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“How does that feel?” Marcille asks. She brings her still-bleeding thumb up to her mouth and sucks it clean. “Too tight? Too loose?”
Falin gives the toy an exploratory wiggle up and down. It’s hard, almost unbelievably so, with a wide, clumsy-looking glans and the approximation of a grossly throbbing vein along the shaft. Fortunately, it is a reasonable color, similar enough to her skin tone, with a purplish-pink head. When she jogs her hips, it bobs rhythmically at a slight delay, and the movement feels good, like palming her clit through her bloomers while reading Marcille’s letters on the ship had felt. Good, but not distractingly so. Still. Something doesn’t quite feel right.
“It’s a bit…” she fumbles for the right word. “Sproingy, isn’t it? It’s very out there.”
“This was the magic shop’s most popular model. Maybe I should’ve gotten the medium? Or the small? I would’ve gotten more than one for you to try on, but they were really expensive, Falin, and it felt weird to spend money from the treasury on… this.”
As though to demonstrate her point, Marcille brushes her hand across the surface of the phallus, circling her hand in a loose fist. It’s the same hand she used to draw the sigils on Falin’s lower belly, the one she’d cut to provide the blood for the spell. Just the sight of that hand around Falin’s cock would be enough to make her shudder, but the sudden burst of sensory input from her movement nearly bowls her over.
It’s not right, not quite, but wow, does it feel good. Falin’s eyes roll back and her mouth falls open on a punched-out moan.
“Oh!” Marcille squeaks. “You like that? That was good?”
“Mm– mmhmm.” Falin nods furiously.
“That’s good! So you can feel it when I do this?” With the glint of scientific curiosity in her eye, Marcille tightens her fist around the shaft of the cock and pumps her hand up and down.
The rough dryness of her palm registers almost as urgently as the explosive pleasure of her movements, the sensation soft and uncomfortable at the same time, like biting into the crumbly shortcakes she’d been given in the Eastern Archipelago. She bites on the inside of her cheek and sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. Marcille, still kneeling on the pillow beside the bed where she’d first crouched down to start on the sigils, follows her with rapt attention, a hungry expression on her face.
“How does it feel?” she asks. While her posture remains professional, with all the collected disposition of a researcher collecting field notes, her voice, growing huskier with each word, belies her intentions. “Tell me, I want to know.”
“Good. Really good. Your hand– you have a callus on your palm. I never noticed it before.”
“You can tell that? Wow, I guess it really was worth all that gold. Keep talking.”
Falin looks down involuntarily. It’s cheating a bit, to see what’s going on instead of leaning into the sensory transmissions of the spell alone, but she wants to see it. A bead of moisture gathers at the head of her cock, and Marcille gathers it with her fingers and smears it down her shaft, following the line of the thick vein. It doesn’t feel like her cock, not really– it’s not anything like it’d felt to have one as a Chimera, with the natural assurance that it was just as much a part of her as anything else, but it’s still a good image, and a damn good feeling. She chokes on her saliva and swallows hard to stop herself from coughing.
“Tighter, please,” she pleads. “And faster. I can take it faster. That feels so good, Marcille, give it to me harder.”
Marcille complies. She tightens her grip just under Falin’s glans, causing even more liquid to leak from her slit. It feels so good, so fucking good and so strange, she can’t help herself from lifting her hips, rabbiting short, animalistic thrusts into the tight circle of Marcille’s hand. She isn’t going to last long like this, she can already feel herself welling up, a tightness forming at her core. Her eyes squeeze shut, and she wills them open just long enough to see Marcille’s expression, her green eyes watching her with ravenous intent.
“Ah, ah!”
“Take it, Falin, that’s a good girl, just take it.”
She knew couldn’t hold off for long, but just how quickly she comes after that catches even her by surprise. It’s shockingly draining, more so than usual, like she’d been held on the edge for much longer than she actually has, just having Marcille stroke her for a minute or two, the orgasm hitting her in arching waves and electric spurts. She’s aware, vaguely of a little of her mana being used up, her core muscles tightening up quickly and then relaxing just as fast. Her mouth is cottony dry, and she grunts once before falling slack, laying back on the bed with her legs dangling off the edge, as loose as a puppet.
When she finally marshalls her strength enough to lift her head, the phallus is still as upright as a toy soldier, not the least bit tired for all her exhaustion. Marcille, still kneeling below, holds out her cupped hand, peering at it curiously. At the center of her palm is about a teaspoon’s worth of white substance, obscenely puddling there like an embarrassing faux pas.
“Oh,” Falin says, just in time to watch Marcille bring her hand up to her mouth and lap it up.
. . .
On the ship back from the rebuilding city of Utaya, Falin thumbs open the letter from Marcille for the tenth time and reads it again in her swinging hammock. She’s on her way back only for a short stint, just enough to participate in Kiki and Namari’s wedding banquet. As she’d been given to believe, Mister Tansu had finally gotten wise to them fooling around and demanded that Namari make an honest woman of his ward. Privately, Falin thinks it likely that Kiki had engineered the situation to her own liking, so that she could backdoor Tansu into approving of the relationship. Regardless, the banquet is going to be a short affair, even if it is a big courtly thing now, since Laios is going to be there, so she’ll only be back in Melini for a short while.
She both mourns that and doesn’t. It’s good to be moving. It’s good to be out in the world, learning who she is and what she wants, outside of her relationship to her brother, her stint as a Chimera, or her… her Marcille.
It’s just that, the more time she spends away from home, the clearer it becomes that, at least sometimes, she is a person who wants Marcille.
She reads the letter an eleventh time, a hand stuck between her thighs. She doesn’t masturbate, she can’t quite drum up the energy to, but she just palms herself loosely over her shorts, just to ease off some of the tension, get the edge off of wanting to be touched so badly.
She reads, My dearest Falin,
Your brother is going to drive me to an early grave! Just the other day, he kept going on and on about having a special monster meat entree at Namari and Kiki’s wedding banquet. Monster meat! I asked him if he was going to hunt it himself, and he went and sulked for forty-five minutes, even though he needed to see the cabinet and he KNEW IT.
Tell me, Falin, that you’ll bring flowers to my grave, and that you won’t let him plant man-eating ones on it. Promise me.
I’m still working on the… the thing we discussed. I have another design I wanted to show you after the banquet, I think you’ll like it a lot more than the last one. I went back to the store, and they were very discreet, even though they know very well who I am now. I made a few alterations to it, but I thought the design was nice, and it came in a lovely wooden box with lavender-scented paper to cushion it. Cost me an arm and a leg, but it was worth it!
You asked me to tell you, so I will say that I used it once, and thought of you. I had your old robe wrapped around my pillow so that it smelled like you, and I wanted you to be home with me. I understand why you need to be away, but I wish, at least, that I could come with you sometimes. I want you in my bed and in my arms and under my tongue.
There. I wrote it for you like you asked. I hope you’re very happy. I will now finish the letter before I embarrass myself any more.
With all of my love and all of my longing,
Marcille Donato.
The waves rock the ship to and fro, and in her swaying hammock with only her feathers and the hand between her thighs to keep herself warm, the world seems impossibly vast and home improbably far away.
. . .
“I see that the monster meat ended up on the menu anyway,” Mithrun says, when Falin’s elbow accidentally bumps him. He holds a chalice of red wine imperiously in one hand, and balances a plate of little meats and tiny boiled quail eggs and precariously-rolling olives in the other.
She says, “Mmm?”
“Monster meat. Your brother made sure that they found their way onto the menu regardless.” With his chaliced hand, he gestures to the cuts of meat.
She squints at them, and finally recognizes the cold cuts as cured kelpie meat, the shine of oily blubber on the surface of the meat unmistakable. She says, “Oh, he did! I thought Marcille would never let him.”
“I suppose it’s an innocuous enough choice.” He drinks from his chalice. His glass eye seems to look right at her, even with her other eye closed to enjoy the flavor. “Are you enjoying the banquet?”
“I am! Kiki and Namari looked very happy, don’t you think?”
Mithrun rolls a shoulder in a careless shrug. He looks like a dark, brooding prince from one of Marcille’s books– all he really needs is the eyepatch. Still, there’s an unwholesome quality to him, even now, like he’d sooner see the whole banquet and all of its attendants reduced to a fine mist as see another toast in honor of the brides’ happiness.
“There you are!” She recognizes Kabru’s voice calling out.
He pushes through the crowd. In the bustle of the wedding attendants, she hadn’t seen him at all since the start of the day, and even then, he’d looked very busy. He’s dressed very well, in rich reds with golden accents that bring out the warm brown tones of his skin, and his hair has a healthy luster. More importantly, he’s accompanied by Marcille.
She’s beautiful, but that’s a guarantee. Someone must have forced her to wear something other than stately black for a wedding banquet, because she’s wearing a luminously blue jacket over a pale teal dress. Her petticoats show a delicate white under the hem of her dress, only a suggestion of them, like a flower bud petaling open. Falin’s teeth sit in her mouth the size of mountains, and her tongue dries up. She gulps down her wine all at once, and is sure her face must be the color of a boiled mimic.
“Hi,” Falin says.
Marcille doesn’t answer. Instead, she closes the distance between them to throw her arms around Falin’s shoulders and leaps up to press their mouths together in a short, smacking kiss. “You!” She announces. “I thought your ship was delayed! I would’ve met you at the dock, if it wasn’t for–”
“Marcille, it’s alright, I thought I wouldn’t be in until sunset. The wind ended up at our side after all, it was a happy surprise.”
“Still, you should’ve told me as soon as you were here, I would’ve come right away, we could’ve gotten prepared together– oh! Hello, Mithrun.”
Mithrun raises his chalice up to Marcille. It isn’t, to Falin’s surprise, nearly as flat and unemotive as she’d expected it. It isn’t as though his face lights up or anything, but he cracks a smile, and even though it’s a small one, it’s genuine. Kabru slides up next to him like a knife to a sheath, the two of them standing at a familiar proximity, Kabru’s posture mirroring Marcille’s next to Falin. It must come to him as naturally as breathing.
Marcille folds her arm around Falin’s, hooking their elbows together so that her hand rests warmly on Falin’s upper arm, exposed by the cut of her loose shirt. “I didn’t know you were coming, either! I thought work at the dungeon perimeter kept you occupied.”
“A happy surprise,” Mithrun says. Kabru nudges him with his shoulder, and Mithrun gives another little elusive smile. “Will I see you at the next support meeting?”
Marcille hmms. “Perhaps. I didn’t find them the most… beneficial. I suppose you will be there?”
“I enjoy the routine. I am told that routine is good for my condition.”
Mithrun doesn’t return the nudge Kabru inflicted on him, but he doesn’t need to, his intent is obvious.
Inevitably, there’s a peppering of conversation after that that goes over Falin’s head completely. Trade and tax, tax and trade, books and theater and the Canaries. Soon enough, Mithrun and Kabru part ways from them to go refill their drinks and talk, she imagines, about the secret and labyrinthine topics that their minds are full of.
“I didn’t know that you and Mithrun go to support meetings together,” she says. It’s a weird topic to start a conversation with after having been reunited after months apart, but it’s what comes out of her mouth.
Marcille flaps her hand multiple times. “It’s a sometimes thing, don’t worry about it. It’s nice to talk to someone else who was a Dungeon Lord, sometimes. Not that I don’t count Laios as one! It’s just that– his experience was a bit different from ours, is all. It’s nice to find common ground.”
Something sour and ugly rolls over in Falin’s stomach. A jealous and hoarding thing that wants to understand all angles of Marcille’s personality and experiences, and for her to be the only one who understands them, for her to go to no-one but her for the things she needs. It’s unfair and unreasonable to want, and it’s made even worse because she doesn’t expect the same thing of herself. Doesn’t she spend the majority of her time away from Marcille’s side, getting the experiences she needs from other places and other people? Doesn’t she do that by choice?
Still. The ugly feeling persists for the whole duration of the banquet. It only gets uglier and more sour whenever they see Kiki and Namari, who look so happy with their arms around each other, dressed to match. Why should they get to be happy? The ugly thing asks. It should be me.
Falin pushes the roiling, hissing thing down, swallows around it, and dances with Marcille, instead.
Nobody dances like Marcille does. She moves like the song animates her directly, without steps or frame or expectation, losing herself in ways she rarely does without being in the depth of a particularly engrossing spell. Her arms stay on Falin’s shoulders, only leaving to flutter off in a gesture or twist like water. Whenever she spins– and she spins frequently, using Falin as a frame to pirouette using or as a brace to fall against– her dress flares out, the blue and white layers opening like grasses moved by the wind, her face happy and relaxed. She’s so beautiful.
“Marcille,” she starts, when they’re catching their breaths. “Do you ever think about getting married?”
Marcille’s cheeks, already flushes from the dancing, turn an even more vivid shade of pink. “To you?”
“In general,” she says. “But– maybe to me, yeah.”
“Um. Sometimes. It seems…” she falters. “My mother… you know!”
“I know.”
“She remarried, you know?”
Falin nods.
Marcille fidgets with the tassels of her coat, tugging them askew and then immediately straightening them. “I don’t know if I could do that. After–”
“After I die?”
Marcille coughs into her hand. Her eyes look a little wet. “Can we not talk about it right now? I’m already really emotional, Kiki and Namari look so happy together. I’m really happy for them.”
She does sound happy, genuinely, but there’s just a bit of that ugly thing in her voice, that jealousy that Falin feels in her own belly, twisting like coiling intestines. She shouldn’t be happy that Marcille isn't happy, but a part of her sings at seeing its equal, at hearing a mate return its call in turn, just the same sour note.
“It’s alright,” Falin says. “We can talk about it later. Do you want to get out of here?”
“ Please.”
. . .
When Marcille gets it out of the case, Falin takes a long moment to eye the phallus deliberately. It’s a little sad-looking, hanging limp in her hands as Marcille holds it out at arm’s length for her to inspect. She concludes that it’s indeed smaller than the previous one, and more natural-seeming, not quite as exaggerated, and the flesh tone of the leather is dyed a closer hue to Falin’s natural skin tone.
She presses a fingertip to it. It remains unresponsive.
“Is it going to stay that way?”
“Flaccid? No, it’ll harden as it becomes flush with blood. That’s the ingenious thing about this design, it doesn’t simply connect on using mana-circulation, it also circulates your blood, so it should feel more connected to you on a bodily level, not solely magical.”
Falin lifts her gaze to meet Marcille’s. She’s got that glint in her eyes, the one that Falin knows all too well.
“Is this legal magic?”
“Well…” Marcille waffles. She flips the phallus in her hand without seeming to notice she’s doing it, handling it like a root vegetable or a spell ingredient. Or Ambrosia. “It’s not… there aren't laws against this exactly.”
“But the underlying theory?”
“...Is very forbidden, yes.” Marcille holds the phallus out until Falin finally takes it in her hands. “You look like you’re holding a dead fish.”
“Noooo,” Falin says. “You don’t hold a dead fish like this! You hold it this way.”
She repositions her hands so that she’s holding the phallus in both hands, supporting the glans in one, with her fingers hooked just beneath it, and cupping the lovingly-sculpted testes in the other. She presents her catch proudly.
Marcille intones, “It isn’t too late to return you.”
“Are you speaking to the dick?”
“No. Now take off your pants.”
After a brief stripping, drawing of sigils, and a few delicate pricks of a needle to select spots on Falin’s pelvis, so careful that she hardly feels more than a small, exciting pinch with each one, Falin finds herself in much the same place she’d been a few months before. She sits at the edge of the bed, Marcille kneeling in front of her, looking down at the cock that’s now attached to her groin, just above her cunt.
It’s distinctly more correct than before. The way that it lies relaxed in Marcille’s hands, like a soft, unassuming thing, that’s more right than the bulging, ridiculous thing she’d tried on for size the first time. She can even imagine that it’s hers; the feeling of Marcille’s hands around it is good and natural, not absurdly heightened, but gently pleasurable. She could fall asleep into this sensation, if she really wanted to.
But… it isn’t quite right either, not entirely. It’s what she’d have if she’d been born with one, but it isn’t the cock she had as a Chimera either. She doesn’t really know if she even wants that one in particular, only that, when she looks down at herself, it feels like she’s looking at a version of herself that could be real, but that version wasn’t her. Framed by the sight of her feathered legs below and her plumage above, it looks absurd and unreal, like a joke told by someone across the room she didn’t quite hear. Her stomach turns sour.
“Falin?” Marcille looks up at her with her big, viciously green eyes. “Do you want to stop? We can just have normal sex if you’d like.”
“No, no!” Falin flaps her hands. “I want to try it, I do!”
Marcille doesn’t look like she believes her.
Falin heaves a sigh as big as a dragon. “It’s only that it looks like… it’s very normal.”
Marcille’s nose wrinkles. “What did you expect, a cloaca?” Then, she remembers herself. “I’m not making you a—”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to make me a cloaca,” Falin insists. Privately, she mourns how cool that’d be, just to try it on for size. “But. Look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“Marcille.”
“Falin,” Marcille says, her tone deadly serious. “I am looking at you.”
Finally, Falin takes in more than just Marcille’s big green eyes and her hands around her flaccid dick. She looks at Marcille’s pupils, at how wide and endlessly black they are, at how her eyes are half-lidded so that her long eyelashes cast shadows down her cheeks. She looks at her lips, at how red they are, and how Marcille catches her lower lip between her teeth to wet it with her pink tongue. She looks at how her throat moves when she swallows, how her pulse must be racing. She looks at how Marcille is looking at her, and sees the hunger she’d been holding just barely on a leash this whole time.
“Oh,” she says. “You are.”
“Mmhmm.” Marcille says. Had her voice been so throaty this entire time? “I can do more than look.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She scoots herself a little closer, pulling herself up on her knees so that she’s leaning over Falin’s waist, looming like a predatory animal. “Do you want that?”
There’s that flow of blood she’d been promised. Falin’s head feels lighter, all of her concerns going far away, and her clit— her cock, feels warmer and heavier. “Mm. Yeah.”
“Good.”
With one hand, Marcille cups the still-soft cock, lifting it up towards her mouth at the same time she leans down to meet it. She closes her lips just around the head, as carefully as the first taste of a new meal, and sucks it gingerly. Her lips as soft as they’ve ever felt wrapped around Falin’s clit, and that familiarity tides her back into a place of relaxed arousal. It’s not so different, if she lets her eyes fall shut and simply leans into the sensation.
Marcille’s kisses the head of her cock for a minute or two, coaxing it into partial hardness, before she opens her lips and takes it into her mouth, laving at the slit with the flat of her tongue.
“Ah,” Falin says, more of an involuntary breath than anything else. “Ah, that’s— oh, that’s a lot.”
Marcille pulls away. “Shh, just let me—”
She lowers again without finishing the thought, pumping Falin’s shaft once with her fist and then taking the fully-hardened member into her mouth. She swallows visibly, her ears nearly flattened back with her intense focus, and she brings Falin’s cock halfway inside before hollowing her cheeks. The shape of it is prominent against her cheek, silhouetted and obscene, and the sight of it alone has Falin bucking her hips involuntarily.
“Fuck, shit, I’m so sorry, Marcille.”
Marcille, pulling away and wiping at her watering eyes with the back of her hand, coughs once and says, “No, no, it’s fine, really, you just surprised me.”
“Are you hurt? Would you like me to—”
“Fine! Really, I promise, Falin—”
They fall silent all at once. Falin’s cock stands up between them, as graceful as a fireball spell, and she feels like she ought to be covering it with her hands, crossing her legs over it. She hardly ever feels embarrassed over her own body, the impulse is as new as it is sudden, coming on hard and fast. Her stomach turns, and her feathers stand up on end, as though to make her look even bigger in front of a predator. Marcille’s hand, the one not currently cupping her cock, lands on her thigh and smooths the feathers down.
“Do you want a break?”
“Maybe?”
“Do you want to stop?”
Falin doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to waste a night with Marcille, when she could be enjoying the heat of her mouth, the velvet heat of her cunt around her fingers, or better yet, around her cock, but she feels so wrong. Everything feels all wrong, terrible and big. She doesn’t want anything except for maybe a hug and a glass of milk right now. Her cock flags between her legs, wilting like a shy animal.
“Yeah,” she admits reluctantly. “I think I want to stop.”
Detaching the cock is nowhere near as easy as putting it on had been, with Marcille wiping the sigils away with a hot, damp towel and ungluing the phallus from Falin’s front, the blood drying beneath it tacky and itchy. She dabs at the spots of it before Falin can start scratching at the area just above her groin, and then kisses her navel softly, nosing the feathers with her eyes closed. She doesn’t look disappointed at Falin, although Falin thinks she can recognize the mulling unhappiness of a researcher looking at a failed experiment. When Marcille whisks away both the towel and the phallus to go rinse off both in the basin, Falin lifts the sheets and pulls them over her head, cowering under them like a dog during a thunderstorm.
She feels not like a tallman and not like a dragon, just feels like the biggest, stupidest animal that had ever been made.
She continues to lie there, rolling in her soiled feelings, until Marcille comes back. With a small noise, she lifts the blankets off of Falin just enough to slide in beside her so that they can press, skin-to-feathers. She puts her arms around Falin’s sides, one sliding beneath her and the over under her arm to hold her across her chest. Her feet press to Falin’s calves, knees knocking against thighs, and she hooks her chin over Falin’s shoulder so that she’s fully wrapped around her.
“Falin,” she says. Her voice is small and careful, like if she says something too roughly, Falin will go fluttering away across the ocean. “We don’t have to keep trying?”
“I want to. I really do want to.”
“I wish you could explain it to me,” Marcille says, wistfully. “I don’t know how you feel, really, maybe that could help me get it right.”
Falin knows that, and she wishes she knew how to express it. What does she want? She doesn’t want a cock that could be hers or a body that might be hers, if she hadn’t lived in it the way that she had lived in it. That she wants her body, the way that it’d been before, but also not that way, because that way hadn’t really been her body either.
If she’s being honest with herself, she wants that a lot. She wants the contents of this bed, her and Marcille together, and she wants to be a world away, discovering who she is and what she wants. She wants things she can’t have and shouldn’t ask for. She doesn’t even know how to start asking for them.
Instead, she says, “I love you. Please just stay here.”
. . .
The Eastern Archipelago is as beautiful as Shuro always described it. Each island she visits is a new vista, new snow-capped mountain peaks and shimmering water, different coniferous forests and humid montane slopes, each more stunning than the last, and each as unique as a thumbprint. The villages she visits are just as distinct, each with their own dialects and peoples, wearing different clothes and living different walks of life. Some architecture is familiar to her, whereas other homes are fashioned in ways she’d never dreamed of in her life.
The dungeons are just as unique, with monsters the likes of which she can only scrawl messy notes and illustrations of to show Laios when she gets home. The magic, which she is somewhat more familiar with, she jots down notes of for Marcille.
But more than everything is the food. The food is so very good.
Eventually, she finds her way to Shuro’s native island. He’s a very good host, that much is no surprise, but she’d always, on some level, expected to be unhappy here. Not horribly unhappy, she does still think he’d make for a good husband, but she would not be a good wife, not to him. Still, it comes as a surprise to be there, walking through an open-air market, happy to be out with a friend.
“Here,” he says, passing her a bowl of transparent noodles piled high and served with a spicy green paste she’s tasted before. “This is ika sōmen, it’s a local speciality. I’ve had it elsewhere, but you’ll only find it this fresh served in port cities, and ours is by far the freshest. I think you’ll like it, if you’d like to try.”
She takes the bowl and thin wooden chopsticks, bringing the bowl up to her face to give it a curious smell. It doesn’t smell particularly fishy, only clean and gingery, with the appetizing, salty-savory aroma of soy sauce that reminds her dearly of Senshi’s cookpot. The thin, transparent strands, soaked with sauce, do look very much like his hotpot slime noodles, and when she brings them to her mouth, she’s delighted to find that, much like his, these aren’t noodles at all, but raw squid cut lengthwise into thin, chewy strips.
The firstmost flavors are the ginger and soy, with the eye-watering green paste to add a pleasant fire, but beneath it all, the squid is remarkably fresh, still tender and sweet with a mild fishyness. She’s struck by the thought that Marcille would adore this, the sharp, herbal flavors and the mild sweet flesh, the easy texture— there’s hardly a seafood dish she’s seen that Marcille hasn’t at least enjoyed. Before she can catch herself, Falin finds herself turning over her shoulder, bowl and chopsticks still held up, looking for Marcille unthinkingly, so she can offer her a bite.
But, naturally, Marcille is home, in Melini. She’s probably working just that minute, probably on something important, while Falin is off having an adventure.
Once she’s started thinking about it, there’s no stopping the tide of thoughts. It’s early afternoon here, so it is probably starting to get late in Melini. It might be past sundown, even— she hopes that Marcille has finished her work for the day, but realistically, she’s better off hoping that she’s at least taken a break for dinner. What has she had to eat? Something she enjoys, maybe, or at least tolerates, and maybe with Laios and Kabru, maybe even with Senshi if he’s wandered back into town. He’ll be bringing fresh produce and salted monster meat if he is, maybe he’s cooked that, and Marcille would probably be protesting that until goaded into trying it. Maybe they’ll be eating together, if Chilchuck and Izutsumi are around, all of them crowding around the table with bowls and silverware clinking.
Or maybe she’s scarfed down a dry loaf of bread and washed it down with invigorating tea, so she can work through the night. Where Falin is, a world away, it’s not for her to say, and it’s not for her to decide. The squid dish doesn’t seem as appetizing anymore, and she passes it back to Shuro with a regretful smile.
“It’s just a little bitter,” she says.
He returns her smile, and, if he notices anything about her disposition, he doesn’t say. He finishes the meal himself, picking at it like a bird, eating small mouthfuls the way he seems to, already losing interest in the meal in favor of pointing her another way. This time, it seems, he leads her towards a bookstore of a kind. It’s not very different from the type they have in the North, but it’s a lot more robust, more like the library they had at the school. A little smaller, but no less packed, and with greater variety to boot. Some of the tomes are written on slats of wood, tied together, others in calligraphic scrolls, and yet more, imported from other lands, are embossed in leather or carved in stone, and one, which the bookseller is unwilling to part with, but is willing to show off, is written on carefully-preserved leaves, with swirling letterwork delicately printed onto each browned blade.
Shuro inclines his head, ever the gentleman. “Take whatever you like, it’s my treat. Consider it a gift.”
She wonders if he means a courting gift. Her stomach dips.
“I haven’t based my magic on spellbooks in years,” she says. “But… I’m sure Marcille would love some of these. Oh!”
She notices, suddenly, an illustrated book, and she picks it up and turns to a random page, only to be met with a beautiful watercolor of an Eastern dragon, coiled and benevolent. The illustration is as artistic as it is dedicated to each painful accuracy, down the number of scales on the dragon’s brow. The artist must be a skilled adventurer if they’d been able to put details these true to life to ink.
“...For Laios,” Shuro says. It isn’t a question.
She turns the page. The next illustration is of a red dragon, a female, lying in repose over a hill-sized hoard of glinting precious stones and metalwork. The artist had gone to great lengths to depict her chin is smooth and without any protrusion to indicate her sex. It’s a priceless work of scientific value and artistic merit. Laios is going to be so jealous that she got to read it before him.
“Yeah,” she says. “For Laios.”
. . .
By the time the waves carry Falin home again, it’s longer than she thought she’d be gone, and the seasons have changed from summer to late autumn. It’s cold, and the nights come quickly, and nobody is there to meet her at the docks when she steps off the boat. It’s dark, and her feathers poof up around her neck like a chicken trying to keep warm, and they stay poofed up the whole way to the castle.
Her mail delivery preceded her by several weeks, if Marcille’s letter is to be believed and she wasn’t just trying to be nice and saying that her books got home safely instead of getting stolen or tipping off a deck somewhere between the Eastern Archipelago and Melini. Falin doesn’t think Marcille would lie about that, but it’d been a few months, and her last letter had been a little more distant than Falin had been hoping for.
All the way home, she lay in her swinging hammock with her hand tucked between her legs more as a stress relief than anything else, reading and re-reading and re-reading Marcille’s letter, looking for answers between lines that didn’t have any hidden messages for her.
Falin, it read, my feet are so cold! Laios says I should get a puppy to sleep at the foot of my bed. I told him that I wanted a parrot, since they’re smarter and prettier and live longer, but he said that a parrot can’t keep my feet warm at night, and then he went on and on about dog names. He said if we got a puppy, you could name it for once. I don’t want a puppy, Falin. I feel like I already have one whenever Laios shows off his dog impression to the cabinet.
Your books arrived safe and sound! They’re very enlightening. Kabru wanted a look at them, naturally, but I told him that, since they’re a gift to ME from YOU, I should be able to read them first before anyone else starts nosing at them. It’s not the same as having you here, but it is very pleasant, knowing you’re thinking of me, so far away. Not that you have to come back soon! Take as long as you want to come back, no rush at ALL!!!
We should talk when you return home. I have something for you.
Kisses and hugs,
Marcille Donato.
Which was terrifying, needless to say.
We should talk ? What does that mean? Falin had never been so frightened in her life than the moment she read those words. What if Marcille was sick? What if Laios decided to abdicate in favor of becoming a full-time mushroom forager? What if some elven noble had sent a request to court Marcille and now she’s going to call their relationship off? What if one of the illegal blood magic phalluses had become possessed with a vengeful spirit and is now, as she walks home, rampaging up and down the Melini coastline?
She picks up the pace, going from a fast walk to a half-trot.
When she finally arrives at the castle, it’s not even pretending to be late evening anymore, it’s fully nighttime, and she has to talk her way past the newly-hired guards (showing off her feathers always gets the questions to stop quickly) to even get into the living quarters. She takes the stairs three at a time in big, gulping hops, wishing she had wings to glide with, and her knees start to protest by the time she’s all the way to Marcille’s rooms. She resolves to heal them later, and stands at the door, debating with herself if it’s too late at night to knock and feeling stupid and childish for even worrying this much about it. It’s fine to knock, everyone knocks.
She knocks.
There’s no response.
Falin knocks again. Again, there’s no response.
Carefully, she turns the door handle and pushes it open, the hinges squeaking like bats, and when she peers inside, it’s Marcille’s bedroom alright. There are books on every surface, and the voluminous volumes of The Daltian Clan held in place of honor on their crowded bookshelves. Drying medicinal herbs sway in the window. The bed is tidy, but in a quintessentially Marcille-esque haste, like she made it in a last-minute rush before she could forget about it. There is, however, no Marcille here.
She should go looking for her, but for a moment, Falin stands at the doorway, just taking in the smells. The sweet smell of her hair oils and her soaps, the chemical odor of her powdery-oily makeup, the nebulous scent of mana from all of her spells and her experiments, some of which line the shelves. But more than anything else, her smell, the musk that’s strongest between her legs and under her arms and on the back of her neck, right at the hairline. It comes mostly strongly from her bed, and just to smell it for the first time in months makes her knees wobble and her mouth water. She wants to go over to the sheets and bury her face in Marcille’s pillow, and maybe jerk off while biting it. Wants to roll around in the scent like a dog, leave her own there, so that Marcille can smell that she’s been here when she goes to bed at night.
It takes a great deal of self-control to tear away from the doorframe before she leaves a dent in the stonework from how hard she’s gripping it and go look for Marcille somewhere else.
She isn’t in the communal baths, or in the latrine, and she hasn’t gone downstairs to get herself a late night snack or something warm to drink to help her sleep. She could’ve gone to someone else’s bedroom, maybe she’s having a sleepover with Laios, talking over policy or a new book series they’ve started reading together, or maybe Izutsumi is in town and is expending her zoomies on Marcille. Maybe she’s talking to Kabru (the jealous ugly thing in Falin’s chest growls), or maybe even with Mithtrun (it snarls ), they did say that thing about the support group.
But Falin has a hunch that she isn’t doing any of those things, and her hunch has never led her wrong in her life, so she goes, instead, to the castle library.
Sitting, or rather lying, right at the center of the library is her Marcille, bent at an angle that cannot be good for her back so that she can rest her face on top of a book, her cheek pressed directly to the surface of a correspondence she’d clearly been halfway through writing. Her mouth hangs open, and she’s drooling. Ambrosia leans against the table next to her, its sprout wilted sideways as though asleep.
It feels mean to go wake her up. She looks like she needs the rest. But she’ll regret sleeping that way in the morning, all groggy and bleary-eyed and fussy for attention while Falin heals the crick in her neck and combs her hair, and while Falin loves doing that, she’d like it more if Marcille was well-rested and in a good mood for that conversation she’d like to have. She paws into the library, careful not to make too much noise on the stone floors, and brings her hand to Marcille’s back, rubbing in a soothing circle.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey, Marcille. Wake up. Marcille.”
Marcille lifts her head, a leaf of paper stuck to her cheek, and grunts out a half-awake, “Ngh.” She palms at her face, knocking the paper loose and wiping the drying spot of drool aside in one smooth motion, then blinks up at Falin. “Oh! Falin! You’re here already?”
Falin’s stomach rolls over like a dead fish. She should’ve gone off the deck of the ship directly into the bay and let herself get picked clean by gulls. Her hand still on Marcille’s warm back, she nods and tries to force a smile. “The ship came in tonight, I came here right away.”
“Good! Oh, good! That’s wonderful!” but it’s not wonderful, because Marcille sweeps her wide sleeve across the table, pushing the papers into one discrete pile and enclosing that pile between the pages of the book they’d been laying on like a bookmark. She moves hastily, obviously trying to hide something.
It’s alright if someone else has started courting Marcille. Marcille is so lovely and so clever, of course other people would like to court her, especially someone who is more of a person than Falin is. Someone established, with a whole heart and mind that could fit into Marcille’s life as neatly as a hand fitting into another hand, and isn’t roaming across the world looking for herself like Falin is. It’s kind of her, even, that she wants to let Falin down easily, in person, instead of sending her a letter from half the world away.
“Falin? Is something wrong?” Marcille’s hand rises to Falin’s face, skimming feathers on the way to cupping her jaw.
“No, no,” she nudges away from her hand. “I just— you said in your letter that you wanted to talk about something?”
Immediately, Marcille brightens, pushing off the table and out of her chair, only to grab onto Ambrosia for support when she stumbles on feet that are still asleep. “Yes! Yes, I do— it’s nothing bad, I promise, it’s really good, I think you’ll like it! It’s only that — can it wait a little bit? Just until after I show you something, I’m really excited for you to see it.”
Falin really wants to hear what that thing Marcille needed to talk to her about what, but she’s so relieved that it’s not a bad thing (there are so many bad things it could’ve been), that she can only nod and follow behind, as obedient as a puppy, as Marcille yanks her all the way out the door. She continues to lead the way, bringing their hands together and lacing their fingers together with a squeeze, taking them back down the hall and to where the hunt began, Marcille’s bedroom. She leads Falin inside and then deposits her in the middle of the room so she can shut the door firmly behind them, locking it and then placing a spell on the door that Falin recognizes instantly as a silence spell.
If she intends on vivisecting Falin right here on her bedroom floor, and only means that nobody come running to Falin’s aid when they hear the screaming, she’s completely down for that.
But she doesn’t go for a knife or a scalpel, only rests Ambrosia at its usual place next to the window, and kneels next to her bed to retrieve a wooden box with a mean-looking lock on it from underneath the mattress.
“Did Chilchuck get you that lock?”
“No!” Marcille insists vehemently. “He just told me where to buy it. And what locks not to buy. I bet he told the locksmith to upcharge me too, that shortstack. It’s supposed to be a really good lock, though.”
No good lock is good enough for a determined half-foot picklock, much less one as seasoned as Chilchuck, but it’s the thought that counts. Falin watches as Marcille fishes out a key from a pocket and unlocks the box, revealing— a little red thing.
Well. Not little, really, just little compared to the one she had before. While she doesn’t recognize the shape of it immediately, it doesn’t take long to identify it as a red dragon sheath in miniature, held precariously in Marcille’s hands like she’s holding something very, very dangerous.
“So,” Marcille says. She’s not much of a blusher, not nearly as much as Falin herself is, but her cheeks and the tips of her ears have gone nearly as red as the sheath. “I got this. For you. Do you want to… uh. Hold it?”
Wordlessly, Falin holds out her hands and Marcille passes it over.
The creator must have done days of research, because it’s very nearly perfect. The texture of it is so close to dragon skin that it feels unreal, the lack of hard scales as accurate as she remembers it feeling. It doesn’t even have the feel of tanned dragonhide, the skin as warm and soft as a living thing. She wonders if it’s only a sheath, or if there are other parts of the anatomy included, and how exactly she’s supposed to put this on, but regardless, she must have sourced it from an expert in dragon biology to have gotten this intimate of details depicted with care and precision.
“Where did you find this? It must have cost a fortune for the spell components alone!”
She’s studying the sheath’s shape and weight with such care that she nearly fails to catch the expression that passes over Marcille’s face, her eyes falling shut and her ears flopping back. As it is, she just manages to catch it, and understands what she’s done immediately.
“You made it?! Marcille! How?!”
Marcille ducks her head. She says, “Well, I… I got your book, the one about dragon biology, with the watercolor illustrations, and it went into… really specific detail, I’m honestly a little concerned about how close the author got to live dragons to find out some of the information about mating habits, but. I found a formulation, just after the last time we tried it, very similar to familiar-creation formulas, but a bit, uh. Wonky. It took some ideas from fairy-creation, though not quite the homunculus in its entirety, just some. Preliminary aspects. After germinating it, it still needed to be fed blood regularly past a certain point, and then I could sculpt it like you would a familiar.”
Falin examines the phallus more carefully. It explains why it feels like a living piece of tissue, rather than long-dead leather or natural rubber, but it doesn’t exactly have a pulse, she’s happy to find. If it’s living tissue, it is closer to a living organ, held alive by magic and a sustained drip-feed of mana rather than a living organism , living independently. Which is a great relief to her.
“Wait,” she says. “Aren’t fairies made using—”
Somehow, Marcille turns even redder, the ruddy blush climbing down her throat and past her neckline. “Yes,” she says. “I didn’t know how to source the— the seminal fluid in an ethical way, so —I improvised. It worked well enough.”
Looking at the sheath more closely, as though she could see the constituent parts of Marcille woven into it and polymerized into the structure, Falin considered what that could possibly mean. “You touched yourself? To make this?”
“Falin!”
“It’s an honest question, Marcille, I promise! Only scientific curiosity, please? Tell me?” To seal the deal, Falin levers her with her most pathetic expression, making her eyes big and wet like a cow’s.
“Uhhhghhh.” Marcille wipes at her face with both hands, pulling at her cheeks so that the red of her lower eyelids show. “Yes, alright? Yes! I thought about you and I put my hand between my legs and I used… that. As a baseline component. A couple of times.”
“A couple?”
“Once a day, for three days. Then I fed it with blood. I told you, I was improvising! It seemed to work alright, so! You know!”
It does seem to have worked alright, but that isn’t what has Falin stop to simply look at Marcille, who’s fidgeting with her hands, worrying at a hangnail and avoiding her gaze, in turn. She imagines Marcille, spending long weeks while Falin was away learning about the world, with a book about dragon anatomy open in her lap, pouring over the finer details in an attempt to replicate them exactly . She imagines Marcille, pricking her finger daily to feed an experiment with her own flesh and blood, fashioning it into a shape that would suit Falin. She thinks about Marcille, collecting raw materials with a hand up under her skirts, circling her clit and dipping her index and middle fingers into her entrance, maybe while thinking about Falin down on her knees under the table, licking her cunt ravenously. All this, for a warm little thing that might make Falin happy.
She lowers her gaze, suddenly feeling bashful in a way she hardly ever feels when it comes to sex and sex things. “ Why?”
“I thought…” Marcille looks conflicted, but she forces her hands to her sides and balls them up into fists. “I don’t know very much about dragons! But you were one— are one, still, a little bit — and I wanted to understand you better. You wanted this — you want this — for a reason, and I didn’t really understand why, but it matters to you. So… I wanted to understand it as much as I could.”
Falin swallows. “Did you? Understand it, I mean.”
“A little… not entirely, not as a gestalt, but a little bit of it. You aren’t who you were before, and you aren’t what Thistle made you, and you’re trying to understand who you are now. I think… this is a part of it, right?”
Is it? She hadn’t thought it was, she’d thought of it only as a way to enjoy sex more, to feel like more of herself when she’s lying next to Marcille, but maybe that, too, is part of figuring out who she is now.
She looks at the phallus again, and gingerly sets it on the table, careful not to put it down too roughly, and she steps forward to close the distance between Marcille and her. She cups Marcille’s face in her hands, pushing her messy hair back behind her ears, and she’s so relieved when Marcille leans into her arms, stepping up onto the balls of her feet to meet her in a kiss.
Marcille’s mouth is just as it always has been, plush, slightly chapped lips and a soft tongue that she grazes with her own. Her blunt teeth still feel so square and delicate compared to her own fangs. She still sighs so sweetly when Falin’s hand finds her nape and grazes her nails along the fine hairs that trail down it, still melts into Falin’s arms like she wants nothing but to be held as closely as possible.
Well. She definitely wants at least another thing or two. Marcille’s own hand glides down the ridge of Falin’s spine and finds the curve of her ass, cupping it firmly and grinding their hips together. She repeats the motion, this time sliding her leg between Falin’s thighs and pushing up with her knees to press against her mound. Falin lets out a breathy whine, parting from Marcille’s mouth, only to catch her lower lip with her fangs and bite it, not hard enough to draw blood, but just hard enough to get Marcille’s hips to hiccup on the next thrust, rolling up in a messy staccato rhythm.
“Falin,” she says, her voice rougher than a lion’s tongue. She clears her throat, trying to reclaim a semblance of control. “Would you like to try it on for size?”
If she were a different person, she might purr something suave like, how about I try you on for size? Or, I bet you’d like me to, wouldn’t you? But Falin is simply not that person, and has no desire to be. Instead, she bounces in place excitedly and tries to shove her trousers down her legs before separating from Marcille, causing them to get tangled together even more, their knees bumping together and their noses brushing when they both suddenly fall to laughter. They meet again in another kiss, this one slow and as smooth as the long, calm ocean.
The rest of the clothing is easier to take off, even with the occasional interruption to coil around each other again, Marcille’s mouth finding the unfeathered parts of her breasts and her sides and pressing biting little kisses all over the smooth expanse of skin, and Falin capturing the tips of her ear between her teeth and gently mouthing it, savoring the texture of her skin there, as soft as the skin of a peach, and the fragrant, musky smell of her body. When she’s finished working Marcille’s stockings down, leaving her only in her frilly, remarkably practical bloomers, she ignores the immediate call to get her mouth on Marcille’s tits and leave marks all over them as soon as possible, and takes up the mantle.
By which she means she picks up the sheath Marcille made for her and holds it tentatively over her groin, unsure of where it’s supposed to go and how to attach it.
“Here,” Marcille says. By now, this next part is all too familiar. “Let me do it.”
This time, Falin tries to watch her throughout, commits the sigils and the words to memory, so that she can repeat it on her own next time. It’s ancient magic, and definitely illegal, but she’s surprised when Marcille doesn’t cut her hand or prick her fingers to power the spell. It must be more ingrained than that, something about the creation of the item itself that powers it. She tries to reason out the logic behind the sigils that would allow something like this to be used, but her background was never in this particular spell, and she loses what tenuous hold she has on her line of thought as soon as she feels the sigils come to life.
She watches the shape of the sheath, dull red and rough-skinned, weave itself into the mesh of her skin, making visible the typically-unseen patterns of growth, which vanish just as easily as the two layers knit together. The nerves connect next, then the blood vessels, and she feels blood rush down to meet it, the sensation first itchy and then buzzing, the way a hand feels when one moves it for the first time after falling asleep laying on top of it. Without thinking, she brings a hand down to cup the sheath where it lies, and it doesn’t feel like it’s covering her clit, it feels like it is her clit, an extension of it, natural as anything. The rough skin of the sheath itself is sensitive, especially around the opening, but only as much as the hood of her clit typically is.
Looking at her hand wrapped around it sends a thrill through her. It looks so natural, so casually there, not obtrusive or supplementary, just— there.
“Is it good?” Marcille asks. Her eyes are supremely green and hopeful, and Falin loves her so, so much.
“It feels— right. I think so. Yes, I think it’s good.”
She palms herself a little roughly, a little delighted and a little uncomfortable. She’s about to take her hand away and pull Marcille onto the bed when Marcille’s hand joins her, her thumb resting over the opening of her— her —
What does she call this, anyway? Her cock? Her sheath?
Before she can ponder that thought any longer, Marcille puts her mouth on her slit and kisses it gently, politely, like she’s just making an introduction. A courting kind of kiss. When she deepens it, opening her mouth and tracing the slit with her tongue, the sensation comes through as clear as a bell, something melting in Falin’s core like hot butter on a skillet. She watches, rapt, as Marcille suctions her lips around the hood and laps at it with her tongue. Without thinking, Falin brings her free hand up to her mouth and bites hard on her knuckles, feeling the fangs break skin.
Parting with a wet noise, Marcille looks up, licking the moisture from her lips. She says, murmuring like she’s afraid of being overheard, “Do you like that, darling? Do you like it when I suck your clit?”
Falin makes a sound around her knuckles that’s a bit like a, “Gnark,” and, helplessly, feels her clit start to coax out of its sheath, the head of it bright red and sharply pointed.
Marcille is quick to bring her mouth back to it, closing her mouth around the tip of Falin’s clit and coaxing the rest out with her fingers, circling them and pumping while maintaining a gentle suction. Falin is fairly certain that she will die this way, with Marcille’s clever mouth around her and the rough calluses on her fingers tracing every bump and ridge on her clit as it fully emerges.
“Marcille,” she chokes out. “Please, please.”
Mercifully, Marcille lets her go, leaning back just enough to look at her, her pupils blown out wide and her lips red and kiss-swollen. She gets up off her knees and comes up around Falin, because the spirits are kind and the world is good, getting one arm around Falin’s shoulders and her knees on either side of her hips. She rests back on Falin’s lap, a wonderful little weight and pressure around her, her cunt so close to Falin’s clit that she swears she can feel her heat, one hand still playing between them. She presses Falin’s clit up, just to watch it twitch and bead up with fluid, just to make Falin twist and throw her head back, whining and groaning, then she lowers her hand and thumbs at the hood of her clit, curious, playful.
“Oh, oh, oh, Marcille, oh, fuck, I can’t take it—”
“You can,” she says. “Be so good for me, Falin, be so good. I want to touch you more. Do you think you could take a finger for me?”
Falin isn’t entirely sure what she means by that, but she’s so addled, so stupidly aroused that Marcille could be asking to put her fingers in Falin’s aorta and she’d say yes, yes, put it in, please, do it now. She nods once, twice, then says, “Fuck me, yes, please, Marcille, please!”
She doesn’t exactly fuck her senseless right away, but Marcille does carefully circle the hood of her clit with her finger, then carefully slides the first knuckle of her middle finger past the sheath’s entrance, just testing how much she can take. She rolls her finger in a slow, inquisitive rhythm, each time venturing a little deeper, until she has her finger halfway inside Falin’s sheath, rubbing back and forth at a maddeningly slow pace. The sensation of it is good, in a strange, maybe-uncomfortable way, a little too much and a little not enough, like a nerve pain or a press on a bruise. Falin’s head lolls down, her eyes falling shut, and she bites without being entirely sure what she’s biting at, just to have something to hold onto. She finds Marcille’s shoulder and latches on, digging her fangs in until she’s sure to leave marks, while Marcille slides her middle finger out and pushes in with two.
The sensation rockets past uncomfortable and rushes into blinding, overwhelming pleasure. She feels it in her lower abdomen, her muscles flexing and twitching, she feels it in her burning nerves, she feels it in her fucking teeth, it’s so good. Falin doesn’t mean to, honestly, she’s so close to Marcille’s ear that it can’t be comfortable for her, but she detaches from Marcille’s shoulder and lets out a noise that cannot be human, far past the range of what typical tallman vocal folds should be able to emit. It’s harsh and mechanical, coming from deep, deep in her thorax, and it rings around the room a few times like a carillon bell.
If the noise scared Marcille, she doesn’t show it, pushing her fingers in and out in a steady, increasing rhythm. Liquid runs from the tip of Falin’s clit freely now, and Marcille collects it with the tips of her fingers, uses it to fuck her harder, to get her to take more of her fingers with each thrust. Falin howls, thrashes, brings a hand to Marcille’s bare shoulder blade to claw desperately like an animal pinned and speared, but Marcille doesn’t let her go, just holds her down and fucks her harder, faster.
Marcille pants in Falin’s ear, her voice a wreck when she chants, “Good girl, Falin, take it for me, you’re such a good girl. Can you come like this?”
“Maybe?” Falin sobs. She honestly has no idea. It feels impossibly good, but not like she was designed to feel this way, like Marcille built the maze and then found a secret entrance somehow. “Fuck me, fuck my clit, you’re amazing, I love you, give me more, please, please.”
She falls to mindless recitation after that, saying again that she loves her, that she needs her, that please, give her everything, that she needs it.
The tether snaps as soon as it goes taut, and Falin comes shrieking into Marcille’s shoulder, gouging tracts down her back with two of Marcille’s fingers inside her sheath up to their last knuckles, the pads of her fingers rubbing at the inside of her hood with her fingers. She presses her hips up once, feebly, against those searching fingers, then she goes completely boneless, falling against Marcille so utterly that she almost topples them both out of the bed, forgetting that she’d been the one sitting on the edge of it with Marcille in her lap.
It’s by Marcille’s quick thinking alone that they don’t both end up concussed, as she tips them both sideways and manages a controlled collapse onto the bed, half their limbs on the mattress and half of them off. Falin’s still twitching when Marcille pulls her fingers out, and she gives a pathetic squeak, followed by a long, resonating groan when she looks down at herself and realizes that she’s still very much hard, her red clit throbbing and stiff, its pointed head painful to look at.
Falin throws an arm over her eyes. “Is it going to be like that forever?” she slurs. Her brain feels like it’s gone to soft putty, maybe a nice rice porridge with runny-yolk eggs. “Marcille! Marcille, what did you do to me?”
“Nothing you don’t deserve,” Marcille says. Based on the smile in her voice, she could almost mean it. Falin looks up just in time to watch Marcille insert the two fingers she’d fucked Falin’s clit with into her mouth and suck them clean. “Hm.”
“Do I taste good?”
“A little funky,” she says. “Salty, definitely. Have you ever had squid-ink pasta?”
Falin fumbles for a pillow, and, having gotten hold of one, brings it up to her face to scream into it. It smells like Marcille’s hair, fragrant and wonderful. She puts it back down reluctantly. Doing so, she makes the mistake of meeting Marcille’s eyes, looking down at her from where she’s pushed up on the blankets.
Her eyes are still more black than green, her mouth impossibly red and inviting, her small breasts heaving with deep, hungry breaths, her nipples prominent. She’s wet. Falin can smell her cunt so easily she must be leaking down her thighs. Falin thinks back to the last couple months, and finds that she can’t remember the last time she’s paid proper attention to Marcille, had her spread on the bed and under her mouth, or riding up on her fingers. With all the fussing over the phalluses, she hasn’t given her mate any attention at all, and that’s something she ought to change immediately.
Overcome by this second wind, Falin marshalls her forces and pushes up on the bed, kicking away a sheet that’s in her way. She reaches for Marcille with both hands, finding her hips and yanking her close, earning a funny squeak and a blush. She looms over Marcille, her clit standing up between her legs like the ridiculous intrusion that it is.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hello,” Marcille says. She leans back on the mattress, her eyes lidded heavily and her lips pouting open. “Is that how it’s going to be, Falin?”
“Mmhm,” Falin hums. “If you’d like that. Do you like that?”
Instead of answering straight away, Marcille gets her legs situated in a more comfortable way so that she’s lying flat on her back, her arms relaxed around her head like a frame around a beautiful painting. She folds a knee and lies it down sideways, parting her cunt for Falin to see, and wow, she was right about the soaking wet part. Her labia is flushed red, with her inner lips glistening wet and her clit pushed out of its hood, pink and lovely. When Falin parts her with her finger, her entrance is so hot and relaxed around her that she sinks a finger in with hardly any resistance, her thumb pressing against Marcille’s clit and rolling it. Marcille gasps, then whines, and then gives out an animalistic, hiccuping groan when Falin pushes up against her front wall and rubs with the pad of her middle finger.
“Falin,” she says, with the tone of an ultimatum. “Falin, if you don’t fuck me right now — ”
“Shh, shh, just lay back, I have you.”
She’s so relaxed that it probably won’t be much of a stretch, as long as Falin is careful, and her clit has a nice taper, narrow and pointed at the head before growing wider at the base, with a gorgeous ridge that Marcille did such a phenomenal job with. It takes some finagling, some rearranging, making sure that their legs aren’t in each other’s way, but Falin finds herself, after enough wriggling, lying on top of Marcille, careful not to completely squish her, holding herself up on one elbow as she positions her clit against Marcille’s entrance and pushes slowly, slowly inside.
If she thought Marcille was hot and impossibly soft around her fingers and her tongue, it pales in comparison to how good she feels around Falin’s clit. Her cunt is so lovely, just like her mouth and her breasts and her beautiful face and her clever mind. She’s so stupid with love for her that she thrusts a little early, pushes in a little harder than she intended to, and while she doesn’t bottom out, she slides halfway inside all at once. Fortunately for her, this earns a shriek from Marcille that doesn’t at all sound harassed or bothered, and her arms come to wrap around Falin’s shoulders, one holding her close in an embrace while the other grips at the back of her head, holding her hair tightly in one hand like a horse by the reigns.
“Is that good?” Falin says, genuinely unsure.
“Falin,” Marcille says, sounding like she’s grinding her teeth. “Yes. Yes, it’s very good, now please fuck me. Please.”
Falin might be slow to take the hint, but she doesn’t need to hear instructions repeated. She pulls out fully, then pushes in, hard, bottoming out and then grinding her hips in a circle that makes Marcille’s head tip back, revealing the elegant line of her throat. She rolls her hips that way a few times, testing to make sure that there isn’t any discomfort or pain on Marcille’s face, and when she sees no sign of it, she begins to gradually increase the rhythm. She rocks in and out, pushing her face into the crook of Marcille’s throat and mouthing at her pulse point, losing herself utterly in the impossible heat and pressure around her clit, Marcille’s cunt taking her in, hot and tight and beautiful. She wants to die here, or maybe to live here, with her body happy and feeling so good and so right, entwined with Marcille’s, within Marcille, until the distinction blurs and all there is is heat and pressure and the intoxicating smell of sweat and pheromones.
Marcille lets go of her back, maintaining her pressure on the back of Falin’s head with her left hand, and she slides her right hand between them until it meets Falin’s own hand, rolling Marcille’s clit under the pad of her thumb. She prizes Falin’s hand away, and Falin grunts, confused, until Marcille folds their fingers together and squeezes tightly, their hands fitted together between their bodies even as Falin’s thrusts start to grow uneven and wild. At first, Falin thinks that she’s feeling something in the spell unwind, and she nearly stops to check, but she recognizes it a heartbeat later, the sensation being the passing of mana from Marcille to her. Neither of them is lacking any, and the connection is superfluous, unnecessary, but it’s remarkable, to be connected so completely, in every way that matters. She passes the mana back as soon as she receives it. They continue to cycle that way, Falin thrusting in and out, Marcille raising her hips to meet her, passing mana back and forth in a circular motion, like the ebb and flow of the tide, like the nitrogen cycle, like the way air cycles in and out of a pair of lungs, the two of them so fully fitted together that, if some great force were to pry open the roof of this castle, they would find only one organism, working towards one unified goal.
Marcille’s breaths start to come faster, her eyes falling shut and her mouth opening in the nearly-silent moans Falin knows mean she’s close to falling apart. Her cunt tightens around Falin’s clit, and she makes a ridiculous, scrunched face until Falin closes her teeth around her ear, and she comes with a hard, noiseless jolt. Her core tightens, and her hips jump up in rabbiting thrusts, her cunt fluttering rhymically until she relaxes onto the mattress with a wrung-out sigh.
Falin doesn’t take long to follow her. She pushes inside once, twice, a third time, and falters on the fourth, sparks appearing behind her eyelids. She spills inside of Marcille, helpless to do anything but keep from squishing her completely. She tips sideways, burying her face in the blankets, and is finally, finally finished. She lies there, as still as a slain dragon, until the stickiness between them starts to make Marcille uncomfortable, and then she rolls off to one side so that they can clean off.
There are spells for this kind of thing, thank any force that’s listening, but that still involves getting up, and they get distracted kissing at least three times doing that, and twice more when Marcille lifts up her knees to clean herself off and Falin catches sight of their combined mess running down her thighs. After that, they make a combined effort to clean the sheets off, and then Marcille hops off the bed to get them both nightgowns.
Left in the newly-cleaned sheets and listening to the noises of Marcille puttering around with her cabinets and her stationary, Falin lets herself fall onto her back and simply bask in how wonderful it is. She feels like a dragon after a big meal, ready to fall onto her hoard and her nest and sleep for a week and a half. And what a good nest this is, that smells so much like her and like Marcille and like the two of them. The blankets all laid out to one side in a knot that she can’t be assed to untangle, and will probably just convince Marcille to splay out on top of, sharing body warmth instead. It’s a very good nest, all warm and soft and safe. It’s not quite their nest, but it wouldn’t be so bad, she thinks.
She might not be ready to stay here all the time, every day of every year, she might not know who she is, removed of all other people in her life and standing on her own, but it isn’t so bad, to come home to a nest for her and for her mate, to come home and spend time with her brother and her friends and have good meals with them. If she doesn’t know who she is all the time, she doesn’t think it would be a bad thing at all, to sometimes bask in the simple delight of being Marcille’s Falin, as long as Marcille doesn’t mind being Falin’s Marcille, some of the time. Not half bad at all.
“Marcille?” she calls out, her voice coming out more quiet and tremulous than she expects. “I’ve been thinking, just now.”
“Mm? I’ll be over in a second, keep talking.”
Falin’s voice grows more steady. She says, “I’ve been thinking, what if we got a place, just for the two of us? A little house, near the castle, so you can still work here easily. There’s lots of empty houses in the inner city. We can clear one out, and it can be ours, whenever I’m here. I… I don’t know if I’m ready to be here all the time, but when I’m here, we can… Marcille? Is that alright? Are you still there?”
Falin sits up, afraid to look and see that Marcille’s gone out the door in a panic, or worse yet, out the window. But when she looks, Marcille is sitting at the other end of the room, holding a piece of paper, her eyes so, so wide, and so green.
“Is that alright?” Falin asks again.
“Falin,” Marcille says. Her voice is so soft, and so loving. “Of course that’s alright, we’ll start looking for a place tomorrow, and oh, that’ll be perfect, I don’t have to lock all the projects away all the time, it’s just— Falin, look at this.”
She crosses the room, still as naked as the day she was born, and holds out the piece of paper like it’ll explain everything. Falin, baffled, takes it and forgets completely the entire concept of literary for a full fifteen seconds, looking up at Marcille, utterly puzzled, before she thinks to read it.
Marcille, she reads in her brother’s serviceable handwriting. Of course you can go on a diplomatic trip! What do you even need it in writing for? I know Falin’s going to the North next, around our birthplace, to see about the state of the village and see if we can broker some kind of peace with the mountain people. Why don’t you join her? I’m sure she’d love to show you where we grew up! If you meet our dad, tell him I have nothing to say. If you meet our mom, ask for her cheesecake recipe for me. And have fun!
Love,
King Laios blah blah blah.
“I was talking to Kabru about going on more trips out for political purposes,” Marcille says. “He said that, as long as Laios approves, and as long as it’s beneficial for the kingdom, he doesn’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to accompany you every now and then. As long as that’s fine with you?”
Marcille looks down at her, her expression hopeful and a little afraid. Falin thinks about this from her side, like she should have done a long time ago, thinks about how many times Marcille watched her leave and sat at home, hoping only that she’d come back when she was ready, and planning quietly, thinking of ways that she could, if only she’d allow, come with her.
She takes Marcille by the waist and pulls her back into the sheets, and kisses her first on her cheeks, and then on her nose and her laughing mouth. She rolls the sheets into an even messier knot, and laughs until she feels like her chest is about to burst. She feels so full of bright, twinkling things that she’ll fall apart if it weren’t for Marcille’s arms around her, squeezing her into a Falin-shape.
They stay all the next day in bed, until Senshi makes them come down for a proper meal, and the day after that, they start looking all around the old city for a house that isn’t in too bad of shape and isn’t so far away from the castle. They walk arm-in-arm, cooing like homing doves, murmuring about the kind shapes of things to come.