Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

Chapter 358: Atlantic Theatre [11]

"I can cure you," I said to her.Maribel didn’t react immediately. She just stood there in the dim hall, the torchlight casting uneven shadows across her face, and for a moment the only sound was the distant groaning from somewhere deeper in the building.

Then her hazel-brown eyes widened. Slowly, like the words were arriving in pieces rather than all at once.

"W...What?" The word came out small and stripped of everything except pure bewilderment.

She’d made her peace with it. I could see that clearly, somewhere between the bite and now she’d done the quiet internal work of accepting what it meant, had folded herself around it and decided how she was going to carry it. And then I’d walked back in and pulled the floor out from under that acceptance entirely.

"I can cure you," I said again. "With my Symbiote. I mean it."

"You’re serious." She searched my face, looking for the crack in it, the tell that said this was something other than what it sounded like. "You’re actually serious right now...."

"I don’t joke about things like this. Not ever," I said.

Something shifted in her expression. Hope is a hard thing to keep out of your face when someone offers it to you out of nowhere.

But after seeing what I was capable, obviously she must have thought I could be actually saying the truth and thus saving her life.

"How?" she asked. Her voice had gone quieter. "How does it work?"

"A transfer. I pass a part of my Symbiote into you, just a fragment of it, not the whole thing. That part bonds with your system and begins repairing the damage. It will purge the infection and reinforce your body at the same time." I explained.

She took a small step back. "A part of your Symbiote. So I’d become like... you?"

"No. It’s different from a full Host bond. I retain the Symbiote, nothing changes on my end. What you receive is a smaller piece that integrates rather than dominates. It will make you stronger, harder to hurt, faster to heal. But you stay human. Fully."

She was quiet, turning it over, her brow creased.

"I won’t be... changed? Not really changed?"

"You’ll still be you. Just a version of you that doesn’t die from a bite," I said. "Which, right now, seems like the more pressing concern."

She looked down at the bite on her arm. The skin around it had darkened further in just the last few minutes, the edges of the wound pulling in that particular way that meant the infection was already moving through her system, already beginning to do what it always did.

She swallowed. Nodded once, short and decisive. There wasn’t really a difficult choice here when you stripped it down to its bones, and she was practical enough to know that.

"F...Fine," she said. "Do it then." She held her hand out toward me, palm up, like I was going to drop something into it.

I looked at her outstretched hand.

If only it were that simple...

"Maribel...." I paused, trying to find the least catastrophic way to say the next part. "The transfer doesn’t work through contact like that."

She lowered her hand slightly. "Then how?"

I held her gaze.

Said nothing for a moment.

"How, Ryan?"

"Through a more... intimate form of contact," I said.

She stared at me. "Intimate like a hug? Skin to skin contact?"

"No." I kept my expression neutral through what felt like considerable effort. "More intimate than that. Significantly more."

Damn it! This is too embarrassing!

Her eyes narrowed slowly. The look of someone assembling a picture they weren’t sure they wanted to see completed. "Like what, exactly?"

I held her gaze and just said it plainly.

"S...Sexual intercourse."

The hall went very quiet.

Maribel stood completely still for about two full seconds. Then the color started, beginning at her neck and moving upward with impressive speed, her tan complexion darkening into something approaching deep red, her jaw dropping open in a way that seemed genuinely involuntary.

"W...WHAT?!" The word bounced off every wall in the hall, loud enough that I was briefly concerned about attracting attention from three floors down.

"I’m not making it up," I quickly said.

"How am I supposed to just BELIEVE that?!" She took another step back, the glare arriving right behind the shock, both of them fighting for space on her face.

"You watched me throw compressed wind blades that tore through a corridor full of Infected. You watched me kill a Hybrid without touching it. You accepted all of that without much difficulty," I said. "But the biological transfer mechanism of an alien Symbiote organism with a superior regenerative physiology is where credibility breaks down for you?"

She opened her mouth and closed it. Her brain was clearly doing something processing my words which sounded pretty right and convincing now that I thought about it.

"I am not lying to you," I said. "I have done this before. It works. But there is no other method, I’ve looked, and there isn’t one, and you are running out of time right now."

"T...There has to be another way—"

"There isn’t. And every minute we stand here debating it is a minute the infection moves further." I kept my voice calm and serious because one of us had to be, and because underneath the awkwardness of the conversation I was scared, scared of the Infected sounds getting closer, scared of a Hybrid appearing in the doorway.

Maribel’s expression cycled through approximately six different things in the span of a few seconds, shock, disbelief, embarrassment, anger, something that looked like it might have been reluctant reasoning, and back to embarrassment again.

"Maribel—"

"JUST GIVE ME A MINUTE!!" She snapped, turning half away from me, one hand pressed against the side of her face.

"Take your minute," I said.

I turned away from her and moved toward the nearest Infected that had been groaning and stumbling against a row of blocked seats since we’d entered. I dealt with it quietly, then the next one. The groaning was setting my teeth on edge, and beyond the practical irritation of it, doing what needed to be done next with that particular background noise and audience, however mindless, was not something I was willing to contemplate.

I worked through them methodically and let Maribel have her minute.

When I turned back around, she was standing near the elevated dais at the front of the hall, just below the dead screen. The torchlight caught her face clearly enough.

She raised her eyes to mine. Or rather, raised her glare.

"If you’re lying to me—" She said it slowly. "I am killing you."

Why on earth would I lie about something like this? What kind of person did she think I was?

I kept that thought to myself.

I mean, I couldn’t even blame to her for not believing me with how absurd it sounded.

"You’re okay with it then," I said, making sure.

"I said I am!"

"Alright." I walked down toward her, and she immediately took two steps back before realizing I was only reaching down to pick up her steel rod from where it had been left on the floor. I carried it back up to the door and slid it through the handles, locking them the same way we’d done in Hall One.

The last thing either of us needed right now was company.

I turned back around.

Maribel had moved down to the dais, standing on it with her arms crossed tight over her chest.

I climbed down to join her and looked at the space. The dais was raised, solid, and, relative to everywhere else we’d been in the last hour, the least covered in blood and debris.

"Here," I said, gesturing to it. "It’s cleaner than the alternative."

She didn’t say anything. Just turned and stepped up onto it and stood there with her arms still crossed, staring at a point somewhere above my head.

I stepped up beside her and stopped.

"I know this is not how either of us wanted this to go," I said. "But the alternative is real and it’s already in your system and it is not going to stop. So."

Blunt, maybe. But it worked, I saw something settle in her expression, the resistance giving way to the plain logic of it.

"Fine," she said quietly.

Then, without looking at me, her voice dropped further. "I’ve never... done this before."

I’d already gathered that she never had sex before from her reactions. It wasn’t a surprise. But hearing her say it out loud made me even more conscious of her.

"I’ll be careful," I said. And I meant it entirely, without qualification. "You need to relax as much as you can. If you don’t it will hurt more than it needs to."

She gave a small nod, barely perceptible.

"Start with...whatever you have on below," I said, the words coming out with an awkwardness I couldn’t entirely suppress.

She shivered slightly but she turned away from me and bent down to unlace her sneakers, pulling them off one at a time, her socks following. Then she straightened and her hands went to the waist of her cargo pants.

She shot me a look over her shoulder.

I turned away. Faced the wall, giving her the privacy of it.

Was it technically necessary given where this was going? No. Obviously not. I did not say that.

The sounds of fabric moving filled the quiet, the soft slide of the cargo pants, the small sounds of her getting them off her feet. Then silence. She didn’t say anything for a stretch that felt longer than it probably was.

"Just—" Her voice came out lower than before. "Just do it quickly."

I turned around.

She was sitting on the dais, knees drawn up and crossed in front of her, arms wrapped around her shins, bare legs pale in the dim light. Her cargo pants lay discarded a few feet away, and resting on top of them, a blue hipster-style underwear she’d folded off alongside them.

Something I hadn’t been expecting hit me squarely in the chest.

I’d managed to stay calm about the whole conversation, pragmatic, straightforward, focused on the urgency. That had served me well right up until this exact moment. Standing here, looking at her sitting there trying to make herself small, flushed from her collarbones to her hairline, arms tight around her knees—

My heart had started going considerably faster than I’d have liked.

I was going to have sex with Maribel.

Another woman again.

I took a slow breath.

"Alright," I said quietly, and moved forward, lowering myself to my knees in front of her.