< This story is an AU written for a collaboration on Tapas. It's set in the universe of KM Langley's "Do you believe in magic?". Shoot me a comment if there's any worldbuilding that doesn't make sense, but also rest assured it's not entirely essential to this little plot.  >

.

𝖔𝖓𝖊

There was something to be learnt about a person by the way they reacted to corruption.

Firstly, whether the forbidden put delight gathered behind their teeth, and glued their eyes to the glistening apple cupped in Eve's hands. And then, that inevitable way it changed. The dawning disgust as that first mouthful of the fruit left nothing but rot on their tongues, and they found the apple was no more than glossy red skin cast over a putrid nest of worms and decay.

Cain had always had more respect for those that were repulsed from the first. Those that knew their goodness and their justice and committed to it, rather than the multitude of weak sinners who flirted with the pretty parts of evil. Magic flaunted its innocence and wonder, but true power – sought power, not that gifted on a golden platter – came with sickness. It came with watching energy crawl through your veins like worms and heaving the melting insides of your guts onto cold stone floor.

It came with this damnable headache grinding into his temple as he tried to remember his subject.

Letting his eyes trail over the mooning faces clustered behind their desks, Cain had to fight back a sneer. Every expression in the room that had once held dazzled eyes jerked into dull repulsion while the last words of his lecture hung like grave tolls in the air.

Almost every face.

Those whose rapture only grew when they gazed upon the rotten insides of power were something ... special. More, when it happened not once but again and again and again. Cain had developed an almost obsessive fixation into working these casual turns from theory to temptation to obscenity into his lectures just so that when his withering scan of the room ended in the far, back corner, he could witness a little glimpse of hunger.

Stupid, given how close he walked to the bone in this place, but he simply ... couldn't resist.

The boy had caught Cain's eye the moment he stalked into the room, jamming his shoulder into the arm of another student half a foot taller than him and delivering a scowl so vicious that Cain had to laugh at the way the other wilted. And that wasn't even counting for the delicious flare of darkly toxic green in the air around him nor those raised scars knifing through his cheek.

One, two, three. The number of times that first lecture that Cain had found himself staring at the boy with some strange, dark fascination stirring at the bottom of his lungs.

Really not his type, not that he'd ever found himself something so banal as a type or any kind of interest in another human being beside how they could be used, but if he did have a type, it certainly wouldn't be scowling university students probably eight years younger than him dressed in that much scruffy black.

Only those scars promised something more – a hint of slick violence – and oh, it hadn't disappointed.

Casper Black was subtly entranced with the forbidden, but when Cain bared its vile underbody, his scan of the room inevitably, inimically, delightfully ended on gluttony.

Cain wanted it, and what he wanted, he would have. Excess and uncontrolled desire ended only one way – the path of Icarus in his hubris skimming too close to the searing mass of the sun – and Cain could taste it on his tongue like that rotting apple that when this boy fell, he would fall like ecstasy in a catastrophic explosion of total annihilation.

And if there was one thing Cain knew how to wield, it was catastrophe.