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Archive it all, were his instructions. Take the library apart, copy it all down, catalog all the artifacts in the house, take stock of all the plants growing in the wood. Boring. Monotonous. Lonely.
They never told him about the monster living in the forest.
Black hair and black eyes and black rags for clothes and black dirt under his fingernails and Percy feels like his heart has stopped, like he's seen something he shouldn't. Gone, in the blink of an eye.
Lonely, he waits for him. Sits under the beech tree on the corner of the overgrown grounds, book in hand. Waiting.
He comes to him like a stray, timid, dangerous. Just glimpses through the trees. He is watching him, Percy knows this. The villagers say there is a monster in the forest. To beware of the old house, cursed and haunted by this beast. Percy calls him his monster, in his head.
Leg pressed between his knees, eyes furious and panicked, his monster kisses him. Kisses his mouth red like a raspberry, tangles his dirty fingers in his hair. He tastes like a wet dog smells.
Nothing can ever be pleasant, he thinks to himself, alone once more.
"Are you a monster?"
"Aren't we all?"
He didn't look human, eyes black as the Flint of his name, face twisted into such an ugly expression Percy wonders if he could kiss him pretty. Kiss him into a different person. Into a person it was acceptable to love. Kiss him until the hard line of his mouth dissolved into something delectable and new, kiss him until all the wrinkles smoothed from his forehead, all the tangles disappeared from his hair.
He is massive, there is no other way to say it. Dark shaggy fur matted with dirt and blood, yellowy white canines glimmering in the weak winter sun, claws tapping against the forest floor with every footstep. Dark eyes the same. Watching his every move. He feels hunted.
"Can't you change it?" He asks.
"It's just who I am." He replies, voice layered with a whine and a growl, gritted words out the corners of his jaws, forcing an animal mouth to form human words.
"Who did it?"
"Me. It was all me. I'm a monster."
He never answers any of his questions after that. But Percy finds a name etched into the wood of a cradle in the house. Marcus.
"I could rip out your heart if I wanted. Put my hand in the cavity of your chest, feel the beat of your essense. I could fuck you and drink your blood, leave your ruined body like a shell on the floor. No one would know."
He thinks he can frighten Percy. Percy thinks if he wants to frighten him, he shouldn't make every threat sound so delectable.
"My little rabbit." Growled close to his skin, teeth nipping along his throat, lips pressed roughly against his pulse. Marcus does not know gentleness, despises it, mocks every gesture Percy makes towards him. Percy gives him softness in multitudes.
They break each other, over and over, hard and soft, again and again until they can lay broken in each others arms. Only then can they exist, the itch of pain, of punishment settled. Monsters, wrapped in each others embrace.