The Bedsprings creaked and groaned. Complaining but not complaining. Exulting in their burden. Their cries going higher, then lower, then higher again. Their tonality matching the pace of their occupants’ movements.

Up amidst the gathered sheets was a man and a woman, both similar and dissimilar in that way that seemed unique to couples who’d been together for a long time.

Coffee straddled cream, his dark hips grinding against her milky white flesh. Their hands were clasped together, their fingers tightly interlocked as if they were trying to push each other apart.

One pair of crimson eyes stayed locked with the other. Pupils dilating and constricting, irises glowing with the light of hellish fireflies.

She bit her bottom lip, a flush of color slowly rising into an ordinarily pallid face.

A sheen of sweat fell from his brow onto her check. An annoyance that she ignored, concentrating on the slickness and heat that lay between the two of them.

An amalgam of his saliva, an oil based lubricant, her own “natural” lubricant, friction and a powerful flood of hormones that had been getting people their age into trouble from the very dawn of human history.

This went on for close to three hours, with occasional pauses in between for changes in position and bathroom breaks.

She was done, by hour two, but let him keep going because as a lust-type he could go on for hours and hours. And because he was a lust-type, she’d still be into it till he stopped, riding his high, on a rail made of empathic linkages.

Once he got his, it was time for her to get her’s she got.

By then, having moved from missionary to an old favored, lazy variation of reverse cowgirl, she was more or less sitting in his lap. She turned around leaning forwards, her full breasts pressing against his chest, her voice a soft whisper in his ear.

“Are you ready, baby?”

He grunted his agreement, still standing to attention on her inner thigh, bumping along her inner thigh as she rose.

She smiled and leaned forwards, giving him a kiss on the lips, a kissing on the brow, a kiss on the nape of his neck. Ritualistic, particular in her process.

Finally she opened her mouth and reveal a mouthful of teeth that shifted from human looking and white, to shark-like and not quite silvered in a matter of seconds, sinking them into his flesh.

He grunted again, his face a picture of love, his grin still in place even as he bled out.

A few drops of blood dribbled over his shoulder, but she caught the rest with her lips. Using her mouth to form, an almost but not quite airtight seal.

She began to suck, drawing him into her, taking his essence, as he’d been taking hers just a few minutes.ago.

He grew pale, his dark skin taking on an ashen cast, a few of his veins darkening, standing out as her power drew his life’s blood into her gullet.

Finally he gasped aloud, emitting a sound of pain, but never issuing a single word of complaint.

By minute five he was light headed, by minute ten his vision was narrowing.

At minute fifteen He collapsed into her chest and she embraced him, her arms around his shoulders. She gave him a squeeze that was two parts reflex, two parts affection, one part anxiousness.

Finally she finished, and she lay him out onto the bed, his large frame seeming shrunken into itself, emptied dry, but not quite desiccated.

Having exsanguinated her boyfriend, she got up and headed to his dresser stand, opening the first drawer and taking out the blue-white box she knew would be there.

Inside the blue-white box was yet another blue-white box, this time made of metal instead of plastic, with sigils for refrigeration and preservation emblazoned on the surface. She opened it feeling that it was cool to the touch, as her body ran warm after its feeding.

Inside the cases were impressions made to hold a set of two syringes. One sat empty. The other still had its contents. A cylinder filled with a radiant blue liquid, that sloshed slowly like heavy syrup.

The substance was a complex of compounds, a creation of the best that modern medicine had to offer, made from rare, mythical biological ingredients and even rarer anomalous radioisotopes. Known to the foundation as Amrita-9.

A serum that could restore catastrophic wounds and do everything but bring the dead back to life.

She screwed a needle onto the tube, flicking it twice to get any air bubbles out. Then she went over, to her boyfriend whose body had by now, started to cool.

Sighing, with a slightly regretful look on her face, because she knew that he’d probably gone into cardiac arrest by now and was working his way into organ failure and brain death.

And while this routine had gotten old by now, with the weight of the stakes feeling muted from repetition, she still felt touched that he’d go through all this, making to wear his usual smile.

Like he was just sleeping instead of dying, and having a very good dream.

“Welp, here we go..this is gonna suck…”

She stabbed the syringe down, using enough force to make sure she hit the man’s heart. The needle pierced his flesh, and the serum entered his system. Flooding the chambers of his stilled heart.

The pitiable lump of muscle slowly and haltingly lurched into motion, a slow trickle of iridescent blue was pumped into his veins, mingling with whatever little traces of red remained in the man’s system.

Anne Genevieve Ambrose watched, standing there naked as the day she was born. Arms crossed, holding her breath till she watched the man finally draw his.

She knew he would make it, she’d been sure of it, having seen him come back from the bleak beyond countless times. Her’s was a man that death couldn’t take, and hell couldn’t keep, his body filled with an evil, maniacal tyrannical sort of life force that refused to be denied. A hardiness of constitution that could regrow limbs, recover from critical traumas in minutes. A constitution that aided by the miracle serum Amrita-9 could be used to claw ones way back from the grave.

Even then, one couldn’t blame a girl for worrying.

He drew breath gasping, eyes wide open. Bloodshot and filled with a blazing red light. He spent a few minutes coughing, choking on his own saliva and blood for a few minutes, while the woman pounded his back, before exhaustedly sighing and collapsing back into the bed.

Satisfied that her boyfriend was firmly back on this side of the mortal coil, she shook her head tiredly, flicking his still standing member with her forefinger as she turned and went to go clean herself off.

*****

Hours later Clancy would wake, his head pounding, the inside his of mouth tasting like a sour mixture of salt, copper pennies and mango scented body lotion.

He was alone in his room, lying on bed-sheets that were dirtied by blood, sweat, a few other things and peanut butter.

If he relaxed and let his senses dial themselves up, he could hear Anne sitting in her room, smashing the keys on her desktop.

Either angrily typing something, gleefully typing something, or trying to figure out whether the machine had died again, because it was modded to all get up and seemed to be unsure whether it wanted to burn itself out or lurch into self-awareness.

He could also hear four of the six televisions in her room, all of them playing at the usual level. Loud but not too loud. The on-screen characters issuing out a mixture of music, slow Spanish dialogue, rapid Japanese dialogue, and English expletives plus gun fire. The noises all blending into one loud slurry that for whatever reason the girl found soothing.

Letting it carry on in the background while she did her thing.

Clancy dialed his senses back so that all he could here was his immediate surrounding. He listened to the soft pulsations of the blood that slushed through his veins. His eyes rolled into the back of his head as he lay there.

Content assessing himself, making sure his healing factor had done what it should do, bringing him back from the edge of nothingness, and bringing him back just a little better than he’d been before he’d plummeted into the misty abyss.

The Flow of magic within his body was stronger than it had been before, he’d 3rd Spiral Magi when he’d gone into that old house yesterday, now he was a 4th Spiral Magi. A seemingly small change with very appreciable consequences for his level of strength and anomalous ability use.

His healing factor would be greater than it had been and more reactive. His spellcasting would come easier. His origin spell, the Red Devil’s Waltz would grow more defined more powerful.

This was just fruits of being a lust-type Caster with a very loving, extremely understanding girlfriend. The consistent sexual activity helping him cultivate his M-Particle level.

Letting him traverse in months, a path that others would have taken a decade or more to complete.

He lay in bed with his eyes close till his awful headache had faded to something slightly less debilitating.

Once he could move without feeling like he wanted to die again, he headed for the shower. After getting cleaned up and dressed, what would follow, would be a miscellany of the usual errands that he did around the house.

Starting with him cleaning his room and the aftermath of he and Anne’s wild romp and ending with him making a roast and a potato casserole for dinner.

Somewhere in between all that, he’d ended up cleaning the rest of the house as well, dusty, sweeping, vacuuming finding something vaguely therapeutic in the action, even though he wasn’t actually all that happy about the fact that he was the one who generally ended up having to do most of the domestic stuff around house.

Begrudgingly accepting the duty, because he was bit of a pushover and his girlfriend was bad enough at doing it that her attempts to help were either ineffectual or resulted in making things worse.

He set up dinner in the living room because they always ate in the living room. In the years that they'd lived in their little townhouse on the edge of suburbs, they’d never once used their dining room as anything other than a place to put things that couldn’t fit in their closets and didn’t make sense to store in any of their work-dedicated storage rooms.

He sliced off a big hunk of roast for himself, heaping the plate with casserole, gravy and greens. Then plopped himself down onto the couch, to watch one of those brightly animated children cartoons that were well done enough to have a large adult following. He wasn’t exactly clear on what the name of the show was, but the jokes were punchy, and action suitably distracting and the plot simple enough that he could let his mind go on vacation while he ate and that was really all he needed.

If he really wanted to know he’d just ask Anne, he’d bet money that if she didn’t have a little figurine of one of the characters in the show on a shelf in her room, she’d at least, have a poster under her bed somewhere.

While she wasn’t really all that into pop culture, she followed it closely as part her crusade to consume as many forms of information and media as she could. As well as to kill time during the period when she wasn’t working on some big project.

Around the second half of the second act of the show, Anne wandered in. Dressed down, in an old sweatshirt with a Cartoon Pig and a balloony caption of the word “Oink” printed on the front.

Clancy set her up with a plate as she not-quite daintily lowered herself down onto the sofa beside him, shifting in place like a cat trying to make itself comfortable.

Anne mostly just picked at her food, mainly focusing on the meat, and potatoes but ignoring the greens. Despite all Clancy’s nagging, Anne was the kind of person who believed it was enough to get all of one’s vitamins in pill form.

The couple sat in silence neither of them feeling the need to say much in the two hour time span while they ate. Making up for spent calories and answering their evolving forms, requirements for nutrients. Supplementing the meal with snacks, junk food and whatever they could microwave.

Although Clancy had thought he’d already cooked in abundance, it would seem that they needed more. They even ended up ordering a pizza.

All this was a consequence of Clancy being a reciprocating lust-type. His cultivation method giving benefits to his partners, benefits that were further boosted by his peculiar physique. And were boosted again, when Anne’s harsh price of gluttony and greed, required her to consume the entirety of his blood at least once every two weeks.

A price that had to be paid if she wanted to stay sane and human. A price Clancy was fully willing to help her pay because it was his father’s fault that she was that way.

This was their life. He would die for his girlfriend anytime she asked and would almost certainly die again in two weeks time, drained dry so she could function as a person. He spent his days constantly almost dying on the job, that was just the way of things.

The two would do their best to make end’s meet, with Anne working at home as a spellscripter and computer programmer.

And Clancy working as freelance agent of the foundation, wandering the through the madness of the monochrome because it was quite lucrative as far as wizarding work went. Especially when one happened to be just a little bit overpowered compared to one’s peers.

The two of them together, doing much better than one would expect a college dropout and a shut-in to be able to do. Still just making ends meet with the requirements of their lives as practitioners and pricey-ness of the serums that kept Clancy’s deaths from being permanent.

******

This was their happy ending. This was the life they’d carved out together, having gone from two scared children, to two mostly alright, but healthily cautious and world-wearied, young adults.

As could be guessed from the shared last name, Clancy Ambrose and Anne Ambrose were technically married

That was mostly for tax reasons, since the state of New Camden was fairly generous to married couples, in attempts to rebuild its population after a devastation of the territory a few decades prior.

As well as because, the two were honest enough when they were building their life together, to admit that they could use all the help they could get and they figured they might as well take that final step, at least, as a formality, since they both knew that what they had was only going to end when one or both of them were dead.

The names were fake, Foundation-given replacements for the real identities that they were all too happy to put behind them.

Before that, they’d been siblings, adopted of course. Anne had been the daughter of cultist agent, her father having absconded in search of bigger better things. Her mother failed the cult too many times and eventually died within the monochrome.

Clancy had been the badly abused, very broken son of one of the cult’s senior members. Twisted by his father’s ambitions to turn his boy into a god.

They were originally intended to kill each other, as yet another of his father’s experiments, each one made to play on the weaknesses of the other. The Yin to the Other’s Yang.

Meant to create a great victor like insects trapped in a poison jar, but instead clinging together against the madness and the monsters, somehow coming through the worst of it alive.

Even managing to overcome the pressures that came after the Cult of Dantalion fell.

Where Anne was rescued as the darling daughter of Alexa Reed, misguided cult follower and victim, and the heroic Howard Goulding one of the US’s two representatives in the UN. Paraded through the media for weeks so that her father could get some much needed sympathy votes in his bid for US Senator.

While Clancy was locked away as the deranged son of the Black Blooded Devil. The same Black Blooded Devil who’d been the former head of the Cult’s North America Branch.

Here they were out from under all that had happened to them, free, making it on their own, and together. Still boyfriend and girlfriend, because neither of them were wearing wedding rings, and they didn’t feel like letting the little certificate that had been filed away in their shared office, label them.

Here they were, happy. Happier than they might have ever expected themselves to be capable of being during the worst of all that hate and blood.

*****

Whatever shows they were watching finally ended, replaced by a fresh faced tween who was feigning enthusiasm for what would ultimately be a “meh” film. Clancy stretched yawning completely exhausted because of the breakthrough in his cultivation and that whole coming back from the dead thing.

As for Anne, she was wide awake. Supercharged still running hot from a fresh dose of Clancy’s life’s blood.

While she could theoretically knock herself out with a heavy overdose of sleeping pills, or a powerful enough sleeping spell, she was more likely to just wear herself down with a series of overnighters. A litany projects she still had yet to finish, video games she’d been wanting to beat, movies to watch and books to read, that would eventually end with her falling asleep at her desk.

“G’night.” said Clancy. Leaning over, to give her a peck on the lips. She kissed him back, leaning her head back a bit so she could still see the television. Her hand on the remote, switching it over to the cable box’s on-demand menu.

“Night…Love you.”