Dullahan 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Story - Part Twelve (nsfw) (Patreon)

Whelp! Here we are! Here's 4765 words of Part Twelve for you! Coming towards the end of this story now, I think. It's been a blast so far, and I reckon there's probably one more part after this, but we'll see. It's up on here today for you to read early, and I'll pop it on Tumblr tomorrow. 

Last time saw the passage of the winter and the coming of the spring, while D was healing up in the Fae Realm. This time, we see much more emotion from D than we're perhaps used to seeing, as he and you work some things out... Also note that 'nsfw' has appeared... 

“D!” you yelled at the top of your lungs. Your feet were moving before you’d even realised, and you hurtled up the road towards him. 

Midnight halted and danced on the spot, snorting and shuffling, and to your immense relief, D froze. 

“D!” you shouted again, tears streaming down your face. All thoughts that you might expose him and leave him vulnerable had fled your mind at the sight of him stopping, and all you could imagine were his strong arms around you once more. “D…?” you repeated as you watched him swing down from the saddle and simply stand there. 

He wore his physical head, which would probably hide his ‘otherness’ from the eyes of your baffled friends behind you, but that thought didn’t cross your mind in that moment. You shot forwards and were almost in his arms before you noticed his expression. He looked so weary and so sad that you faltered, skidding to a halt and just staring at him. 

“D? What’s wrong? What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” he rasped, his voice so much softer and quieter than it had been before. “It’s good to see you again.”

Something was off. “I… I can’t believe you’re really here,” you whispered, tears still tracking down your cheeks. 

“I came to leave you that,” he said, gesturing at your front door where a letter was nailed to the wood, and your heart dropped. 

“What… What is it? What does it say?”

“Read it,” he said in that awful, defeated, aching voice. 

You stepped the last few paces up to him and laid your hands on his chest. He heaved suddenly at the contact and reeled back away from you. 

“I can’t,” he hissed, turning away. “I have to leave. I can’t stay. There’s no reason for me to be here, and I have to move on.”

“No reason?” you repeated dully, feeling a horrible chunk of ice slide through your gut at his words. “Nothing…? No reason at all?”

“Don’t,” he choked, still looking away.

“I thought you were dead!” you spat, emotions frothing inside you. “All these months, and not a single word from you! Or from Ten! I thought you’d died, D. I mourned you. But I never moved on.”

He did turn to look at you then, his icy, silver eyes wide with shock and horror. “She didn’t tell you I survived?” 

You shook your head, vision blurred with tears. 

D screwed his eyes shut and gave an animalistic growl, grinding his sharp teeth. “I’m sorry,” he finally said, staring at the ground between his black boots. “I thought she would. I was… I was in a bad way. I almost didn’t make it. This is the first time I’ve been able to make the journey from the Fae Realm, and it’s left me weak. But I would have thought she’d have told you.” A heartbeat later, he added, “I asked her to.”

“Why would she let me think you’d died?”

Realisation sank through him like a stone and his shoulders sagged. He exhaled and brought his index finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. “Of course.”

“What?” you blazed. 

He sighed expansively and then stole a glance down at you from his towering height. You couldn’t help a nervous, watery smile when he met your eye, which he returned with one of his own. That was something, at least. “She knew that with the injustices straightened out here, I’d have to move on. She told me just yesterday not to come here, to let you go. She must have hoped that you’d think I was dead, and that I wouldn’t come back.”

“But you did,” you said. “Come back, I mean.”

“Only to leave you that,” he countered, pointing at the letter again. 

“D…” you choked and then closed the distance between you at last, and flung your arms around him. “You risked your life to protect me, and you nearly died. You gave so much to this town, and… and to me… Please don’t just go.”

“I have to,” he said, stubbornly refusing to embrace you back. He was like a pillar of cold stone in your arms. “I can already feel the next place - the next injustice - pulling at me.”

“No,” you gulped, shaking your head. “I won’t lose you twice. I can’t. I love you, Justice.”

The dullahan in your arms fell utterly still at those words. You knew they were true. You’d thought about him every day, your heart had weighed heavy in your chest since the moment Tenacity had spirited him back to the Fae Realm. He was a good creature, with a heart of gold. You were not going to let him go. 

He murmured your name, and then his arms closed softly about your shoulders, one hand cupping the back of your head. You felt the sharp claws of his hand scraping against your scalp, and then he began to tremble. 

“D?”

He clung to you, and lowered his head, slowly pressing a kiss onto the crown of your head with his cool lips. Something hot dripped onto your hair, and you jerked back to see that he was crying. “I don’t want to leave you,” he confessed in a tiny, broken voice. “I don’t want to go. I want to bury my head here with you and live the rest of my existence with you. But I can’t.” Somehow, despite the strangeness of those words, it was oddly the most romantic thing you could ever imagine anyone saying to you. 

You swallowed, and the next sentence to leave your lips seemed like the most logical thing in the world. “Then I’ll come with you.”

D stood bolt upright at that and then shook his head vehemently. “No, your whole life is here. Your friends,” he added, glancing back down the road where you could just see Kravik herding the rest of them back to the town. “Everything is here. You’re needed here.”

You shook your head as well. “No,” you said. “Morwenna is still far from old and infirm,” you said, thinking of your mentor who ran the house of healing. “And Will wants to learn. He’s good at it too… he can take over from her. I don’t need to stay.”

D fell silent again, and you shivered slightly. The spring evening was still chilly, and standing out here in the cold was beginning to sap the heat from your body. 

Seeing this, the dullahan looked down at you more closely, and then turned his gaze away. He took one step, half turning from you, but you grabbed his wrist and clung to him. 

“You’re cold,” he said. “You should go inside.”

“Only if you come with me.”

He sighed and you watched another section of his resolve crumble away. “Fine,” he nodded, ushering you up the steps ahead of him. 

As if in triumph, Midnight gave you an earsplitting whinny, and you looked round and rushed past D to hug the horse. “Thank you for bringing him back to me,” you said, face buried in her soft coat. “I won’t let you down…”

The horse lowered her head over your shoulder as you clung to her neck, and it felt almost like she was hugging you in return. The heavy weight of her head began to make your arm tingle after a while, so you patted her solid neck and she raised her head again, blowing hot air down your collar as she passed, almost like a laugh. 

When you turned back to the house you saw D staring at you from the porch, looking like he’d been slapped. As you approached, he croaked, “She wants to stay.”

“Well, I’m glad one of you does,” you retorted, a sudden hurt anger flaring hot in your chest as you stormed up the steps to the house. “Even if it’s just for the carrots, at least one of you has a reason to want to be around me.”

“Don’t,” he said, his voice gritty and harsh.

Your fists found their way to your hips, and you spun on the porch, framed by the front door, and glared at him. “Then tell me. If you have a reason you want to stay, then tell me.”

“You know I would stay if I could.”

“No I don’t,” you fired back. Stomping past him, you snatched down the letter, ripping it right off the nail that held it in place in the wood of your front door, and blasted your way inside. The door bounced back off the wall as you burst in, and it almost swung shut in D’s face. He caught it and stepped warily inside after you. 

“Please,” he murmured as you stood there, breathing hard. “Please don’t be angry with me.”

You whipped around and stared him down once more, tears sparkling along your lashes. The sight of you like that seemed to lance through his chest and he deflated a little more. “Let me come with you,” you said, setting the letter down on the kitchen countertop and trying to sound persuasive without being pushy. 

“It’s not safe,” he countered immediately. 

“I don’t care. I love you, D. Did you not hear me?”

He bared his sharp teeth in a grimace of pain and lowered his head. “Don’t say that,” he whispered, voice quavering. 

“Why not? It’s the truth. You know it is. You're a kind of fae: you can tell if someone’s lying to you, can’t you? Am I lying to you?”

In a gesture so small you almost missed it, he shook his head. “No,” he said. 

“Then tell me why I shouldn’t love you.”

His head snapped up, his eyes blazing with the green foxfire light you’d come to associate uniquely with him, the strange, eerie, spidery lines across his slate grey skin pulsing with the intensity of his emotions, and he roared, “Because I’m a monster! Look at me! You’ll never be safe with something like me. You’ll never be happy. I’ll only bring you suffering and death. That’s all I ever bring the people who love me!”

The full force of his emotions hit you like a wild winter squall and the breath left your lungs in a hoarse gasp. D staggered backwards and sank down into a chair behind him, his forehead tipping into his hands as he began to wheeze and hiccup. 

“The only woman who ever loved me died because of me,” he choked. “I can’t… I won’t let that happen to you.”

In a heartbeat you rushed to him and knelt before him, taking his strange and monstrous hands in yours and clinging to him. “D,” you sighed. “Oh my poor, pure, beautiful dullahan. I’m so sorry.”

His words were barely audible as he whispered, “She died because of what I am.”

“She died because you’re a dullahan?”

He shook his head. “When I was human. I…” he leaned back, swiping the back of his hand roughly across his cheeks, smearing his tears across the flaring, pulsing green lines. His gaze did not meet yours, and you left him that privacy at least. He took a ragged breath and continued. “The inn on the main street of this town is called the Highwayman’s Secret,” he said, and you nodded, wondering at his change of topic. “Well, that secret was that the highwayman loved the innkeeper’s daughter, and that love bound them together in life and… in death.”

You knew the story. Everyone knew the story. It was a local legend. Poems and songs had been composed about the tragic love of the highwayman who rode off one night to win gold for his lover, and the king’s men had moved in in his absence and tied up the landlord’s black-eyed daughter as bait. The only way she’d had to warn him of their presence was to pull the trigger of the crossbow to which she was bound just at the moment she thought she saw him in the trees at the edge of the town. He’d turned and fled back into the night at the screams of the villagers, not knowing his love had died for his freedom. Too late he heard the tale, and spurred his horse back to the town. They had shot him from his saddle with the same crossbow that had killed his love, also felling his midnight black steed. He had not died in that attack, and he had been sentenced to death by public decapitation. 

They had left his body in the marketplace, but as dawn broke, there was no sign of his body.

The tale played through your mind with the speed of a galloping horse. He knew you knew the story. “That was you?” you finally croaked. “Bess was the woman you loved?” 

He nodded. 

“Ten found me. In particular, she’s drawn to women who are wronged. The injustice of Bess’ -” his voice broke as he spoke her name, but he soldiered on, “Bess’ death drew her here, and she found me. She read what had happened to me simply by touching me, and she knew I would be the one to avenge Bess’ death. So Ten created me. I endured the trials - at least they didn’t have to cut my head off, as that had already been done - and I survived. I brought death down on the whole troop, and I saved the captain for last.” He took a shuddering breath. “It’s his spine I took as my weapon.”

You knelt there in front of him, stunned, with your hands resting casually on his solid thighs just above the knee. “You’re afraid,” you said after a long, stretching, silent pause. 

“Yes,” he admitted. “I can’t bear to have that guilt on my soul all over again, should anything happen to you.”

“What’s to say it’ll happen again though? Don’t I get a choice? Bess chose to try and save you. Don’t I deserve the same right of choice?”

“No,” he snarled. “Not if it gets you killed.”

You fought to keep your voice calm. “Do you know for certain that that’s what will happen if I come with you?”

He blinked and turned his head sharply back to look at you. “Well, no, of course not, but… I… I can’t risk it. I…”

“No,” you said firmly. “I can’t risk staying here and never seeing you again. I’ll go mad. I want to come with you. I helped you this time, didn’t I? Maybe I can help you again in the future. You can’t move around during the day - you say the sunlight weakens you? Well, I can.”

D’s eyes went wide again and he shook his head frantically. “No,” he pleaded. “No, it’s too much of a risk.”

It took a deep, deep breath to steady yourself. Shouting at him would not get him to change his stubborn mind. Instead, you reached for his cheek and placed your palm on the cool, hard skin. It was almost leathery in texture - definitely inhuman - and smooth as polished marble. You turned his face so that he was looking directly at you. “I love you,” you said, and kissed him. 

He didn’t respond at first, but then he took a deep breath through his nose, like a swimmer surfacing for air, and his hands darted to your waist. He moaned against your lips and gripped your hair, his hands roaming all over your body as he came alive beneath you. He pulled you down into his lap, kissing you and touching you like it was a dying man’s last wish. Intoxicated with the taste and sense of you, his clawed hands dug into your clothes and he simply tore them open, pressing his face against your bared chest, kissing and sucking hard enough to dapple you with bruises. 

“I need you,” he hissed, taking your nipple in his teeth and then sucking it, cupping your breast with his hand at the same time and kneading it hard. You rolled your hips in his lap and felt the solid line of his cock beneath you. “I can’t live without you,” he whimpered. “I don’t want to. I can’t bear it.”

“Then don’t,” you whispered, and he surged to his feet, carrying you easily through the hut towards the little bedroom adjoining the living room. He pitched you down onto your bed and began to undress. You stared in wonder at his sculpted torso, his rippling muscles, and the way the snaking, spidering lines spread across his whole body in a hypnotic pattern of pulsing, phosphorescent lights. He blazed with love and lust for you.

Naked, he knelt on the bed between your legs and ran his palms up the length of your legs from ankle to hip. He circled your hipbones once with his thumbs and then turned his hand palm up and brought his fingertips to your wet sex. A jolt seared through you at his touch and your back arched off the sheets, fingers twisting into fists beneath you as you cried out, deep and guttural. “D!” 

He lowered his lips to you and replaced his fingertips with his tongue, laving over you and setting you afire all over again. He hooked his arms beneath your thighs, parting them with a growl, and spread you open to his mouth. His sharp canines occasionally pricked you, but it proved a wonderful counterpoint to the soft, deftness of his tongue against your swollen clit. He lapped at you, relishing the taste of you, moaning against you, and when he pulled back a moment to draw breath, he stared at you with hooded eyes, glazed with lust. 

“I need you,” he said, and something about his tone told you it ran deeper than sex. 

“I’m yours,” you moaned. “Please…”

He didn’t hesitate any longer. Straddling you, he lined himself up, groaning as his weeping tip hit the heat of your entrance, and he slowly slid himself into you. The stretch was perfect, and as he filled you, you began to moan, sliding your palms up his muscular, toned arms where he now braced himself against the bed. His hips moved back and forth, slowly at first, and his eyes were closed in utter bliss at the feeling of your tight heat around his achingly hard cock. 

The steady tempo didn’t last long. In no time he was growling and snarling, his hips thrusting his cock more deeply into you with each stroke, until he hit that spot inside you that lit you up, and you all but screamed, clinging desperately to him as though he would tear you apart with the pleasure he gave you. “D, I’m… I’m going to come…” you panted. 

“Come for me,” he growled in your ear, his breath snarling with the effort of maintaining his rough and desperate pace. “Come for me. Come around my cock and claim me,” he hissed. 

And with that, you came. Clenching in blinding waves of pleasure, you wrenched his climax from him and he gave a great bellow as he emptied himself into you. His hands tore gashes in your sheets, his canines were bared in a rictus of pleasure, his eyes screwed shut as his torso contracted with the violence of his orgasm. In that moment he gave himself utterly to you. 

Eventually he slumped on top of you, spent and empty, just catching himself on his forearms in time to keep from crushing you. Occasionally you felt his cock pulse inside of you, and after another few minutes of heart pounding silence, you felt some of his release begin to leak down your thighs. He grunted and rolled off you, his cock lying half-quiescent across his slate grey thigh. You hadn’t been given much chance to appreciate the sight of him earlier, and now you gazed in wonder at him: a bright, glowing vein ran up the length of it, and a network of phosphorescence spread in smaller fractured lines along his cock, like cracks in ceramic glaze. The tip of his cock was a vibrant green, fading into his cloudy grey skin towards the base. The remnants of his come that slicked along his softening cock were the same softly glow ling green as those odd veins were, and as his blood and his tears had been. The green glow was his life force, and it covered your own thighs now too. You smiled. 

He might have been a monster, but he was your monster. There was no way you were ever going to let him go now. 

D lay there, his lips slightly parted to reveal the line of his white teeth behind, and his eyes stayed closed. His lashes danced lightly on his cheeks, and you drew the sheets up over him as you slid from the bed to clean up a little. He was exhausted. The journey from the Fae Realm had left him weakened, and now he had given himself to you so completely, he had almost no reserves left. 

After cleaning yourself up, you threw on a robe and went out to find Midnight still standing in the road where anyone could see her. You approached her at a hurried jog and grabbed her loose reins. “Come on, girl,” you said, leading the willing mare round to the back of your little hut. You untacked her, bringing her bridle and saddle just inside the back door to your house, and then you fed her a couple of carrots from the cellar. “You stay here, alright?” you said. And the mare nodded once. “Good girl. He’ll be alright,” you reassured her, and she snorted and nodded her head again. 

Slipping silently back into the hut, you saw that attached to the saddle was the gruesome vertebrae whip. Deliberately ignoring it, though it still made you shudder, you made your way back to your bedroom, hanging the robe on the back of the door. 

To sleep beside him was a dream you had never dared allow yourself, and yet there he was. He seemed larger than ever has he lay in your modest little bed, and yet there was something vulnerable about the gesture of allowing himself to fall asleep, completely naked and spent, in your presence. 

Perhaps he would come around to the idea of your accompanying him. Nuzzling up to him, you laid your head in the hollow of his dark shoulder and draped your arm across his torso. It rose and fell slowly with the rhythm of someone who is lost deep in dreamless, exhausted sleep, and you hoped to follow after him. 

When you woke, daylight spilled in a wide arc across your face, and you opened your eyes groggily, rubbing them as the sleep drifted from your mind like a waning tide. You ached deeply, and moved your hand down your body. As the memories flooded back to you, you gasped and sat bolt upright. The bed beside you was cold and empty. 

Tears and panic choked you and you let out a short, sharp wail of despair, thinking that he had awoken and left. 

Footsteps sounded on the wooden floorboards outside your door, and a moment later it flew open and D burst in. “What’s wrong?” he barked. 

With a sob of relief, you flung yourself at him, heedless of your nakedness, and he caught you gently in his arms. “I thought you’d gone,” you mumbled into his shirt. 

“Shh,” he said, stroking your hair. “No. I’m sorry. I was wrong. I can’t leave you.”

“But… does that mean you’ll stay here? What about… your work? What about fixing things? What about…?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, leaning back. It was only then that you realised he didn’t have his physical head on. When you did a double take at the loss, his shoulders slumped. “Forgive me,” he said. “I… It is draining to wear take my full physical form all the time here.”

“I don’t mind,” you smiled, remembering how dullahans were more vulnerable when they were whole like that. “I was just surprised that I didn’t notice straight away.” 

He huffed an amused little laugh, and you drew back, eyes ablaze with curiosity. “Can I touch it?” you asked, and his ghostly green brows drew together in a knotted frown of wary confusion. 

“Touch what?” he asked slowly. 

“Your neck…”

He took half a step backwards, initially shaking his see-through head. But then he stalled, inhaled deeply, and strode past you to sit on the edge of your bed. You joined him and drew the sheets around you to stave off the prickling chill of morning. 

“May I?” you asked again as you sat beside him. 

He nodded, and the dense fog that had formed his head faded to almost nothing. Tentatively, you raised a finger to the empty collar of his shirt and touched the scars of his neck. The skin was puckered and leathery, the way so many old scars were, and it was as cold as the rest of him. The skin closed around the point where his vertebrae were, leaving no trace but a low dip with a hint of bone. 

“Can you feel that?” you asked, fascinated. 

“Yes,” he whispered, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. 

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

You pulled back and let your hand drop to his thigh. He scooped up your hand in both of his and squeezed tightly. As he did so, the normal opacity of his ghostly head returned, and you could see his features more clearly again. 

“You know…” you said, playfully biting your lip, “I wouldn’t mind repeating last night again, but with you like this… I want to feel what it’s like with your ‘other’ head…”

He scowled in consternation, and you had to laugh. 

“Not now, though, don’t worry. What are we going to do then? And where is your physical head?”

“I… The chest I keep it in is out there,” he said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder. “I was thinking of burying it under the apple tree in your garden.”

You smiled and brought your hand to his shoulder. Squeezing hard, you said, “How about you bring it with us?”

“Us?” he croaked. 

You nodded. “Us.” 

“Are you sure? I could stay here with you…” he said. “You wouldn’t have to leave everything behind.”

“Would you still have to go away though?”

He was silent for a while. “Yes,” he said eventually. “I would, but if my head is here, you can still talk to me -”

“D,” you said flatly. “Talking to your disembodied head in a chest is hardly the same as having you here… And yes, I’m sure we could still have fun, but really, I want all of you.”

He snorted at the image and then it softened into a proper smile. “Well, it’s your choice. If I stay, I’ll be unable to resist the call to justice elsewhere. I know that. I can’t change it. If you come with me, you’ll always be in danger. We’re not thought of well. People think we’re spirits of death, and that to see one is to invite death upon yourself. You’ll have to lie. You’ll always be an outsider.”

“I’ll have you,” you said, knowing how naive it sounded. 

He sighed. “I’ll stay until tonight,” he said, sending a thrilling drop of icy panic through your veins. “I will have your answer from you then.”

He stayed in your hut that day, and you managed to convince him to give you a repeat performance of the previous night. His ghostly head felt very different, sending cold tingles through you that had you coming more quickly than anything ever had in your whole life. He brought you to completion four times before you begged him to fill you. After the show you’d given him, he didn’t last long. 

As the sun began to set, you knew you were going to have to give him your answer. 

He was out with Midnight, grooming her coat with a brush from his saddlebags, when the sun finally dipped below the horizon. He looked up at you as you opened the door and went to him. His hands fell quietly to hang by his sides, and Midnight looked from one to the other of you, her ears swivelling flat back against her head in apprehension. 

You’d made your decision about staying or leaving. 

Taking a deep breath, you gave him your answer.

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