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rainbowfic2019-03-16 07:19 pm
dray) wrote in rainbowfic2019-03-16 07:19 pm
Daffodil #11, Tequila Rose #7, Kondo #4
Name: Dray
Story:everwood
Colors: Daffodil 11) "Go Exploring", Tequila Rose 7) "A lady came in the door", Kondo 4) "But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future."
Supplies and Styles: Frame, Portrait, Fingerpainting, Graffiti (S19 Spring Cleaning), Brush ('Encroach'), Stain ("A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad." -Bob Edwards), Pastels (fluffbingo Round 2, 'Tempt'), Glue, "Conveying your message to others today may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean you should just give up. In fact, it’s absolutely imperative that you find a way to express your thoughts."
Word Count: 7,461
Rating: Mature (M/Monster lovin')
Warnings: Inter-species mating rituals
Notes: This ran long, like way long... but I'm weirdly proud of it for the fluff to angst to smut ratio. If you make it to the end, many thanks for reading.
The lantern guttered, and Boyce shook himself from his reverie as Trellis peeled back shutters to reveal the pink glow of dawn. The slate he'd been toiling over looked illegible, he was convinced, but it was the best he could do. On it, the main course was the river road, long and winding between the foothills that butted up against the Dragontooth Mountains, which sketched a path from the Glacier Lake to roughly his neck of the woods. Over a distance of what he knew to be a week and a half of overland travel between the outpost capital of Snowedash and the sleepy river town of Oraston, Boyce had marked his clearing.
The outflow from the Glacier Lake was wide and deep and heavily trafficked, humans having settled the South coast as they built up industry around the mountain mine, the nearby forest, the fish that spawned in the lake. It wouldn't have been possible without the peace treaty between humans and the other creatures that called the lake home, but between there and here, the peace quickly petered out, and Boyce knew very well that humans interpreted rules however they needed to. These two serpents weren't going to get very far by slinking along the river bottom at this time of the year.
Neither would using the tributaries help. The one that fed the river road from his clearing meandered back to the bluffs in the foothills fully East and nowhere close to the Glacier Lake. There were several other tributaries, several other settlements to bypass, too. In any of them, there could be people with their eyes out, quietly looking for the pair. Gurile had told him that if things were as bad as Owen thought, there'd be activity looking to fetch the serpents back, and perhaps lashback to the local folk who helped them escape. Boyce hadn't been back to talk to Gurile since, but it was all a cause for concern.
He shoved himself to his feet and carefully propped his slate under his arm, wiping his chalky hand on his pants as he peeked out the window. Trellis was still perched on the stream bank, where both of the creatures had remained just above water. They'd introduced themselves, but their names were so alien that Boyce didn't dare to venture pronouncing them. Star, the one with the mark across its forehead, and Scar, the dark one that seemed stand-offish and suspicious... he'd call them that for now until he could better understand their language.
They were so long. They hadn't spotted him yet, but both of them were cuddled together with Trellis' roots and branches extended for them to hold against the current. With the gauzy light of dawn, he could see their trailing tails undulating in the water, three, four times his length with scales marked in a variegated pattern of pearlescent greys and obsidian black. They were strange and beautiful and Boyce felt a pang as he watched them quietly converse in their own language. Even awake, he could feel the second-hand vibrations as Trellis' roots picked up the deeper, slower song they used under the water.
The bank was bursting with verdant life, and Boyce realized with some deep embarrassment that Trellis was flourishing, in that strange way that it had, provoking the flora to sprout around it and green up the immediate surroundings. Early flowers were budding far ahead of their time, moss was furling tendrils outward, inviting and soft. Boyce went red at the ears; Trellis was showing off in a way that was far from appropriate. It was the same language that Daphne had used with him when they had been... close... and as far as he knew, her tree had been completely of one mind with her. Would the serpents understand what it meant? Were their strange stories about the dryads he'd inadvertently come to know so specific that they'd recognize the invitation Trellis was aiming for? And what else did they know about the dryads that he didn't?
"Stop that," he murmured, chastened that Trellis was taking initiative in a place he'd never thought to pursue. Hard to tell a tree what to do, even if they shared a connection he couldn't quite understand. He paced around the cabin for a lap and then took a deep breath, exhaled it. Opened the door.
The pair of mer-creatures slipped a little deeper into the water at the intrusion, noses and eyes and strangely hair-like frills poking up from the current with guarded curiosity evident in their dark eyes. Boyce settled on the lip of the tilted porch and folded his legs, setting the slate over his lap. "It's going to be tough, crossing the streams. Oraston is only the first town. There's Maeston, here," he pointed to the map, "and three more. Then there's the lock in Snowedash, the big lake city."
"We-e re-emember," Scar said, lips moving just over the water. "Much e-ease-ier to go with the-e current, than against it."
"What do-o we-e do-o?" Star asked, blinking several times, parsing the map.
"I'm not sure," Boyce answered, halting as he uttered the truth. "The new moon came and went last night. We could get you out to the river tonight, but there's only one or two more nights before the moon's bright enough to cause us real trouble." He paused, frowning. "The log-drivers are out at all times, this time of the year. I don't know what I'd do if either of you were hurt."
The pair glanced at one another. Something shivered along Trellis' roots and up Boyce's spine, and he was glad that he was holding his slate in his lap. Then his world lurched, and Trellis slid into the cold water, startling both mer-creatures enough that they dived and disappeared down-stream. Trellis, half-submerged, left Boyce kicking back to the surface with an angry oath on his lips--but at least the dunking had solved the problem he'd been facing a moment ago. "You son of a leaf," he cursed, distracted from anxiety about all of his things being half-drowned by the frigid temperature of the stream.
A half a dozen meters downstream, the serpents peeked out above the water, watching the spectacle unfold. Boyce clawed his way around the smooth bark of Trellis' porch rail until he'd made it back to the bank, where he pulled himself up onto the rich moss Trellis had tamped down overnight.
Trellis made a half-turn, and opened its door. The mer-creatures looked from it, to Boyce. Boyce, dragging his soaked hair from his face, dropped his forehead into his palm. "Be my guest," he growled, finally realizing the tree's intentions.
The wet splash had woken him enough that he was ready to go about his day. He left the mer-creatures to slither into his home while he tended his garden and his chicks, which had thankfully been unmenaced in the night. He aggressively over-weeded the garden, pants and shirt hanging from a line in the sunniest patch between trees as he worked. He also pulled at the buds that were blossoming from his hair and beard and, exposed to the light, from his shoulders and chest hair as well. He missed the dryads--he loved Daphne is a deep and abiding fashion--but there were times when he wondered if what he'd gotten from them in exchange for Trellis really was a net gain. This was the first time that Trellis had gone so blatantly against his wishes, acted as though completely on its own, and it made him leery. He spooked easily. It didn't make matters easier, now realizing that he didn't have complete control over his own home.
A few hours later the cabin sloshed back into the clearing, porch moulded upwards, roots and low-lying branches barely above the soil. Water dripped continuously from the lower half of the house and Boyce watched, mouth agape, as Trellis set itself down near the chicken coop. The mer-creatures were perched at the windows, apparently comfortably coiled up in the wash basin that Trellis had made of itself. Scar was holding one of Boyce's few books--a gift from Owen--over the windowsill, pages flipping, fingers glossy but apparently dry. So was the book, miraculously.
Boyce hastily found his garments, still half-wet, and threw them on before he came up to the edge of his tree. Star's mouth was just faintly open, its smile eerie. "This is very-e good," it said, looking over Boyce's garden and the chicken coop avidly. "Youur ho-ome?"
"Yeah," he responded. He scrubbed at his beard, unsure what to do. "Are you comfortable in there?"
"Oh, yes," Star said. It disappeared, sloshing around inside so that a little water spilled over the window ledge. Thrusting itself back up into the light, it slung its arms over the sill and grinned again. "Very-e good. Very-e clever. We-e can cross the-e stre-eams now, yes?"
It handily circumvented the need to follow the shore-line, Boyce had to admit... but he knew that it cost Trellis something to uproot itself. All that extra weight could not be good for it, over an extended period of time... and all the work it took to ask the natural trees to move out of the way for it would not help. Boyce shook his head in disbelief. "It will take a while. Days. You don't want to be confined for too long..."
"We-e will manage," Scar said, looking up from the book. It blinked at Boyce, and then grinned as well. The long, thin welt it bore made the gesture a little more ominous, but Boyce did his best to push that from his mind. "Youu offer a great de-eal... Maybe-e the-e storie-es of dryads are not so bad, after all."
"You're, uh, not dealing with a dryad," Boyce reminded them. He wasn't sure how a dryad would react to a creature like this, in honesty. Daphne liked to accept the world with open arms, he knew, but the rest of the dryads had been more suspicious and closed off. Had that only been with humans? Did they interact with these water-goers so differently...? Not for the first time, Boyce wondered what the balance of the Evermarches had been before humans had settled the river. He wondered if he owed it to both species to escort these two safely home. "We should see how far Trellis can go with you inside. It's a day to the next stream. I guess we'll put in up there, see if it's possible to make the entire trip this way."
"Let's do-o it," Star agreed, and then, gesturing to him, flicked its fingers in a strangely human fashion. 'Come closer,' the gesture said.
Boyce, thinking of his early-morning embarrassment, felt rooted to the spot for a moment, but eventually he approached Trellis. The height of the cabin put the serpent a little over him, but from this close he could see every scale. It brought its hand--webbed, he noticed--down to scritch at the corner of his jaw. Those claws looked sharp, but Star made a point to be careful. Frowning, Boyce stepped back.
"We-e have storie-es of man, too-o," it said, hair frill splaying a little as it curled its arm back under its chin and smiled. Tucked up like this, it looked almost friendly.
Boyce felt heat flushing across his cheeks and cleared his throat. He couldn't assume, but it was hard to parse that hooded look any other way. "I only want to get you home safe," he said, raising both hands, slowly tamping them forward. Star looked at the gesture very hard, sighed, and disappeared from the window lip.
The rest of the day was spent tidying up the clearing he'd be abandoning for at least the next two weeks. He looked longingly at his garden, which was in full bloom, at the bees that were buzzing around pea shoots and the beginnings of staked-out tomato flowers, so early but so eager to grow under his attention. He constructed a little fence on Trellis' roof for the chicks to roost in, and packed up the belongings he would use on the trail to keep himself and two huge serpents fed. He hoped it would be enough, though he really didn't know what to expect.
Scar ignored him for the most part, disappearing now and again but reappearing with another book, which it seemed to consume rapaciously. Star didn't return to the other window, and Boyce was left sweating, worrying if he had offended the creature so irrevocably by resisting what he assumed had to be advances. That Star had made an advance on him teased at the deep embarrassment he'd first felt take root early in the morning, and he contemplated what the serpents thought men might be good for. He didn't even know if they were the 'maid' kind of mer, nor if they were compatible in any other sort of way.
He kept his thoughts to himself, toiling harder to distract himself from questions he knew were too indecent to ask.
Night descended swiftly, and Trellis had only just crossed their home stream by the time that dusk really began settling in. Boyce was on foot, keeping easy pace with the slow, inhuman gait of the tree. It was a waste of a day, he supposed, but he was exhausted after his sleepless night, and if they were camped out next ot the stream, the serpents would not have far to go if Trellis could not sustain its attempt to play out the part of a walking pool.
He climbed up the latticework at the back of the cabin and checked on the chicks, who had all clustered into the nesting box that Trellis had grown as the light dimmed. They'd spent the entire afternoon skittering around the leafy, mossy roof, pecking eagerly at ladybugs and leaves with undistinguished avarice, but it was a strange place and they were all young, yet. They only swarmed out to peck at the feed he sprinkled around, and then retreated to their low perches. He could have used their company, tonight; the silky bantam, runt of the flock, liked to escape her greedy flockmates by sitting in his hand and allowing the man to preen her. Chickens were simple, dumb companions; the new company he found himself with was turning out to be a mess of complexities. Now he knew why Owen was not eager to ask the favour of him.
He came down as the night really set, unfurling a light tarp to sleep under. It had been a long time since he'd slept on the ground, but he'd done it for years before he'd met Daphne, and he was tired enough that tonight wouldn't be a problem. He was about to lay his head down when a splash caught his attention, and Star leaned far out the window, peering at him. "Boyce," it said, "it is a custom, to-o sing the-e night song. Come." It gestured again, and Boyce stifled a yawn.
Intrigued but wary, he padded around the cabin's side and Star snaked down, taking his arm. He pulled back at first, but it placed his hand on Trellis' bark, and then slipped back up into the window and disappeared from view. Curious, Boyce left his hand where it was and waited. He could hear sloshing, see the occasional trickle run up over the window. Trellis quivered a little, though Boyce wasn't sure if that was exhaustion or excitement. His tree did not often emote.
Like in his dreams the previous night, the sensation of vibrations rose and fell, but above them, the sound of the serpents' voices laid a sonorous timbre that managed to pierce his heart. He couldn't see them from here, but he could feel that, through Trellis, they were coiled around one another with their arms resting on the far windowsill, presumably looking up at the ragged line of the night visible through the branches on either side of the stream.
He remembered the same sounds, more distant by far, from the earliest days of his youth. Boyce frowned, thoughtful, trying to tease out the memory... but it too was complicated, and he eventually closed his eyes and simply listened.
They said their good-nights after a long and haunting tune, and Boyce made his way back to his sleeping roll. Despite the upset to his routine, he was asleep within minutes, and dreams of serpent songs and long, closely twined sinuous bodies haunted his sleep. The next morning he woke with a start, a hand to his cheek coming away smeared with broken petals and sap. The ground around him was a bed of luscious grass, all the way to Trellis, who was fairly bursting with an orchard's worth of flowers. Little birds had settled all around them, singing brightly as they chased after moths and early season bees--in short, the little area was a cacophony of life, and again he felt deeply embarrassed. Either this was Trellis' fault or the fault of his dreams, but either way, he was going to be starting the day without a cold dip--this time intentionally.
Both the serpents watched him come and go around Trellis with fixed attention, Star occasionally trying to imitate the little birds, while Scar with a deathly chill of silence. Boyce did his best to ignore them both after a gruff good morning. He fed the chicks and thrashed some of the taller grasses down to make space to prepare breakfast, and after a short exchange with the pair over simple fare, they were on their way.
Over the course of the night Trellis had worked its magic: Boyce could already see where they were headed by the clear little avenue where natural trees had pushed aside, their roots exposed, the soil churned. They'd come to no harm, likely shifting back to their old haunt after Trellis had trundled through. Boyce felt a vague pang of uncertainty that someone might stumble on the long, thin clearing and think to follow it back to discover them... but he travelled ahead and scouted around. They were deeply within the woods, aiming for the next stream, and the worst they'd stumble across were boars or swamp hags; village-folk didn't come this far into the forest for fear of even worse.
They reached the next stream by evening and Trellis didn't hesitate to stumble down the bank and directly into the water. The pair of serpents gushed out of the front door and into the cold, fresh water, leaving Boyce to do damage control on the roof where his chicks had, stupidly, nearly gone overboard. He hadn't expected to find a brace of dead fish on the bank when he climbed down, but Scar was keeping pace with the current, watching him just with its eyes above water. Boyce approached the offering carefully, waiting to see if the misunderstanding was his... but Scar dipped under the water again when he took the first fish, and he didn't see sign of them until after the sun had set.
The smell of roasting meat was satisfying and Boyce sat on the shore enjoying the comfort of privacy for a good long while. He noticed the pair returned to Trellis by the splashing of their bodies wriggling in through the open door and the surge of delight that came upon him, second-hand. A damper settled over his mood as he considered Trellis' enjoyment of their company; a thought had come to him as he was considering coming over to share dinner with the serpents. Had Daphne been so interested in him because of these second-hand feelings? He'd found himself deeply in love and he'd carefully severed ties with her when she'd rejoined her copse of dryads because she'd needed to go, to get further away from human settlements and the damage they could do. Now he wondered if she'd felt the same way about him. Had it hurt to leave him? Had it hurt when she'd realized they'd had a child that the dryads couldn't care for? Would she care if she knew that he'd had to pass Vianne on in turn to more capable parents?
Boyce sat in front of his camp stove with a dissonant glaze of emotions leaving him stunned and not a little alarmed. On any given day, this level of despair would be the point at which he would fish out a bottle and maybe lay out under the stars, or lose himself in rereading one of the books that Owen had given him. Step one of that sorry kind of misadventure was kept entirely in Trellis' cupboards, though, and at the moment those were guarded by sea serpents who had in turn left him with these mixed thoughts. He was compromised, he didn't want to foist his problems off on others; he couldn't, if they were going to trust him to get them home safely.
Still, Trellis' undercurrent of pleasant familiarity ran through him and he did his best to translate that. He'd offer them some of the fish--there were far too many fillets for him alone--and ask them to fish a bottle out for him in return. No explanation needed, no fuss or problem.
Star came to the window when he called softly up. "You still hungry?" he asked. He offered the heaped plate up without waiting for a reply, and, clearing his throat, added, "you don't have to eat it. Just thought... thought I'd share how I make things. Like your night song."
"This is goo-od," Star told him, holding the plate loosely. It hadn't stopped looking down at him, and he found himself stuck on his next step, until Star added, "join us for more night song?"
Boyce shook his head, mostly to clear his thoughts. "Would you... do you see any bottles in there? Just need one that's at least half-ways full."
Star made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a chiding tsk, and Scar crammed in next to it, seizing the plate. "If youu want it, join us. It is ru-oode to ignore the-e commu-oonal songs, e-even if youu are a split-legger."
Boyce stared at the pair of them, stomach dropping quite suddenly as he realized they intended to keep him around. He wasn't sure he could cope; even under good circumstances that singing made him feel deeply disquieted for reasons he wouldn't put a finger on. He wished he had some of Owen's grace in circumventing the kind of awkward he knew he sweated by the bucket. Swallowing a stammered response, he furrowed his brow, then said, "I guess it's a deal."
Trellis had remained in the water all evening, cycling the pool it had made of itself over the last two days. Boyce was forced to half-wade, half-climb around the side of the cabin to get to the door, which opened readily when he entered. Like it always did, Trellis had modified itself to suit the needs of its inhabitants. Little vents under the water were allowing a bit of the current to carry on through it, but those were the least of the changes. Boyce gawped at his cabinets, which were all curled up under the roof like modular wooden casks and tightly woven netting. The floor space, like this, was much larger... but in a second he realized every square inch was needed.
He hadn't realized how the mer-creatures had to wind themselves over one another to be able to coil into the cabin. Even in the gloam he could see that they were not given much space for privacy, and he bit his lip at the awful hospitality he must be providing, forcing them to share such close quarters. No wonder their evening singing sounded so sorrowful.
"He-ere," a voice said, startling him badly. He hadn't spotted one of them raised above the water in the near-complete darkness, but a set of hands slipped around one arm and he felt the water thrash nearby until he was guided to a raised coil. "Sit," the voice said, and Boyce, doing so, felt firm, serpentine muscle and silky scales under him. Another tightened behind until he was given little choice but to lean back onto it.
"Do you... is this how you do this with other humans?" He was struggling to find the words because he was still suffering from extremely mixed feelings. If he'd known he'd be in this situation in an hour or two he'd have worked harder to enjoy his privacy earlier in the night, maybe done his best not to go down that rabbit hole of worrying about old love affairs long buried. Hard to have a civilized conversation with an entirely different species, let alone manage himself at the same time.
The voice that settled close sounded a little more like Star's, he decided, though he couldn't see either of them well. "Sometimes," it said. There was something intimate in its voice that made Boyce feel tetchy. He was relieved when the second voice joined in, harder and more distant.
"When we-e were brought to-o the-e circus, we-e were made to sing for the-e humans, for days." Scar rustled somewhere across the cabin, and Boyce believed it. The same bitterness touched its voice that he had heard in some of the dryads'. "They didn't change our water, they barely-e fed us. We-e uused to-o think huumans re-espected Ooaaohn. No, they re-espect nothing."
If Boyce wasn't already damp with stream-water, he knew he'd be sweating. "I'm sorry," he said, feeling the obligation tug at him through the milieu of his own fears and sorrows.
"That isn't all tru-ue," Star said. "They re-espect one another. Youu," the coils tightened a little under and behind Boyce and he was distinctly aware that he was being addressed. "Youu go to-o great lengths be-ecause your huuman asked youu to-o. Youu have a great re-espect."
"Insu-oolar," Star rejected the notion. Boyce felt that he was sitting on the edge of a much deeper argument than he had any right to be present for. He heard Star huff, and then was dreadfully startled as the coils around him slipped back under the water and the pair of serpents scuffled. Briefly dunked, Boyce scrambled up and stumbled over several lengths of tails before he found Trellis' comforting wall and pressed against it.
"Boyce," Star's voice was further now, across the cabin. "We-e are be-eing ruude in our host's home." Despite the words being directed at him, Boyce had no doubt that they were not meant for him.
Still, he felt compelled to respond. "It's nothing." And then, feeling the water trembling around his calves and thighs, something happening, maybe a further scuffle, "I can't speak for the rest. You shouldn't've gone through that, though... if I can take you home safe and sound that's all I want. It's... I don't just owe Owen a debt. I..." He had to think for a moment, because here his thoughts clashed and stumbled and left him speechless. "When I was a sprout, I could hear your people's singing all the way up the side of the mountain; it was... it was good. Didn't do anything to deserve it, but you weren't doing it for me. It was..." He slowed again, deeply aware of the fact that they were waiting on him and feeling frustration mount as he struggled for anything like eloquence. "You lived your lives, we lived ours. We didn't touch one another's day-to-day much, but you always closed out the day with a song, made me feel like we were included somehow. It was... a kind of harmony."
The last word fell into silence, and Boyce found himself worrying that he'd strayed too far over a line. Over more than one; already, speaking about his past felt like a deep breach of his own boundaries, but the serpents' agitation necessitated bridging the gap somehow.
He felt a loose coil of a body press up against his calves, and Star's voice was closer when it replied. "Then it is settled. Youu are our host. We-e sing the-e night song and... close out the-e day."
Further away, Scar let out a sigh that shivered into the water. Boyce said nothing, worrying about sparking another scuffle. His silence at least provided them space to begin their warm-up. In a few minutes, he found himself in close quarters to the pair of them as they slipped more comfortably to Trellis' window ledges to sing to the stars and the forest and the strange land around them. Maybe, somewhere, the serpents in the lake were singing, too... Boyce closed his eyes in the darkness and listened and, slowly, the feeling of being alone meshed with his idle dreams--maybe out there the dryads heard strange singing and felt something, too. Maybe Daphne wasn't entirely human, didn't feel things as deeply or in the same way that he did... but he'd felt genuine affection from her, deep trust... she'd gone out on a limb to entrust him with not just Vianne but with Trellis, too. She'd done everything to take him out of the human world in which he'd been struggling to make him feel more a part of the forest that had sheltered him...
By the time the last of the singing had died away, he scrubbed at his face and felt his eyes burning. He didn't say anything because his throat was constricted, the lump of feelings swelled up to take his entire broad chest. He felt the splash of a long body slithering around and wasn't surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder. It wasn't hard to guess which of the serpents was on him when it wrapped around under his arms in a hug and began a thrumming purr, even if he couldn't see them. Tentatively, he raised his hands and placed them on cool, scaly shoulders, and testing (both for himself and for Star) rested his cheek against a head frill that felt strange, cool but fleshy. He felt a deep beating there, like a heart-beat that surged through the purring. It was soothing, and he swallowed his overwhelming thoughts after a while, felt them drawn off like bad venom.
After a while he found the need to shudder a sigh, and the serpent pulled back enough to give him space. "Do-o youu want to-o be-e close?"
Boyce laughed, gulped again because it had been too close to a hiccup, something uncontrolled. "Things don't go well, when I'm... like that."
Star shifted, its whole body curling to press more up against him. Boyce was aware that Scar was in close proximity, most likely glaring disapproval, and that sobered him a little to the invitation, but Star was adamant. "Huumans and we-e are different, but not so badly-e." It let itself back down, resting its chin on his shoulder. Boyce, careful, did his best to relax, which wasn't saying much. Star splayed its webbed hand over his chest, over his wet shirt. "Follow me-e," it suggested, and found an octave that was lower than Boyce would have expected, was more in his range. It hummed, one note, slow and steady. Waiting, expectant.
Boyce, feeling shocked by the gesture, found himself freezing up. "I can't..."
"Close your eyes," Star said, somehow maintaining the note as it spoke. Boyce realized belatedly that the serpents could see in the dark, and the stab of embarrassment was almost enough that he tried to sink under the waterline and crab-walk out the door. But Star was leaning on him, and he could vaguely feel his own hammering heart under its hand. He took a deep breath and hissed, and then closed his eyes. After a few moments, he grated a note, faltered half-ways through, and then tensed, deeply uncomfortable.
"He-e's not raised to-o it," Scar hissed, voice still across the room, but Boyce felt a flick of water that splashed them both and was well reminded that they were both coiled around the room. "Youu might as well be-e squee-ezing a stone."
"I don't sing," Boyce confirmed, still embarrassed, but gratified by that unflattering but astute observation.
"Some huumans do-o," Star murmured, thoughtful. It withdrew its hand and then, to Boyce's surprise, pulled up his shirt, slipped both hands beneath it to feel at the hair of his stomach and chest. "But not youu. Then listen," Star murmured. It coiled around him and managed to wedge its body behind his legs, goading him away from the wall until it had him sitting back on a curled twist of muscled tail. Long claws laced around from his chest to his back, feeling him out and chasing goosebumps across him, which shivered back around as another second-hand surge of delight chased his heavy mood to a further corner of his mind. He begrudged Trellis' connection just now, knew it was clearly trying to leave an impact on him. But Star, either unaware or gladly abetting the tree, hummed and soothed and stroked until he felt on the edge of the world, pain and loss a far-off thought. "Can I be-e close with youu?" Star murmured. They had to be deep into the night by now.
Boyce came back to himself enough to feel concern. "What does that look like?" He regretted undoing all of Star's work--it had been a long time since he'd felt so at ease, a very long time... but he couldn't go into intimacy blind again, the way he had with Daphne.
Star vibrated a deep chuckle. "Does it loo-ok like?"
Still, Boyce felt something loosening and it took him a moment to realize that Trellis had let down a vine. The lantern bumped against the side of his head and he floundered for a moment, and then released a huff of a laugh that took some of his deeply unwanted tension away. "I'm not... being literal. I don't know how to make you happy. Or... how you work..." He didn't have matches and the torch had no fuel in any case, as much as he'd have liked some light to navigate by.
Sonorous laughter met his admission and Star pressed up to him again. It took his hands and set them at what would have been a woman's hips, where its humanoid torso flared, where what he knew were paler scales widened along its belly, faintly iridescent. "Start he-ere," it instructed him.
Boyce carefully, tentatively nuzzled against the cheek that rested against him again, and found the bearing of something like hip bones, stroking those as Star purred its strange rhythm. Her strange rhythm? No... after a few moments, hands roaming, he had a feeling that it was more like his strange rhythm. He was more careful to explore the texture of scales around the serpent's belly, but they had taken on a fascinating kind of tension, pulled back into folds that led to a protrusion that... well, it felt familiar enough that he realized more or less what to do with it. He stifled a noise of embarrassment and gratification both as he realized that maybe he was thinking too alien when he worried about what to do when intimate with a mer...man? But there was more he wanted to ask, that he couldn't ask, not really, not right away.
Instead he listened to the pitch of Star's purring to determine if he was doing right, which hitched when his hand slipped from folds of flesh that had puffed and pulled back to reveal smooth flesh, a shaft that was hardening as his fingers brushed carefully along its length. Boyce closed his eyes and sighed as he explored that fully. There was enough there to leave him thinking indulgent thoughts, and he tested Star by firming a grip and stroking him harder. He was gratified further by the gasp just under his cheek, but that was put on hold as Star pushed back, sudden, and gripped him by the wrist. "Slo-ow," it shuddered, and Boyce, chastened, was further left dampened by the sly note of laughter somewhere further in the darkness. He felt, secondhand through one of Star's coils, something shift in the water, firming up where he'd been reclining. Hard to forget that Scar was in audience, obviously watching or at least listening. Flushed with mixed arousal and embarrassment, Boyce did his best to shut worry about an audience out. He didn't need to be judged from afar when being led to explore someone so new.
Star picked at his belt and Boyce belatedly realized that his wet pants were achingly in the way. The serpent had been so heavily draped over him that he'd felt a little crushed, but the sudden freedom of a bare cock unconstrained by belt and wet fabric made him sigh with relief. He tensed right up again when webbed hands and long nails combed at the hair down his stomach, to his erection, and then slipped right below and began playing with his scrotum. "What is this?" he heard, to dismay, and he bit his lip on a very improper response.
"Uh... don't mess with that... that's not... not for starters," he tried and failed to clarify.
Star at least pulled his hand away, palm glazing along the underside of his cock, webbed fingers strange and smooth and shiver-inducing. "Did I hurt youu?"
"No," he admitted, but he was entirely distracted. "That felt good."
"And this?" Star settled against him again, the length of his own erection pressed beside Boyce's, trapping them against one another. He realized belatedly that at this height, Star was a little longer in the torso compared to him. It felt strange to, after one or two exceptions, be on the smaller side of a person. Leaning back as he was, Boyce wasn't sure what to do about this strange position, except try to settle more comfortably against the coils that were propping him above the waterline.
He sighed, and felt Star shift against him, and bit at his lip as the folds and bumps of the serpent's retracted scales softly engulfed his erection. It was strange, definitely different, but he might be able to work with the sensation and the intensity of Star's investment in doing things right. It was when they were rubbing against one another harder, water splashing under the pair as Boyce loosely slipped a leg around the length of tail, that Star jostled up a little, and Boyce felt the head of his cock press hard into what he realized was more than a slight depression. He froze when Star gasped and went tense, when the hands stroking his arm and the back of his head curled in enough that little pinpricks of nails dug into his flesh.
"You okay?" Boyce asked, doing his best to hold perfectly still. Sea serpents might be entirely new to him, but he was very familiar with that kind of tensing. He knew he wasn't an easy fit for most.
"Ah," Star responded, for once without words. Then he shifted a little, and, testing, pressed himself until Boyce's cock was lodged against tight, rigid folds. "O-oh... This is..."
"You don't have to--" Boyce began, thinking maybe the merman was being overzealous.
"No... I..." Star sucked in a breath and shivered from hips to tail-tip, and somewhere in the far side of the cabin Boyce heard Scar make a noise that he couldn't interpret. "This is more close than... I... Youu fit well," he finished, hips rocking over him in a way that Boyce couldn't ignore.
He settled his hands over the merman's strange hip-like bones, trying for a light grip but failing, at times. The experience was so uniquely different that he couldn't lose himself in the moment, but it was obvious that what he was doing for the serpent was enough to leave him thrumming, shivering in a way that was easy to feel. The experience was deeply gratifying, easy and familiar in ways that left him enjoying the hard rut he was being ridden for. He could hear Scar murmur something in that language he didn't understand, and Star snapped a distracted response. "You're sure..." Boyce asked, feeling the merman tensing, all the signs pointing to an imminent orgasm. The fact of the matter was that he wasn't sure: there was something else going on here and he was in no state to untangle the intricacies.
It turned out he didn't have to, though the next moment was a strangely disorienting one. He felt Star tense, hard, so hard that his cock was pressed back and he had to catch the disappointed noise in his throat as the sweetly tight, warm grip of what felt an awful lot more suited in a woman was replaced by the cool rush of water. He couldn't identify the gentle brush of soft flesh against him next, save that Star was bent over him, shivering as though deeply into waves of climax. The realization gratified him, and Boyce tightened his grip on the serpent's hips to encourage it--if this was a typical orgasm, it was an awful long one.
Soon, Star folded forward, limp and heavy against him, cock still hard on the both of them amazingly despite the merman's obvious tipping point. Boyce slipped his hands around Star's shoulders and stroked him for a few moments, thoughtful and dazed. "Is that enough...?" he tried to ask, feeling very little from the serpent but a low, tired purr for several minutes.
"We-e shouldn't," Star responded, breathless. Boyce could still feel the pulse of the creature's shaft against his thigh, and the ache of his own erection, so sadly refused, was equally a distraction. His anticipation came crashing to a halt as the merman clarified, "we-e can't fertilize them without appro-oval..." in a wistful tone that left Boyce suddenly on edge.
"Ah... what..." Suddenly he wished he had a light. He dipped his hand under the waterline and felt, bumping against his half-pants'd leg in the light current, something soft. Jelly-like, fist-sized spheres, dozens of them. "Ah... oh," the clarification dawned on him a moment or two later and he felt about as equally erotically charged as though he'd been dunked in an ice vat. "You're not a man...?" as though he was banking on one last chance.
Scar hissed petty laughter from near the window and Boyce, trapped under Star, briefly wished again that he could scuttle out the door and to the bottom of the ocean, never to see light again. Embarrassment and confusion and deep shame warred with an overabundance of stifled erotic charge and he genuinely didn't know what to think. Wet scales lifted from his bare torso, and that disarmingly cock-like protrusion with them--that was a relief. He knew he was as unappealingly limp as he could possibly get. He wasn't disgusted, that wasn't it exactly. He was... confused. Very much left in the dark. Star's hands were on his shoulders, though one of them shifted, giving him a little more space. "Youu don't... I should have said something..." And then, carrying on heroically, "when we-e mate, that is... what youu did with me-e is more serious. Eggs are... it is how youu stimu-ulate..." and then, faltering, it carried on, "it's o-okay, they will never hatch if we-e don't..."
"Hold back," Scar murmured, tail twitching in petty delight. "Youu should have said it all be-efore, idie-ot."
Star snapped something else, again in the language that Boyce couldn't possibly understand. He pulled himself free and hastily redid his pants, though he was hopelessly waterlogged at this point. The thought of thrashing around in the dark, amongst what could be dozens of eggs, left him a little weak at the knees. He held up both hands, once again tamping them forward until he found Star's torso. He rested his palms there, still and careful, mastered his face into a calm mask. "Nothing went wrong. Nobody's hurt... I think." And then, "that felt... good... all of it. Should've laid everything out first, but... I wasn't... entirely in my right mind."
That, at least, stopped Scar's incriminations. Star plucked at both of his wrists again, placing his hands higher up on his... her... its chest. "Youu didn't say..."
Boyce bit his lip. "How often do you... do this... the less intimate version?"
"Often, for fun," Star responded, voice lifting out of embarrassment back into the kind of forward optimism that Boyce was more familiar with.
"Tomorrow, before we leave... Can we try again? Without the company?" He felt himself flushing again as Scar hissed an annoyed noise, but Star was definitely laughing.
"Ple-ease," it said, "on the-e bank, in the-e sun, where it is so gree-en. One more try."
Story:
everwoodColors: Daffodil 11) "Go Exploring", Tequila Rose 7) "A lady came in the door", Kondo 4) "But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future."
Supplies and Styles: Frame, Portrait, Fingerpainting, Graffiti (S19 Spring Cleaning), Brush ('Encroach'), Stain ("A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad." -Bob Edwards), Pastels (
fluffbingo Round 2, 'Tempt'), Glue, "Conveying your message to others today may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean you should just give up. In fact, it’s absolutely imperative that you find a way to express your thoughts."Word Count: 7,461
Rating: Mature (M/Monster lovin')
Warnings: Inter-species mating rituals
Notes: This ran long, like way long... but I'm weirdly proud of it for the fluff to angst to smut ratio. If you make it to the end, many thanks for reading.
The lantern guttered, and Boyce shook himself from his reverie as Trellis peeled back shutters to reveal the pink glow of dawn. The slate he'd been toiling over looked illegible, he was convinced, but it was the best he could do. On it, the main course was the river road, long and winding between the foothills that butted up against the Dragontooth Mountains, which sketched a path from the Glacier Lake to roughly his neck of the woods. Over a distance of what he knew to be a week and a half of overland travel between the outpost capital of Snowedash and the sleepy river town of Oraston, Boyce had marked his clearing.
The outflow from the Glacier Lake was wide and deep and heavily trafficked, humans having settled the South coast as they built up industry around the mountain mine, the nearby forest, the fish that spawned in the lake. It wouldn't have been possible without the peace treaty between humans and the other creatures that called the lake home, but between there and here, the peace quickly petered out, and Boyce knew very well that humans interpreted rules however they needed to. These two serpents weren't going to get very far by slinking along the river bottom at this time of the year.
Neither would using the tributaries help. The one that fed the river road from his clearing meandered back to the bluffs in the foothills fully East and nowhere close to the Glacier Lake. There were several other tributaries, several other settlements to bypass, too. In any of them, there could be people with their eyes out, quietly looking for the pair. Gurile had told him that if things were as bad as Owen thought, there'd be activity looking to fetch the serpents back, and perhaps lashback to the local folk who helped them escape. Boyce hadn't been back to talk to Gurile since, but it was all a cause for concern.
He shoved himself to his feet and carefully propped his slate under his arm, wiping his chalky hand on his pants as he peeked out the window. Trellis was still perched on the stream bank, where both of the creatures had remained just above water. They'd introduced themselves, but their names were so alien that Boyce didn't dare to venture pronouncing them. Star, the one with the mark across its forehead, and Scar, the dark one that seemed stand-offish and suspicious... he'd call them that for now until he could better understand their language.
They were so long. They hadn't spotted him yet, but both of them were cuddled together with Trellis' roots and branches extended for them to hold against the current. With the gauzy light of dawn, he could see their trailing tails undulating in the water, three, four times his length with scales marked in a variegated pattern of pearlescent greys and obsidian black. They were strange and beautiful and Boyce felt a pang as he watched them quietly converse in their own language. Even awake, he could feel the second-hand vibrations as Trellis' roots picked up the deeper, slower song they used under the water.
The bank was bursting with verdant life, and Boyce realized with some deep embarrassment that Trellis was flourishing, in that strange way that it had, provoking the flora to sprout around it and green up the immediate surroundings. Early flowers were budding far ahead of their time, moss was furling tendrils outward, inviting and soft. Boyce went red at the ears; Trellis was showing off in a way that was far from appropriate. It was the same language that Daphne had used with him when they had been... close... and as far as he knew, her tree had been completely of one mind with her. Would the serpents understand what it meant? Were their strange stories about the dryads he'd inadvertently come to know so specific that they'd recognize the invitation Trellis was aiming for? And what else did they know about the dryads that he didn't?
"Stop that," he murmured, chastened that Trellis was taking initiative in a place he'd never thought to pursue. Hard to tell a tree what to do, even if they shared a connection he couldn't quite understand. He paced around the cabin for a lap and then took a deep breath, exhaled it. Opened the door.
The pair of mer-creatures slipped a little deeper into the water at the intrusion, noses and eyes and strangely hair-like frills poking up from the current with guarded curiosity evident in their dark eyes. Boyce settled on the lip of the tilted porch and folded his legs, setting the slate over his lap. "It's going to be tough, crossing the streams. Oraston is only the first town. There's Maeston, here," he pointed to the map, "and three more. Then there's the lock in Snowedash, the big lake city."
"We-e re-emember," Scar said, lips moving just over the water. "Much e-ease-ier to go with the-e current, than against it."
"What do-o we-e do-o?" Star asked, blinking several times, parsing the map.
"I'm not sure," Boyce answered, halting as he uttered the truth. "The new moon came and went last night. We could get you out to the river tonight, but there's only one or two more nights before the moon's bright enough to cause us real trouble." He paused, frowning. "The log-drivers are out at all times, this time of the year. I don't know what I'd do if either of you were hurt."
The pair glanced at one another. Something shivered along Trellis' roots and up Boyce's spine, and he was glad that he was holding his slate in his lap. Then his world lurched, and Trellis slid into the cold water, startling both mer-creatures enough that they dived and disappeared down-stream. Trellis, half-submerged, left Boyce kicking back to the surface with an angry oath on his lips--but at least the dunking had solved the problem he'd been facing a moment ago. "You son of a leaf," he cursed, distracted from anxiety about all of his things being half-drowned by the frigid temperature of the stream.
A half a dozen meters downstream, the serpents peeked out above the water, watching the spectacle unfold. Boyce clawed his way around the smooth bark of Trellis' porch rail until he'd made it back to the bank, where he pulled himself up onto the rich moss Trellis had tamped down overnight.
Trellis made a half-turn, and opened its door. The mer-creatures looked from it, to Boyce. Boyce, dragging his soaked hair from his face, dropped his forehead into his palm. "Be my guest," he growled, finally realizing the tree's intentions.
The wet splash had woken him enough that he was ready to go about his day. He left the mer-creatures to slither into his home while he tended his garden and his chicks, which had thankfully been unmenaced in the night. He aggressively over-weeded the garden, pants and shirt hanging from a line in the sunniest patch between trees as he worked. He also pulled at the buds that were blossoming from his hair and beard and, exposed to the light, from his shoulders and chest hair as well. He missed the dryads--he loved Daphne is a deep and abiding fashion--but there were times when he wondered if what he'd gotten from them in exchange for Trellis really was a net gain. This was the first time that Trellis had gone so blatantly against his wishes, acted as though completely on its own, and it made him leery. He spooked easily. It didn't make matters easier, now realizing that he didn't have complete control over his own home.
A few hours later the cabin sloshed back into the clearing, porch moulded upwards, roots and low-lying branches barely above the soil. Water dripped continuously from the lower half of the house and Boyce watched, mouth agape, as Trellis set itself down near the chicken coop. The mer-creatures were perched at the windows, apparently comfortably coiled up in the wash basin that Trellis had made of itself. Scar was holding one of Boyce's few books--a gift from Owen--over the windowsill, pages flipping, fingers glossy but apparently dry. So was the book, miraculously.
Boyce hastily found his garments, still half-wet, and threw them on before he came up to the edge of his tree. Star's mouth was just faintly open, its smile eerie. "This is very-e good," it said, looking over Boyce's garden and the chicken coop avidly. "Youur ho-ome?"
"Yeah," he responded. He scrubbed at his beard, unsure what to do. "Are you comfortable in there?"
"Oh, yes," Star said. It disappeared, sloshing around inside so that a little water spilled over the window ledge. Thrusting itself back up into the light, it slung its arms over the sill and grinned again. "Very-e good. Very-e clever. We-e can cross the-e stre-eams now, yes?"
It handily circumvented the need to follow the shore-line, Boyce had to admit... but he knew that it cost Trellis something to uproot itself. All that extra weight could not be good for it, over an extended period of time... and all the work it took to ask the natural trees to move out of the way for it would not help. Boyce shook his head in disbelief. "It will take a while. Days. You don't want to be confined for too long..."
"We-e will manage," Scar said, looking up from the book. It blinked at Boyce, and then grinned as well. The long, thin welt it bore made the gesture a little more ominous, but Boyce did his best to push that from his mind. "Youu offer a great de-eal... Maybe-e the-e storie-es of dryads are not so bad, after all."
"You're, uh, not dealing with a dryad," Boyce reminded them. He wasn't sure how a dryad would react to a creature like this, in honesty. Daphne liked to accept the world with open arms, he knew, but the rest of the dryads had been more suspicious and closed off. Had that only been with humans? Did they interact with these water-goers so differently...? Not for the first time, Boyce wondered what the balance of the Evermarches had been before humans had settled the river. He wondered if he owed it to both species to escort these two safely home. "We should see how far Trellis can go with you inside. It's a day to the next stream. I guess we'll put in up there, see if it's possible to make the entire trip this way."
"Let's do-o it," Star agreed, and then, gesturing to him, flicked its fingers in a strangely human fashion. 'Come closer,' the gesture said.
Boyce, thinking of his early-morning embarrassment, felt rooted to the spot for a moment, but eventually he approached Trellis. The height of the cabin put the serpent a little over him, but from this close he could see every scale. It brought its hand--webbed, he noticed--down to scritch at the corner of his jaw. Those claws looked sharp, but Star made a point to be careful. Frowning, Boyce stepped back.
"We-e have storie-es of man, too-o," it said, hair frill splaying a little as it curled its arm back under its chin and smiled. Tucked up like this, it looked almost friendly.
Boyce felt heat flushing across his cheeks and cleared his throat. He couldn't assume, but it was hard to parse that hooded look any other way. "I only want to get you home safe," he said, raising both hands, slowly tamping them forward. Star looked at the gesture very hard, sighed, and disappeared from the window lip.
The rest of the day was spent tidying up the clearing he'd be abandoning for at least the next two weeks. He looked longingly at his garden, which was in full bloom, at the bees that were buzzing around pea shoots and the beginnings of staked-out tomato flowers, so early but so eager to grow under his attention. He constructed a little fence on Trellis' roof for the chicks to roost in, and packed up the belongings he would use on the trail to keep himself and two huge serpents fed. He hoped it would be enough, though he really didn't know what to expect.
Scar ignored him for the most part, disappearing now and again but reappearing with another book, which it seemed to consume rapaciously. Star didn't return to the other window, and Boyce was left sweating, worrying if he had offended the creature so irrevocably by resisting what he assumed had to be advances. That Star had made an advance on him teased at the deep embarrassment he'd first felt take root early in the morning, and he contemplated what the serpents thought men might be good for. He didn't even know if they were the 'maid' kind of mer, nor if they were compatible in any other sort of way.
He kept his thoughts to himself, toiling harder to distract himself from questions he knew were too indecent to ask.
Night descended swiftly, and Trellis had only just crossed their home stream by the time that dusk really began settling in. Boyce was on foot, keeping easy pace with the slow, inhuman gait of the tree. It was a waste of a day, he supposed, but he was exhausted after his sleepless night, and if they were camped out next ot the stream, the serpents would not have far to go if Trellis could not sustain its attempt to play out the part of a walking pool.
He climbed up the latticework at the back of the cabin and checked on the chicks, who had all clustered into the nesting box that Trellis had grown as the light dimmed. They'd spent the entire afternoon skittering around the leafy, mossy roof, pecking eagerly at ladybugs and leaves with undistinguished avarice, but it was a strange place and they were all young, yet. They only swarmed out to peck at the feed he sprinkled around, and then retreated to their low perches. He could have used their company, tonight; the silky bantam, runt of the flock, liked to escape her greedy flockmates by sitting in his hand and allowing the man to preen her. Chickens were simple, dumb companions; the new company he found himself with was turning out to be a mess of complexities. Now he knew why Owen was not eager to ask the favour of him.
He came down as the night really set, unfurling a light tarp to sleep under. It had been a long time since he'd slept on the ground, but he'd done it for years before he'd met Daphne, and he was tired enough that tonight wouldn't be a problem. He was about to lay his head down when a splash caught his attention, and Star leaned far out the window, peering at him. "Boyce," it said, "it is a custom, to-o sing the-e night song. Come." It gestured again, and Boyce stifled a yawn.
Intrigued but wary, he padded around the cabin's side and Star snaked down, taking his arm. He pulled back at first, but it placed his hand on Trellis' bark, and then slipped back up into the window and disappeared from view. Curious, Boyce left his hand where it was and waited. He could hear sloshing, see the occasional trickle run up over the window. Trellis quivered a little, though Boyce wasn't sure if that was exhaustion or excitement. His tree did not often emote.
Like in his dreams the previous night, the sensation of vibrations rose and fell, but above them, the sound of the serpents' voices laid a sonorous timbre that managed to pierce his heart. He couldn't see them from here, but he could feel that, through Trellis, they were coiled around one another with their arms resting on the far windowsill, presumably looking up at the ragged line of the night visible through the branches on either side of the stream.
He remembered the same sounds, more distant by far, from the earliest days of his youth. Boyce frowned, thoughtful, trying to tease out the memory... but it too was complicated, and he eventually closed his eyes and simply listened.
They said their good-nights after a long and haunting tune, and Boyce made his way back to his sleeping roll. Despite the upset to his routine, he was asleep within minutes, and dreams of serpent songs and long, closely twined sinuous bodies haunted his sleep. The next morning he woke with a start, a hand to his cheek coming away smeared with broken petals and sap. The ground around him was a bed of luscious grass, all the way to Trellis, who was fairly bursting with an orchard's worth of flowers. Little birds had settled all around them, singing brightly as they chased after moths and early season bees--in short, the little area was a cacophony of life, and again he felt deeply embarrassed. Either this was Trellis' fault or the fault of his dreams, but either way, he was going to be starting the day without a cold dip--this time intentionally.
Both the serpents watched him come and go around Trellis with fixed attention, Star occasionally trying to imitate the little birds, while Scar with a deathly chill of silence. Boyce did his best to ignore them both after a gruff good morning. He fed the chicks and thrashed some of the taller grasses down to make space to prepare breakfast, and after a short exchange with the pair over simple fare, they were on their way.
Over the course of the night Trellis had worked its magic: Boyce could already see where they were headed by the clear little avenue where natural trees had pushed aside, their roots exposed, the soil churned. They'd come to no harm, likely shifting back to their old haunt after Trellis had trundled through. Boyce felt a vague pang of uncertainty that someone might stumble on the long, thin clearing and think to follow it back to discover them... but he travelled ahead and scouted around. They were deeply within the woods, aiming for the next stream, and the worst they'd stumble across were boars or swamp hags; village-folk didn't come this far into the forest for fear of even worse.
They reached the next stream by evening and Trellis didn't hesitate to stumble down the bank and directly into the water. The pair of serpents gushed out of the front door and into the cold, fresh water, leaving Boyce to do damage control on the roof where his chicks had, stupidly, nearly gone overboard. He hadn't expected to find a brace of dead fish on the bank when he climbed down, but Scar was keeping pace with the current, watching him just with its eyes above water. Boyce approached the offering carefully, waiting to see if the misunderstanding was his... but Scar dipped under the water again when he took the first fish, and he didn't see sign of them until after the sun had set.
The smell of roasting meat was satisfying and Boyce sat on the shore enjoying the comfort of privacy for a good long while. He noticed the pair returned to Trellis by the splashing of their bodies wriggling in through the open door and the surge of delight that came upon him, second-hand. A damper settled over his mood as he considered Trellis' enjoyment of their company; a thought had come to him as he was considering coming over to share dinner with the serpents. Had Daphne been so interested in him because of these second-hand feelings? He'd found himself deeply in love and he'd carefully severed ties with her when she'd rejoined her copse of dryads because she'd needed to go, to get further away from human settlements and the damage they could do. Now he wondered if she'd felt the same way about him. Had it hurt to leave him? Had it hurt when she'd realized they'd had a child that the dryads couldn't care for? Would she care if she knew that he'd had to pass Vianne on in turn to more capable parents?
Boyce sat in front of his camp stove with a dissonant glaze of emotions leaving him stunned and not a little alarmed. On any given day, this level of despair would be the point at which he would fish out a bottle and maybe lay out under the stars, or lose himself in rereading one of the books that Owen had given him. Step one of that sorry kind of misadventure was kept entirely in Trellis' cupboards, though, and at the moment those were guarded by sea serpents who had in turn left him with these mixed thoughts. He was compromised, he didn't want to foist his problems off on others; he couldn't, if they were going to trust him to get them home safely.
Still, Trellis' undercurrent of pleasant familiarity ran through him and he did his best to translate that. He'd offer them some of the fish--there were far too many fillets for him alone--and ask them to fish a bottle out for him in return. No explanation needed, no fuss or problem.
Star came to the window when he called softly up. "You still hungry?" he asked. He offered the heaped plate up without waiting for a reply, and, clearing his throat, added, "you don't have to eat it. Just thought... thought I'd share how I make things. Like your night song."
"This is goo-od," Star told him, holding the plate loosely. It hadn't stopped looking down at him, and he found himself stuck on his next step, until Star added, "join us for more night song?"
Boyce shook his head, mostly to clear his thoughts. "Would you... do you see any bottles in there? Just need one that's at least half-ways full."
Star made a noise that sounded an awful lot like a chiding tsk, and Scar crammed in next to it, seizing the plate. "If youu want it, join us. It is ru-oode to ignore the-e commu-oonal songs, e-even if youu are a split-legger."
Boyce stared at the pair of them, stomach dropping quite suddenly as he realized they intended to keep him around. He wasn't sure he could cope; even under good circumstances that singing made him feel deeply disquieted for reasons he wouldn't put a finger on. He wished he had some of Owen's grace in circumventing the kind of awkward he knew he sweated by the bucket. Swallowing a stammered response, he furrowed his brow, then said, "I guess it's a deal."
Trellis had remained in the water all evening, cycling the pool it had made of itself over the last two days. Boyce was forced to half-wade, half-climb around the side of the cabin to get to the door, which opened readily when he entered. Like it always did, Trellis had modified itself to suit the needs of its inhabitants. Little vents under the water were allowing a bit of the current to carry on through it, but those were the least of the changes. Boyce gawped at his cabinets, which were all curled up under the roof like modular wooden casks and tightly woven netting. The floor space, like this, was much larger... but in a second he realized every square inch was needed.
He hadn't realized how the mer-creatures had to wind themselves over one another to be able to coil into the cabin. Even in the gloam he could see that they were not given much space for privacy, and he bit his lip at the awful hospitality he must be providing, forcing them to share such close quarters. No wonder their evening singing sounded so sorrowful.
"He-ere," a voice said, startling him badly. He hadn't spotted one of them raised above the water in the near-complete darkness, but a set of hands slipped around one arm and he felt the water thrash nearby until he was guided to a raised coil. "Sit," the voice said, and Boyce, doing so, felt firm, serpentine muscle and silky scales under him. Another tightened behind until he was given little choice but to lean back onto it.
"Do you... is this how you do this with other humans?" He was struggling to find the words because he was still suffering from extremely mixed feelings. If he'd known he'd be in this situation in an hour or two he'd have worked harder to enjoy his privacy earlier in the night, maybe done his best not to go down that rabbit hole of worrying about old love affairs long buried. Hard to have a civilized conversation with an entirely different species, let alone manage himself at the same time.
The voice that settled close sounded a little more like Star's, he decided, though he couldn't see either of them well. "Sometimes," it said. There was something intimate in its voice that made Boyce feel tetchy. He was relieved when the second voice joined in, harder and more distant.
"When we-e were brought to-o the-e circus, we-e were made to sing for the-e humans, for days." Scar rustled somewhere across the cabin, and Boyce believed it. The same bitterness touched its voice that he had heard in some of the dryads'. "They didn't change our water, they barely-e fed us. We-e uused to-o think huumans re-espected Ooaaohn. No, they re-espect nothing."
If Boyce wasn't already damp with stream-water, he knew he'd be sweating. "I'm sorry," he said, feeling the obligation tug at him through the milieu of his own fears and sorrows.
"That isn't all tru-ue," Star said. "They re-espect one another. Youu," the coils tightened a little under and behind Boyce and he was distinctly aware that he was being addressed. "Youu go to-o great lengths be-ecause your huuman asked youu to-o. Youu have a great re-espect."
"Insu-oolar," Star rejected the notion. Boyce felt that he was sitting on the edge of a much deeper argument than he had any right to be present for. He heard Star huff, and then was dreadfully startled as the coils around him slipped back under the water and the pair of serpents scuffled. Briefly dunked, Boyce scrambled up and stumbled over several lengths of tails before he found Trellis' comforting wall and pressed against it.
"Boyce," Star's voice was further now, across the cabin. "We-e are be-eing ruude in our host's home." Despite the words being directed at him, Boyce had no doubt that they were not meant for him.
Still, he felt compelled to respond. "It's nothing." And then, feeling the water trembling around his calves and thighs, something happening, maybe a further scuffle, "I can't speak for the rest. You shouldn't've gone through that, though... if I can take you home safe and sound that's all I want. It's... I don't just owe Owen a debt. I..." He had to think for a moment, because here his thoughts clashed and stumbled and left him speechless. "When I was a sprout, I could hear your people's singing all the way up the side of the mountain; it was... it was good. Didn't do anything to deserve it, but you weren't doing it for me. It was..." He slowed again, deeply aware of the fact that they were waiting on him and feeling frustration mount as he struggled for anything like eloquence. "You lived your lives, we lived ours. We didn't touch one another's day-to-day much, but you always closed out the day with a song, made me feel like we were included somehow. It was... a kind of harmony."
The last word fell into silence, and Boyce found himself worrying that he'd strayed too far over a line. Over more than one; already, speaking about his past felt like a deep breach of his own boundaries, but the serpents' agitation necessitated bridging the gap somehow.
He felt a loose coil of a body press up against his calves, and Star's voice was closer when it replied. "Then it is settled. Youu are our host. We-e sing the-e night song and... close out the-e day."
Further away, Scar let out a sigh that shivered into the water. Boyce said nothing, worrying about sparking another scuffle. His silence at least provided them space to begin their warm-up. In a few minutes, he found himself in close quarters to the pair of them as they slipped more comfortably to Trellis' window ledges to sing to the stars and the forest and the strange land around them. Maybe, somewhere, the serpents in the lake were singing, too... Boyce closed his eyes in the darkness and listened and, slowly, the feeling of being alone meshed with his idle dreams--maybe out there the dryads heard strange singing and felt something, too. Maybe Daphne wasn't entirely human, didn't feel things as deeply or in the same way that he did... but he'd felt genuine affection from her, deep trust... she'd gone out on a limb to entrust him with not just Vianne but with Trellis, too. She'd done everything to take him out of the human world in which he'd been struggling to make him feel more a part of the forest that had sheltered him...
By the time the last of the singing had died away, he scrubbed at his face and felt his eyes burning. He didn't say anything because his throat was constricted, the lump of feelings swelled up to take his entire broad chest. He felt the splash of a long body slithering around and wasn't surprised to feel a hand on his shoulder. It wasn't hard to guess which of the serpents was on him when it wrapped around under his arms in a hug and began a thrumming purr, even if he couldn't see them. Tentatively, he raised his hands and placed them on cool, scaly shoulders, and testing (both for himself and for Star) rested his cheek against a head frill that felt strange, cool but fleshy. He felt a deep beating there, like a heart-beat that surged through the purring. It was soothing, and he swallowed his overwhelming thoughts after a while, felt them drawn off like bad venom.
After a while he found the need to shudder a sigh, and the serpent pulled back enough to give him space. "Do-o youu want to-o be-e close?"
Boyce laughed, gulped again because it had been too close to a hiccup, something uncontrolled. "Things don't go well, when I'm... like that."
Star shifted, its whole body curling to press more up against him. Boyce was aware that Scar was in close proximity, most likely glaring disapproval, and that sobered him a little to the invitation, but Star was adamant. "Huumans and we-e are different, but not so badly-e." It let itself back down, resting its chin on his shoulder. Boyce, careful, did his best to relax, which wasn't saying much. Star splayed its webbed hand over his chest, over his wet shirt. "Follow me-e," it suggested, and found an octave that was lower than Boyce would have expected, was more in his range. It hummed, one note, slow and steady. Waiting, expectant.
Boyce, feeling shocked by the gesture, found himself freezing up. "I can't..."
"Close your eyes," Star said, somehow maintaining the note as it spoke. Boyce realized belatedly that the serpents could see in the dark, and the stab of embarrassment was almost enough that he tried to sink under the waterline and crab-walk out the door. But Star was leaning on him, and he could vaguely feel his own hammering heart under its hand. He took a deep breath and hissed, and then closed his eyes. After a few moments, he grated a note, faltered half-ways through, and then tensed, deeply uncomfortable.
"He-e's not raised to-o it," Scar hissed, voice still across the room, but Boyce felt a flick of water that splashed them both and was well reminded that they were both coiled around the room. "Youu might as well be-e squee-ezing a stone."
"I don't sing," Boyce confirmed, still embarrassed, but gratified by that unflattering but astute observation.
"Some huumans do-o," Star murmured, thoughtful. It withdrew its hand and then, to Boyce's surprise, pulled up his shirt, slipped both hands beneath it to feel at the hair of his stomach and chest. "But not youu. Then listen," Star murmured. It coiled around him and managed to wedge its body behind his legs, goading him away from the wall until it had him sitting back on a curled twist of muscled tail. Long claws laced around from his chest to his back, feeling him out and chasing goosebumps across him, which shivered back around as another second-hand surge of delight chased his heavy mood to a further corner of his mind. He begrudged Trellis' connection just now, knew it was clearly trying to leave an impact on him. But Star, either unaware or gladly abetting the tree, hummed and soothed and stroked until he felt on the edge of the world, pain and loss a far-off thought. "Can I be-e close with youu?" Star murmured. They had to be deep into the night by now.
Boyce came back to himself enough to feel concern. "What does that look like?" He regretted undoing all of Star's work--it had been a long time since he'd felt so at ease, a very long time... but he couldn't go into intimacy blind again, the way he had with Daphne.
Star vibrated a deep chuckle. "Does it loo-ok like?"
Still, Boyce felt something loosening and it took him a moment to realize that Trellis had let down a vine. The lantern bumped against the side of his head and he floundered for a moment, and then released a huff of a laugh that took some of his deeply unwanted tension away. "I'm not... being literal. I don't know how to make you happy. Or... how you work..." He didn't have matches and the torch had no fuel in any case, as much as he'd have liked some light to navigate by.
Sonorous laughter met his admission and Star pressed up to him again. It took his hands and set them at what would have been a woman's hips, where its humanoid torso flared, where what he knew were paler scales widened along its belly, faintly iridescent. "Start he-ere," it instructed him.
Boyce carefully, tentatively nuzzled against the cheek that rested against him again, and found the bearing of something like hip bones, stroking those as Star purred its strange rhythm. Her strange rhythm? No... after a few moments, hands roaming, he had a feeling that it was more like his strange rhythm. He was more careful to explore the texture of scales around the serpent's belly, but they had taken on a fascinating kind of tension, pulled back into folds that led to a protrusion that... well, it felt familiar enough that he realized more or less what to do with it. He stifled a noise of embarrassment and gratification both as he realized that maybe he was thinking too alien when he worried about what to do when intimate with a mer...man? But there was more he wanted to ask, that he couldn't ask, not really, not right away.
Instead he listened to the pitch of Star's purring to determine if he was doing right, which hitched when his hand slipped from folds of flesh that had puffed and pulled back to reveal smooth flesh, a shaft that was hardening as his fingers brushed carefully along its length. Boyce closed his eyes and sighed as he explored that fully. There was enough there to leave him thinking indulgent thoughts, and he tested Star by firming a grip and stroking him harder. He was gratified further by the gasp just under his cheek, but that was put on hold as Star pushed back, sudden, and gripped him by the wrist. "Slo-ow," it shuddered, and Boyce, chastened, was further left dampened by the sly note of laughter somewhere further in the darkness. He felt, secondhand through one of Star's coils, something shift in the water, firming up where he'd been reclining. Hard to forget that Scar was in audience, obviously watching or at least listening. Flushed with mixed arousal and embarrassment, Boyce did his best to shut worry about an audience out. He didn't need to be judged from afar when being led to explore someone so new.
Star picked at his belt and Boyce belatedly realized that his wet pants were achingly in the way. The serpent had been so heavily draped over him that he'd felt a little crushed, but the sudden freedom of a bare cock unconstrained by belt and wet fabric made him sigh with relief. He tensed right up again when webbed hands and long nails combed at the hair down his stomach, to his erection, and then slipped right below and began playing with his scrotum. "What is this?" he heard, to dismay, and he bit his lip on a very improper response.
"Uh... don't mess with that... that's not... not for starters," he tried and failed to clarify.
Star at least pulled his hand away, palm glazing along the underside of his cock, webbed fingers strange and smooth and shiver-inducing. "Did I hurt youu?"
"No," he admitted, but he was entirely distracted. "That felt good."
"And this?" Star settled against him again, the length of his own erection pressed beside Boyce's, trapping them against one another. He realized belatedly that at this height, Star was a little longer in the torso compared to him. It felt strange to, after one or two exceptions, be on the smaller side of a person. Leaning back as he was, Boyce wasn't sure what to do about this strange position, except try to settle more comfortably against the coils that were propping him above the waterline.
He sighed, and felt Star shift against him, and bit at his lip as the folds and bumps of the serpent's retracted scales softly engulfed his erection. It was strange, definitely different, but he might be able to work with the sensation and the intensity of Star's investment in doing things right. It was when they were rubbing against one another harder, water splashing under the pair as Boyce loosely slipped a leg around the length of tail, that Star jostled up a little, and Boyce felt the head of his cock press hard into what he realized was more than a slight depression. He froze when Star gasped and went tense, when the hands stroking his arm and the back of his head curled in enough that little pinpricks of nails dug into his flesh.
"You okay?" Boyce asked, doing his best to hold perfectly still. Sea serpents might be entirely new to him, but he was very familiar with that kind of tensing. He knew he wasn't an easy fit for most.
"Ah," Star responded, for once without words. Then he shifted a little, and, testing, pressed himself until Boyce's cock was lodged against tight, rigid folds. "O-oh... This is..."
"You don't have to--" Boyce began, thinking maybe the merman was being overzealous.
"No... I..." Star sucked in a breath and shivered from hips to tail-tip, and somewhere in the far side of the cabin Boyce heard Scar make a noise that he couldn't interpret. "This is more close than... I... Youu fit well," he finished, hips rocking over him in a way that Boyce couldn't ignore.
He settled his hands over the merman's strange hip-like bones, trying for a light grip but failing, at times. The experience was so uniquely different that he couldn't lose himself in the moment, but it was obvious that what he was doing for the serpent was enough to leave him thrumming, shivering in a way that was easy to feel. The experience was deeply gratifying, easy and familiar in ways that left him enjoying the hard rut he was being ridden for. He could hear Scar murmur something in that language he didn't understand, and Star snapped a distracted response. "You're sure..." Boyce asked, feeling the merman tensing, all the signs pointing to an imminent orgasm. The fact of the matter was that he wasn't sure: there was something else going on here and he was in no state to untangle the intricacies.
It turned out he didn't have to, though the next moment was a strangely disorienting one. He felt Star tense, hard, so hard that his cock was pressed back and he had to catch the disappointed noise in his throat as the sweetly tight, warm grip of what felt an awful lot more suited in a woman was replaced by the cool rush of water. He couldn't identify the gentle brush of soft flesh against him next, save that Star was bent over him, shivering as though deeply into waves of climax. The realization gratified him, and Boyce tightened his grip on the serpent's hips to encourage it--if this was a typical orgasm, it was an awful long one.
Soon, Star folded forward, limp and heavy against him, cock still hard on the both of them amazingly despite the merman's obvious tipping point. Boyce slipped his hands around Star's shoulders and stroked him for a few moments, thoughtful and dazed. "Is that enough...?" he tried to ask, feeling very little from the serpent but a low, tired purr for several minutes.
"We-e shouldn't," Star responded, breathless. Boyce could still feel the pulse of the creature's shaft against his thigh, and the ache of his own erection, so sadly refused, was equally a distraction. His anticipation came crashing to a halt as the merman clarified, "we-e can't fertilize them without appro-oval..." in a wistful tone that left Boyce suddenly on edge.
"Ah... what..." Suddenly he wished he had a light. He dipped his hand under the waterline and felt, bumping against his half-pants'd leg in the light current, something soft. Jelly-like, fist-sized spheres, dozens of them. "Ah... oh," the clarification dawned on him a moment or two later and he felt about as equally erotically charged as though he'd been dunked in an ice vat. "You're not a man...?" as though he was banking on one last chance.
Scar hissed petty laughter from near the window and Boyce, trapped under Star, briefly wished again that he could scuttle out the door and to the bottom of the ocean, never to see light again. Embarrassment and confusion and deep shame warred with an overabundance of stifled erotic charge and he genuinely didn't know what to think. Wet scales lifted from his bare torso, and that disarmingly cock-like protrusion with them--that was a relief. He knew he was as unappealingly limp as he could possibly get. He wasn't disgusted, that wasn't it exactly. He was... confused. Very much left in the dark. Star's hands were on his shoulders, though one of them shifted, giving him a little more space. "Youu don't... I should have said something..." And then, carrying on heroically, "when we-e mate, that is... what youu did with me-e is more serious. Eggs are... it is how youu stimu-ulate..." and then, faltering, it carried on, "it's o-okay, they will never hatch if we-e don't..."
"Hold back," Scar murmured, tail twitching in petty delight. "Youu should have said it all be-efore, idie-ot."
Star snapped something else, again in the language that Boyce couldn't possibly understand. He pulled himself free and hastily redid his pants, though he was hopelessly waterlogged at this point. The thought of thrashing around in the dark, amongst what could be dozens of eggs, left him a little weak at the knees. He held up both hands, once again tamping them forward until he found Star's torso. He rested his palms there, still and careful, mastered his face into a calm mask. "Nothing went wrong. Nobody's hurt... I think." And then, "that felt... good... all of it. Should've laid everything out first, but... I wasn't... entirely in my right mind."
That, at least, stopped Scar's incriminations. Star plucked at both of his wrists again, placing his hands higher up on his... her... its chest. "Youu didn't say..."
Boyce bit his lip. "How often do you... do this... the less intimate version?"
"Often, for fun," Star responded, voice lifting out of embarrassment back into the kind of forward optimism that Boyce was more familiar with.
"Tomorrow, before we leave... Can we try again? Without the company?" He felt himself flushing again as Scar hissed an annoyed noise, but Star was definitely laughing.
"Ple-ease," it said, "on the-e bank, in the-e sun, where it is so gree-en. One more try."
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Thank you again! I have more plot planned, but I've been getting a build-up of one-offs that I haven't been sure where to post so I may dump a few of those in before I continue. Being one or two prompts away from finishing a colour but having to hold back does not feel good, lol!
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Yeah, it's a bit awkward, but YOU CAN DO IT I BELIEVE IN YOU
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Boyce is going to develop a complex before long!