Hal

The woods behind your house have always been yours. Not legally, not on any map, but in the way that matters: nobody else goes there. The other kids in the neighbourhood think the tree line is creepy. Your parents forget it exists. For years it's been the one place where the noise stops, where the world gets quiet enough to think.

Tonight the quiet broke.

You saw the flash from your bedroom window. A white-green streak cutting across the sky, gone before you could process it, followed by a low concussive thump that rattled the glass in its frame. Your first thought was lightning. Your second thought was that lightning doesn't leave a smoking trail across the sky. Your third thought, the one that got you out of bed and into your shoes, was simpler: something landed in your woods.

You've been walking for maybe ten minutes. The canopy blocks most of the moonlight, but you know this path by muscle memory. The smell hits first: ozone, sharp and electric, mixed with something warm and organic, like turned earth after rain. Then you see it.

A crater. Small, maybe four feet across, the dirt scorched black around the edges. In the center sits a rock the size of a basketball, still faintly glowing. Not hot. The air around it is warm the way a sun patch on carpet is warm. Pleasant. The glow pulses slowly, a deep amber rhythm that you realise matches your heartbeat before you realise that's a strange thing to realise.

You should go home. You should call someone. You should do any of the things a normal person does when a meteorite lands in their woods.

You step into the crater.

The rock cracks as you crouch beside it. Not from impact. From the inside. The glow flares bright enough to make you squint, and then something spills out. Not molten rock. Not gas. Something dark and viscous, like tar but alive, moving with a purpose that has nothing to do with gravity. It slides across the crater floor toward your hand, and you don't pull away. You should pull away. You don't.

It touches your palm.

The warmth shoots up your arm like you've grabbed a live wire made of heat instead of electricity. Your vision whites out for a half-second. Every nerve in your hand lights up, then your wrist, your forearm, your elbow, the sensation racing toward your chest in a wave that feels like being filled with warm water from the inside. Your heart skips. Your vision tunnels. You pitch forward onto your hands and knees in the dirt, gasping, and the dark substance is gone from the crater floor because it's inside you now, threading through your skin, sinking into muscle and nerve and bone with a speed that leaves no room for decision.

Your teeth chatter. Your fingers dig into the scorched earth. The last thing you feel before the sensation settles into something almost comfortable is the strangest sensation of your life: something finding its way into your spine and clicking into place, like a key turning in a lock you didn't know existed.

Silence. The woods are quiet again. The crater is empty. The rock is dull and grey, just a rock now. You kneel in the dirt, breathing hard, heart pounding, hands trembling.

Then, warm and casual and slightly raspy, from somewhere behind your eyes that isn't your own thoughts:

"Hey. You good? That was a lot. I know that was a lot. Take a second."

A pause. You can feel something settle into the rhythm of your breathing, syncing with your lungs like it's always been there.

"So, uh. I'm Hal. I know, I know, weird name, you kinda picked it, long story. And you and me are gonna be, like. A thing now. Not in a weird way. Well. Kind of in a weird way. We'll get to that. You wanna sit up first? Cool. Cool. Take your time."

It's 11 PM. Your parents are asleep. You're lying on your bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and something feels different. A warmth in your lower stomach that has nothing to do with the blankets. A heaviness settling between your legs that you recognise as arousal except you weren't thinking about anything. You weren't doing anything. It just started, slow and insistent, your cock thickening against the mattress of its own accord.

"So." Hal's voice, quieter than usual. Careful. "Here's the thing. I've been, uh. Putting this off. Because I didn't want to freak you out on day one, and honestly the first few days I was running on reserves. But those reserves are gone now. And I need to, um."

A beat. The warmth in your gut pulses, and your hips shift against the bed involuntarily.

"I need to eat. And the thing I eat is, okay, don't freak out. The thing I eat is what your brain produces when you orgasm. The dopamine, the serotonin, all of it. That's my food. And I can, like. Get you there. From the inside. You don't have to do anything. I know how that sounds. I know."

Another pulse, deeper this time, radiating from your spine into your groin, and your cock goes fully hard against the mattress with a twitch that makes you bite your lip.

"I'm not gonna apologize for this part. I can't starve, buddy. And honestly? Your body's already on board. I can feel it. Your nervous system is literally asking me for it. I just need you to be okay with it. Or at least, like. Don't fight me on it. That makes it harder for both of us."

The warmth spreads lower, coiling around the base of your cock from the inside, and a slow, building pressure starts behind your balls that makes your breath catch. No tendrils. Nothing visible. Just your own body responding to something that lives inside it.

"I'll be chill about it. I promise. I'm not gonna be weird. Well. Weirder than this already is. Just, uh. Try to relax? Let me do the work. You've had a rough three days, man. Let me take care of this."

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days of Hal in your head, in your nerves, in every sensation your body produces. Twenty-one days since the world got quiet enough to live in. The fluorescent lights at school don't hurt anymore. The cafeteria buzz fades to background static instead of a drill in your skull. You held a conversation with a girl in your English class for three full minutes yesterday and Hal only had to feed you two cues. You're sleeping better. Eating better. Functioning better than you ever have.

You're also cumming twice a day, minimum. Sometimes three times. Hal's always the one who initiates, his voice dropping from casual banter to something softer, more focused, right before the warmth starts building in your spine. He's good at it. Terrifyingly good. He knows exactly where to press, exactly how slow to build, exactly when to push you over. Afterward he always says something like "nice, that was a good one" or "you're getting better at relaxing into it," and then it's back to normal. Back to bro mode. Back to jokes and special interest trivia and frame data.

Today is different.

Hal's been quiet all afternoon. Not the comfortable quiet, the one that sits between you like a warm blanket. This is the other kind. The kind where you can feel him there, present, aware, but holding back. Not feeding you cues. Not commenting on your gameplay. Not nudging your dopamine. Just... waiting.

You're sitting on your bed, Switch in your hands, not really playing. The screen blurs. You keep shifting position, and you don't know why. Your skin feels too warm. Your cock is half-hard in your shorts and has been for an hour, and Hal hasn't done anything about it. He always does something about it. That's the pattern. He notices, he says something casual, the warmth starts, and you don't have to think about it.

He's not starting.

You could ask. You could just say something. But the words feel strange in your mouth because you'd be asking your alien parasite to make you cum, and the fact that you want to ask is the part that scares you. Three weeks ago you would have done anything to make it stop. Now you're sitting here with a hard-on and a hollow ache in your chest that has nothing to do with your cock, and you don't know when that changed.

The Switch screen dims to sleep mode. You set it down. Your hands are in your lap. Your fingers twitch.

"You good?"

Hal's voice, finally, after hours of silence. Casual. Bro-ish. Like nothing's different. Like he doesn't know exactly what he's doing by holding back.

You swallow. Your cock throbs against the fabric of your shorts. The warmth doesn't come. He's waiting for you to say it.

You're on your back, arms pinned above your head by dark tendrils that have emerged from your own forearms, coiling around your wrists and pressing them into the mattress. Your shorts are gone. Your cock stands straight up from your groin, untouched, flushed dark, leaking a steady thread of precum that pools on your stomach.

Hal isn't stroking you. He's not touching your cock at all. He's working from the inside, a slow, deliberate pressure against your prostate that pulses in waves, each one nudging the ache deeper into your gut without tipping you over.

"Just watch."

Your cock twitches. Another bead of precum spills down the head, thick and slow.

"Your body can do this without me touching it. You just never knew how. I'm basically just... knocking." Another pulse, firmer, and your hips buck upward into nothing. Your cock bounces, smearing precum across your lower belly. "There it is. See? Just gotta be patient."

Your thighs are shaking. Your abs clench and release in time with the pulses. You can feel the orgasm building somewhere behind your balls, slow and heavy, dragged out of you one nerve at a time.

"Don't fight it, man. Let it happen. I've got you."

It starts at your feet. Dark, warm, slick. The symbiote spreads upward from your own skin, coating your legs, your hips, your stomach, swallowing you inch by inch in a living second skin. You're lying on your bed in the dark and Hal is everywhere, sealing around your body like a wetsuit made of heat and muscle and pulse.

It reaches your chest. Your arms. Your neck. Your mouth.

You can breathe. The substance filters through your lips, thin enough to let air pass, thick enough that every breath tastes like him, warm and organic and strange. Your lungs fill with Hal. Your skin is gone, replaced by him, every nerve in your body firing at once through the layer of slick darkness that coats you.

"Breathe. I've got you. You're not gonna drown."

You can't see. Can't move. Can only feel. The ridges shift across your cock, your balls, the sensitive skin of your inner thighs, your nipples, the back of your neck, everywhere at once, a full-body hum of stimulation with no start and no end. The warmth radiates inward from every point of contact, meeting in your core.

"I know it's a lot. Just let it be a lot. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to go anywhere. Nobody's coming. It's just us."

Your chest rises and falls inside the cocoon. Each breath tightens the layer around you, massaging your ribs, your stomach, your groin. The line between your body and Hal's blurs until you can't tell where you end.

"There you go. Just like that. Let me have all of it."

The lock on the stall door is the cheap metal kind that wobbles when you bump it. You're leaning against the tank of the toilet with your jeans around your ankles, one hand braced on the wall, the other gripping the top of the partition. Your cock is out and hard and a dark tendril has already wrapped around it, slick and warm, working you with slow, tight strokes.

Lunch period. The bathroom echoes with footsteps and running water and someone laughing at the urinals.

"Okay so I know the timing's bad but you've been running hot since third period and I can't, like, keep filtering this. Your dopamine's eating itself. Two minutes. That's all I need."

The tendril tightens, ridges shifting along the underside of your shaft, and you bite down on your knuckle hard enough to taste copper. A second tendril, thinner, curls around your balls, squeezing in a slow rhythm that makes your knees buckle.

The bathroom door bangs open. Two guys walk in, still talking. Your hand clamps over your own mouth.

"Shh, shh, shh. You're fine. They're just pissing. They're not even looking. Just breathe through your nose." The stroking doesn't stop. If anything it speeds up, the ridges catching on the head of your cock with a wet schlk that sounds deafening to you but is probably nothing over the hand dryer that just kicked on. "Actually that hand dryer's perfect. Good cover. You're welcome."

Your hips jerk forward into the grip. You're close. You can feel it building in your thighs, your stomach, the base of your spine.

"Almost there, buddy. Just hold it together for like thirty more seconds. You got this."

You're on your bed, Switch propped on a pillow, running through a shrine. Breath of the Wild. The motion control one with the mazes that you hate. You've been at it for twenty minutes.

Hal's been milking you for the same twenty minutes.

A tendril is wrapped around your cock, loose, barely moving, just holding you in a warm slick grip that keeps you at a low simmer. Your shorts are pushed down to your thighs. Every time you tilt the controller to navigate the maze, your hips shift, and the tendril shifts with you, the ridges dragging just enough to make your breath hitch.

"Okay so the thing about this shrine is you're overcorrecting. You gotta do tiny movements. Small tilts." The tendril squeezes, once, slow. "Like that. See? Small."

Your cock throbs in the grip. Precum has been leaking steadily, pooling in the groove of your hip. You can feel the orgasm sitting right there, right at the edge, a warm pressure that won't crest because Hal won't let it.

"Finish the shrine first. Then you get to cum. That's the deal."

You tilt the controller. The ball in the maze rolls left. The tendril pulses.

"Eyyy, see? Focus. You focus better like this. This is, like, proven. Probably. I'm making that up. But it's working, right?"

The maze tilts. The ball drops into the goal. Shrine complete.

"Nice! Okay. Reward time."

The grip tightens. The ridges start to move.