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Falin isn’t a dragon anymore in every way, except for the ways that she is.
With the continent having finished rising out of the sea, the little dungeon island is vast, far more vast than they could ever hope to explore in a single trip, much less in a day. Still, they make an effort to, traveling out a little more every day. The castle is, after all, only a very small part of the world, and while Senshi, Izutsumi, and Chilchuck have made their intent to wander their own ways clear, they seem loath to leave too quickly.
Falin’s grateful for that. There’s so much different these days, it’s nice to have Chilchuck’s familiar face around, and she’d like to get to know these two new friends who helped save her brother while she still has the chance to.
“Senshi, is this one poisonous or edible?”
The dwarf peers down his nose at the mushroom cap, twisting his mouth this way and that. “Poisonous,” he says. “I think. Better leave it there, to be safe.”
“I could –” Laios starts.
“No.”
Marcille is a bit farther down the goat path to Falin, one hand holding her staff to lean against and the other braced against the trunk of a tree. She’s standing upwind, and the air smells very faintly like her hair oil, and slightly more like the salt of her sweat. Falin is not a dragon anymore, except in the ways that she is.
Between her and Marcille, Chilchuck is checking the ground for tracks, since he’s still concerned about the wild pigs that they sighted a few kilometers back and haven’t seen since. She wishes that she weren’t as aware of him being there as she is, because he’s standing directly between her and Marcille, and Falin really doesn't like it when people do that anymore.
Marcille called it revivification anxiety syndrome , a subset of mana sickness caused by some energy diffusion going awry in the revival process, making the one revived unhealthily attached to the one who revived them, like a duckling imprinting on the first thing it sees coming out of the egg. “It’s more frequent in cases of prolonged death before you get healed,” she said, flushing a little. “We, uh. We did leave you in ice for a very long time, Falin.”
That’s all well and good, of course. She’s always been very drawn to Marcille, and passing at least a fraction of her tests in magic school would have been much harder if she wasn’t able to mostly cope with that old bugbear. It would be easier to deal with if she could stop thinking about eating Marcille, which is new.
Maybe it’s not eating exactly. The urge is very similar to what eating had been like as a Chimera, that kind of deep-pit-of-her-stomach hunger that couldn’t be stopped by anything short of a swimming hole of curry and a nap, but it was strange to conceive of it as so singularly directed at a person. She looks down the goat path and she sees the back of Marcille’s neck – the source of the hair oil and the salt-skin smell and she wants to push Chilchuck out of the way so that there’s nothing between them when she buries her face in Marcille’s nape and closes her blunt teeth at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.
“You should take the poison one anyway,” she whispers to Laios. “Just keep it away from the rest, I bet we could use it to make something cool.”
Laios gives her a conspiratorial wink and subtly pockets the mushroom in a fold of his armor.
“What do you have!” Marcille shouts without turning around. “Drop it right now!”
. . .
In the castle kitchen while making lunch, Falin asks, “Do you think it’ll go away soon?”
Marcille purses her lips in thought. She has a knife in one hand and a mushroom in the other, a plain, un-magical mushroom without any monster parts, and she uses the knife to deftly take it apart while Falin dices wild onions with a cleaver. “It should be gone already, it’s been long enough. But I don’t think the journal articles I read were written with any case like yours in mind, Falin.”
“I’m one of a kind,” she declares, gesturing with the cleaver at her chest, still layered heavily with feather down.
Marcille smiles. She says, “Always were,” and Falin’s heart turns over like an hourglass.
It has gotten better, though. Closer to what it was when she’d just met Marcille and wanted to be around her all the time, before she really knew what a crush was. In the first few days, she couldn’t stand it whenever someone other than her touched Marcille, wanted to cart her off to a quiet cave somewhere, and. Well, Falin didn’t know how to finish that thought. She’d never had a hoard of her own, what was even going to do, sit on her? She glances over at Marcille’s clever fingers, the sorcerer’s calluses on her knuckles and thumbpad, her dainty wrists. She’d completely squish her.
“Onion’s done,” she says. “Now what?”
Senshi has his back turned to them at the other end of the castle kitchen. He’s revived the woodfire stove last week and is still fiddling with the means of controlling the heat to his satisfaction, but he lays his shield over the stones and drizzles oil into it. He says, “First we saute the onions, then we deglaze with a bit of dry wine. Then, the mushrooms, or they’ll drink up all of the oil.”
The smell of the wine steaming in the pan rises up and makes the stifling, dead air of the mildewed castle dreamy and fragrant. Falin wants to find a soft thing to fall asleep on, maybe a patch of grass or a dusty pillow.
“What are you making?”
Senshi says, “Mushroom and sorrel soup.”
Marcille wrinkles her nose. “Sour soup,” she says. “Can’t you leave the sorrel out?”
He leaned back and huffed through his nose, his nostrils flaring. “I can’t stick the leaves back onto the stem, you know. Would you rather we look for some dryad fruit instead?”
Marcille looks like she wants to argue for a moment, but instead she chews resolutely on the inside of her mouth and resolves to fetch the mortar and pestle to grind the sorrel into green paste. Falin tucks a leaf into her mouth before Marcille can grind them all down, and it dries her tongue and sticks to her palate, but it’s not too sour. A little fruity and herbaceous, even, like lemon balm.
The rest of the soup comes together quickly, and they sit around the covered pot listening to it burble and mumble, at least a full hour before the flavors come together enough to eat. Marcille pulls her stool behind Falin’s, the legs screeching against the floorboards, and then tucks her fingers into her hair, parting it into two short sections to make of it a little braid. It’s not long enough to make into a ropelike plait, the way Marcille did before she had to trim her hair as short as it is now, but she coils it into a polite tail, getting it out of Falin’s eyes with her clever fingers.
It’s strange. She doesn’t have the energy to care for her own hair, or, more correctly, the desire to, but Marcille doesn’t seem to mind at all when it comes to Falin’s hair.
“It’s softer now,” she says under her breath. “Like -- oh, hold still, you have a twig here.”
Falin holds very still as Marcille unwinds the stick from her hair, and then finally, without as much as a tug on her scalp, she fishes it out and hands it for Falin to hold onto. Falin brandishes it like a wand until Senshi squints at it and declares it to be a stick from a bay laurel. He plucks it clean of the leaves, which he gives a rudimentary rinse to before depositing in the pot to flavor the soup, and graciously returns to her a naked stick, which she is slightly less inclined to use as a magical locus.
The soup is a little sour after all, but also savory and rich, leaving her belly full despite the lack of protein. There are more than enough dusty beds in the castle for the lot of them, there’s no need to share like they used to, but Falin’s so cold these days, like she can’t quite get the chill of the ice out of her fingers unless she’s lying next to Marcille’s warm side. So somehow they always seem to fall into the same mattress. Falin falls asleep quickly that way, the gnawing hunger in her gut sated by Marcille’s steady breathing coming from the pillow next to hers, within an arm’s reach.
. . .
It’s… awkward with Shuro now.
It’s inevitable that they run into him frequently, where it be while out exploring or while learning the ropes of politics now that her brother’s the king. This time, it’s the former, and he’s out there already, traveling with his new -- or rather, old -- companions, save for Izutsumi.
“I hope he doesn’t come this way,” Laios says.
“He’s coming this way now,” Izutsumi says.
Chilchuck whistles through his teeth. “Jeez, look at him haul ass.”
Falin squints downrange at his party, even though she doesn’t really need to anymore, her eyesight’s sharper than it’s ever been. She feels like she could see the corners of the horizon if she strained her eyes enough. “Yeah, he’s really going. Should we leave?”
“He’s your ex,” Marcille says. Then, “Laios, he’s her ex, stop bristling.”
“We should leave,” Laios concludes, and turns halfway around before Falin can stop him.
“Too late,” Chilchuk says. “Incoming.”
At the last few steps, Shuro loses all momentum and comes to a meandering stop, looking down at his feet and then back up again. Then he puffs up like a game hen and steps right up to Marcille, of all people.
“It is great to see you,” he says, almost as stiff as Laios is. “How’s– the kingdom?”
“It’s great to see you too, Shuro.” Falin says. She gives him a very honest smile. It’s hard to stay distant from him, even now, and he’s gone to great lengths to help them from afar.
She’s more preoccupied, anyway, with him standing between her and Marcille.
Shuro looks at Falin and then back down at his feet. He looks defeated more so than anything else. She thinks he must have already come to terms with losing her entirely to death, and maybe feels a little wrong-footed, having lost her to circumstance, instead. She doesn’t imagine he’ll ask her for her hand in marriage again, even if he wants to. Maybe he doesn’t feel like he deserves to. Maybe he doesn’t want to. She certainly can’t say.
She did like him very much. He was, and still is, very handsome and very thoughtful. Even though she never loved him the way he loved her, she thinks she could’ve learned to love him that way, with enough time. He’s easy to like. Still, she doesn’t think a marriage between them would have worked, even if she hadn’t sprouted feathers and claws.
“I thought it might be nice if we traveled together for a stretch,” he offers, still looking down. “Just until we reach the castle again.”
“We’re not going to the castle right now,” Laios says. He pats his bag, laden down with artifacts and treasures. “We’re off to trade some of the excess wares. Did you know that running a kingdom costs a lot of money?”
In a rush, Shuro says, “I can give you money.”
“Please don’t --” Marcille starts.
“Yes, Shuro. Give us money,” Chilchuck says. Laios nods once, jaw clenched tight enough to crack walnuts.
In the end, they neither travel with Shuro, nor does he give them any money. They do, however, trade some of the wares for gold to start putting together a treasury, and pass some artifacts off to people who can better study them, and Falin finds beetle larvae to watch eat plants for an hour or two. She doesn’t even want to eat them very much, just enjoys their undulating motions, their cute little faces when they cut apart leaves with their mouthpieces and crunch them in happy mouthfuls.
That night, they don’t immediately go back to the castle, since they don’t have monsters to worry about with Laois’s curse, and Senshi wants to check out the new dungeon forming at the valley nearby the next morning. They make camp just ahead of the valley, and they sleep in their bedrolls around the smoldering embers of the fire. It’s a cooler night, and Marcille sets up her bedroll between Falin and Laios’s, though all of them sleep fairly close together to conserve warmth. Her brother is embarrassed about seeing Shuro again– he isn’t really sure if they’re friends these days, and that makes him itchy– but as soon as he lays his head down on his pillow, he goes right to sleep, leaving Marcille and Falin awake and looking at each other in the near-darkness.
When she thinks everyone else has gone to sleep, or at least everyone else is doing a good job pretending to be asleep, Marcille asks, “Would you really have married Shuro? If all of this hadn’t happened?”
Falin doesn’t really know who she’d be today if all of this hadn’t happened. So much has changed in the past few weeks, months. She doesn’t feel that different at all, but also like she can hardly remember who she was before. Did she start getting hungry when she took the place of the red dragon? Or was she always this hungry, and didn’t know it, the way your hand feels like someone else’s hand when you wake up after sleeping on it?
She looks across at the abstracted shapes of Marcille’s face in the dark. The wisps of her hair, a single line where her nose is, the simple bow of her lower lip. She had said before that the Winged Lion had eaten her desire to maintain her own hair, the part of her that wanted to look in the mirror and see her hair in a tidy braid. What was it like, to have your desires eaten? Falin is so hungry these days, she wants so much. She’d be a feast, really.
She says, “No, I don’t think I would have really married him. I don’t think he really would have been happy with me, I’m not that different now than I was before. There’s just more of it.”
“More of it?” Marcille says.
“More of it,” Falin says.
She makes a gesture with her hands that Marcille can’t even see in the dark, and isn’t sure herself what she means by it. What is there more of? She’s always loved the way Marcille smells, the way her friend’s shape fell against hers, their hands held together like a prayer, but now there’s more of it, or maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe there’s less of her to hold that want in. Maybe the bowl she’s held that love in got smaller, and it keeps pouring over, and she wants to put her teeth in Marcille’s neck and suck bruises, wants to hear what sounds she makes when she licks her ears, wants to taste the inside of her mouth. She wants to know what Marcille’s cunt smells like, wants to rub her face in that smell until it’s all she can sense, wants to make a soft nest of blankets and pillows and fuck Marcille in it until they both pass out.
She’s wanted that all in the past, but it’s never been so– ravenous.
. . .
The thing is– and please do not blush, she’s doing enough of that herself– the dragon Falin fused with, the dragon she was as a Chimera, had been, biologically, a male dragon. This includes all that can be expected with a male dragon, although she’s a little glad that she never had to deal with having hemipenes. Still, she’d had the sheath, with the testes and penis to match, and it’s not as though she’d had any opportunity to use them, but even now, there’s a sense that there used to be… well, something there that there isn’t anymore.
Which is not to say that she wants a cock hanging between her legs now. It seems like kind of a pain to handle, anyway. Dangling even when she wouldn’t be using it, getting her in trouble, at least when she’d been a Chimera, it’d been nice and tucked away when it wasn’t in use, which was all the time, more like an oversized clitoris in its hood, really.
It’s just that, sometimes, when she moves her hand between her legs at night, thinking about the scent gathering at Marcille’s nape, or the way her mouth looks so soft and her lips so well-cared for, the sudden, steely intensity she gets about the eyes sometimes, she’s aware that something isn’t there. She isn’t mourning it exactly, not the way she mourns her wings whenever the wind picks up and her feathers stand on end, wanting to join the birds in whirling flight, but she’s aware of it. That odd, distracting awareness keeps her from being able to finish most nights, and that’s a shame, because maybe that would tide over how hungry she feels whenever she catches sight of Marcille the way she is right now, washing herself in a cold spring.
They’ve been given a little bit of space, thankfully, the boys over at the other end of the spring, and getting Izutsumi to bathe in water will be a team effort they’ll handle lately, so she’s able to let her eyes linger. Marcille is facing away, bent at the waist to scrub at her legs, and Falin stares openly at the soft curve of her waist, the rolls of pale, bare skin and fat forming over her hips, the inviting shape of her ass and her pale thighs. Falin’s mouth waters, her pointed teeth feeling too big for her lips to fit over, made for biting.
It’s now that she feels like she could probably still have used that cock, actually. She wants to put her hands over Marcille’s hips, bend over so she can bite the back of her neck in a mating lock, and slide into her cunt from behind. She wouldn’t, not even if she still had the cursed thing, but she can entertain the thought. It feels so natural to, like it was what she was made to do, to fuck Marcille from behind like an animal, leave prints of her hands on her thighs and her lower belly, hear Marcille tell her how much she likes it, how good she’s fucking her, sighing and squeaking and making ridiculous Marcille noises until she comes on her cock.
Falin’s face must be as red as a berry right now. She splashes at her face with the cold water and scrubs at her eyes with it, like she could blur them again. Maybe her desire is so much harder to ignore now because of how much clearer she’s seeing everything. It might be much easier to compartmentalize how tantalizing Marcille smells and sounds if all she saw when she raised her eyes now was a sweet, smudgy shape and not… a very cute ass.
“Falin?” Marcille rises and turns at the waist to look at her. Rivulets run from her throat to her breasts. “Are you cold? You’re being very quiet.” She looks over her shoulder. “Is there a bug or something?”
They’re all on their own, now. What’s stopping her from bringing her mouth to Marcille? What’s stopping her from closing her teeth around those small, round tits, from sucking marks down to her navel, following that fine line of delicate yellow hair to the space between her thighs, from taking her clit between her lips and sucking?
“Definitely,” Falin says. “Don’t worry, it flew off. Do you want help with your hair?”
“ Please.”
Marcille wets her hair thoroughly before handing off the bar of soap and container of hair oil, one at a time. As she lathers in the soap, Marcille sighs and tips her weight back against her, so that her back presses the feathers on Falin’s chest flat, her head lolling back when Falin rubs at her scalp with the flat ends of her nails.
“Phew, you really needed that, huh,” she says. “Your scalp’s so dry.”
Marcille fusses. “Ugh, I just can’t bring myself to wash it more, I know it needs it. Every time I go to do it, it’s like I’m moving through a slow spell, it seems so boring and it takes forever. ”
Falin cups her hands over her forehead so that the water doesn’t run into her eyes when she rinses out the soap. She must be really enjoying it, because her eyes are shut and her mouth pouts a little open, even when she isn’t about to speak.
“I can do it for you more often, if you’d like.”
“Would you, really? I can help you with your leg feathers, if you’d like, but you’re so good at this.”
“Mmhm.”
Maybe, Falin thinks, as shameless as a dragon, if I do it well enough, she’ll let me wash everything else, too.
. . .
That night, rolling around in her bedroll, Falin dreams of flying, as high up as she’s able to before the air gets thin and she struggles to breathe it in. The wind flutters in her wings, and she smells live prey on it. She flies low, lower, until the ground solidifies beneath her, the vast array of green and blue turning into grass and trees and winding rivers. Motion catches her eye, a herd of deer running from tree cover to tree cover, and when they cross an open field, she narrows her attention to one straggling behind, and stretches out her talons.
It’s not even a fun challenge. The deer leaps this way, and that way, but she’s coming from up high, and is too large and too dangerous to escape. She catches it in her claws and breaks its neck before it can begin to kick and fight. Warm blood runs down her claws. She brings it close to her chest, and winds a hasty flight towards her nest.
Her nest is in a high clifftop, a cave carved into a sheer face and padded with sheep’s wool and cotton and branches, soft and reinforced to protect her and her mate when they’re asleep inside, and to keep the heat from escaping during the night. She alights in it, careful not to disturb the nest or drop her prey. When she comes inside, she is a chimera, still, but she is also a tallman, in the strange way of dreams, so that she doesn’t oversize Marcille, who is sleeping inside of the nest, anymore than she already does in her waking life.
Marcille wakes up, but doesn’t say anything. She’s very naked, like she was when they bathed before, and that feels very correct to the structure of the dream. Falin brings the deer carcass over, and it is still warm in her hands. She tears it apart, sinew by long-stretching sinew, unwinding the flesh into bite-sized morsels, and Marcille sits back in exactly the way she absolutely would not if this were real, and lets herself be fed fresh, red mouthfuls right out of Falin’s blood-wet hands. The raw, tender meats of the internal organs, the soft, best cuts of the carcass. Her mouth and chin and the stretch from her throat down to her breasts runs red with blood, still warm and alive, and this all feels very natural, very right to do.
After she feeds Marcille to her fill, the carcass is done away with, again in the way of dreams. There’s no messy cleanup, no throwing the remains out of the nest, nothing like that, it just goes away and is out of mind. Marcille lies back against the soft part of the nest and opens her legs, beckons Falin to come over with her smiling red mouth and her lidded green eyes.
Falin falls on all fours between her legs, to press her face where Marcille is hot and fragrant, where the smell of her body is impossible to ignore. She laps at her cunt messily, licking with the flat of her tongue without plan or intent, just wanting to get to the heart of that scent. Marcille breathes an aching groan; Falin sucks her clit, rolls it with her tongue mercilessly. Everything goes hot and rippling like a fever dream. Marcille’s fingers pull at her hair until she comes up to bite at her throat with her sharp teeth, hard enough to draw blood.
Marcille’s hand runs between their bodies all the way down to Falin’s unsheathed cock, grasping it too-tightly in her hand and bringing it to her entrance. There’s a wordless beat, and then Falin pushes inside her, thrusting into the blinding heat of her cunt.
It’s everything she’s always dreamed of, as hot as the skin regrown by a healing spell and so tight it hurts. She fucks Marcille inexpertly, rutting her hips in short, rabbiting thrusts, but who cares? She’s fucking her exactly like she’s supposed to, stupid and thoughtless and messy in a nest, mating like animals in heat.
She just wants to get deeper in, get as deep into Marcille as Marcille’s been inside her, counting her bones and redressing them with flesh, remaking Falin with her own hands and substance like an artist. She wants to know Marcille that implicitly, that wordlessly, wants to melt into Marcille’s skin like a healing spell. She’s so close to it, if she could just get deeper in–
Falin wakes up wrestling her blankets into a knot, a pooling wetness between her legs, and her underclothes completely unsalvageable.
. . .
“Senshi,” she asks him over the pot of stew they were working on, a few days after that. “Do you think craving raw meat is a sign of illness?”
He says, “Hm. Keep stirring.” With a paring knife, he chops potatoes and adds them to the pot while she stirs all the way to the bottom of the pot, scraping to keep the stew from burning. “It could be an iron deficiency. How’s your blood?”
“Red. It doesn’t seem any thinner than usual, and when I checked for vitamin deficiencies, no healing spells would take. I don’t feel weak or dizzy.”
“Is that so?”
Lying on the floor next to the fire splayed out on her stomach, Izutsumi says, “You seemed pretty weak and dizzy when Marcille checked you for ticks last night.”
Falin would never kick a cat, that’d be cruel.
Having finished with the potatoes, Senshi takes the big wooden spoon from Falin’s hands and stirs the pot himself, the muscles of his arms straining with the force of his long, methodical turns. “Falin, you’re a growing girl–” he starts.
“Oh, I’ve had sex,” she says. She flaps her hands at him. “And I’m a cleric! You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh!”
“Coulda fooled me,” Izutsumi says.
“I’ve known Marcille for a very long time. Since I was only a kid, really. I know how I feel about her. But I think that she still looks at me and sees that kid.”
“As opposed to?”
A monster, she doesn’t say.
When she doesn’t answer, Senshi sends her to the other table to chop herbs for finishing the stew with. She pulls leaves from their stems and rolls them into bundles in her fingers, then slices them thinly. They smell so much more fragrant than they ever had when she’d been only a tallman. Curiously, she touches the pad of her thumb to the blade of the knife, just enough to make a spot of blood well up. She brings it up to her mouth and presses her tongue to it.
It tastes fine. Good, even. Not at all watery or runny. Good, hot blood.
After depositing the herbs in the stew, Senshi tastes for spices a few times, adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that, before ladling the first, piping hot bowl and handing it to Falin. It smells mouthwatering, and although it isn’t what her mouth craves, it’s enough to make her forget, for a moment.
“Tell you what,” Senshi says. “She’s up with his highness and Kabru, talking about some trade deal, or something else important.” He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. “I’ll get the boys to come down for their meals so I can tell Laios when he’s full, and so Kabru won’t strangle him when Laios begs for his portion. How about you bring Marcille’s bowl up to her and tell them supper’s on?”
The bowl is so hot and steamy in her hands that she feels a little disappointed that she can’t eat it herself, but the dream still rolling freshly in her mind has her nodding. Eating Senshi’s cooking is one of the many beautiful things about being alive and part of the world again, but it cannot surpass the sudden kick she gets whenever she thinks about feeding Marcille, about taking care of her however way she can.
Her fingers are a little sensitive from the heat of the bowl by the time she’s made it to the big wooden door where the three of them are, especially the stinging cut on her thumb. She moves the bowl to her left hand and knocks with her right, then opens the door slowly when she hears Marcille’s chipper, “It’s open!”
Inside of the room, Laios and Marcille have their heads bent over a sheath of papers while Kabru sits in a chair, head in his hands. His curly hair flops over his piercing eyes dramatically, and he looks like a statue of a defeated warrior.
“But in volume six, General Hareus reveals that Uriale’s mother wasn’t just a peasant tallman, but a–”
“Senshi says dinner’s ready,” Falin announces. Once Marcille’s started about the big volume six twist, there’s no stopping her.
“Darn,” Kabru says. “I thought you might be here to kill me.”
“Only if Senshi made poison herb stew for dinner. And even then, I have a great spell for food poisoning that I’ve been eager to try out on a real person.”
Marcille graciously takes the bowl from Falin’s hands, her fingers brushing past Falin’s sore fingertips so that their knuckles bump together like a greeting. “As long as that’s real meat stew and not monster, I’ll risk it. Ah, real food. To think I’ve gone my whole life eating normal food without ever being grateful that it wasn’t made out of slime.”
Laios looks briefly heartbroken. Falin knocks her shoulder against his, and he smiles up at her again, looking so happy to see her there, the same way he does every day, that all is forgiven.
She says, “It’s only for Marcille,” and the heartbroken expression makes a return. “Senshi wants you downstairs so that you can’t bully Kabru for his share.”
“Like I’d give it to him.”
“He really thinks I could?” Laios brightens at the prospect. “Okay, I’ll go down. Marcille?”
“I’ll have mine up here, I want to finish up some of my notes first.”
“Alright, but don’t stay up too late, it’s getting dark. You’ll have to tell me the rest of volume six another time, I’ll probably turn in after dinner.”
“Lazy,” Kabru says, but he follows Laios out the door and down the stairs for their share of talk and stew.
That leaves her and Marcille in the room alone, with one bowl of stew. Falin digs around in her loose robe pockets until she fishes out a wooden spoon and offers it to her.
Marcille goggles at her. “Aren’t you going to go down and get a bowl?”
“Nah, I’ll sit with you, eating alone stinks.”
She watches Marcille twirl the wooden spoon in her hand, notices the way her deft fingers move and come to settle on the neck of the spoon. “It’s a pretty big bowl just for me,” she says. “I bet we can share it.”
It’s a bit like being in school again, like whenever she brought nuts and odd fruits that she’d found in the market over to Marcille’s bed and cajoled her into trying each one, first separately and then in combination with each other, but it’s also not like that at all. Marcille takes the first bite, blowing on the spoon before slipping it between her lips. When Falin eats her spoonful, she’s struck by the deliciousness of the stew, how tender the meat is and how well-spiced the vegetables are, how the ingredients come together in perfect balance, but also by the knowledge that the spoon had just been in Marcille’s mouth, is still warmth with it. She’s aware, in a way that she’d never been aware of when they were at school, eating fruit, that Marcille is looking at her mouth just as intently as she’d been looking at hers.
Halfway through the bowl, Marcille’s hand alights on her thigh, and stays there tentatively. Her fingertips twitch, as though she’s about to dart it back any second. But she doesn’t. She keeps it there, just above Falin’s knee until they’ve finished the bowl and scraped it clean, Falin dipping her fingers along the bowl and bringing the remains of the liquid up to her mouth to lick it clean.
“Are you still hungry?”
“Maybe,” Falin says. “Do you remember the rabbit curry, from when I was a Chimera?”
“The one we trapped you with?” Marcille sounds a bit bewildered that she brought it up.
“It was really good, though, so warm and filling. I was so hungry all the time, and remembering it is so foggy, like when you take a nap while hungry and wake up confused and angry.”
“Is that how you feel now?”
“No,” Falin says. “Yes, maybe. Not angry. A little confused, but not foggy. Everything is so clear.” She lays her hand over Marcille’s and plays idly with her fingers, lifting it so that she can trace the lines across her clever palm. “And I’m still hungry.”
“We could get more stew, if you want.”
Falin says, “No. Let’s stay here.”
There is a long moment where neither of them do or say anything, it’s just Falin holding Marcille’s hand and Marcille holding Falin’s gaze. Then Marcille drops the wooden spoon in the empty bowl and brings her other hand up to Falin’s jaw, cupping it as if to hold it in place as she brings their mouths together in a kiss.
It’s– a bit strange. Marcille’s mouth doesn’t taste exactly like she’d imagined in her dreams, not like hot skin and salt and blood, but mostly like the smokey flavor of the stew and a little vegetal from the herby paste she cleans her teeth with. Marcille is as fastidious as a cat, it’s not surprise that her mouth tastes so fresh and clean, but her lips are soft and plush. Her beeswax balm doesn’t taste like anything, but it makes her lips slip over Falin’s without any friction. Are Falin’s own lips chapped? Does it bother Marcille that they’re chapped? Marcille’s hand at Falin’s jaw nudges her slightly to tilt her head a little, enough for the kiss to deepen, for Falin to slide her tongue along Marcille’s, just a little bit, and the contact is so electric she breaks the kiss to pant for air.
Marcille’s green eyes are half-lidded, the pupils blown out like blots of ink, and her hands fist and unclench in the fabric of her dress. “Was that alright? I should’ve asked, but it looked like– you wanted that, right?”
“Mm, mmhm.” Falin swallows. How much of Marcille can she swallow up until she’s sated? Until the pit of her stomach goes warm and full? She’s going to find out if it takes her the rest of her life. “Yes. Again?”
“Yeah, let’s– again.”
They meet in the middle, more messily this time, more frantic, Falin’s hands coming up to Marcille’s yellow hair and tangling it, making a wreck of her braid. Marcille’s hands fall on her shoulders, one arm coming around her neck to get closer, her fingers digging into the collar of feathers at her neck, the other framing her face, her thumb landing on the joint of her jaw. They kiss with their mouths open, like maybe Marcille wants to eat her alive as much as Falin wants to get inside of her, Marcille’s tongue in her mouth, tracing her sharper teeth, laving at her own tongue, tasting what Falin tastes. It’s not enough. She wants to get deeper in, wants to invite Marcille inside her chest, wants to climb into Marcille at least as deep as the Winged Lion got to go, wants to know what it’s like to lap at Marcille’s wants and wishes with the flat of her tongue .
“Ah, ah,” Marcille pants. A drop of blood runs from her lower lip, where Falin’s sharper canines nicked the skin.
Falin can’t help it. She catches Marcille’s lip between her own and tugs on it, laves at it, laps up that spot of blood and licks it off her teeth. It tastes like her own blood did. Good, clean blood, hot and alive.
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry, that was– do you want to stop?”
Marcille’s hand comes over her mouth, covering it, her eyes open wide with shock. But she looks– she doesn’t look like she hadn’t liked it.
“No, that was. It’s just a lot, I’m alright. Is that what you want?”
Falin closes her eyes and rubs at her own face. “Maybe? I just want to– it’s so hard to say what I want to do. I just want you. I want you so much, all the time.”
Marcille titters a half-deranged little laugh, her eyes welling up. She says, “Yeah. Me too, also. Falin, I did some really insane stuff because I wanted you so badly. I would do it again, too.”
“I know.”
“I just,” Marcille dabs at her eyes with the heel of her hand, pushing away tears. “Can we go somewhere else? Your brother is going to come up here soon, and I am not asking him for permission to court you.”
“Ugh, no. Come on, let’s go to my room.”
. . .
It’s like sneaking back into the dorms after having snuck a couple drinks, darting around the halls into the room of the castle that Falin claimed. It doesn’t really feel like her bedroom yet, just a room she sleeps in and puts her things down in between hiking and studying and meals, but when she creaks the door open and tugs Marcille in by the hand, it feels like her room. When Marcille sits on the edge of the bed and starts kicking off her shoes and socks, and Falin pulls her long, comfortable robes over her head and throws them in a heap at the corner of the room, it feels like her corner of the room and her bed that she tips Marcille back onto, mouthing at her neck and pulling her dress down so she can suck bruises into her decolletage.
It's thoughtless and instinctive. Marcille’s hands fisting at the back of her neck hard enough that white feathers shed in her hands, Falin breaking apart just long enough to haul Marcille’s dress up over her head so she could bite at her small breasts, kiss her navel and the pale, sparse hair trailing down from it. Pulls down the loose white trousers she wears beneath so eagerly that she hears a seam split. She rubs her face across the surface of Marcille’s thighs, cupping the back of her knee with the palm of her hand so that she can part her legs and fit herself between them, kneeling beside the bed on the bare stone floor.
She’d done this once before with Shuro, and a handful of other stuff with girls from classes and other adventurers, but it’d been different from whatever she’s doing now. She hadn’t loved Shuro, as easy as he is to like, but she hadn’t needed to love him to enjoy sex with him, especially with how gentle and sweetly handsome he’d been, so careful with her. He’d guided her so kindly and with such patience, even though he’d basically been as inexperienced as she’d been, red up to his ears the whole time. He’d kissed between her legs so carefully, lifting his head to ask if she was alright, if she was enjoying this, and his mouth had been hot and wet on her cunt, so much that she’d come the first time on his face before he moved above her and slid inside in slow, rocking increments. His faces and noises had been sweet and endearing, little squeaks and grunts and attempts at stoicism, and he’d been good, if quick to finish. And in the aftermath, he held her in his arms and helped her clean up and asked if she liked it, and she had. He was very easy to like.
But this isn’t like that. Kneeling between Marcille’s legs, she feels like she’s getting away with something, like she’d stolen something that she has to eat quickly before someone can notice she’s taken it.
Marcille looks down at her, raised up on her elbows on the edges of the bed, and she asks, “Falin, are you alright? You look a little scared. Do you want to slow down?”
“No,” she says. She doesn’t want to slow down at all. She wants to do this forever. “I love you.”
Marcille says, “Oh.” Then, “Oh! Oh, Falin.” She clambers up, still more or less naked, and wraps herself up around Falin’s upper torso in a clinging hug, her legs wrapping around Falin’s chest. “Oh, I love you too! You know that, right? You know that I love you?”
“I know,” she says. She does know that, though the angle of that love is new. “I’ve loved you for a really long time, Marcille.”
“That’s okay, come here, come here.”
Falin rises, burying her face in Marcille’s chest. They clamber onto the bed, pushing aside the blankets and covers so that they can entwine together, skin-to-feather-and-skin, Marcille’s hands tangling in Falin’s hair. The feeling of her bare legs is a little muted by the feathers on Falin’s, but it’s more than enough to lose herself in.
“I’ve loved you,” Marcille says, “since you came back to me, and asked me to be an adventurer. It was so stupid. I hadn’t seen you in years, and you’d grown up so much, and you were so beautiful, Falin. You’re so beautiful.”
“I’ve loved you since you were taller than me.”
Marcille is quiet for a moment, and then says, “OH. That long?!”
Falin nods into her chest, comforting herself on the smooth skin of her breasts.
“That’s… wow. That’s a really long time, Falin. Why didn’t you say anything? You agreed to marry Shuro…”
“It didn’t seem fair, wanting so much from you. I’d have you my whole life, and then I’d die, and you’d be alone again.”
There are very few things Falin can imagine being worse than being left alone. She’s a coward that way. A coward who sent her party away because she couldn’t stand to see them die, couldn’t bear the thought of them leaving her, so decided to leave first. It wouldn’t be fair to ask Marcille to outlive her a second time.
Marcille strokes her hair, moving it away from her face so that they can look at each other. She’s so lovely, her rounded ears low and her eyes shining. “It’s not too much,” she says. “It’s not too much at all. Whatever you can give me is enough, Falin, it’s more than enough.”
“I want to be by your side for as long as possible. Even if it means doing illegal magic, I don’t care. I want it.”
“We can talk about that later.”
“And I want to eat you out,” it comes out in a big, half-coherent rush. “So fucking much. I want to feel you come on my face, I want to know what you taste like when you finish. I want it so much I feel half-starved all the time.”
Marcille’s face goes pink all the way down to the tops of her breasts. Haltingly, she says, “You’re allowed.”
Almost unconsciously, Falin’s hips twitch and roll, rubbing her groin against Marcille’s legs, her shorts bunching up between her thighs. “I want to be inside you,” she says, rutting harder. “I wish I still had a cock sometimes, I want to feel you around it. I want to feel how tight you are when you finish.”
“Ah, oh, you’re–” Marcille looks like she’s struggling with what part to say first, one of her hands landing on Falin’s ass and squeezing. “You’re such a good girl, Falin. But you know that wouldn’t work, right? If you were still a dragon? That’d never fit inside of me, that’s insane.”
Briefly, Falin entertains the dynamics of that image and feels so turned on she may pass out. She says, “Guh.”
“No. No! Not even a little bit, Falin, that’s– we’re not doing that, don’t even think about it.”
Maybe if she just keeps rolling her hips against Marcille’s legs the way that she is right now, she could finish in her shorts, just to the sound of Marcille’s voice and her soft body against hers, the warm smell of her skin, and the thought of Marcille’s tight cunt wrapped around her cock.
“But,” Marcille says. “If you really want that. I know some magic, some really weird, experimental magic, that we can look into. Don’t look at me like that! It’s a lot harder to make a temporary change than a permanent one. But there are,” Marcille’s blush, somehow, grows even deeper, “stores we can go into. With toys. Some magical, some not. There’s… things we can try. That might help with how you’re feeling.”
“Do you want that?”
Marcille opens her mouth and looks simultaneously like many thoughts and no thoughts at all are running through her head. “Yeah. I do want that. In the meantime.”
She takes Falin’s hand in her own, and brings their combined hands down to her unclothes, a small scrap of fabric that’s damp at the front already. Without removing them, she slides Falin’s hand under the fabric, guides it down, past her clit, and between her folds, to the unbelievable warmth of her cunt.
With her free hand, Falin pushes at the hem of her smallclothes. “Can I look at you?”
Marcille gives a tight nod, holding her self-control between her teeth.
She has to part a little bit from Marcille, stop rolling her hips against her knee, so that she can slide the flimsy fabric down and reveal the soft, yellow hairs dusting the junction of Marcille’s thighs. When Marcille shifts on her side a little, crooks her leg at the knee to give Falin more room to look and touch, she can see the pearl of her clit, peeking furtively out of its hood, the inviting pink of her inner lips. Her mouth waters, and she licks the sharp points of her canine teeth.
“Come up here,” Marcille says, and palms Falin’s ass until she squirms ungracefully up on the mattress so that they are face to face.
A little less than that, actually– Marcille leans in until she can rest her face on the long, thick feathers on Falin’s collar, but it leaves them pelvis-to-pelvis, so that Marcille can arrange them how she’d like. She urges Falin to brace her hand with her hips, so that her thrusts have the weight of her hips behind them.
“Marcille,” she asks. “Have you thought about this before?”
Marcille squinches her face. “Shut up.”
Tentatively, Falin rolls her hips once, pushing her hand up with the motion, and her fingers skate across Marcille’s cunt in a skimming, exploratory thrust. The tips of her fingers glance past her entrance, and slide up to graze her clit. Marcille’s breath leaves her in a sudden gasp, her expression growing slack in surprised pleasure.
It’s not quite what she’d dreamed of, but the resemblance is there, and the reality is far more intoxicating.
Marcille’s hand finds hers again, brings her down to her tight entrance. “Easy,” she says. “Gentle, at first. Then harder. Start with one finger.”
“Is that how you touch yourself?”
Sheepishly, Marcille says, “Your hands are bigger than mine.”
Falin starts with one finger. She doesn’t push in at once, Marcille’s cunt feels so narrow that just pushing in feels like it’d hurt, even with one finger. She traces her entrance with the flat of her middle finger, savors the added dexterity that fingers give that a cock wouldn’t allow, enjoys the softness, the slick heat, then sinks in the first knuckle with a slow rock of her hips.
“Ah, that’s good. Keep going.”
She pushes deeper. Marcille lets go of her hand and moves it up, instead, to circle her own clit. Falin tries to commit the side-to-side motions she makes to memory so that she can imitate them with her tongue when the time comes. Easier than she expected, her finger slides in to the last knuckle, enveloped in tight heat. On the next thrust in, she makes a beckoning gesture with her finger, rubbing at Marcille’s front wall the way she usually does when she’s touching herself.
“Ah!” Marcille’s hand on her ass tightens, feeling less like she’s grabbing for the fun of it, and more to hang on for dear life. “Like that! Good girl, Falin, give it to me.”
“Another?”
“Yeah, just– slowly.”
She’s so wet and open for her now that the press is easy, but she pushes in carefully with her middle and ring fingers anyway, sinks in sweet and slow and watches Marcille’s face the whole time. Her eyes fall shut, her mouth open and panting, and a shudder runs through her when Falin bottoms out.
She finds a rhythm quickly, pushing in and out while Marcille, with increasingly fumbling hands, rubs at her clit. She’s a lot rougher with herself than Falin expected, and it makes her feel a little bit insane. After one hard thrust, earning a hoarse moan from Marcille, Falin leans down and bites at her shoulder, putting her teeth in just hard enough to leave marks but not draw blood, and the moan tapers off into a wobbly, sweetly loose noise, something between a whimper and an animal cry of pain. Before she can unlatch from her shoulder, Marcille’s free hand tangles in her hair and keeps her there.
Breathlessly, she urges, “Keep going, harder. Give me another finger.”
Even with as wet as she is and how easy the slide of her fingers in and out has grown, it’s a press to fit her index finger in, and she feels almost absurdly big and obtrusive inside of Marcille’s cunt. Falin’s fingers really are so much bigger than hers, and her cunt stretches around them, hot and tight. Her fevered mind conjures the image of her whole hand inside of Marcille, and her hips rabbit in their next thrust, stuttering. She wonders if she can come just from this.
“Falin, Falin! Harder! Good girl, fuck me harder!”
This time, she does bite hard enough to draw blood, and it's that that gives her the drive to keep thrusting harder into Marcille, even as her abdominal muscles burn and her wrist aches and her fingers cramp. The taste of Marcille’s blood on her tongue again, the salt and iron, the feeling of Marcille inside her as she’s inside Marcille, fingers on her bones even as she fucks her deep and hard. It’s another deep, breathless thrust, a second– and then Marcille’s voice breaks on a scream, her cunt rhythmically tightening around Falin’s fingers like she could draw her even deeper.
The only thing in the world that could draw Falin away from her mouthful of Marcille’s shoulder is that she wants to watch Marcille’s face as she falls apart, and it’s just as she’d imagined it. Her eyes shut tightly, tears beading at the corners, so beautifully undone that it’s only real by its imperfections. A couple of stray hairs have caught in her mouth, and she spits them out messily, wiping at her mouth to get them out of her face even mid-orgasm. Falin loves her so much her heart feels like it might roll out of her mouth.
Instead, she keeps fucking her through the orgasm, slowing her thrusts until its just a slow rock in and out, and then not at all once Marcille’s hand catches hers and holds it there, keeping it inside of her, motionless, like she just wants her close for a while longer. She falls slack, lying on the mattress on her side in a boneless heap, one of her legs thrown over Falin’s hip, dead to the world if it weren’t for her panting and the occasional twitch of her toes.
“Good?”
“Mmm,” Marcile hums. “Really good.”
“Can I have my hand back?”
“Mmm. No.”
Falin laughs. She waits a little while longer, but eventually her fingers get uncomfortably numb and she has to gently pull them out, rubbing at Marcille’s side soothingly as she tugs them free. The pads of her fingers have gone wrinkly and they shine with moisture. She brings them up to her lips and laps up the wetness. It tastes like skin, salty and a little funky, even a little bitter at the end, and she drinks it up to the last drop, then leans in and finally nuzzles the back of Marcille’s neck, buries her face in the source of the smell that had been driving her insane for weeks. It's as good as she imagined. Better, even.
She holds Marcille for a long while. With her in her arms, she doesn’t feel like a tallman, or really like a Chimera, just like Falin Touden, exactly where she’s supposed to be and exactly what she’s supposed to be, holding the girl she loves. It’s pretty great stuff.
Eventually, Marcille raises her sleepy face and blinks up at her. “Hey.”
“Hi. We’re lying in the wet patch. We should probably clean that up if you want to nap.”
Marcille wrinkles her nose, then pushes up. “Nap? Oh no. Come here, I want to touch you.”
Despite looking thoroughly spent, Marcille marshals her energies with an impressive second wind, sitting up in the mess of wet sheets they’ve made and grabbing at Falin’s hips.
Somehow, in the whole process, it’d never occurred to Falin that Marcille might want to touch her too. She isn’t opposed to the idea, not in the least– she doesn’t need to come, really, feels like she already has in some ways, but the tight heat between her legs and in her lower stomach is really quite intense– it’s just that she’d always imagined this being a little one-sided. She hadn’t expected Marcille to be selfish or anything, only that, in her dreams, Marcille always laid back and allowed her to explore, to play, to eat her fill, and allowed her to take care of her. It never occurred to Falin that taking care of Falin herself might be just as important to Marcille as taking care of Marcille had been to Falin.
So when Marcille leans in, elbows up to Falin and presses herself close, all Falin can really do is lean back and let herself be swept off her feet.
Marcille presses her mouth first to Falin’s feathered chest, getting herself a mouthful of feather dust. Falin says, “You don’t have to do that. It’s a bit– strange.”
“It’s you,” Marcille says. “I don’t mind.”
To Falin, it doesn’t seem like Marcille only not minds. She pushes up Falin’s heavy breasts in both her hands, cupping them and thumbing at the bare skin around her areolas, burying her face in the softer feathers of her sternum and pressing kisses there. She circles Falin’s nipples with her thumbs, then lifts her face to put her mouth on one of them, sucking a biting kiss that sends electric pulses down to Falin’s core. She does the same with the other nipple, sucking and biting, pulling the skin taut between her small, blunt teeth and then releasing it with a wet pop.
Moving away from her breasts, Marcille spits out a small feather. “ Pteh. Pteh. ”
“See? What did I tell you.”
“It’s a bit strange,” Marcille admits. “But I like it. You’re so soft.” She flutters the feathers on Falin’s chest, then traces her hands up to her upper arms, squeezing the muscles there. “Not here, though. You’ve gotten really strong, too.”
Falin flexes. The feathers rise on her arms, fluttering like a preening pigeon. Marcille laughs, her nose wrinkling. She kisses either of Falin’s hands, then her throat, then meets her lips in a slow, sweet kiss.
“I like you. Every part of you.”
Falin squirms. She must be very red now, she’s never been good at taking compliments.
“My good girl. Lean back for me.”
Falin lies back on the bed obediently, and Marcille continues trailing kisses down her front, only occasionally stopping to spit out another feather. She traces them down Falin’s stomach, squeezing her soft sides and nosing in around her navel, then even further down, smoothing her hands lower to either of Falin’s legs, straightening them out along the mattress so that she can tug her shorts down her thighs and then fully off, throwing them into the clothing heap in the corner of the room. Between her legs, Marcille pulls her hair back into a loose knot, her braid having long come undone, and mouths at the down feathers around Falin’s noise, nosing at the newly-revealed skin and looking up at Falin with blazing eyes.
Her hot mouth finds Falin’s clit– Falin thinks it’s a little bigger than it was before she’d been a Chimera, but if it is, it’s by the faintest of degrees– and Marcille circles it delicately with the sharp point of her tongue. She teases her, licking a broad, indirect stripe across her cunt, carefully avoiding her clit to instead gently kiss her hood, then back down to lap at her entrance.
Falin brings her hand down, then hovers it, unsure of where it can be safely laid, and Marcille catches it with one of her own, kisses the flat of her palm, then interlaces their fingers, lying their combined hands on Falin’s lower stomach. She says, “Tell me what you like, Falin.”
“I like you.”
Marcille huffs a laugh. She fits her lips around Falin’s clit and sucks so, so gently.
“Ah! I like that. Oh, I like your mouth. You have such a lovely mouth, Marcille. Ah!”
A harder suck, just a little too much, bordering on pain. Falin’s tightens her grip on Marcille’s hand, her abs flexing. The feathers on her arms and legs flare out like a fluttering bird.
“A little less, ah, yes, like that. Marcille. Oh, oh, Marcille, I like you so much.”
A sweet kiss to her mons pubis. “Can I touch inside you? Do you like that?”
“Mm, yes. Please.”
She expects fingers, and startles with a whimpering cry when Marcille enters her with the tip of her tongue instead, fucking in and out in maddening little thrusts. She feels like a drawn string, like a spell held just on the edge of being cast, all of the touches not being enough and then too much. She shudders, rocking her hips up against Marcille’s mouth, and if it weren’t for their combined hands there on her lower stomach, she’d break her nose.
“Be good,” Marcille warns. “Be a good girl for me, Falin. Stay there.”
Trembling with the effort of staying still, Falin flattens her hips to the mattress and stays put, even as Marcille continues to fuck her with her tongue, then brings her mouth back up to suck her clit mercilessly.
It’s a bit like being resurrected under Marcille’s hands again, or what little of it she can remember clearly. Mostly, she recalls the sensations. With normal raise dead spells, you just pop back up, like breaking the surface of water, but with Marcille’s unlawful work, it’d been so slow and languorous, like waking up from sleep. She’d come back into her body in ebbs, first her sense of touch, then her hearing, then her sight, so that she felt the touch of Marcille’s spellwork before she’d felt anything else, the careful work of her hands pulling her back bone by bloody bone, inch of flesh by inch of flesh, wiry nervous systems reconnected one by one. It wasn’t like she’d been under the effect of a spell, but like she’d been the spell itself, worked into being by Marcille’s mouth and hands and labor alone.
That’s how she feels now. Not entirely, but a little bit, like all she is, depends on the work of Marcille’s tongue laving playfully at her entrance, the suction of her lips around her clit, her free hand holding her labia apart to give herself space. Like if she stops moving her mouth, stops kissing, stops fucking her with her mouth, Falin will trip back into the warm space between consciousness and unexistance. She’s not afraid, though. She feels so good under Marcille’s exacting attention. Her muscles tense and relax, and pleasure rolls up from her lower belly like an overfilled bucket. She trusts Marcille so implicitly, she has Marcille’s name written on the inside of her body, it feels so natural to fall into her hands, so easy to relax into them and let her play her body like an instrument she’s mastered. It’s all so natural.
Someone is crying out, high and distant and in wordless, animalistic pleasure. It takes a moment for Falin to recognize her own voice, she’s so deep in it. Then, all at once, she’s back in her body, bright and alive and as electric as a rippling thunderbolt. Marcille tongues at her clit too hard, too roughly, but just roughly enough, just what she needs, and she rolls her hips up to rut against her face, once, twice, three times, and then releases with a roar.
The fall back to earth afterwards is surprisingly gentle. Falin unwinds, her limbs leaden, her breaths so deep and full that they make her stomach rise and fall rhythmically. Marcille guides her through the aftershocks, lapping at her cunt as her hips twitch and make half-hearted thrusts. Her muscles ache pleasantly, expended to their last.
Finally, Marcille comes up. Her hair is an utter wreck, and her mouth wet from the chin down with Falin’s own come, a few fluffy white down feathers stuck to her lip. Falin laughs at her, then asks, “Kiss me?”
Marcille complies. She lifts herself up and deposits herself on Falin’s chest, making her huff an involuntary, “Oof.”
Then Marcille presses their mouths together without any grace or intent, just contact and affection and the joy of proximity. Falin tastes herself on Marcille’s lips and her tongue, her within Marcille and Marcille within her, like a stupid snake eating its own tail. She sighs contentedly, so happy in the filthy nest of tangled blankets and wet sheets and loose feathers that she could die here and be perfectly happy.
But she doesn’t die there. Because that would be rude to Marcille. And because, in the morning, there will be more kissing, and more fucking, and probably pancakes after that. And there will always be more more rocks to pull up to see what lives under them, more pleasures to chase, more bright horizons to learn about, and most of all, there will be Marcille to hold in her arms, to discover those bright new horizons with, and to show cool bugs to whenever Falin finds them.