his head go dizzy and his heart beat fast. He cried and told the doctor he didn't want it in the room.

The doctor said it was part of the procedure.

Javi begged the doctor to take it somewhere else.

The doctor pressed some buttons, and the cage came to a stop next to his head. Weird legs stuck out of the cage and touched his face. Javi cried harder. Then the legs got a grip on his chin and his cheek, and the needle thing found his ear, and slid inside.

Then Javi stopped feeling bad, and started feeling good instead. He giggled and told the doctor it tickled.

The thing in the cage kept poking him. Javi ground his pussy against the chair, and giggled again, and came. He liked the way it felt when the needle slid in and out of his head, like a cock sliding in and out of his mouth or his pussy or his asshole. It felt good when the nice men fucked his body, but it felt even better when this leggy thing fucked his brain. He couldn't remember why he'd asked the doctor to take it away.

He came two more times before the leggy thing was done and the cage slid back into the wall. When it was gone, he asked the doctor if he could go back and let it poke his brain some more. The doctor said he would, but not for a while, because he could only get poked so many times before he died and he didn't need another procedure yet. Then the doctor led him back to his room, and told him another nice man was going to come and fuck him in a few minutes. He told him to be on his best behavior, and to do everything the nice man said, and make sure to touch his dick whenever he wasn't making a nice man feel good so that he could come a lot and hatch more larvae.

Javi obeyed, because why wouldn't he? That sounded like it would feel really good.