Official blog for the writing of E. Eurydice Rainbird (aka SylveonWIP) • 18+ only! • 24yo transfem she/it wolfthing • A library containing cosmic horror, polyamory, malleable bodies, and smut • Hope you find something that strikes your fancy! • The vibrant green and brown of the forest shed its layers and plummeted towards a dry and desiccated grey.
I have a backup bluesky for in case everything goes pear shaped here! I hope I don't need it soon, but I might post links to my AO3 chapters if you want more specific notifications.
Commissions open!
Hi there, I'm Evelyn! I'm trans, lesbian, and disabled and have found a love for writing gracefully early in my life, and I'm chasing it with everything I have. I gravitate towards stories of fortifying self identity and biological rule-bending, set in an array of all kinds of settings.
This blog, while promoting my stories as I wade into the terrifying waters of publication, will also serve to document my thoughts and keep me sane and able to share creative projects that don't need the same channels. My stories you can currently access include:
PRINCESS OF THE FOREST: A queer-first adaptation of the Studio Ghibli movie Princess Mononoke, which features lesbian romance, an enhanced spiritual flavour to the world, and a conflict with fate so central to the plot you knowing what happens in the movie is the intended way to read
A SISTER'S CARE: A siscon story I will be posting both on AO3 and here on tumblr. Focusing on disability recovery and the importance of close support for all moments in life, as well as some therian wish fulfilment thrown in for good measure
Chapter 1: Recovery
Chapter 2: Changes
Chapter 3: Surf
Chapter 4: Steam
Chapter 5: Tension
Chapter 6: Rain
Chapter 7: Chase
Chapter 8: Caught
Chapter 9: Wind
Chapter 10: Coil
Chapter 11: Spring
Interlude: Flower - (non-canon)
Chapter 12: Grind
Chapter 13: Ring
Chapter 14: Cruor
Chapter 15: Date
Chapter 16: Action
Commissions I've done!
Threshold
Dear Lil Hellspawn
🐺💖
If you like my writing and want to help me keep going with it, consider supporting me here. Every donation will be appreciated, and make a difference. <3
This story is a commission for the same lovely reader as before (thankyou Morgan <3) - message me if you'd like to commission your own work!
CW: The same severe and targeted transphobia as the first chapter
The phone clatters onto the table, switched off and placed down like it was a remote detonator or hypervirus containment vial, a rushed gentleness that is imbued with fear from nail to wrist. The responsible hand vanishes out of sight soon after, shaking with a new, punitive limp to its uncertain movements, and with a distinct desire to find some painful cuticle to free from its mirrored twin instead of sitting aimlessly on Natalie’s lap.
Natalie takes a moment to think as burgeoning hurt and anxiety start a slow and ever-turning rancid simmer on her face. A riotous rainbow of hasty reevaluation runs across hurdles and speed bumps with every swallowed tear and dawning revelation, numbed and dull in parts by her monochrome makeup, yet exaggerated in others by cubist chiaroscuro suggesting the wholesale memory of a snarl within her black lipstick and winged eyeliner.
Realisation, full and proper, is filling her from a rusted faucet that screamed its protests against its opening, but whose collection of aged oxide has fused the valve wide open. Its pressure is threatening the badly glued seams of her. She looks as desperate as I felt when I first realised I was never going to be accepted by them. It’s mirrored perfectly on a face that thankfully looks nothing like mine.
The sight is not as satisfying as I might have wished it to be.
Sadism of this kind never suited me, no matter how hard our father tried to train it into me.
I take my time with my coffee, attempting to enjoy the relative skill of the barista behind the service counter that cramps him to an unkind degree, while the gifted food settles in my stomach. I watch as my matching gift gives Natalie emotional indigestion.
“They’ve never talked like that before.”
I just shrug, feeling anticlimactic and let down by some cosmic joke that never quite reached its punchline.
“He called me a dyke…” She sounds so hurt, torn up, and raw. A fair response, but one that was far too fresh for my liking right now. It was an emotion that would sit for days, and I was getting restless.
And it won’t even the worst they’d be willing to call her, if she falls as far as I did.
“I thought I was making progress. I thought he was changing-”
I finish the last third of my coffee in one large draught before placing the mug down onto the table a mite louder than I intended. It cuts off the end of Nat’s sentence and drags her eyes up from the spot on the table where my phone sat untouched. She stares at me, wide eyed, and for a second looks like a Miyazaki character. Chihiro facing down the bathhouse matron with eyes as big as saucers and some supernatural shiver that runs up her spine.
And then she melts.
She recognises it’s me, not some witch here to steal half her name, and she shows that innate trust once again. My heart clenches at the sight, torn asunder with anger and something more painful, and I ignore my suddenly bouncing, fidgety leg.
“Look, he’s not going to change unless you manipulate him into it,” I start soft, trying to settle the anxiety in me, but like the mug’s descent it comes out harsher than I intended. “You’ve given him a new script to follow with you, but he needs puppet strings to actually change. It’s what he’s done to us and mum.”
“It’s just- That was the only reason-” Natalie swallows hard, slouching in her chair and making herself look small. She pauses in the middle for a breath or two, realising the angle her sentence was heading towards. She backtracks while her voice grows shakier with every word. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Nina… I shouldn’t have done it with the reasons I had- the reason I had… But I thought it was a genuine reason. I thought I could bring you back.”
“I thought you would try.” My voice is hollow as it echoes over my tongue with stale air. “That’s why I showed you the texts.”
“…They’re never taking you back.”
The admission rings through Natalie’s mind like a bell, loud and clear enough I trick myself into hearing it on the outside. It cracks the shell of her hope and trust in our parents into dozens of little, ragged shards, each with an uneven razor edge sharp enough to do more harm if left unattended. The rock, that up until now she had been building her life on, reveals itself to be hollow; a paper mache facade that has been rotting at her feet for years. And it doesn’t help.
Maybe it helps her, but my mind is pacing back and forth while I’m stuck staring at the front door of the cafe and the street beyond.
“No, they aren’t.” It’s all I can say, but the hurt that seeps into the words is enough to carry a shadow of everything I’m feeling into the empty space between us.
I need to leave. I need to get out of this city. I have what few scraps of life Natalie was able to scavenge for me at my feet, and now every minute spent here feels wasted. I even have her on my side, more than I even desperately hoped for as I ran through different ways to handle the meeting with her while I struggled to not fall asleep in my seat as I waited. But I got the change handed to me, and now I need to leave.
But Natalie is immobile. She watches her faith in our- her parents crumble before her eyes.
A wax-wrought Damocles, staring up through blinked-away tears at the sword of candle flame; an Icarus of Paraffin tasked with holding up the weight of Helios’ chariot while he watches Atlas already crushed and discarded beneath Ouranoss’ corpse; a scared girl hesitating before the task of planning her escape.
I recognised the look.
The sun deserves my ire - my turbulent, painful anger - but only now do I realise it doesn’t deserve my fear any more. It holds the emotion close to its core, and will never let go - but it doesn’t deserve it. Making me more scared won’t achieve anything any more.
But it does deserve Natalie’s.
My anger aches to stop my painful extrication from happening again, but all it can really achieve right now is to push me to leave.
Even if it thought it could make a difference, reaching out to rip Natalie from her Mercurial spot so close to the sun would only leave me splattered with porcelain droplets of her. It would hurt her while she begged me for freedom, she would bend and sag under the melting attention, and strain against my inadequate strength, and all I would be left with would be trails of wax down my forearms, quickly hardening in streaming paths that look like tears.
The pain wouldn’t even matter to me, but I would only make things worse for her. She would be spent beneath my fingers.
I look down at my arms and see the maladive green undertone of my blood beneath my skin. Instead of the temporary, ivory scars of my sister’s imagined need for me I see real, pallid lines running perpendicular, evidence of what I was running from. I rub my skin to crack the illusions free of my arms, feeling the texture of softly brittle candle wax shattering beneath my fingers more vividly than I would like. My arms are warmer than they should be.
I gently shiver the disturbing fantasy away.
My anger remains awake. The temptation to smother it is weak enough to ignore as I level a stare at Natalie and wrestle my heart back into normal ranges. I see too much of myself in her, but right now I wouldn’t even be able to save an older version of myself.
Natalie breaks me out of my internal cycle, either through very lucky timing or an understanding of how dramatic my mind can sometimes be, by gently kicking the bags that are still cramping our feet beneath the table. The gentle tinkling of zipper metal rings like wind chimes for a brief second and drags me wholeheartedly back to the front of my mind.
“I grabbed what I thought was important,” She said, “But I didn’t have much time. I didn’t know how long they’d be so I rushed.”
“What did you get?” I kept a grip on the conversation, using it like a harness to keep me from falling into the cavern of my mind. I sounded a little distracted.
“Everything off your desk.” Natalie’s immediate, utilitarian answer soothes the worst of my anxiety and I breathe out a sigh of relief, finding myself grounded in the cafe a little more. “Clothes, a handful from each drawer, plus the extras I saw when I grabbed your phone charger from beneath the bed.”
The experimental clothes, bought from amazon and tried once or twice before being hidden in a bundle strapped up between bed slats, was in one of the bags. It was comforting to know that it wasn’t in my bastard parents’ possession, and then actually having the clothes was a relief. They don’t really fit me, but I hadn’t realised how much losing them would have hurt before realising I now had them.
I smile at Nat, finding safety in expressing the inert happiness rather than the violent mood of despair shaken free that definitely would have ended in tears.
“Ah… Good.” My words feel dwarfed and inadequate, but I have nothing else to add.
“Apart from that I grabbed honestly kinda random stuff from the bathroom, and I think your razor is loose in the bag-”
“Makeup?”
Natalie cringes a little, “Oh… I didn’t think to look.”
That’s fine, it’s easy to replace, just, “You should probably find it before they do.” When Nat nods I get her back on track. “What else?”
“Uhm… I went through mum’s files and grabbed your folder.”
My shock was probably very visible because a flicker of pride passes through Natalie’s eyes. She thinks she’s done a good job, not fucked something up, and it’s all true because that folder is probably the most important thing for me to have gotten out of that house. Passport, birth certificate, insurance information, everything original when it comes to me is in that folder, with copies placed in others for ease of access. It was part of the way our mother kept some sense of control over her life, by being the gaoler of all the vital documents of everyone in the immediate family.
Hell, even the prescriptions for the meds she knew about are in the folder. And I have it now.
I can’t keep the smirk off my face, “Oh, you’re going to eat so much shit for that when they find out.”
“Yeah, well, I genuinely thought I was helping them out when I grabbed the folder for you, so there’s not much they can do without my guilt.” The threat of repercussions fills Natalie with accurately measured dread, but she keeps it out of her voice.
“Oh to be a fly far away from that wall…”
Natalie shrugs something akin to agreement to the sentiment, but doesn’t say anything.
I bring up the last vital member of the list that has yet to be mentioned. “Hormones?”
My hesitancy is rewarded with a sheepish, avoidant reaction from Natalie, and my mind immediately jumps to the expensive conclusion that I’d need to replace it all. But then Nat jumps in.
“I got them! I’ve got them! They’re in the bag… It’s just…” She shies away from my intense stare, the one trying to dig the events out of her reticent mind. “They might smell real bad. And they might not be okay any more.”
“What happened?” My anger influences my tone too late in the process of making the words for me to stop them, and the sight of Natalie shying away from my harsh tone etches itself into my mind. It will be a long time before I forget the hurt on display there.
“I- Um… I realised that I hadn’t found them when I was already out the door, and I was already running late,” Her voice picked up pace as she said each word, nervous about my reaction and wanting to avoid another impatient question. Shame at my lack of control makes my blood run hot. I don’t want to do this to her. “I couldn’t really check everywhere, that would have taken too long, and there was one very obvious place I hadn’t looked yet, and it was on the way out-”
The garbage bin, placed on the pathway from the front door to the driveway.
“They threw my meds in the trash?”
A tiny, apologetic nod comes from Natalie, relaxing slightly as we both process afterwards my relatively calmer voice.
“I- I have no idea when they did it, how long they were there. How hot they got. The sun hadn’t quite hit it yet, but it was already warm…”
“So they might be denatured… Shit.” So it was a coin toss whether it was the same expensive replacement as before. I didn’t like that.
“Sorry I didn’t look for them earlier…”
I shake the price tag from my head, “Better than nothing. Thank you.”
The words are hard to swallow. They’re not exactly what I want to be saying. There’s a part of me that doesn’t like thanking her after what she put me through, but most of me just wants to be saying goodbye. Leaving. Getting away from here. Out, out now, before it’s too late-
My phone starts ringing, vibration against the metal table drumming with the resonant frequency of the tense surface to make it so much louder than it needed to be, and I jump so hard I have to scramble to stop my empty coffee mug from meeting the floor. Place it back down, take a breath, why is it so hard to breathe? Take a moment- The sound of the call gets quiet, the vibrations dulled, I see my phone in Natalie’s hands (now on silent) with its screen showing an unknown number facing me. I knew it wasn’t my parents already, their ringtones were set to an file of just silence, but I didn’t have any way of knowing who it was.
I swallow, place the mug right-way-up back on the saucer, and take the phone from my sister’s offering hand.
When I answer I am met with skinwalker, American Psycho charisma that writhes its way through the whorls of mobile service to curse my ear with its presence. It’s crisp and confident, and barely the right shape to mimic a professional kindness while not being offputting in an immediate sense, but I recognise the general shape of it and can feel out the shape of the man behind it. It’s also spoken through a terrible connection, and ends up horrendously compressed.
“Hello, this is Alexander Spence from Saint Dymphna Community Hospital,” It starts, masculine and optimistic, though pulled back to not scare off a jumpy animal, “Am I speaking to Sebastian Nikitovich?”
I wince away from my name, but keep myself focused on the task of the phone call and fall into my own script, calling up the response he’s fishing for, tweaked for my own purposes.
“Yeah, that’s me. You said you were from…” I make purposeful eye contact with Natalie and repeat the name he rattled off as best I could remember, “Saint Dymphna Community Hospital?”
Natalie jumps on the task, drawing her phone out and researching while the man - the fittingly-blandly named Mr Spence - continues his grease slicked drawl. I try not to curl up within myself.
“Ah, good, I’m glad you’ve picked up, Seb. Can I call you Seb?”
“No.”
“Now, Sebastian, I’ve heard from some concerned people close to you that you’re currently experiencing some difficulty - specifically housing.”
Nat is scowling at her phone, glaring at the screen like it would bulimically divulge its secrets if it just got intimidated enough. Her teeth worry at her obsidian lips, progressively staining her teeth, and her eyes dart around the screen. I rule her out as the source of Mr Spence’s concern.
There’s two very obvious options left, and the concern someone they would reach out to is not something I think I would want.
“Son,” He barrels through my silence. “We try our best here to help those who come to us only with what, and who, we have in the room, but regrettably sometimes there are situations that require a different hand. After hearing parts of what you’ve been experiencing we decided it was warranted to reach out to you and offer you a place to stay. Practically indefinitely.”
“Practically?” I ask, falling for the trap.
The monologue on the other end changes subtly in tone, becoming more confident that he was being successful. “For your situation I’m sure it’ll feel indefinite. We, of course, have our upper limits for how long someone can stay with us, but most people get back on their feet long before that clause comes into effect.”
“How long?” I keep my voice flinty, stem the flow of his confidence.
“We can offer five years of accommodation in our long-term patient area.”
“But I’m not a patient.”
The tone shifts again, from carrot to stick. Honey to vinegar. “Mental health is a very serious thing, Sebastian. And homelessness only makes it worse. I’m sure you’ve been very stressed in this time - have you been couch surfing? Sleeping rough? We can take that stress off your shoulders. We can give you a bed and a roof that won’t be taken away. You don’t have to stay out there.”
“You’re trying to institutionalise me.” I study Natalie for more information as I accuse him, but she’s so absorbed in what she’s found that she doesn’t even see my silent question.
“No, Mr Nikitovich, we’re not a psychiatric ward. We’re a community hospital that focuses mostly on quality of life and of mind, with a focus on returning to wider society when the scale of it is less scary for you than it is right now.”
“He’s right.” Natalie speaks up, her search finding its answer, and her ears picking out the words from the phone speakers pressed against my ears.
“Who is that? Sebastian are you alone right now?” I barely acknowledge him.
“They’re not a psych ward - that would require medical approval. They’re a conversion therapy camp.”
“Ah, right.” I scoff and end the call.
* * *
The phone falls from my sister’s grip, hung up and discarded back to its no-man’s-land home in the middle of the table, before the scoff even halfway leaves her throat. She’s angry, bristling at the hackles and scowling at some middle distance, and I don’t even try to blame her. Something in me wants to, but that’s not me: it’s our parents; the eye hooks screwed into the wood of my puppet shell that the strings are attached to.
I place my own phone on the table, neatly stacked beside my keys and purse, and try and push the horror stories of Saint Dymphna out of my head. Once I found a place that wasn’t on the side of the ‘hospital’ it was very easy to figure out who they were. The thought of Nina going through that brought a spark of anger to the front of my mind, but the surge of dread I’ve been treading water in soon swallows it again.
It’s hard to stay focused. Today is about Nina! Nina, who is homeless and needs help from me! Who deserves all the effort I can offer her, and more!
But it’s not fair.
I hide my short and panicky breath from her, but I still feel it just as keenly. I can barely spend any attention to fix it, and my hands are fusing together in my lap from friction welding, and my world is falling apart beneath me.
It’s not fair! I did everything they asked of me!
A leviathan of fear and observation cracks its way out of my internal landscape, revealing its hiding spot beneath the mountain ranges of rationalisation and indoctrination that obscured the beast’s presence. It crumbles the earth as it wakes, demolishing the road networks of the hopes and plans I had laid brick by brick at its feet and over its thickened spine. It brings an apocalypse to a world that did not know of its presence, and it’s not going away now.
I had been perfect for them - perfect grades, perfect obedience! They never told me to not be gay because they clearly didn’t think their golden child was dyke material. But I was! And that tore up the pattern and made everything go tits up.
But this is about Nina, not me, I’ve got to suck it up and be better for her, because she needs that really badly right now.
I look up at my new sister and see every half-buried, flickering emotion on her face like they’re spelled out for me on a page. She’s angry, hurt, scared, restless, hopeful for a quick escape, dreading a painful one, unsure how to feel about me, and recognising everything that I’m letting slip onto my expression like she’s felt it all before.
It’s absurd. I’ve never felt so close to her, yet I the very last thing I did was get her kicked out, and I feel more sure with every passing moment that she’s about to run away.
She’s slightly reclining in sullen disappointment, legs slightly parted to accommodate her height and the bags beneath the table, and has her head cocked down so she can stare at me and the front door past her eyebrows like just glaring at us will make us part for her. The sight does something dangerous to my brain.
Rich skin, full of depth and definition, curls around her arms and graces the curves of her neck and her jaw before pulling upward to the warm slice of her lips twisting unconsciously as she watches me back. She looks like she’s being lit from within, and the light is slowly going out, filled with the cold glow of carbon-choked flame fed very, very little.
My heart aches at the thought of losing that flame.
My wringing hands in my lap bring my mind to back to my skin, exposed up my arms to the very top of my biceps where even at the thickest portion of my muscle there’s nothing but pallid, ghostly absence to be found. If her flame, so close to being snuffed out, is so still so colourful, how bad am I going to get before mine vanishes?
Maybe I should leave too?
I watch as Nina’s eyes gravitate to the cafe’s door. She twists around so her legs are in the walkway between tables, one step closer to leaving. One of her legs starts anxiously bouncing.
I could fall to my knees in front of her. I could beg and offer every hidden corner of my heart up to her, for her. I would place myself at the mercy of that glare, flood myself with sympathetic, nauseating hurt and hopeless fury to show that she is not alone. I’d stow myself in her bag, reduce myself to a trinket or arm candy to convince her to not discard me. I’d pull myself forward to the harbour of her hips, wrap my arms around the outside of her thighs, and apply the begging of my tongue any way she wishes.
I’d drag myself up to straddle Nina’s legs and free my shirt from my skin. I’d reach a hand behind her neck and offer everything I am up to her - including the motherly care I was keeping for some future child or promising partner - in an attempt to fill the ravenous hole our mother has left within her.
I would let her feed off me, if it pleased her, simply to be offered a chance to be by her side… To not have to go back home.
I would debase myself rather than return to the middle-class Bluebeards and the evidence of their previous victim that now is looted and scattered across a bedroom that will either never be touched again or have every little thing sold off in an online auction within the month for a fraction of its value.
I could offer everything up on a silver platter for her. I would. I’m about to…
But she barely has the strength to get herself away.
So I have to prepare to go back. Prepare for pretending that I haven’t seen their truth, like I’m still salvageable. Prepare to do and say ludicrous, hurtful things to convince them I’m still on the puppet strings while I plan my own escape.
But first I’ve got to help Nina’s.
Gods, how did she live like this? Already anxiety was eating away at my stomach like a bacterial ulcer, chewing my stomach lining and the bravery that relied on it staying intact. How long had she managed this, as well? Her meds had dates on them from months and months ago, prescribed to someone I’ve never met.
Not important. Ugh. This is so much to think about.
“What now?” I start, weaker than I should sound, and cringe at the waver in my voice. Whatever I set up for doesn’t follow, topics and suggestions second-guessed until they found shallow ditches of my mind to repurpose as graves.
What could I even say? Well, what would even make a difference?
Make a gamble.
“Hey,” I restart, “At least that meant they were out of the house this morning. I don’t know how much I would’ve been able to grab if they weren’t gone.”
Can she see through my smile? It feels weak even in its apology, and like it’s fighting against its anchor points keeping it tied to my face. Nina takes in my words with well-earned cynicism, but there’s a ghost of something that passes behind her eyes and the response coils from gallows humour to a smile that fractionally fills some hole in my soul that had been running dangerously empty.
“Yeah, they’re their own undoing.” It’s a smile forged of tears that she talks through, the grain of genuine appreciation brought out of the white water and purposefully presented. Something between us repairs a little bit. Then Nina answers my original question. “What happens now is that I find my way to the train station and leave.”
Leave? The dread I had arrived with today comes back in it’s full-blooded, cold-sweat nature and tugs on my guilt with way too much strength. Once again I’m met with the thought that I’ve completely ruined Nina’s life, and each time it’s a little harder to fight off. I know now that she’s not able to come back home - and I wouldn’t subject her to that - but I thought at least she would be living in LA! Sleeping on couches for a while, yeah, which hurt my guilt already, but still here! Still within reach…
But she’s bailing on the city entirely. Giving up on her degree here, her friends here, on-
No, it’s not about me.
I swallow my distressed shock and just try to be supportive. I hope most of the emotion was invisible to Nina, but she knows me too well to have missed it and so she gives me time to process. It’s a kindness that I don’t deserve, that hurts to swallow, and that is interrupted by another ringtone buzzing against the table.
It’s my phone this time, and I jump a little less than Nina when her phone lit up, but the glimpse of my mother’s face on my screen before I answer sets some gears turning in the back of my head before I even speak.
“Hi mum!”
I plaster a mimicry of my usual, lighthearted tone across the speaker in the way that she never notices or cares about, and I pull on the strings that make me sound a little relieved at the chance to hear her voice on the other end. Start grateful, react to what she actually says, that way she can believe I like her on average. It comes so easily to me, I don’t really notice that I’m doing it. Just that I needed to.
“Natalie! What’s going on with you?” Outrage, sensationalist emotion, and a hint of deep, moral concern that justifies itself as it goes. “We’re trying to sort out this whole thing with Sebastian, thinking you were fine at home, and…”
I stop paying attention to her words and start to speak over her. “Okay? And? So am I. I think my strategy was working just fine until she got a call from a fucking conversion therapy camp.”
“Her? You’re don’t seriously think he’s-” A pause, a change in tactics. “The hospital wants to help, is able to help, but you got in the way of that. Why?”
Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, I hate this. This is making my guts churn like a dough hook is trying to knead all my different organs into one, homogeneous blob of stomach acid and internal bleeding. Why do I hate this so much? She’s saying terrible things, but this is otherwise a normal phone call and I’m freaking out like I’ve just been conscripted. I want to throw up.
“If you wanted to help,” Is what comes out instead, “You wouldn’t have gone there.”
I make very brief eye contact with Nina, but I’m too rushed in my own mind to process anything I see on her face. It would take too much, be too complex, and letting anything slip with my mother is a bad idea. Years of proof and practice pile into that opinion, convincing me of her inability to bend and then covering its tracks so I can pretend better.
I don’t think about it. I slide my car keys out of my purse and over to her side of the table.
“Put him on the phone.” Harsh, softened at the edges, showing the blade edge that could fall on me if I don’t hand Nina over to her.
“Mum…” I sigh the word, buying time. I turn in my seat to face an empty chair across the walkway between tables before answering. “Even if she was right in front of me, and I thought handing the phone over was a good idea, do you really think she’d pick up?”
“He will if he knows what’s good for him.” Bitter. Barely smothered to politeness. The blade edge turned just barely towards me.
I put as much condescension that the mindset of teaching a young and stupid kid will let me get away with into my voice, and then speak through the angry silences, “That’s not the point. The question is if she’ll even listen to you… Do you think so…? Because you haven’t really given her any reason to.”
“We’re her parents…!” A pause. “His! Fuck!”
She’s livid now, letting the mask slip a little too much, showing the fresh anger that was polite to let simmer for a few days before releasing. I glance at Nina who is holding the keys a little dumbly, still in plain sight. Awkwardly swap which hand is holding my phone just so I can reach over the gap and - quietly - swat her hand out of sight.
“And?” I say, full brunt force. “She already chose homelessness over you. If you want her back, give her more! But you’ve already chosen to give her less.”
I can hear the low whine of her mood change from anger to pleading desperation, and I pull the plug. I interrupt her before she can enact her new plan, however genuine the emotions she’s using for it may be.
“Look, mum, I-” Cut off mid sentence, put a quizzical tilt to my words. “I know you wanted to get to her through me but-” Cut off again, more confusion, turn back towards the table. “Shit.” Phone down, not on speaker, ignore the hints of her words that are coming through in the next silence. Play the partial truths. “I can’t see my keys… Fuck- I’m worried…” Shake my head at Nina who’s trying to gesture that she has my keys. Take my phone from my ear. “Mum, you’re on the table right now, I can’t hear what you’re saying, but I think-” Stumble over the name ‘Nina’ because I know she doesn’t want them to know her name. “I think Seb has my keys. I- uh- I gotta go! Talk later.” Slam the hangup button.
Sag.
Breathe in air that feels too thin..
Shake like I just padded the bill for someone who will definitely find out, but who might not find out too early.
Recover. As best I can. Unpack how easy that was later. Unfold myself from the self hug that I can’t pin down the start of.
“I hated that…” My voice is distant and shaky, but present nonetheless. Doesn’t help me not be surprised by it, though.
The quiet that comes from Nina doesn’t feel like the calculating moments of silence I’m so used to in the family. It flows as dense air, cooled by its proximity to her, pooling as mist as it hits the ground. It’s not frigid, nor is it suffocating, but the presence of her hatred of our parents - of our mother - is almost visible.
The warm part of it is wonderful. It’s a breath of fresh air, an acknowledgement of what I actually have to deal with constantly, and it’s a knowing glint of empathy surpassing sympathy. But it slowly vanishes. It is smothered by the shared truth we reached in separate ways: the empathy can’t achieve anything.
“Yeah, that was rough.” The apology in her voice is worse. Wait, has she been voice training? She doesn’t sound how she did when I turned up. Maybe I just didn’t notice- “That was some wonderful lying, though.”
I let out a laugh - a hollow, dry expanse of an outlet that lets all my collapsing bravery escape before they try to tempt my tear ducts.
All I can manage in response is, “Thanks.”
“I should probably support your lie by driving somewhere.”
“Yeah, probably.” I’m so deflated… I can barely think. I vaguely hear her get up from her chair and extract the bags from underneath the table.
Then she pauses, expectantly.
“You coming? I’ve got a train to catch.”
The question is so innocuous, so childish in the need for company before something scary, so easily asked, framed in the casual familiarity we embodied just days ago, that it knocks some energy back into me.
I sit bolt upright, stare up at her, watch her brown eyes shimmer in the harsh sunlight with bolstered bravery and a small sliver of joy in the mischief, and my eyes catch on her smile. Who could ever hurt that smile?
Me.
I did.
I nod and shake myself from my mood as best I can to follow my sister to our shared car that has been marinating in the early morning warmth of it’s twelfth Californian summer. I hope, based on memory, that the trip across the city will take a few hours. Enough to feel like things are somewhat normal. That I just have a sister, and nothing more dramatic is happening…
* * *
The hug is unbearable and horrendously kind. Natalie is soft and warm, pressing herself into me without reservation or overbearing concern, simply desire to hold me before I vanish from her life, and I feel tears start to ram at the barrier gate of my eyelids.
Following some desperate, lonely instinct I’m trying not to look to close at I run my hand through her hair. I grip the back of her head with all my strength and smell her conditioner mixing with the sweat of the humid day.
I feel the last vestiges of the family I wanted, the only fragment that ended up real, hold me back, and still the hurt over her betrayal rears its ugly head from the worm-hole it’s gnawed into my heart. It’s been beaten and bruised today, but it’s not dead yet. I wonder how long it’ll take to starve.
But I don’t let go. I don’t let it ruin the last moment of reprieve I’ll get before the long journey and new life I’ll have to manage alone. I hold my sister.
I hold her until the loneliness is going to steal my legs out form under me, trap me in a new cage of cold iron, and in a flash I’ve pulled away and I’m pretending the teeth of that looming bear trap don’t exist.
My heart has never been so strained before. I wonder if it’ll ever recover, or if it will stay malformed and scarred from the pressure of it all. I hide the arrhythmic panic from my mind as I climb onto the train. It stops threatening a heart attack when there’s glass between us, but my eyes struggle to leave her for any time at all.
I wish I had managed to look away, because the expression of tortured heartbreak on Natalie’s face makes me realise the mirrored one on mine.
I want to run out there and wipe it from her, to replace it and show her she doesn’t deserve to be sad. To show her all the secret ways of treading water while you yearn for anything else. Show her it’s not all permanent, not inescapable. That she deserves the type of love that they will never offer her.
But it’s at that moment that the train starts to move, and I disappear from her life.
I want to hold you tight and love you in all the ways you see as love.
I want to learn the ways you've abstracted the hungry absence that you're convinced yourself you cannot feed enough to sate. I want to look into the hidden corners of that ragged, septic, half-scabbed wound for the spots your lonely fingers reach when the ache gets too big or too small.
I want to experience it all, memorise it all, simply to know how to put you face to face with the love I wish to share with you - that you cannot fathom unless I drown it in purple prose and awkward, banal absurdity, until the acidity of its change leaves my heart pitted and barely shaking.
I'll learn because I want you to see my love in a way you'll recognise, a way you'll be unable to look away from the sheer size of, that will dwarf your shaking boots and drown out your half formed claims of being 'undeserving.'
The pain of love's translation will be worth it. I hope.
Thankfully the changes got reversed, but it has gotten me thinking about how I want to share my writing in future - primarily because tumblr have said they still think reblogs can be 'improved,' and I'm not sure what that means.
I have a backup bluesky for if I suddenly disappear (willingly or not) but it doesn't quite feel like the right space for my writing. I unfortunately designed how I interact with everyone a little too much around how tumblr feels to use.
Making a Discord server came to mind, and the amount of work that would take came to mind immediately after. The workload of managing a server is nothing to sneeze at, and while I'm sure I'd be able to find people willing to become mods I either don't think I'm big enough to warrant the space or it would become a safe haven for a big chunk of the yuricest&other community.
That would be far outside my reasonable scope and also possibly fall afoul of Discord TOS and waste all the setup.
One other option is a Patreon, with a $0 minimum. I like it for how straightforward it is for getting tier rewards to people and general communication, but I don't like it for how spaghetti-fied the internal structure is, and for its historic treatment of porn.
I'm going to keep thinking about things, and I'm very happy to hear feedback or other suggestions.
I sincerely hope I can stay on tumblr but as we all know things are sometimes just out of our hands.
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
It’s very clear that you all have strong feelings about Tumblr and about this change. We hear you. The passion people have for how Tumblr works is one of the things that makes this place special.
As this rolls out over the next few days and you explore it, we’ll keep reading your replies and reblogs, so please keep sharing your questions, concerns, and ideas.
Your creativity has always been the heart of Tumblr, whether you’re the original poster or adding something brilliant in the reblogs, and nothing about this change is meant to limit that.
If you’d like to talk directly beyond the comments, leave a reply and we’ll follow up with as many of you as we can. We want to work with you to make Tumblr better.
"nothing in this change is meant to limit that" Regardless if it's meant to or not, it absolutely will stifle creativity and community in a major way. Here's a few examples off the top of my head.
An artist posts their work that they put a lot of effort into. One of their followers reblogs to compliment the color choice, and then someone else reblogs from them to give feedback on the shading. OP does not see that feedback.
Someone posts their writing, and a mutual reblogs with "Wow, this is so good!!" Then, a large blog reblogs that post with the mutual's addition, potentially getting OP's writing hundreds or thousands of notes, but now they're unlikely to ever see them.
Someone asks for help brainstorming a story idea. Several people reblog the original post with their ideas, each building off of each other. Now OP is going to have a very hard time seeing those ideas and conversations beyond the first reblog.
Iconic posts with huge numbers of notes are nearly impossible with the note count split up across all the additions. There will be no new 100k note posts, instead it'll be hundreds or thousands of posts with a few hundred notes each, which will destroy any sense of site-wide community.
Conversations through reblogs will become difficult if not impossible, especially with more than two blogs involved.
Seeing a funny post and checking the notes to see what other people are saying about it won't yield much.
The site will overall feel much smaller and less active due to lower note counts (as well as the people who are going to leave if this change persists).
On this very post, if anyone were to add their feedback on a reblog of my post, it wouldn't notify you (the Changes team).
If I wanted my social media to have Twitter's posting features, I would just use Twitter. Tumblr has something unique, and to get rid of that is shooting yourself in the foot. I personally am unlikely to stay on Tumblr if this change persists, even though it's my primary social media, and most of my friends have said the same (including those who are currently paying for no ads).
Feel free to contact me for more information about my concerns. I'm tired right now so this may not be incredibly well-written.
(If any of my followers want to add anything, the Changes blog is where the feedback form has been directing people, so post it here. Just make sure to go to the version I'm reblogging from instead of reblogging from me, because like I mentioned, the new changes mean that they won't see anything posted on a reblog of my post.)
I just read chapter 16, and first off I want to say its fantastic! I love the series.
I wanted to ask the context behind the "take-out" line in it though. I (an American) thought about it in the context of take-out food, but the writing makes it seem like a much bigger deal than that. Am I missing something?
Okay so fun fact when Overwatch was actually, like, a good piece of media they released a new map set in Australia and got flamed for this same mistake!
Australians hate American slang just as much as UK slang because in a lot of ways we traded the crown for the white house, and the establishment of the country being based on fringe cultures definitely boosted that sentimentality.
Find the full story here, without coloured text or the previous chapter
A big thankyou to lilbatgal and her wife for commissioning this chapter <3
The custom ringtone that is steadily growing more familiar cuts out as your sister answers the call, says hi in a lovesick, bubbly way, and then gets caught off by Madison’s voice.
“Hey, I’m really sorry, I know we’ve been planning this for a while…”
“What’s wrong?” Sof asks, and you look over from the prep you’re working on for the complicated lunch you and Sof have been planning.
“There’s a couple protests happening around Australia right now and I really need to join the Canberra one.”
“Oh, damn,” You join the speakerphone conversation, keeping an eye on the hints of your sister’s disappointment on her face, and the ones you’re feeling yourself, “What happened?”
“Uhm… So the people who run the Sydney Mardi Gras just had their annual general meeting last night and a motion was forced through banning anyone with alpha lycanthropy from having a position on the board-” Mads took a rushed breath, “Everyone who’s not an advertiser is fucking pissed because it means that the previous chair Dan Bruer, who got reelected into his seat at the start of the AGM, is now illegible to hold it.”
“So what happened?”
You can almost hear the angry shrug on the other side, “He got kicked off. Number two got his seat. Everyone who planned it were very happy, and especially the cop representatives. Now werewolf communities are rushing to make their upset known.”
You and Sof look at each other, half considering the complex lamb rib dish waiting patiently on the counter, and you see thoughts cross her eyes that match the ones runing through your mind.
You’ve been anxious to show Madison that you and Sof are safe, and to find ways to slip your affection for her into little moments in the hopes to boil the frog a little bit. But showing you can be there for her is more important right now.
It barely took a moment, but your sister responds with, “Where’s the protest?”
“Well,” You hear the static-crackle and compression crushed sound of a door being opened on the other side of the line, “I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know?” Your question is a little more amused than it should have been because you hear Flare respond, getting over her fear of phone calls.
“It’s a little all over the place! It’s leaning for the front lawn of parliament, because this goes against anti-discrimination laws even within the grey zone of not-for-profits, but there’s a couple other locations being discussed.”
“So why are you leaving already?”
“I’m helping set up. I’m part of the uni’s werewolf society.” You look over to Sofia who probably should have known that information and see a surprised look on her face. Madison sighs. “I’m really sorry again, I wanted to hang out with you but-”
“Let us know where it is and we’ll join you.”
“A-are you sure? Protests aren’t really very-” Romantic? “-Relaxed.”
You would have argued the point if she had said romantic, but her actual response feels very tailored for Sof’s capacity. You really appreciate it. You look at your sister, silently asking how her energy is doing in the way you’ve gotten used to over the past half year, and see she’s doing great, smiling wide though a little sad about lunch, and holding herself with very decent balance. You’ll bring a camp chair for her, and she’ll last the whole day.
“We’ll be there. We have to figure out our place in the community eventually.”
Madison relaxes audibly over the phone, “I’m glad. I’d really like to see you two.”
- 🐕🦺 -
When the location was finally settled - on the grass outside of parliament house, like Madison predicted - you packed Sof, the seat, and a few supplies into the car and drove as close to the protest as possible.
You climb the rest of the hill slowly with Sofia by your side.
Halfway up you see a small bundle of energy dart down the footpath towards you, dressed in a warm red, knitted dress on top of a black long sleeved shirt and with her mop of bright-yellow blonde hair bobbing in the breeze behind her. As she gets close you can pick out the snake bite piercings she was scheduled to get yesterday, now in and glittering white in the sun. She chose them to mimic Sof’s fangs and match her tongue bar, and they suit her tiny, round face very well.
You remember a couple nights ago Sofia calling her head a grape, while you argued she was more of a mongoose. She insisted, very cutely, that she was a desert wolf, at the very least.
It brings a smile to your face as she collides into both of you for a hug and then winces back as her new piercings are squished against your tits.
“Oow! Shit!” She clutches her bottom lip as she recovers and Sofia laughs at her. “I forgot I had them!”
“Forgot already?” You ask.
“The ibuprofen is helping…” She rubs her new jewellery gently before brightening up. “It’s good to see you! Sorry about lunch, I know you’ve been planning something good.”
“It’s okay,” Sofia brings her into a much gentler hug, squeezing the safe bits of her with all her strength as she had discovered the tiny girl enjoys. “We can always make it another day.”
Between the happy squeaks coming from Madison you could make out a small, tentative question.
“Tomorrow?”
“Yeah, we can do tomorrow!” You respond.
Sof jumps a little bit from surprise and excitement, since she didn’t hear Madison’s question, and you can see the slight remnants of her disappointment fade into joy. “Oh you’re going to love it, Madison. And it’s now turned from a four hour to a twenty-eight hour marinade, so it’ll be even better!”
The rest of the climb passes quickly with the energetic company, and you’re soon greeted by someone who came over to the edge of the roughly designated protest area in search of Madison.
She’s incredibly fit and intimidatingly tall, but pursuingly kind in the twist of her lips at the corner of her smile and the way her eyes linger on whoever she’s studying, even while her smile sits practiced enough to flash her large fangs at any opportunity. She carries herself on an elbow crutch with the habit and fluidity Sof is reaching with her cane and rakes her slightly-frizzed curtain of straight, brown hair back from her face while she studies you all. It makes her look both streamlined and watchful as she comes to a stop just ahead of the three of you.
She stands in clothes that fit her well. They match her body and look professional while expressive, in that strain of fashion perfect for news article photos and national television, but it doesn’t suit her very well at all. The vinyl wrap on the aluminium of her crutch matches her outlook much better, with its rich purple background and vibrant red guillotines.
She looks at Sofia and Madison with familiarity and a subtle sense of protective ownership.
“Oh, hi Kiera!” Sof recognises her instantly. “Why the crutch?”
“Ableist.” She fires back with a smirk. Sof comically looks down at her own cane which was now decorated with stickers of all different subjects and sources, before levelling a stare at Kiera. “I need something to lean on when I make my speech.”
“Just lean on me instead.”
“And take us both down? No thanks.” She sharpens that grin at Sofia. Madison gets your attention as they start bantering.
“We’ve still got a little bit to set up, can you come help?”
Her black eyes, soft and fragile, look up at you for help as she stands with a nervousness she doesn’t let her voice carry. How can you say no to her? But your hearing picks up the conversation that carries on between Kiera and Sof as you walk away with Madison.
It gets interesting when you start unwinding audio cables to run between the mic stand and the speakers.
“She really looks like your omega, huh?”
“What?” Sof half-chokes. “Who, Madison?”
“Yeah, obviously. Who else would I be talking about?”
“Keep your ABO brainrot behind your teeth, Kiera, or you’ll find out what a real knot feels like.”
Your heart leaps into your throat. You turn to stare at your sister in response to the flirting she’s doing with far more bravery than she usually has and see a casual smile on her face and a growing disbelief on Kiera’s. She’s never been that brazen with anyone but you but it seems to get taken well.
“No way… No way! Really? Holy shit! I only know two other girls like you and one built her entire business model around it. That’s- Wow. You feel okay about it?”
“Yeah… I feel pretty good about it, actually. I was considering SRS like twenty percent before, but now that’s plummeted to zero.”
You turn back to your task and a confused Madison. You just nod back at the bickering girls and tell her that you’re spying. She laughs at you with Mads’ unrestrained twinkle.
“SRS?”
“Bottom surgery… Getting a pussy.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
She clears her throat a bit. “I also got bigger, I think.”
“Well, yeah, obviously.”
“No, I mean ignoring the knot.”
Kiera blinks and then chuckles. “Damn, lucky girl! You’ll have to give me a test run eventually.”
“That depends…” She looks over at you and Madison while you set up the mini stage. She waves when she catches your eye. “My love life is a little complicated right now.”
“Ah yeah. Mads does struggle to open up.” It doesn’t sound like Kiera knows about Flare. “I believe in you, though!”
“I love her. I’ve loved her for a while. We’re making progress, but…” She trails off a little and her focus shifts to you. It’s difficult to notice across the distance, and Kiera would probably have a tough time of spotting it even right next to her. But it lights up like a beacon for you. “What if it hurts?”
Kiera’s voice grows a little softer, “That’s only if you do it wrong. Stretch, warm her up, be gentle… and it’ll go fine.”
“It’s just… there’s so much capacity to hurt her. I’ve got to do everything right otherwise it hurts.”
“Hold on,” Kiera interrupts, “Is there anything else we need to chat about back here? I’d like to sit down, but I don’t want anyone listening in to stuff you’re not comfortable talking about.”
“We could move a chair for you back here,” Sofia pauses for dramatic effect, “But Ivy has been listening in the whole time.”
You hear Kiera’s full and shocked laugh as it echoes over the lawn and your embarrassment reaches fiery-blush proportions, but you try to act normal as they start climbing the rest of the way and set up their camp chairs to the side of the stage. You finish up the task Madison had given you and head over to them, but Kiera is called off for protest organisation before you reach them.
“Sorry, packie, back in a moment.” Kiera moves fast across the lawn, flashing you a smile as she passes you.
“Hey,” You start, casually, as Sof settles into comfort and you’re left alone with her.
Sof carves a sly grin on her face which makes your blush worse and your heart beat faster. “Hey.”
“You knew I was listening in.”
“You kept staring at us.” Okay, fair point. You sit on the ground in front of her facing away, resting your shoulders back into her knees. It’s surprisingly comfortable.
Time for the delicate topic. “You’re… scared you’re going to hurt me?”
“Yes.” Her answer is immediately changed in tone. It’s light and brittle, like it could be blown away by a strong breeze, or cracked if stared at too intensely. “Terrified.”
There’s no smile on her face any more, her guard has stopped being useful. She never uses it around you any more. She never feels the need to hide anything. But this hasn’t come up. It’s been almost two weeks since you both figured out you’re knot compatible, and she hasn’t wanted to fuck you in a way that would risk it since. You weren’t really sure why, but she was spoiling you in plenty of other ways, so you just assumed it was a change in preference. It makes a lot more sense now.
You keep your head angled up to watch her as you chat.
“Why? You know I’ve taken it before.”
Sofia shivered slightly at the memory, staying quiet, “Yes and it was fantastic, but you weren’t like this.”
“Why would it hurt now, though?”
“Eh, I’m… Not really worried about pain. ‘Hurting’ you or ‘harming’ you, I’m treating the terms interchangeably.” A little of her bravado slips in, but vanishes just as quickly.
You prod her a little harder, “So, what does harming me mean?”
“Well,” Sofia starts to really squirm in her seat, struggling to face down the topic, “What if it’s just plain unpleasant? That’s the worst one. Or what if it’s good and then gets really bad and we’re stuck? What if we get stuck and it’s really uncomfortable, or you start to panic, or any number of things, and I can’t pull out? What if it is good and it shouldn’t be?”
You start soft and gentle, easing her through the anxiety, “Hey… Sof? Sis?” You get her attention, brought up from her hands stuck in her lap. “Sex with you should be good, and it is.”
Sofia takes a heavy breath before mouthing out a very jagged, “Okay.”
“I really enjoy sex with you, and if you never use your dick with me again, that’ll be okay. We’ll always find other things to enjoy.” You pause for a moment as her anxiety brings her hands into your hair, patting you for her own comfort. “But I don’t think that’s what you want.”
She shakes her head so slightly, and doesn’t speak.
“It’s okay to want that. We’ll work it out, only do it when you’re comfy, even if it takes months to work you up to it. But we will work it out if you want it.” You can tell there’s a missing piece in her mind, and you seek something out to fill it. “You’re not a bad person for wanting it. You’re not dangerous to me for it. I want you to want it.”
The last part seems to strike a chord in Sofia’s mind, and you watch as all the anxiety that had been growing taut inside her relaxes. You know it’s still there, but it’s not making her miserable which is a big improvement. It’ll be a lot easier to fully remove later.
You take a moment to enjoy the warmth of her legs as you watch the business of the pre-protest. You track Kiera as she chats to important figures who agreed to speak today as well, and study Madison as she helps a photographer understand the order of events from the rushed planning of the morning. It’s nice to be here for it, especially as Sof grows more and more relaxed.
“I love you, Ivy.”
The words send a spark of new and familiar warmth up through your heart and your spine. It makes you smile like nothing else.
“I love you too, puppy.”
Kiera comes back soon after and studies you with entertained curiosity. “Sorry about that, just practicalities that needed to be sorted, but Ivy probably already knew.”
“Nah,” You dismiss with a shrug, “It was boring.”
“That’s some pretty impressive hearing you’ve got there, girl.”
The same tone of the title that she used for Sof hits you strangely, and gears start to turn behind your eyes as you respond.
“Gamma lycanthropy has its perks.”
“A lot of people call them negatives, seek to numb their senses.” She studies you for earplugs, secret sunglasses, gloves to limit touch, while she settles into her chair next to Sof. “But not you.”
You decide to give the honest answer. “I find it euphoric.”
“Ah! So you’re a capital-w Werewolf, like us!” She gestures to Sof as well as herself.
“Yeah. But back on topic that I shouldn’t have heard…” You glance up to Sofia with a mischievous grin and catch the start of a soft panic in her expression. “I’m throwing you under the bus, Sof. Sorry.”
You turn your attention away from your anxious sister and regard a suddenly-more curious Kiera, leaning in for the gossip that’s about to be spilt.
“Sof has this American friend, Julia, who’s a werewolf - and a Werewolf too, I guess.” You put enough strain on the word to get the unfamiliar title across while you lie through your teeth and a wide, conspiratory smile. “Sof and her have an… interesting dynamic that has led to a half-promise of a visit at some point in the future, but she’s also been changed, like Sof. She’s… Is the official term ‘compatible’ or is it something else?”
“That works, but it’s mainly used for official language,” Kiera answers while her mind processes everything else, “Nice slang terms include ‘knotted’ and ‘knottable.’”
“Cool!” You answer while Sof’s embarrassment behind you bleeds into admiration of you, and your casual vibe continues to spike into anxiety as you keep the lie going. “So, she’s knottable, and is potentially going to fuck my darling sister here at some point, so she’s worried about how that will go.”
Kiera looks to your sister who confirms your lie as best she can with a simple, reserved nod. She then regards both of you with a look that reads as pride and joy in subtle parts. The gears in your head stop clicking as they arrive at an answer.
The vibrant woman’s playful terms, and casual approach to sharing sex with Sof, and her position here at the protest - it all speaks to a familiarity and desire to protect the people around her. She’s not a natural in the role of leadership, you can tell that just by how she holds herself in the group: experienced but constantly adjusting, thinking hard, taking moments. Plus the smell of subtle anxiety constantly coming off her. She invited you in to casual nicknames easily because she’s trying to embody a pack mentality.
Not a pack leader, not an alpha in the sense of those terrible studies, but just a member of a pack who’s there. As a ‘capital-w Werewolf’ she is trying to live up to that ideal, because it’s euphoric for her.
And it’s working. Almost everyone who’s here early is looking over to Kiera at some point or another, and then finding someone else when they see she’s busy. Even the one politician who showed up, with a very purposefully obvious Greens pin on his outfit, looks at her with recognition when his eyes wander from the conversation he’s having with a small news crew off to the side.
But Kiera’s pack-tending instincts are cut off by a lilting voice you’ve been tracking since she helped the photographer find a way to charge a spare battery.
“What are you three talking about?”
Madison claims a spot on the grass right in front of you, finishing the rough circle, as she inserts herself gracelessly into the conversation. You’re very happy for her company, glad that enough is set up for her to relax with you now.
“Knotting.” “Knotting!” Comes your and Sof’s responses, slightly mistimed for proper perfection, and joined as well in the cacophony by Kiera’s more diplomatic version of, “Werewolf sex.”
Mads looks hurt, playing up the emotion for her jester performance, “And you didn’t call me over immediately?” She glares at you and Sof the hardest.
Kiera studied Sofia, though, and when she saw no hesitancy from your sister the pack mentality remained in her posture, unchanged.
“You’re here now, Mads!” Kiera smiles wide at her.
“Okay, catch me up.”
“Honestly haven’t covered much.” Her words calmed Mads’ over-excitement and anxiety. The sincere tone let her just express her curiosity, which was really pretty to see on her. “Just that we’re talking about compatibility.”
Madison turns to you two and asks, “Wait, which one of you?”
“Both,” Sof immediately responds with the tidbit you had been planning to tactically not reveal to Kiera, “Shared genetics and all.”
You interrupt to avoid any unhelpful conclusions, “But we’re focusing on Sof right now…”
Madison looks at both of you in wonder and a glint of something in her eye that reveals she had expected that to be the case - for Sof at least - while not being strong enough to obscure her obsession. And was it tinged with a little lust?
“So with Julia-” Kiera starts.
“Who’s Julia?” Madison’s expression snaps in an instant. Accusatory exaggeration, akin to a camp murder mystery stage play, with a manic prankster’s grin tucked behind helps her shut all her openly expressed fascination back into its box.
Sofia responds with the lie, spoken excellently, “Long distance American friend, coming over for the solar eclipse in a few years.”
You’ve been looking forward to that eclipse for a long time. The previous one was in Exmouth, and only barely too late to make it while accomodating the uni calendar, so you hadn’t been able to go see it.
“So with Julia-” Kiera tries again, wrangling the pups’ attention away from their combined attention deficiency. “What are you worried about?”
“I’m worried about only knowing it’s a bad idea once it’s too late.”
“Oh, you’re worried about getting truly, properly stuck?”
“Yeah. Too little margin. If something is bad but you can get out of it easy it’s fine, but how I’m imagining it that’s not really the case.”
“How much reading have you done into it?” Kiera asks, but then Madison jumps in with her own question.
“Actually, how much do you know about shibari?”
Sofia opts to field her crush’s question first. Can you really keep calling it a crush? It’s more of a distinguishing title for you since ‘her love’ could refer to you too-
“Nothing, really.”
“Well, compare it for a moment.” Mads’ point is backed up by a sage nod from Kiera, who has picked up on the comparison already, which is quite funny to see during such a kinky topic.
“Okay… Big buildup, hard to get out of, easy to dislike, I see what you mean…”
Sof doesn’t see what Madison does, so she pushes harder. “What are the management strategies for shibari?”
Sof is quiet for a moment before Kiera fills in the gap.
“Constant communication, negotiation beforehand, more specific questions than just ‘doing good?’ And if things go wrong? Comfort to stop the panic, quick release knots if you chose to use them, rope scissors, walking your partner through what’s happening and what you’re doing.”
Madison cringes in sympathetic pain. “Okay, ignore her mention of rope scissors, I don’t really like that image, but everything else is good.” Sof still looks a little unconvinced. “The negotiation beforehand, and the knowledge of where the fail-safes are if things go wrong, are all to mitigate the emotional impact if things go wrong. Actually physically getting out is rarely the issue.”
“The most important thing, though, is that both you and Julia agree that it will be okay if things go wrong, just the same as how you approach any intense kink.” Kiera seems to spot something in Sof’s posture, so she presses harder. “It’s not just your responsibility.”
“Oh…” Another bit of tension bleeds out of Sofia’s body as she breathes out the word.
“Back to my original question though.” Kiera starts and then sees Madison’s tight-pressed lips and slivers of emotions that are peeking out from behind her shield. “Very helpful tangent, Mads. But! How much reading have you done?”
Sofia sighs, “A little, but it’s all assuming the person with the knot is a guy. ‘Just wait until your refractory period gets too strong, then you’ll get soft!’ Doesn’t really help me.”
“You don’t have a refractory period?”
Sof shakes her head while Mads half-sings, “The wonders of estrogen!”
Kiera seems surprised and Sof finally manages to answer, “Yeah, refractory periods are very much a testosterone thing.”
“Damn! Even luckier!” Kiera looks very impressed, before taking a moment to work things through in her mind. “…I see the issue, though.”
“Yeah… Nothing’s really targeted at non-op trans women.”
“Okay, what else did it say?”
“Just… wait to get soft. That doesn’t feel very reliable.”
“Damn, terrible sites. Didn’t even talk about vasodilating compounds?” She saw the confusion on Sof’s face. “Reverse viagra. It’s not really medically available yet, because the ones we do have are for much more general, long-decay use and generalised disorders, so the reverse-viagra stuff is still in testing. They’re pretty desperate for testers, though, especially those who have compatible partners. There’s also muscle relaxants, for knottable girlies.”
“I feel like maybe I just shouldn’t have sex like this.”
“That’s blatantly untrue and ignoring everything I just said.” For a brief moment Kiera looks very angrily dismissive before continuing. “But back to the main issue. You’re worried about getting stuck, but human bodies are a little more flexible than that. You’ve seen those CT scans of people with random items up inside them and you’re worried you’re gonna have to carry you and your friend into the ER and deal with the awkward stares, but you really don’t have to worry.”
“That’s a funny image.” Mads adds, with a sparkle of something behind her eyes. You’re getting to know her better and the sparkle looks a lot like vivid imagination and rich desire to you.
“Yeah and also a pain.” Kiera smiles down at her. “Those radiology images, however, are all of things without flanges - or flanges used incredibly incorrectly. You, however, packie, are one big flange attached to your cock. You’re gonna be able to get yourself out.”
The dappled overcast day finds a lucky break in the cloud cover to bathe the lawn in bright, noonday light that paints everything a little sharper and makes you squint your eyes closed for a long few moments to get used to it. Sof’s hands on your head keep you grounded, and when you finally open your eyes again you see worry quickly evaporating off Madison’s face as you return to your normal, relaxed state.
“I’m a little bit more than that.” Sof rises to the bait and sounds a lot more lively than before.
“Sure. Look, getting soft or just waiting it out are bad solutions, I get that. But you’re not going to be stuck. There’s this video I want to show you of a girl who made it seem like she was trying out her new, knottable pussy with a pretty sizeable toy for the first time before pretending to realise it got stuck. It’s really hot, and she plays up the struggle wonderfully, but silicon doesn’t get soft and she still got it out.”
“Ooh, can I see it too?” Mads asks.
“You really are a hunter, aren’t you?”
“Hey!” Flare growls while she blushes.
“Hunter?” You ask.
“She’s calling me a werewolf hunter: like trans chasers.” Flare responded while half-glaring at Kiera.
“Am I wrong?” The teasing in her voice was playful and performative, masking the spike in her anxiety as everything got closer to the rally’s posted time.
“N- Shut up!” Mads reaches over the patch of ground with all her height and smacks a hand over Kiera’s shin. You save your crush from her embarrassment by changing the subject.
“How much time do we have?”
“Hour and a half.” Kiera’s leg starts bouncing.
“You’re already set up, though?”
“Internal miscommunication. We said it would take two hours to get here and set up, they heard done by two o’clock and posted that.”
She really needs a distraction. Or something to make her feel confident about the speech she’ll be making.
“What are you going to talk about?”
“I haven’t really decided yet.”
Sof looks at Kiera like she’s been replaced by an impostor, “You’re just going to wing it?”
“Of course not.” She smiles shakily at your sister. “I just haven’t decided which version I’ll be using.”
“That sounds dumb,” Madison’s insight doesn’t have the impact she wanted it to have.
“You want to go up there instead of me?” Kiera stares her down until Madison shakes her head, and then sighs. “The main argument they used to get rid of Dan Bruer is that alphas are a threat to themselves and others, and so shouldn’t be in charge of such an important cultural movement. So all my speeches touch on that. But how specifically I address it is still up in the air.”
“What are the options?”
“Outrage, rationalism, personal sympathy.”
“Outrage sounds like a good option.” Sof adds.
“Yeah, until the speech is more about the angry girl saying it than what I’m saying.” She lets out another anxious breath, this aggravated sigh is ironically more stable than the last. “It’s the thing that stumped entire movements: which strategy do I use? I know, I know, it’s not that big of a deal, it’s just one speech, but I want to do it right. It’s just the next stepping stone in the path, but I don’t want to go backwards.”
“I don’t think you will,” Mads says softly, with a familiarity with Kiera that you don’t have.
“I want to do the movement justice; I don’t want to ruin their progress, even a little; I want to help the pack around me, defend them as best I can; And I want to make it easier for everyone who’s yet to be turned or yet to realise who they are. And that’s a shitton to put on my own shoulders.”
“Past, present, and emerging.” Mads says it with a smile, but you bump her knee to interrupt it.
“That’s in bad taste, Madison.” She apologises after you chide her. “I know you want to lighten the mood, but using Aboriginal struggles while we’re sitting on the grass in front of parliament house is a little insensitive.”
“Also,” Kiera continues, “Even if it wasn’t I’ve barely gotten rid of my American accent, and I still have little hidden American-isms in my speech pattern. I still say ‘take-out’ sometimes.”
You and your sister wince and Sof says, “Oh, that’s a bad one. Not even like a funny one. That’s just bad, Kiery.”
“Which is why I’m so scared of talking in front of people! What if there’s just a hidden rule I’ve never heard that I fuck up?!”
“Hey, you’ll be fine.” You snap her out of the mild hysteria before it becomes a panic attack.
“Sure, I’ll be fine, but will I be good?”
“You’re being so critical of yourself.” Sof pipes up with some advice she had to learn herself not too long ago. “You’re never going to comfortably do good if you talk to yourself like that. Just relax, pick one, and go for it even if it feels like the wrong strategy. Let yourself fail a little bit.”
Mads is still staring at the floor.
She’s pulled herself inwards, all shelled up and avoiding the rest of your eyes, gripping onto her elbow with sharp fingernails that dig into her black sleeves hard enough to turn them grey and translucent at the indents. What colour she usually has on her face has left, and she’s worrying the inside of her new snakebite piercings with her teeth, twisting the metal around the air on the outside and making the new healing points more inflamed, and probably much more painful. A subtle, concerning quietness fills out her body language. She looks like she wants to run away before she cries in front of everyone.
You bump her knee in the same way as before and she flinches.
“Sorry! Sorry, Mads.” You keep your voice quiet to not interrupt the conversation above you. “What’s wrong?”
Mads squeezes her eyes shut and wrestles with something in her mind, and says one crushed word before Flare takes over.
“Fuck. How do you always spot it so easily?” Her voice is so quiet, like that one hurt confession from Sofia all those months ago: said by instinct, to get the pressure out of her heart, but not meant to be heard.
“Why can’t I love you the way I want?”
Your senses had been new, your heart had been wanting to hear something like it, and you passed it off like a hallucination. Like a moment of emotions grown too wild and vivid to be entirely real.
You wish you had let yourself believe the words were real, because Sof needed you to hear them and respond to them even if she hadn’t intended for you to notice them at all.
“I’m really perceptive, Flare.” You respond. “And I pay a lot of attention when I care about someone.”
“I didn’t want you to see that.” Hackles raised, a wheel of hurt churning in the back of her mind, attention split.
“I’m sorry.” You see some tangle of thoughts grow loose behind Madison’s coal-rich eyes, the threat of betrayed fire catching the vein still stuck in its eye-bag sconce. You give the apology time to sit in her mind before continuing. “I did see it, though. And I’m here. Anything you want to talk about?”
She cringes for a moment, and you think she’s going to deflect. You wouldn’t blame her, she’s entitled to her hesitations, but there’s a bit of you that hopes. Hopes for her, in every difficult moment, to see you as someone to trust. To turn to you.
She glances up at Sof for a moment, a flash of assessment that lands on the right side of the coin flip. She takes a slow, steadying breath, and tries to calm the worst of her grounding techniques.
“It’s- Fuck, it’s really fucking hard to know what I’m dealing with a lot of the time.” She speaks with a shiver in her words, and the smell of something deep and vulnerable in her burning away grows to fill the space with emotional reflexes of cigarette ash, sulphur, and bushfires. “CPTSD makes it so hard to figure out how to handle my stress responses. I’ve figured out that I’m probably not autistic - it’s just that there’s not a single untraumatised autistic person out there, so I act similar enough often enough… Is it the same with OCD? Am I constantly critical of myself, never letting go of any memories, because I have another disorder? Or is it simply that my PTSD is C enough in the right fucking ways to make me think I am, and I’m just being a bitch to myself? Myself and Flare-!”
Her fingernails dig in harder.
“Woah, Mads, it’s okay. You’re okay. It’s fine…” You consider adding something else, not sure if she needs to hear it or not. Your bravery wins against your anxiety in a hard fought battle. “You’re overreacting.”
“I know I’m fucking overreacting, Ivy!” She hisses at you, all half-stolen breaths and shaking hands, trapped into a dense sphere of scalding, creaking iron that would be easy to overlook if someone was not looking for it. “That doesn’t make it easier! It makes letting the thought pass possible, but I’ve yet to find a way to make it easier that doesn’t feel like I’m feeding it.”
“Can…” You start, not sure where you’re going, but your gaze keeps gravitating towards the fingers digging into her arm. “Can you look at me?”
Madison’s eyes flicker open for a brief moment, glancing at you with more shame and disgust at herself than the strength of the playfulness she usually keeps alive and burning in her irises, but she shutters them again very quickly. She takes a long and difficult moment to recover before trying again, and manages to hold your gaze a lot easier this time.
She still looks like she’s going to bolt, but her eyes spend as much time on you as they do on the ground in front of her, which is a significant improvement.
“Thank you, Madison.” You scrape all the concern in your heart off of your tone. You let yourself feel it, you process it and hold it and worry so fucking deeply about her, but you let your voice just keep the care that’s pushing you to push her. “Can I hold your hand?”
She curls for a second, shifting in her spot, glaring and blushing a little bit before pulling herself a little closer, and your heart does optimistic things when it sees something other than distress on her face. But she slowly reduces the pressure on her arm and finally pulls her fingers away, pushing her hand towards you.
You take it, softly at first to not scare her away, and then give it a comforting, firm squeeze. You let her know that you’re not letting go, for one reason or another.
Her hand is so tiny. It’s still warm on the palm and pads of her fingers from the heat of her arm, radiating heat they don’t usually have. She grips onto you like you’re a lifeline.
“I don’t care what your trauma is saying.” You push the sound of a smile into your voice as hard as you can while keeping your eyes solid and grounding. “I like spending time with you. And I like you best when you’re not trying to be perfect.”
Madison lets out a breath that sounds like it would descend into tears in any other situation, and you hold her hand steady as the rest of her tension starts to slowly melt.
She responds, very quietly, “Thank you, Ivy. I like you too.” Then there’s a moment of recovery before she speaks again. “Want to hear what it was saying?”
“Would that help?”
“It’ll probably just feed it.” She’s quiet for longer, struggling to not seek your comfort. “I’m working on it. It was saying I had fucked up and returned to the out-group.”
“Okay, that’s dumb.” You’re not sure what you were expecting, but nothing that small.
“Yeah… It’s just- With you and Sof I can find ways to connect… There’s so much we can have in common and it all should be enough, but there’s always one thing that feels like a fish bone made of steel stuck in the middle of my throat.”
“You sound like Sof with that description.”
Madison relaxes a bit more at the comparison, another natural reminder that she’s not being rejected, like your hand wrapped around hers.
“Fuck, I probably shouldn’t even be here, helping Kiera and everyone else out. I think of it with them as well, and it just gets in the way.”
“Why is that?” Your mind catches up and you correct the question. “What is it?”
“I want to be a werewolf. Like you three.”
“Oh,” That makes a lot of sense for Madison. You’d been subconsciously accepting her into the inner world of you and Sof’s lycanthropy already anyway. “What’s the politics of that?”
Mads shakes her head slightly. “Not good,” Flare responds. Her eyes flick up to the two alphas nearby before dropping to her lap once again.
“You deserve community…” You say it softly, welcoming, understanding. You hope it gets through.
“Mmm…” Mads’ response in noncommittal.
“Do we want to include the other two in this?” You’re gentle with the suggestion, and Madison takes a deep breath. When she speaks again she’s just louder enough to draw the awareness of Sof and Kiera. And she says it with a lot of shame you don’t think she’s earned.
“I want it so badly.” She picks at the knit of her dress, needing something look at and do with her other hand. You twist around slightly to grip her hand better. Her voice settles more. “I know I probably shouldn’t. There’s so many downsides, so much risk, so much stigma - but then I realise I sound like the libs talking about being trans and then the desire just flares brighter.”
“The desire for what?” Kiera pops into the conversation, a suspicion of the answer bleeding into her curiosity.
Madison sighs, starts speaking, and gives up. Guilt eats her in front of you, and you can’t bear it.
“To be turned.” You answer for her. She nods, and whispers her thanks in a way only you are able to pick up.
You feel Sof stare at your shared love interest with an intensity and swirl of emotions you don’t really have the time to pry apart.
Kiera takes in a sharp breath, “Ah. Should’ve seen that coming…”
You study the pack-leader’s face, forming a picture for yourself between the churning grimace and distracted, darting motion of her eyes. She leans forward, and inattentively fucks with a peeling corner of her crutch’s vinyl wrap. And she stares at Madison like she’s just met the girl but knows everything about her from a glance.
“Is that bad?” You continue.
“No. Always no.” She’s firm on that. Immovable. “There are Werewolves without lycanthropy, and lycanthropes who aren’t Werewolves. But specifically wanting the disease is… complicated. It won’t always be, but it is now.”
“Why is that?” Sof asks, backing up your friend and taking her share of the focus.
“Goes back to the AIDS crisis.” She sees the relative lack of understanding on both you and Sof’s expressions. She doesn’t sigh at it, though, just gauges how basic to start. “You know that HIV and lycanthropy cases started popping up around the same time, right?”
“Yeah,” You say while your sister nods, “But not much more than that.”
Kiera considers for a moment, reclining into her camp chair to take some more pressure off the still-retreated Madison.
“The epidemics started in different spots… Paris was the centre of lycanthropy while New York, my home, was the hub of AIDS - for the entire history the cities had more than their ‘fair share,’ though in America quite a few states just refused to diagnose the AIDS for way too long. It’s why if you go looking all the graphs will start in 1990, even though the plague started in the mid-seventies. I’m sure you can guess why.”
“The homophobia.”
“Yes, but crucially to what we’re talking about it was the way it transmitted. HIV, while horrendous, is really fragile. Blood contact is really effective, but one of the only other ways it could actually transfer was through sperm and blood-membrane barriers. So men were really easily able to spread it, but if they didn’t spread it to someone who could cum in someone else, then it the new person was a bit of a dead end. That’s why it spread so much in the gay community specifically.
“In Paris, though, lycanthropy was a more general pandemic, but it wasn’t a national emergency for different reasons. It was sort of seen as a party disease - and the avant-garde scene had a field day with it. It was weaker as well, back then, and in very few people. Some researchers were saying it was a symbiotic virus, like the bacteria we have in the rest of our body, and was overall very helpful aside from the silver allergy.
“Then it jumped the pond.”
She paused to collect her thoughts, and you take the moment to check in on your girls. Sof behind you is paying a lot of attention to Kiera, taking in everything she says and absorbing it as best she can. Her emotions are a little frayed, but not too badly for the serious topic hanging in the air. Mads, on the other hand, is doing bad.
She’s curled up again, and is clearly looping through more obsessive, unkind thoughts.
You grip firmer around her hand and pull towards yourself, easing her wordlessly across the grass until she’s fully looking at you and ignoring her internal world.
You don’t stop there, though. You shift your hands to grasp her shoulders gently and pull her from her spot into a new, intimate one, resting up against you with your arms wrapped around her while you rest back into Sof.
She squeaks slightly at the contact, and then the movement, but settles into the hug like a startled and starving stray.
She’s warm and feverishly shaking, like she’s holding in a long-trapped laugh or pressurised tears. She smells of orange blossom and instant coffee. You shove your nose into the back of her hair to continue your mini-task of memorising her smell. You’ll give her space to properly let it all out soon.
You hold her while Kiera continues, and people start arriving for the protest fashionably early, instead of ludicrously early like you and Sof.
“In the mid-eighties there was this big push by AIDS activism and the gay community to use condoms and specific positions that were guaranteed to be safe, and it had a really big impact. People with AIDS were suddenly able to have sex again, and it was this mini-renaissance within the activism. While the Catholic church was condemning condoms, to try to make sure everyone who was gay got AIDS and died, the activists were fucking each other so much that hardcore gays and lesbians were occasionally sleeping together.
“It was a really effective movement, and a breath of optimism amongst the fatalism of the other actions by ACT UP, and WHAM, and everyone. And it was built on the foundation of kissing being safe.
“But when lycanthropy reached New York… We know now that the presence of the viral load in alpha saliva, and the similarities between the two, let HIV piggyback on lycanthropy transmission, but it was really hard to diagnose at the time.
“The first ones to notice were the lesbians. They went from the primary nurses at the hospital beds of AIDS patients to being in those beds themselves, with no idea why or what was happening to them. But it was really difficult for that to garner the attention of researchers. They were women, after all.
“The next thing to happen was how it worsened the gay cases. The growth of HIV in a third of new cases was dramatically higher, exacerbated by the rapidly mutating lycanthropy, and in those people the speed at which they died was so fast they were considered outliers. Which is difficult, especially with how fast some AIDS patients died. But in the community the allure of the new, European disease which offered a permanent boost to strength or sensitivity kept growing. The ‘party drug’ attitude had also reached New York.
“Which made the Catholic church even worse about the epidemic. Hearing cases of people choosing to be infected with something that caused AIDS-like symptoms just spiked their general attitude towards it all. They incensed the ‘moral majority’ into a worse religious, homophobic, homocidal fervour, and condemned anyone who showed the symptoms. They spread the lie that AIDS was a choice, as well as lycanthropy.
“The fashion trend that happened that year was wearing pure silver crucifix necklaces, to prove you weren’t ‘tainted,’ white gloves with silver wire sewn into the palm so if you shook the hand of a werewolf it would hurt them, and putting silver filings in holy water for the same reason.”
The noise of the crowd around you grows stronger, reaching the point where you have to start focusing on ignoring certain parts of the world around you. You don’t like doing it, trying for too long hurts and can lead to migraines, but you want to stay for the protest. Maybe carrying earplugs isn’t the worst idea.
There’s a deep anger behind Kiera’s eyes as she continues, “There were quite a few beta-complication deaths from those choices, which led to some very surgical lawsuits, which were only allowed to be successful by the church because it only stopped the church from inflicting harm through those techniques, and the prosecuting lawyers quoted the bible in the courtroom.
“But…” She says it with a lot of force, like she’s getting herself back on topic, “Lycanthropy also meant AIDS could spread to the straight community. And it did. Fast. Especially through that same ‘party drug’ mindset combined with all the Reagan-era opinion of AIDS just being a gay disease, so simply don’t be gay.”
“Like that’s possible to do,” Sof jokes, lightening the air.
“Exactly, but it was still the opinion, and people used it to make some very dumb decisions. HIV cases in straight people exploded, funding followed suit, the drugs to manage HIV were invented and were made cheap, and then slowly more expensive which was its own thing, and the pandemic was no longer a thing about gay people - medically.
“The stigma followed. Anyone with lycanthropy or AIDS is seen as a danger to themselves, to others, and to ‘common morality’ by anyone who is influenced enough by the Catholic church. Which is a surprisingly large amount of non-christians, and so even today being turned is seen as a death sentence by those people.
“The ableism and homophobia is rife, so choosing to be turned today is choosing to face all that down. Even in the werewolf community there’s those who hate the purposefully infected.”
Madison speaks up from the nest of your arms she had curled up into, “They treat it like you chose to amputate a limb.”
Kiera nods, “But from the outside, it’s very much a ‘why would you choose this lifestyle’ kind of bigotry that rings very similar to queerphobia talking points. So it remains a very complicated middle ground that has yet to outgrow its roots.”
“I still want it…” Mads whispers.
“Even if you get nothing but a silver allergy?”
“…Yeah…”
“Anything I said today news to you?”
“No… Not the important things.”
Kiera sighs and smiles at Madison, who clutches your arms and lets you feel her warmth. “Okay, pup. You have at least two weeks to back out.”
“What, you don’t trust me…?” Flare tries to put on a brave face, hold an accusatory tone, but something in her isn’t strong enough to hold it up. You hug her a little harder.
Kiera laughs, “No, not that. I just need to find my backup toothpaste so I can still brush my teeth while the viral load recovers.”
You and Madison both work it out at the same time.
“Wait-” Mads looks up at Sof behind you briefly.
“You’ve done this before?” You ask, interrupting Mads and distracting Kiera from her observation.
“Oh, huh? Yeah! A few times, actually.” Kiera, unsure leader of the Canberra pack, laughs to bleed the rest of the tension off. “I turned one girl who I also later turned into an ex when she picked up an ADFA contract to fund an experimental lycanthropy cure she didn’t tell me she was looking into. I’ve made sure that everyone afterwards has known the risks.”
“Oh, even for that ADFA is a bit yikes.”
“More than a bit… Trying to cure it I was fine with.”
“How do you do it?”
Kiera softly smirks at you. “There are plenty of ways, but… I don’t think Mads wants it from me.”
Madison, who had been looking between Sofia and the ground, suddenly jumps at her name and blushes hard, retreating further into your arms. She grows steadily warmer, embarrassment bringing blood to the surface of her skin and making her bright red. You grow anxious as the little flutter of your heart grows stronger while she retreats into you, pressing herself more against you for comfort. Would you protect her well enough?
You want to try.
“What are you hoping to get, Madison?” You whisper to her, and immediately see the potential mistake.
You had been draping her over you, with her head resting on your shoulder, which meant your mouth was pretty close to her ear. And when you had decided to be secretive about the question you had leant in even closer, so when you breathed out the words you felt them twist through her messy strands of hair and curl over her ear, tugging on sensitive skin and an eclectic collection of piercings. With your arms wrapped around her you can instantly feel the reflexive, twitchy breath surge through her followed by a weak and needy shudder than runs through her muscles.
Her hands wrapped over your forearms tighten as she confesses in a single, shaky release of energy.
“Fangs.”
You smile against her, still whispering, “You would look gorgeous with fangs.”
Mads whines as she presses further into you, running her head against your neck and burying herself in your hug as deep as possible, while her legs clamp together and one of her hands drops to make sure her dress is tugged down far enough on her thighs for modesty while her legs clamp together.
You relish the feeling of her arousal.
“What are you two whispering about down there?” Sofia’s happy, curious tone buts into your interaction and you enjoy it as much as the secrecy with Madison.
“Nothing!”
You angle your head to smile up at her, and she picks out the joy on your face easily. She cups your cheek as you grin and draws out a low and pleasant noise out of you, and the emotional connection and physical touch is good enough to get you to forget you’re in public for a moment. It’s worth it, cuddled in between her and Madison, even if it goes slightly wrong eventually.
When you come to from the comfortable vibe you notice Kiera is gone, and there are quite a lot more people than you remember there being before. The protest is getting close to starting, and everything from the stage to the police cordon full of officers who would rather be anywhere else but babysitting the people they hate the most are set up. The grand total of news coverage is two tiny news stations planted to the side of the lawn so the hill doesn’t rob them of their angle, and so the crowd of around a hundred doesn’t get in the way of their shot.
There’s been bigger protests here, even ones you’ve found the time to got to, but this is a snap rally about something happening in Sydney - ignoring the comparison to other, bigger things, this is a pretty good turnout.
The protest gets underway close to the posted time, though a bit earlier due to the restlessness of everyone who turned up early, and goes smoothly. Various people get up and talk about the events, the history, and everything in between. The Greens guy doesn’t throw any curveballs, so you and Mads entertain yourselves by talking about him being there rather than what he’s actually saying. At one point she brings her phone out and finds a live-tweet thread from the Sydney rally which has plenty more politicians, but seemingly the only main-party politician there is the one running to get the current Lib MP out of her seat that controls Darlinghurst and Oxford Street - the historical gay hub of the city.
You end up whispering about it through the next speech as well without noticing, but as soon as it’s Kiera’s turn Mads gets quiet and you follow suit.
She chose the personal sympathy tactic.
She talks about her time in New York, interacting with the communities there that are still so focused on the late decades of the twentieth century, and crucially about the infighting and similar decisions that were pushed forward early on to not let infectious lycanthropes hold positions of influence. It leads easily into how those communities realised it was a dumb decision and avoided implementing it or reversed it, and how those groups fighting for in-community acceptance turned to getting lycanthropy unbanned by the Paralympics - and other professional sport leagues. Something Dan was always an advocate for in Australian spheres. She lets the irony hang in the air as she finishes her speech.
The rest of the rally passes by smoothly, right up until the point where you all realise you have to get up, and to let go of each other, though for Sof the former is more stressful.
Madison helps you get your bag and chair to the car while you focus on giving Sofia an extra limb to lean on with your hand in hers as you slowly make your way down the hill. Conversation is lighthearted and optimistic, which is always a good idea after a protest, and carries on past the surprisingly smooth acceptance from Madison of getting a lift home. She doesn’t live too far away, and the slow wind down is nice, but there isn’t enough bravery between you all to get her back to your apartment.
You do reiterate the plan for today’s lunch to be made tomorrow before she gets out of earshot, though.
And then Sof surprises you.
“I didn’t realise how much I wanted it.”
“Want what?” You turn to her before turning the car on again, giving her this quiet moment that’s letting her be forward.
“I thought I just wanted it a normal amount, and was scared a shitton by it…”
You piece it together, “Knotting?”
She nods, before turning to you with an anxious, hopeful mix in her eyes. “Could we swing by a pharmacy before going home? I want to pick up some muscle relaxants.”
You can’t help it but your heart’s lovesick hammering turns into a wide, beaming grin that you can’t wipe off your face. You don’t want to take it too directly, what if she just wants them for another day? But… What if she wants them for tonight?
Your voice has a Mads-like giggle in it when you respond, “Yeah! Of course, sis! Let’s find us some good ones.”
Sof matches your laugh, which grows a little stronger as you do a happy little embarrassed dance in the driver’s seat.
Interlude: Oxygen Not Rationed (non-canon smut chapter)
Author’s note:
Another interlude? Why yes! This one, like the previous one, isn’t exactly canon. It has as much influence on the rest of ASC that dreams have on our own lives - you can give it as much or as little meaning as you want. Read it and obsess over it for the rest of the story, or ignore it once you put it down and ‘wake up,’ up to you!
The actual dream, though, is a little strange. It’s depicting a version of Ivy who is literally trans rather than allegorically, and her sex dream is very based on wish fulfilment that my Ivy wants, which required a few changes for how story Ivy sees things.
Mads and Flare are a system in the main story, but she’s a character who is meant to mainly represent my plurality and polyamory, among other things I wasn’t able to fit into Sofia. But, in this dream-version that’s taking one layer of allusion, allegory, and characterisation from the surface of ASC, to write the smut that my Ivy wanted they needed to be part of the same system. Mads, Flare, and Sofia.
On that note, thank you to my wife - my Ivy - Kit for commissioning this chapter.
- 🌌 -
The dream starts strange, but Ivy doesn’t notice.
She goes through the motions of removing her extra vacuum suit attachments, placing the chunks of metal into their spots in her locker with tired limbs, and then painstakingly peeling herself out of the skin-tight synth cloth that’s made of a fabric awkwardly between latex and hemp in its texture. Thankfully there is a comfortable lining on the inside to make wearing it bearable, but unfortunately it soaks up sweat like a wet sponge and makes getting out of the suit a process that feels more like removing a wet-suit than something designed to hold out space.
Ivy gets it off eventually, and collapses onto the bench in the middle of the changing room to recover from the ordeal while sweat steams off her exposed skin. She takes a moment to admire herself while her limbs go on strike, too exhausted to lift her off the mimic-wood seat or put her vacsuit away.
She summons a mirror in her neural implant, seeing her naked form stare back at her through the fuzz of tiny CRT lines she’s styled her HUD to have.
She’s gorgeous. Brown hair tumbles down her shoulders, strands still half-remembering the shape of the ponytail they were in moments before as they frame her easy smile and glitter of blue-green irises watching out from bright eyes. She finds herself beautiful, her face shape very similar to her gorgeous wife, and appreciates the lingering touches of makeup that she forgot to remove last night.
She’s fit in a casual way, built off her job repairing the outside of the ship where the edge of the artificial gravity goes wonky, but she’s also full. Her tits sit heavy on her chest in matching, candid beauty to the plush thighs and wide hips filling out her silhouette, each stretch of skin studded with tiny gems of beaded moisture that gather and vanish in the humid room. The obviously good bits come with harder parts to like, like the tummy pouch or the stretch marks, but she’s been slowly working on liking those too.
The most recent effort to improve how she sees herself is where her eyes dip next.
Between her thighs, peeking out as her legs spread apart in happy exhaustion, is a mound and a clit that weren’t there until very recently. Having her dick never really stressed Ivy out, she could use it and enjoy the sight of it, and even sometimes use it the way it was designed, but never to the extent of her wife, but replacing it wasn’t really an issue until she randomly, suddenly, and genuinely considered changing.
Now, with the novel new organ dragging her attention down to an ache she still has to get used to, combined with the thrill of others being able to watch her in the room, there’s a part of her that wishes to drop her hand and continue her exploring of her new lust. Using the locker room for sex wasn’t taboo and definitely wasn’t even that rare- but. No. That’s what Madison is for, and she would be a lot more fun.
Ivy dresses in her simple jumpsuit, and next to nothing else, and enters the main thoroughfare of the ship with her front zip undone a tastefully slutty amount to show off her cleavage, and heads towards home. And to her waiting wife.
The familiarity of the space opens up to her asleep mind, reminding her of a real apartment lived in for years now clad in sci-fi white panelling and greebles lit by internal neon lights, but she discards the interruption and looks around the front room, finding Madison easily.
No, that’s not Madison, that’s Sofia-
Ivy recognises Sof within Madison’s face as she rises to greet her wife, sporting a brand new strip of shaven hair that runs down one side of her head - now dyed a rich brown to match Ivy’s hair and a contrast to the electric blonde she had before. Grey eyes simmer with glee and arousal as they stare Ivy down, glittering in their hidden depths with some inside joke she wasn’t let in on, and when they come close Ivy realises she’s looking slightly upwards towards them. Madison isn’t taller than her, but some deep part of Ivy thinks it suits Sof really, really well.
“Hello, kit.”
“Hi Sof!” Ivy greets back with bubbly optimism, enjoying the intimidation just as overly much as both she and Sof like. “I like the new hair. Just you up there right now?”
“Sort of.” Her smirk invades her tone, and she twists her neck to show off her neural port, which had an unfamiliar, shining device plugged into it. It glows softly pink, like infrared emission got twisted and scattered by the muscle surrounding the wires that plunged into her brain, twisting the light to reach the surface flesh-coloured and alive. She lets go of her hair to cover the implant. “We’ve been experimenting, too.”
If Madison has been experimenting, on top of the knot she requested of the same surgeon-bot Ivy got her new pussy from, then there was something very exciting waiting for her very soon.
Ivy swallows a shaky breath and tries to be composed as the new flavour of arousal she wasn’t used to yet floods her mind.
“O-oh, that’s exciting! What have you been up to?”
Sofia deflects, “Are you feeling good? Thirsty, hungry? Hurting at all? Migraine?”
Ivy shakes her head, “No. Feeling pretty good, actually.”
“Good!” The menace of Sofia’s smirk purposefully breaks slightly to let genuine care peek through for a few moments. “Then come with me.”
Sofia leads Ivy to their shared bedroom, and what greets Ivy far exceeds her expectations for what the surprise could be.
Tangled into a sweaty and naked pile on the bed is Madison how Ivy expected to see her; long blonde hair still intact, and still the correct height; grey eyes coiling with a maternally anxious smile that has etched itself into Ivy’s memory. But she’s wrapped around another girl.
She’s tiny, first of all, like she’s just barely eighteen. She looks like how Madison did when she was that age, or how Ivy did, or like a secretive third sister who neither of them remember. Her face shape is squashed a little, ears protruding more, a dimple present in her lower lip that Ivy and her sister had grown out of, which creates a soft contrast to the jagged mess of her hair. Blonde strands are hacked away into a birds nest of uneven ends that form a mop or a mane of bright hair around her face that makes her look like a puffer fish from the right angle and exposes glittering expressive black eyes staring through half-lidded, blissed-out eyelids.
She slots into the arms of the Madison you expected to greet like she was made for it. She hazily waves at Ivy.
The glow behind their necks sits bright and orange, like a strip of firelit copper that glances off their hair and makes their strands look woven out of gold. Ivy recognises the air of constant protection from Flare, still in a recognisable body, which means that her mind isn’t playing tricks on her and the impulsive, energetic Mads has indeed put herself in a body that is even easier to overpower. That same bit of her brain tells Ivy that the sight is deeply correct.
“What? Huh? But- you’re all separate?”
Ivy turns back to Sofia, surprise on her face. Sof just smiles while Flare extracts enough energy out of the comfortable cuddle to answer.
“The new devices help us spread our mind across new bio-drones,” She gestures at herself and Mads, especially so at the fire-light glow behind their necks, “Aaaand… it’s maybe a little jailbroken to help each of us only focus on one body at a time.”
“That’s- incredible, Flare! This is so cool!” Ivy takes a step towards the bed and endorphin-rich pile of her sister (sisters) in the sheets, not noticing as Sofia moves into the space she left, blocking her escape route. “How does it feel?”
There’s a moment where the lights behind Flare and Mads’ necks dim towards red slightly, and their expressions smooth out into a cocktail of differing perspectives, before reestablishing themselves into that fiery orange glow.
“It feels incredible.” Flare’s answer is simmering in arousal and awe.
The desire to curl up and do nothing vanished from Mads’ face after the dimming, and she suddenly darts up at Ivy to wrap her arms around her waist in a very energetic hug.
It feels different to normal. There’s less mass behind her hugs so she throws herself at Ivy with more speed to compensate, sending part of the sheets flying with her legs and exposing more differences between Sof and Flare as the latter girl starts to sit up and Ivy returns the hug.
She doesn’t have a knot. She’s still massive but it’s a relatively normal girl cock that meets Ivy’s eyes. She starts to drool anyway.
“We can choose to re-soup again, to check in or feel what the others are feeling. It’s very useful in carefully chosen moments, but having separate bodies is kind of a wish come true.”
“I see you’ve already tried it out.” Ivy tries to keep her voice steady under the generous squeezing from Mads’ fingers and the encroaching feeling of Sof closing in behind her.
“Mhm. It’s like when we plugged into you, before, but better. We’re more in sync. Plus it helps that we’ve been dying to do something like this for ages. Headspace just isn’t the same.”
Ivy remembers a moment where Madison had brought out a neural link adaptor, and had used it to fuck Ivy in her head, take over her arms and finger her mercilessly, send fake sensations of impossible things down the wire, and plenty more. Ivy had stumbled around for a few days afterwards a little confused, like she had to accommodate a limb she wasn’t missing, so the cable had been put away for special circumstances but the memories are still strong.
“I make really cute noises with my new voice!” Mads squeaks up at you, her words lilting with her usual jester playfulness in a new tone and timber that suits her very well.
“I bet…” Ivy tries to lean in to Mads’ touch, to take her reigns a little and toy with her new body, but is stopped as Sof’s hand curls around the front of her neck and holds her in place. She gasps, making a matching squeak to Mads, and freezes.
“We’ve gotten a grip on it, yeah,” The rich strain Sof puts on the words curls over Ivy’s ears in a delicate whisper and threatens to steal the strength from her legs. “It’s your turn, sis.”
At the same moment as Mads’ hands drag her up to kneeling on the bed to steal Ivy’s lips in a kiss, revealing as she went a matching absence of a cock to Ivy and contrasting against her triplets, Sofia’s hands drop from Ivy’s throat and curl around the shape of her tits, groping through the fabric and through the artfully placed gap in her zip. Ivy finds herself trapped between energetic, giggling lips on a fuzzball of a feral girl and fiercely strong hands married to an immovable torso that is keeping her from falling to the floor.
Eventually the barriers are considered too obstructive, and the zip of Ivy’s jumpsuit is slowly pried further open to spill her breasts out as a tongue as sharp and warm as rubies finds its way past her lips.
Air is stolen from her by Mads, slowly but surely, as she is exposed to the air of the bedroom by Sof’s encroaching hands. She feels Mads’ underdeveloped tits press against hers and feels the warmth and softness of Sofia’s body along her back. The jumpsuit stops its descent at her hips, always the most difficult part to fit into the standard cut of the outfit, and instead the hands find Ivy’s body again, without the layer of durable fabric obscuring the sensations. Madison giggles at Ivy and bites her tongue slightly as her attention wavers.
Ivy’s nipples are standing hard when one hand presses itself into the squeeze of Ivy and Mads, and the smaller girl gasps and twitches from sensitivity as the hand brushes against her sensitive tits. The amusement Ivy feels, the heaping serve of cuteness aggression, is short lived as Sofia’s desire and fingers clamp around her stiff nipple.
Pleasure rocks through her body, sending her hips twitching in response and her mind spinning as the vague air of arousal clarifies to a single, bright point.
Mads doesn’t let up, though. She keeps her tongue buried in Ivy’s mouth while the girl whimpers against her captors. She uses the muscle like a gag as the noises fail to settle, and presses her chest into Ivy’s tits and Sofia’s fingers, seeking out stimulation, friction, and pleasure against the attention that’s being spent towards her object of lust from another limb of her mind. She also struggles against the wave of arousal and need that is slowly clarifying into parseable, processable chunks in the hours since getting her new cunt. She remembers how much fun it had been for Ivy, and how intense it had been, to discover the tips and tricks, and imagines Flare’s cock sliding into her warmth, slick with Mads’ own saliva, once again.
While Mads is struggling to stay coherent in front of Ivy, Sofia is struggling to keep herself reigned in. She had volunteered to greet Ivy at the door and reluctantly dragged on clothes to do so, but being pressed up against Ivy’s grinding was making those clothes feel very tight. To remove them, though, and to free her knot to grind against Ivy’s addled attention, required her to let go of the soft and gorgeous tit in one hand and the soft expanse of soft, warm stomach in the other, and that was unacceptable.
They could feel each other in the back of their mind, and could feel small, distracting tingles of the other’s sensations. They could even half-see themselves through Flare’s eyes and feel her hand gently stroking herself to get hard again. But they pushed them down. Soup, melding, being one person was wonderful, and had both great benefits and wonderful insights for them, but they each loved their sister more than they could handle. Being separate was their way to process that all at once, without taking turns in a more implicit way than just needing to take up space near Ivy.
There is something that bleeds through anyway. It’s in all of them, so it’s easy to accept more. The pressure of love and lust for the hard working girl in front of them.
Ivy squeaks as she’s twisted by Sofia’s arms, following a silent suggestion sent over the transmitters, and feels the rough hands pull her easily out of the tight jumpsuit that she always struggles with. She looks up at grey eyes and a sleek, new patch of shaved hair and swallows hard.
She moves to speak, but whimpers instead as Mads’ hands drop down the front of her newly exposed abdomen to discover both her lack of underwear and how wet she is. She’s trapped once again against one of her sisters’ bodies.
The tiny girl is not merciful as she explores, sending new, sleek fingers deftly exploring Ivy’s folds and teasing just at the entrance, hesitating to press further in while her lust is so out of control. She darts back to your clit and sends tantalising, merciless attention through it. She leaves one set of terrible fingers there and chooses to grip the other around Ivy’s waist, gripping her where she’s softest and easiest to move around, and only a little to support her weight.
She ends up with her mouth on the back of one of Ivy’s shoulder blades where Sof and Flare like to bite. Muscle memory bringing her anxious kisses and licks to a familiar spot.
Sofia takes the distracted moment to rid herself of her offending clothes, exposing more muscle than Ivy remembers Madison’s body having, and prying a stiff, leaking knot from her inadequate shorts. She comes in close once again and with the weight of her wolfcock making it droop down slightly while it’s not inside something - the sight of which sends a shiver through Ivy’s spine and a difficult swallow down Mads’ throat - when she presses up against Ivy’s body again both other girls can feel the heat of the knot press up against Ivy’s clit and the fingers currently rubbing it.
Mads makes room for her triplet as her mouth finds Ivy’s, feeling Sofia’s need to get friction on her length as soon as manageable, but then pauses when her fingers on instinct (possibly borrowed from one of her headmates) were about to plunge themselves deep into Ivy’s cunt.
Breathy, like she had run out of oxygen rations, and in between the lustful, deep kisses with Sof, Ivy begs, “Please- Please Mads, can- c-can you finger- mmmfh!”
She gathers her bravery and arousal and pushes her fingers in, immediately amazed at all the little differences between the feel of hers and Ivy’s, and tries her best to work around Ivy’s intense arousal and Sofia’s knot pressed up against the ideal space for her hand to be. Was she doing it okay?
Flare, sensing the usual apprehension in Mads and the desperation still running rampant in Ivy, pulls herself around to Mads’ side. She puts a hand on the back of the tiny girl’s neck, drawing a sensitive moan from her from the touch placed over the implant and new device that have spines of metal that plunge into sensitive nerves, and opens a small connection to her triplet.
“Hey, Mads, you’re too tense…”
Flare’s voice is gentle in the ways Sofia tries to be dominating, but similar in how they try to be protective, but the gentle guiding voice matched with the comforting kiss that happens over Ivy’s shoulder, and the impact on how well it means she’s being fingered as Flare lets Mads borrow some bravery, makes Ivy feel like an item, a sculpture to enjoy, and it’s incredibly arousing.
Mads’ fingers are immediately more assured. They’re firmer where they need to be and gentler where it works better, and the whimpering into Flare’s kiss turns needy in time with the more arrogant curling of her fingers. She’s been teased by Flare’s attention and tongue, and the only way she has to get it out is through Ivy, which turns her into a very pushy lover.
Ivy feels the grip around her waist and the grind of the knot and feels trapped, she feels the tongue piercing her mouth and the fingers digging up against her sensitive walls and feels pierced, and she feels the ebb and flow of attention between all of her sisters and feels loved. The overstimulation, the flood of attention, builds deep in her abdomen, a fierce and hot forge of arousal that threatens to spill over with every new way these girls choose to fuck her. An ounce of incandescent fire splashes over the side and gifts her first orgasm to her audience as Flare weaves a hand through Ivy’s hair and drags her by her sensitive scalp into a new kiss.
Ivy’s hands, which had no idea what to do before and know even less now, shake as they try and hold her weight up using Sofia’s shoulders, but the necessary focus in her muscle is robbed by the friction against Sofia’s knot that she was getting slowly slick and the pressure inside her from Mads’ fingers she was utterly soaking. The kiss with Flare is a delicate contrast, even to the girl’s hand which is still gently tugging at Ivy’s hair, but her lips are soft, delicate, and endlessly passionate. It’s a slow kiss, and it finishes the puzzle of their affection while Mads returns to gnawing on Ivy’s shoulder.
The orgasm is quick and fiery and not nearly enough for Ivy.
It’s certainly not enough to sate the triplets.
Once the initial orgasm faded Flare properly took over. She took Ivy’s weight from Mads, getting her triplet to scoot out of the way, and gently leaned the dazed and excited Ivy down onto the bed.
Ivy easily complies, despite the butterflies in her stomach. She feels Flare’s arms gently coerce her limbs into position, and feels Flare’s cock press hard against her thigh as she falls down onto the bed above her. She gets pulled and softly encouraged by hands around her hips, and intense stares on parts of her body, to pull herself into the pose Flare wants for her.
She ends up on her back, legs spread and ready for Flare to fall into her, with Madison crouching over her chest, anxiously smiling down at her sister and following the orders of Flare while her empty pussy spreads her slick onto Ivy when ‘accidental’ contact is made.
Mads tries not to grind against Ivy’s tits too much.
Flare angles Ivy’s hips up, gripping the soft sides of her thighs to get her in the perfect position, and orders Mads to move - the words do wonders to make both Mads and Ivy pliable and needy.
“Mads, be a good girl and sit on her face for me.”
The voice is coated with honey, sticky and dripping and staining all that it falls onto. Anyone it falls on has the choice to leave its mark there, to feel the weight as it seeps further in, or can choose to lap at it, wipe it away with immaterial fingers and make a bigger mess as they try to clean themselves up.
Ivy chooses to keep it, Mads tries to hide her face behind shaky hands as she shuffles forward and lowers her aching cunt onto Ivy’s mouth.
The taste of Madison is rich and overpowering, but wonderful in that unique way Ivy has grown to love. With different partners in the past Ivy had predicted the taste of pussy badly, and a strange part of her half-expected Mads to taste of orange blossom, but the sharp reality is more arousing to her than any other option. It’s a taste she’s put effort into learning. She laps at her sister wildly.
Mads feels a rough tongue slide through the middle of her folds, tasting and sucking up her flavour as it passes over the hole she wishes for Ivy’s tongue to disappear into, but the wave of bright bliss that surges through her at Ivy’s exploration is enough to quieten that part of her mind for now.
Ivy’s tongue laps, and circles, and sucks Mads’ clit in quick succession, making the girl’s legs weak and stealing what little space she had been keeping above Ivy’s mouth for her sister’s comfort. She whines as her legs give out, and Ivy beneath moans loudly as her weight settles. And then the pattern of her tongue changes suddenly, but not too dramatically.
Flare had pulled herself forward underneath Ivy’s ass, positioning her thighs for the easiest thrusts, and had slowly started plunging herself into Ivy’s cunt. The stretch was immediate, relieving, and difficult to manage, and Ivy, feeling her attention split between pleasuring two of her sisters, is struggling to manage the sensations.
Between Mads’ begging - “Oh, Ivy please- Gods please keep going- don’t stop- don’t-” - and the difficulty of letting Flare into her Ivy kept flipping her focus between them, subconsciously sacrificing the other. If her tongue was moving well, pleasuring Mads well, then she was clenching around Flare too tight, and if she was relaxing herself to let Flare slide inside her the way she wanted then Mads was going ignored, and Ivy never wanted to do that.
A hand spreads across her stomach, soft, comforting, and still, joined by words Ivy was impressed she could process so easily. “Hey, kit, it’s okay… Just relax, and let us fuck you. Let us do the work. You’re focusing on Mads for us, just Mads. Let everything else just feel good.”
It works. Ivy feels herself relax, feels her hands around the back of Mads’ thighs grip down firmer, and begins eating Mads out with a newfound hunger and focus.
Flare slides into her with ease after her gentle words, and watches as the length of her disappears into her sister and has the knock-on effect of making her triplet cum on Ivy’s tongue. She pulls out slightly and thrusts back in, enjoying the brutally tight warmth of Ivy’s cunt as it fights to keep her girlcock inside.
She knows Ivy can take her, she knows Ivy can take Sof’s knot which is a lot thicker than Flare’s girlcock, and they had also specified the dimensions for Ivy before ordering the surgery. From experience she knows she can take it because they had gotten their knot inside her quite a few times already before this new experiment. But it was still new muscle. It hadn’t been properly broken in yet, and the struggle was gorgeous. They’re all planning to enjoy her while she’s like this.
She fights against Ivy’s tightness and pants heavily, her own moans joining Mads’ desperate noises and creating a gorgeous sound she finds herself enamoured with when listening to it through Sof’s ears. Flare fills her sister up as Ivy pushes orgasm after orgasm into Mads, bringing Ivy ever closer to her own.
Mads was struggling to stay up even this much, with all her weight resting on Ivy’s face and the tongue pressing deep into her cunt, and with both hands running through Ivy’s hair in an attempt to support more weight on her sister, but the orgasms were becoming too much. Spike after spike of pleasure jolted iron bolts of delirium up Mads’ spine, so she knew there was a time limit.
She was enjoying pushing the clock to its very end.
Ivy swallowed constantly, taking in huge mouthfuls of Mads’ new girlcum, general wetness, and her own drool, savouring the flavour for a moment, and then sending it down to her stomach. It was a constant battle to keep her tongue against her sister’s clit or pursuing the lofty goal of her g-spot for enough time to keep the overstim going while Ivy struggled to manage the fluids flooding her mouth, all while Flare continuously plunged deep into her, but she put all her mind to the task. She would pleasure this girl if it was the only thing she could manage.
But the constant friction inside her makes the heat in her cunt so much harder to ignore. It feels like it’s spilling down her body even as it’s endlessly pumped into her, rushing through veins and filling her with the bronze-gold that her sisters’ necks glow with. It’s making her lightheaded, and her focus is slipping, but it just felt so good she has to stay aware for it. And the hands in her hair pulling sharp points of desire to the front of her mind were helping with that.
Ivy’s second orgasm comes suddenly and strongly. She clamps tight around Flare’s girlcock, and sucks Mads’ clit hard, drawing a groan and a squeal from her respective sisters while tasting a larger rush of Mads’ cum coat her tongue and relishing the telltale throb of Flare’s cock as it finishes filling her up. Ivy is half surprised she’s able to process it all.
The surprise is short lived when the dream- when her mind loses focus and the bodies around her shift while emotions recover. When it all reclarifies Ivy finds herself on her chest, her hips dragged into the air with fingers pressed into her ass, digging into the spot where her prostate used to be, while a dripping knot presses against her achingly still-underused cunt. A slap, which brought her back to awareness, still stings against the skin her thigh.
Ivy whines at Sof, and presses her hips backwards to try and get onto her.
Sofia lets Ivy instead press further onto her fingers, stopping her with the simple, blinding stretch.
“Hnnnnnng-!” Ivy’s wordless protest falls on sadistic ears.
“Stop squirming, Ivy.” Sof’s words are immovable and grinds Ivy’s brain to a halt. The order is still so hard to follow, but she makes a very impressive effort. “I’m in charge now, and you’ll go my pace even if that’s too fast, ‘kay?”
Ivy desperately nods, correctly guessing the right path to getting more pleasure while the fingers she’s memorised over years sit stretching the wrong hole.
Ivy can hear the smile in Sof’s patient sigh. “You’re such a good girl for me, Ivy.”
She writhes under the praise and continued denial, hoping that the words would be followed by a reward for her good behaviour, but Sof just admires how much more Ivy drips from the comment.
Seeing her triplet’s cum leaking out of Ivy was hot enough, but watching in real time as her sister’s cunt grows more glistening and wet is intoxicating. The smell of it is intense and rich: it floods the room with the unmistakable brand of their sex, which wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t also joined by the sweat dripping off all three of Madison’s bodies.
Sofia looks to the side of Ivy, using a divine amount of self control to look away from her desperate prize, and checks in on Mads. Madison opens up the channels between herselves and checks in on all each alter.
Mads, lying sideways on the bed with twitching limbs, is filled with a manic glee that almost gets the other two bodies, who were not exhausted from overstim, to start giggling uncontrollably. She’s happy to watch what’s about to happen to Ivy and finger herself later on once it gets going. She’s very, very happy about being able to watch from a new perspective.
Flare had been out of the room for a few moments to fill up water bottles to keep them all hydrated, but the new hyperawareness of each other reveals the lie, or the half-lie. Flare had also been looking for restraints to put on Ivy’s arms later on, binding them behind her torso.
And Sofia is only being held back from shoving her knot into Ivy by her concern for her alters. But with that satisfied Madison closes the connections again and everyone resolidifies back into their own, unique bodies.
Sof wastes no more time. She pulls her teasing fingers out of Ivy to grip her hip, dragging a hopeful twitch from the girl, while the other hand grasps her shaft to lift the weight of her wolfcock up so it can be pointed straight into the core of her sister. The warmth radiating off Ivy drives Sof insane, and so she plunges into the hole without much foreplay.
Flare had done the hard work for her, anyway.
The length of Sof - bigger than she is in reality - slides past stretched muscles and slick tightness with practice. Seven inches of thick, smooth shaft fill out the empty attention Ivy had been lacking before ending suddenly in a sharp surge outwards. The familiar feeling of the knot’s impact sends shivers of memory and anticipation through Ivy, which cause her to clench frantically around Sofia’s length.
“Good girl… Oh it went in so smoothly - such a good pet.”
The tightness that Ivy had gained with her arousal is quickly turned to pliable looseness under Sofia’s words. She goes slack, drooling into the mattress and feeling her eyes roll into the back of her head, but her muscles stay working where Sof needs them the most.
As Sof groans in pleasure and begins a slowly increasing tempo, working her sister up to her knot, but suddenly stops changing her pace after a few moments. Flare had come back, supplies for later placed to the side and padded fabric handcuffs brandished in front of her. Sof lets Flare wrestle Ivy’s arms behind her and clip them together, but once that was done, and Ivy’s moans were exacerbated by her bondage, she sped up again.
Sofia was right, Ivy should have listened. Her pace was eventually too fast. But just like with pleasuring Mads, who Ivy could catch glimpses of when her eyes randomly decided to focus, it was a challenge that she enjoyed doing well at. Sof knew her limits, and so she kept below Ivy’s upper boundary while being intense enough to bee ‘too much.’
It was a skill she loved to perfect, day after day, and Ivy drooled for it.
It also meant Ivy’s thoughts weren’t anywhere near as formed as the other three.
Pleasure, friction, size, fuck… the sheer size of it was difficult to take at a slow and generous pace, and Sof is far more generous than she is slow. Ivy is spread apart, mercilessly and brutally, like she’s placed herself in front of a malfunctioning fuck machine powered by hydraulics or gravitics, and then has to deal with the sorrowful sensation of Sofia leaving her, emptying her and making her feel hollow, only to then flood back into her until she’s just shy of the length Ivy aches for.
She knows how intense the knot will be: she’s felt it plenty before. But this time feels different. Like there’s more attention on her, more ache and yearning. It’s making the anticipation worse. And the desire to force herself backwards onto Sof, to ignore the kindness she’s still putting into the pace, is incredibly bright - but Ivy has no energy of her own any more. She’s being fucked out.
While Sof is still being kind with her pace she’s only doing so because she really enjoys being kind to Ivy. In her total-power fantasies over her sister she’s a benevolent carer who provides everything to the mirror of her wants. In the achievable, kink-based fantasies she’s a presence of authority offering kindness where Ivy hasn’t seen it before: the ship captain, with authority to jettison her from an airlock, offering her a home and forgiving the theft charges; an old-earth soldier stowing their assault rifle to build a warm shelter for a stranger; a werewolf in ancient forests sparing her prey.
And right now kindness was giving Ivy repeated reminders of what she’d be forced to take very soon.
She flinches and squeaks every time Sof’s knot hits her entrance, which turns into grasping fingers in the sheets and gasps whenever Sofia puts a little more force into them. It’s entertaining, and playful on a very base level. It’s a mean playful, and that’s doing wonderful things to Ivy, but all good things must end, especially to make room for better.
So, with very little warning, Sofia digs her fingers into the soft flesh around the solid handholds of Ivy’s hip bone, and forces the knot into her sister.
Ivy’s mind goes blank with static as she tugs on the sheets beneath her and tries to breathe as she’s forced open by Sofia’s cock. Her toes curl, her knuckles go white, and everyone but her hears her high-pitched, keening whine that escapes her throat. She holds on in the electric storm until the worsening stretch of her entrance reaches that magical point and Sofia slides that last little bit in with all the ease in the world.
She’s actually almost sucked in. And despite the way Ivy’s mind relaxes, free of the intensity, Sof slid in so quickly that the tip of her wolfcock bumps against Ivy’s cervix, which draws an adorable and slack-jawed flinch from her sister.
Getting knotted feels like an orgasm to her, in shape but multiplied wildly in intensity, folded over itself a dozen dozen times into a sharp, slicing moment of clarity. She’s been told by Madison that nine times out of ten she orgasms during it as well, when it’s dull enough to be manageable. And with how shaky her legs are now, plus the heavy breathing coming from a very aroused Mads next to her, she probably came from this one too.
Sof never gets tired of the tightness. It engulfs her, traps her as close as she can possibly get to Ivy, and lets her put as much energy as she wants into thrusting because there’s no risk of pulling out by accident. The delicious elasticity of Ivy’s cunt keeps her in, and the wonderful sensitivity of Ivy’s cervix was the squeaker, within the plush toy that was her sister, that lets her know when she reaches deep enough into Ivy for Sof’s satisfaction.
Shallow, difficult breaths are forced around crushed organs and a heavily bent spine in Ivy’s body as she struggles to keep herself together while Sofia is impaled inside her. She’s been pulled tight around the knot and is practically fused to her sister’s hips, running waves of clamping pressure and twitching sensation through the muscle of her cunt. Sof holds her still enough to fuck her with the speed Ivy craves, and takes all responsibility out of Ivy’s mind’s weak grip.
As she’s being fucked, and as the flow of warmth inside her gets steadily harder to contain, she feels a small, shaky figure crawl up next to her, and part of Ivy’s mind registers the desperation and pleasure on Mads’ face. She brings herself close, seeking out Ivy’s face for a deep and desperate kiss, while her fingers stay focused on their task of burying themselves as deep as they can manage inside her still-new pussy. Her kiss is sloppy and as distracted as Ivy’s, but it’s arousing nonetheless, and it makes the two of them more lightheaded.
On the other side of Ivy comes the comforting presence of Flare, staying mostly on her knees but tucking in close against Ivy’s shoulder. She sends a hand up though the gap left by the arch of Ivy’s back and grasps one of her tits, playing with the sensitive nerves with the callous attention Ivy loves the most when things get this intense. Her fingers dance and grope as her teeth flirt with the idea of leaving another bite mark on Ivy’s shoulders.
And through it all Sofia keeps her speed and intensity at the maximum that Ivy can handle.
The girl never stops when she cums, so Ivy can only keep track of her sister’s orgasms through the vague awareness of the abstract ‘fullness’ of her womb, or the ‘heaviness.’ Ivy doesn’t want her to stop, either. Even as the minutes drag on over the course of subjective seconds and she’s forced to cum, burning hot and harsh, around the shape of Sofia’s knot.
She doesn’t want Sof to stop even when Mads finally wears herself out from masturbation, fingers slick with yet another surge of orgasms that have ripped through her before she relaxes into a stream of lazy kisses with Ivy.
She yearns for Sof to continue as Flare trails her hand around to the front of Ivy’s throat, clasping her fingers down on those delicate, blissful pressure points while she takes a portion of Ivy’s shoulder between her teeth.
She aches for it to keep going as Sofia’s energy fades enough that she stops pressing up against Ivy’s upper limit, and the tip of her wolfcock begins to fail to kiss her cervix.
She wishes with all her heart for it to never stop even as she is slid forward onto the bed and twisted so that Sof could follow into the pile without crushing her or pulling the knot out.
She smiles wide and still wants more even as the cosy warmth envelops her, and she feels the distinction between her sisters fades. She giggles and silently begs for for the formless aftershocks to never end when she feels the vulnerability of Sof in the tiny form designed for Mads trapped within Ivy’s grip, and both Flare and Mads’ obsession in the arms that used to be just Sof’s.
She finds herself engulfed on all sides by her sister, by Madison, once again, in a new and novel way, and it’s so comforting she can’t help but slip back into formless sleep and let the dream end.
She tells them all she loves them first, though, and with that she is happy enough to fall asleep.
There's a bench out the back of the store, worn down to starving ribs of dark wood, with peeling paint and rusting steel holding the maltreated thing together.
When it was made it was slathered with a green-stained resin that spilled over onto the fresh arms of steel in the haste to cover any gap of exposed wood. But now, with exhausted limbs drooping from the years of labour and neglect, all that decorates most of the wood is cigarette ash.
My cigarettes have made up a fair source of the coating.
For all outside perspectives and wishes for the bench, it's just a normal park bench, following all the standardised design requirements put in place by creatures of bureaucracy leering over the council's shoulder, placed in a strip of park now-forgotten as commercialisation sprung new stores around the patch of dirt like mycelial faerie rings. There is, after all, a better, greener park just down the road.
Yet this one lingers.
It’s not quite forgotten: it’s a good spot to get away from prying eyes for less-than-legal activities and secret trysts, and those activities tend to deposit a thin layer of garbage as time goes on, so the binmen or lines of sullen teenagers sentenced to community service for spray-painting dicks or political slogans on street signs come around into the secluded harbour every so often. But for most of the time it’s the unofficial ‘food court’ of the retail and customer service workers of the commercial curtain wall.
I push the half-finished fag between my fingers into the gnarled and weather-worn pits of the wood of the bench, watching as a new burn mark is left on the delicate and horrendously treated grain of the bench. I envy it.
I only really got smoking because there was nothing else really to do when I followed Rosie on the atrociously long breaks she took on the slow days. She had a feel for those dead quiet days, always knew exactly when the next customer would come in and announced it, loudly.
“Five hours left! I’m going out back for three…”
It was amazing how the store kept afloat. We barely had any customers, barely sold anything, we didn’t even really have a set thing we sold… No theme, just shit. Not even an antiques store, or a dollar store, or a pawn shop. We just had what some people needed, and no one else came in.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the same magic that kept the park in the faerie ring alive was the same thing that kept its battlements intact, but the far more logical reason was money laundering.
There weren’t even many other employees. Just me and Rosie, for most of the time.
So, I had stared to join her. A lot.
We talked, spent hours getting to know each other and smudging our sense of boundaries of what was polite, or then even entertaining, to talk about until the well ran dry and there was suddenly nothing to say. We talked a lot about nothing.
And I started smoking with her.
Terrible habit, I know. But since I didn’t have the choice of talking with anyone outside of this little hovel of an urban-magic bubble for months the choice was isolation or getting used to the feeling that the smoke streaming from Rosie’s mouth shouldn’t smell so sweet.
Looking over at her I watch the press of her lips as she holds a new dart between her lips and aims the flame of her slowly dying lighter at the delicate ends of the paper, the dancing, tiny, orange spark darting back and forth in the reflection in her eyes. She smiles at me when she sees me looking, and relaxes back into the bench like it’s a throne.
I turn my eyes away, running my mind’s gaze through the image of her thighs filling out her skin-tight black jeans and her torso sitting proud through the lazy fabric of the oversized, branded shirt they haven’t bothered to reprint in years. The XXXL shirt of meagre fabric sits on her form with a sense of ironic modesty only found in the mind of me and Corradini.
My heart is dragged up my throat on a barbed hook as I remember how she looks right beside me. The tearing, sickening yearning is flooded in its wake with coldness as all my warmth drops low to my cunt despite my brain’s protests.
I want to kiss her – more accurately I want her to fuck me on this bench in broad daylight to truly test the secrecy of the spot, but imagining kissing her will do. She’s gorgeous, and confident, and turns her perfected coercion onto the secret desires of my heart with all the unconscious skill in the world. But she has never asked. Never hinted. Never accidentally shown a want for me.
The Smoke flowing out of Rosie’s mouth smells of tobacco ash, tar, half solidified resin, years of damage to her lungs, a habit I was brought into despite myself all for a pretty girl, and nectar.
It sits hot and acrid on my nostrils, and yet it reaches deep into the base of my skull and yanks on the animal part of my mind.
I had been okay with baring my soul with her even when its hidden depths were boring, I had been okay with these paid breaks that lasted forever but no one could prove they happened, I had been okay with sitting close in winter and splaying limbs in summer. I had been okay with accidental touches, and thankful for what little skinship I could scavenge.
I was not okay anymore.
The yearning breaks quietly, the river it spilt onto the landscape of my soul rushes slowly, and I feel an odd calm instead of the burst of lust and uncontrollable energy I had been fearing. I feel confident.
I turn to Rosie, with her arms spread over the back of the bench, and suddenly move.
I quietly pull myself into her lap with my knees on either side of her hips, not an ounce of anxiety on my face, and grab the cigarette from her grip.
I study her expression and see the evidence of her beating heart beneath her chest, married to the anticipatory anxiety in the twitches of her shoulders and the hope in her subtly arching neck. I take a drag.
It tastes atrocious. It burns my throat and my lungs and makes me want to throw up, but it’s a feeling no worse than the yearning that has dominated me so I habitually swallow the revulsion. I hold it in my lungs before gently leaning in.
I press my lips to Rosie’s and feel her shift beneath me, reacting to the kiss with every muscle in her body. I relish the feeling of her surprise as I pry her jaw open, forcing a tongue into her mouth and grinding the heat of my crotch into her lap. I grip the sides of her face as she becomes too eager and almost ruins my plans.
I pull my tongue back and let the smoke that shouldn’t taste so sweet pass from my lungs to hers.
She shakes beneath me once the breath is done, letting out the smoke to the side and recovering from crossed eyes and an unstable spine like what I had done to her was akin to a religious experience.
But it was dirty, and simple. There’s no stroke of divinity to be found here, and when Rosie’s eyes meet mine again she sees that fact, plain as day on my face.
I’m the same as I’ve always been. And I need her.
There’s only a bare moment before I fall back onto her and turn all my months of want into real action, and I discover the form of her beneath the shirt that did so little to hide her, but Rosie manages to fill the gap with a single word, formed out of a breathy sigh.
Find the full story here, without coloured text or the previous chapter
A big thankyou to digitalsymbiote for commissioning this chapter <3
“I’m having a really bad day.”
The text you sent sat there for a while as you struggled to focus but, eventually, you hear the vibrations of a reply cut through the haze in your brain.
“Oh no, what’s wrong kit?” The pet name does a lot to lessen the top, frustrated layer of your discomfort. It’s still fresh, exhilarating, and downright adorable, but your mind is a little too out of it to enjoy it as much as you have been. “Madison says hi as well.”
“Hi Mads & Flare!” The message got a little puppy emoji reaction. You smile at it through the stress. “Nothing’s really gone right today. Going to need lots of cuddles when I get home.”
“Oh you’re going to get plenty. Do you want it to be just us?”
She was asking if you needed girlfriend-Sof specifically, which you aren’t going to be comfortable with Madison seeing for a long time yet. It was a good question… You hadn’t thought about it very much. To be fair, it’s really hard to think of anything right now.
It would be really nice to have access to that more explicit physical support, but it’s not what you need. What you need is care, and with how much care Sof needs all the time it’s difficult to ask for a situation where she would need to put her symptoms aside to look after you.
It’s a really uncomfortable thought, actually.
So if Madison was there, especially with how genuine Mads could be, she could take care of Sof while Sof takes care of you. You’re willing to accept that.
“No, I think extra company would be helpful.” You respond.
“Oki. How long until you’re done?”
The idea of dealing with more today is… untenable. The idea of chasing down the missing part for any longer makes the patience in your brain snap.
“Now. I’m fed up.”
“Oh, it’s a really bad day, huh?”
“Yeah. Home soon.”
Packing up is easy. Walking home is easy. Climbing the three flights in the elevator is weirdly hard due to the low, mechanical whirr that your sensitive ears pick up easier than usual which grinds into the soft temples of your migraine.
But then you’re practically falling through the front door and into Sofia’s arms.
“Woah, heyyy, it’s okay, I’ve got you.” She catches you and holds you tight, grounding you in your body how you’ve been unable to do all day by yourself, now shoved into a tangle of clothes and hair that smells like the rose conditioner you share and the budget detergent you use. She smells comforting, and very familiar. You feel yourself relaxing even just being held by her.
But your nose picks up something less familiar.
Old orange blossom, instant coffee, and brittle sugar wrapped together by a fragrant incense smoke that could have been lavender or gum wood earlier in life. It’s joined by natural smells you’ve come to expect from people: sweat that makes it incredibly difficult to deal with some under-hygienic men or incredibly attractive people, which sits heady and light here; lingering flavours of deodorants and soaps that mix together into an unwieldy cocktail of sanitation; the gentle and homely smell of the fabrics making up someone’s outfit; a half-shadow of old emotions from experiencing a normal day.
Smelling it all, out there, had been so overwhelming. It was so hard to deal with some days, and you had predicted that some of those days wouldn’t be worth finishing. You’re glad you reached that conclusion before today, because otherwise you would have just powered through and suffered as a result.
But this still-unfamiliar bundle next to you is not overwhelming in that same way, and it’s incredibly relieving to know the two aspects are not intricately linked. You open your eyes to acknowledge the scent’s source.
Madison, standing just behind Sofia in the entrance, watches you with wide and curious amber eyes. She lacks confidence in how she’s assessing you but she still studies you, and looks incredibly kind as she does, which leaves you feeling awkwardly observed while intensely comfortable in Sof’s arms.
Madison spots something on your face and pulls her stare away, leaving you to your recovery. You don’t think you look all that bad, but you feel it so maybe more is reaching the surface than you thought.
You take the moment to study her back, and you see her dressed in a black singlet painted with bleach into something akin to a two-tone album cover of a psychedelic band that stretches from her collarbones to the top of her thighs. It’s almost a dress on but for how short it is, a reversed mirror to the first outfit you saw her in, and so simple jean shorts were worn beneath for modesty. Apart from those, and the permanent piercings that never come out, there is nothing more complex to her outfit. She is truly casual in this space.
You smile at that.
Sofia finally ends the hug and pulls you up straight.
“Hey, sis,” She smiles playfully crookedly at you while her eyes analyse you with much more practice than Madison’s, “You okay? You need meds?”
You nod, rasping out your tired voice, “Yeah, meds would be great. I need to sit down.”
Sof almost passes you off to Madison before heading off into the apartment to fetch ibuprofen while you struggle your way to the sofa, letting your bag fall to the floor near the kitchen table. You collapse onto the pillows and clasp your eyes closed to master the impact of the fast change in height. It takes a moment for the dizziness to fade, but then you start on the process of removing all your accessories. You’re thinking about every step more than you should need to, but whatever.
You’re prying the nudibranch earrings - which have more whimsy in each of them than you have felt all day - when you notice that Madison had stuck near you and looks very indecisive as she watches you.
Before you can figure out what’s going on with her Sof calls out from the other room, “How bad are the migraine symptoms?”
“…Bad.” You can’t really hide it from her, and she’d just be upset if she worked it out, so you give the honest answer that hurts to acknowledge.
You don’t like struggling this much, or making Sof run around to do things for you, but you’re still able to realise that the best way to take care of her again is to recover. Properly recover.
“Okay, you’re having three then.”
Sof comes out of your room - which was quickly becoming both of yours - and hands over a glass, two paracetamol, and tree ibuprofen. Madison looks at the collection and then up at Sof, confused as your sister sits next to you on the pillows.
“Aren’t you not supposed to take more than two?” Her voice is solid in its concern, almost flinty as her mind behind it processed the long-term impacts of what she saw.
“Yeah, but her doctor is concerned enough about these spells she told Ivy to not take ibuprofen regularly and to down more than recommended when it gets bad.” She rubs your back as you take the pills and wait for the pain relief to start. “She probably only suggested it because of the regular blood tests we’re doing for lycanthropy management: if anything bad is happening as a result we’ll catch it easily.”
“It just feels weird… We’re told by the box how much to take, by parents and doctors, and everything, and then the rules can be changed?”
“That might be an autism thing.”
“It’s not autism, it’s CPTSD.”
“Yeah but-”
“Can we close the blinds?” Your voice cuts through the casual banter, the gentle humour that had bled into Madison’s voice, and the relaxed tone that Sof was speaking with. You feel like you ruined the moment, but Sof is immediately kind.
“Yeah, of course we can.”
Your sister responds, but when weight lifts up off the couch your sister’s arm is still there around you. Darkness is spread through the room anyway, though, and you find yourself able to relax your eyelids that you had scrunched up at some point. Then it gets darker as the door to Sofia’s room is closed, and darker still as the most of the lights are turned off.
“Thank you.” You relax, and breathe out an almost-sob.
“You’re welcome, Ivy.” Mads responds. You know its her because you’re finally able to process the subdued flight in her voice. Her tone always feels like it’s being shaken around inside a tin can for fun, but she’s trying so hard to be calm for you.
Sof leans you backwards with the sideways hug until you’re resting back into the sofa. You can open your eyes, and unlock your muscles, and breathe easier, and it’s thanks a lot to the company you’re with. You watch Mads sit down on the other side of Sofia as you melt into her cuddle, water long since finished and glass scavenged from your grip.
“How was your day…?” Sof is gentle as she asks. The offer to vent is genuine, and not a demand in the slightest. It’s not a test, or a bar you need to meet. It’s just one of the ways she’s ready to be kind to you.
“Ugh… Do I have to?”
“No.”
“Can I wait until the pain meds kick in?”
“Yeah, of course.”
You bury your face into the nook between her neck and her shoulder, pressing your forehead into the wild warmth of her muscle. It’s become a favourite spot of yours when you need to think, in the week or so since you tossed away the pretences between you, and you know it will remain a staple of her comfort for a long time yet. You’ve only truly needed it once since you found it.
Most days you’re flying through, ecstatic and giddy at worst and smiling from ear to ear at best, excited by the chance to come home to Sofia as your partner and share your day with her like you’ve always wished for out of a relationship. Yeah, a lot of it was done before, and you’re going to get the chance every day from now on, but it’s still a wonderful feeling. You feel almost gravitated home, almost anxious to see her smile.
And then there was a difficult day.
Every moment felt like a slog; the hours felt like they were on strike with how slow they moved, and the urge to check the clock was impossible to ignore but constantly unsatisfying; every word slid off your mind like water, but left you with the memory of being wet. It was frustrating and maddening, but you had this to come back to. Warm arms and a kind smile.
Which made it possible to slog through.
You’re not going to wait for the pain relief.
You sigh, “Someone fucked up my entire plan for today.”
“Oh no,” Your sister picks up on all the little hints of your mood in your voice, and reacts appropriately.
“I was supposed to be testing the impacts on conductivity on the new meta structures from various treatment options, and I had everything set up yesterday for it, but when I got in today the multimeter was gone.”
“Gone?”
“Stolen! By someone!” You pull your head out of the nook to tell the story properly and to watch your audience take it in. Sof looks like she’s biting back her vocal stim from that one two sentence horror post while Madison sits attentively, but not still at all. “It’s the only multimeter sensitive enough for the differences in treatment, and it’s not even really a multimeter it just looks like one because that’s what it used to be. It’s been customised specifically for my experiments so I needed that multimeter. So I needed to go find it!”
“How long did that take?” Madison’s voice is calming in how much frustration it holds on your behalf. You find it comforting.
“It didn’t.”
Flare scoffs, “Oh it just wasn’t around?”
“No!” You flail your arms around, hoping to express your exasperation. “It probably would have been fine without the migraine, but I was set a task that I couldn’t complete and that really got to me.”
Sof speaks quietly to try to not interrupt your flow, “Do you want some tea?”
You look at her gorgeous, calming grey eyes and generous smile and nod, but before she can even get her arm out from around you Madison is already up and in the kitchen.
“What am I grabbing?” The words float over with brimming energy, but it’s oxymoronic when combined with the distinctly Flare-like scowl on her face as she looks at the tea cupboard.
“Ginger honey, Canberra Breakfast, and whatever you want.” Sofia gives out the request and then studies Madison very carefully until it’s obvious that she’s only grabbed two tins. “What are you doing?”
Madison pauses like a spotlight has fallen right on top of her in a prison breakout. Mads’ response comes saccharine and hopeful. “Making tea?”
“What are you making for yourself?”
“…Canberra?”
“The fuck you aren’t! I bought that caramel tea for you for a reason.”
You see, in the dim light falling out of the ajar pantry door, a small but pretty blush crawl across Madison’s cheeks as she reaches in to the cupboard for another tin with a thankful smile. You feel the expression on your face change a little to match.
“Sorry, Ivy,” Sof continues, “Please continue.”
You regain your flow, remembering from the brain fog where you had stopped.
“I assumed that someone who knew what it was had grabbed it, so I chased down everyone in the lab who could have possibly needed to use it, and then anyone who knew it was so sensitive, with every technique I could - including sending emails to the people who weren’t there. But nope!” You watch Madison working, and still feel the need to care for Sof in the ways you can manage like this. “Sofia likes hers really overbrewed and milky, by the way.”
“Yeah- I know how she likes it.” Madison sounds like she caught a live fish in her throat. The upset is clear to hear.
“Oh, sorry.”
She shrugs with a wide grin as soon as you apologise. “I’ll spit in your tea and then we’ll be even.”
“That seems like an overreaction.” You still laugh at her jester-esque performance. It’s endearing. You get back on track, “But, anyway, that means whoever took it just saw a random multimeter and borrowed it, not even knowing how important it is to track down! So now my nice tool is floating around somewhere in the chem department, or possibly further, and I might never see it again.”
You pause as the sound of the boiling kettle becomes too loud to focus through for a moment. The moment it clicks off you continue as Madison pours the water into the individual mugs and messes around with her phone.
“I could at least try to go around to the other labs nearby, ask if they have something I could use or if they’ve seen a random person walking around with the fucking thing, but no luck. I went to everyone I was willing to stomach in the building, and was about to just start wandering to others, when I threw in the towel.”
“Yeah that’s a good place to call it.” Sof spoke with compassion but not much else, instead using her focus to study you and figure out what you need and want to hear, and how exactly to say it.
Flare speaks with enough scorn for the both of them, though. “Look, they fucking stole that thing, alright? Not ‘borrowed’ or ‘misplaced,’ they stole it and made your job impossible. If you’re not letting yourself be upset about that I’m going to be upset for you. I’ll do that anyway.”
“I am upset.” Your voice feels meek, worn out, as she deposits Sofia and your mugs onto the coffee table in front of you.
“Did you spit in mine?” Your sister asks the question with a wide, shit-eating grin.
“Yeah.” Mads responds while already turning back for her own mug. “A really big glob, didn’t you hear? I was working on it for minutes.”
“Good.” You see the smile on Sof’s face dial back down to something genuine and enamoured.
“What did your colleagues say?” Madison finds her spot on the sofa again, placing her mug and a small sauce dish on the table before turning to you for your answer.
“Not much. They wanted to help but didn’t have any more ideas than me…”
“Then! Bah-!” She throws her hands up in frustration. “No wonder you had a shit time of it today!”
“Anything else happen?” Sof asks.
“Lunch was nauseating. I really struggled with it…” You pause to think for a moment. “Nothing else. What have you been up to?”
Sof nods towards the TV. The screen is off and dark for your comfort, but connected to it by a cable is a laptop you don’t recognise set to a very low brightness and open on Steam.
“Mads was playing Hades,” Your sister smiles with a conspiratory, secret glint, and you wonder why until she throws her crush under the bus, “But we got distracted.”
Madison’s eyes fly wide open in miniature panic as she rushes to defend herself against the accusation.
“No! Well, yeah, but not like that!”
You decide to join in the fun and add a scandalised tone to your voice, “Not like what, Madison?”
“We were talking about the Illiad!” The blush rising up her neck was beautiful, but the answer she gave was so mismatched you can’t help but laugh while her voice rambled on. “We were!! We did a couple runs and got talking about how Supergiant represented Achilles and Patroclus, and then got sidetracked further when that obviously led to the parallels with Hades II and the Odyssey, and we did not fuck!”
“Okay, okay, I believe you!” You force the words through the giggles. “I would have smelt it on you anyway.”
That made Madison crumble. She looked tiny and so easy to corner, and the feverish energy she used to correct the mistake was adorable on her. But you decide to be kind.
“Tell me about it.”
You manage to make yourself sound serious and genuine enough to only make her question your motivations a little. Her doubt is, thankfully, interrupted by one of the three separate timers on her phone.
Madison reaches over to your mug and pulls the teabag out while she slowly gears up to answer.
“Well…” She starts slow, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s either Mads, Flare, or Madison-soup. “As I was telling Sofia, if you look at the two classics as joint thing - a series - you get a world built around a choice: seek glory in war or head home. Achilles chose glory, or rather chose revenge and the glory followed, and in Hades he is plagued with this loneliness as a result of being separated from Patroclus. Fuck, even the deal he struck with Hades represents it. ‘I’ll serve as your eternal guard so send Pat to Elysium when he’s probably already there’ sounds a lot like ‘I’m going to kill this one guy so good the entire world remembers because I can’t get my husband back’ if you look at it the right way.”
The other timers went off as she finished, and all three teabags ended up on the sauce plate Madison brought over so the seeping tea wouldn’t stain the table. She didn’t slow down once she hit speed, and a lot of it was going over your head, but it was more about hearing what interests her so you let her go wild. It was nice to hear, and by the comfort radiating out of Sofia she was really enjoying it too.
The tea is delicious, when you take a tentative sip, and you find that it’s not as hot as it usually is. You realise that Madison probably brewed it at a little under boiling like the packaging told you to but you never bothered with. The taste of the tea is different as a result. A little sweeter, a little softer.
It’s really nice.
“But then we get to Hades II and oh boy is Odysseus a wet fucking puppy who needs a good bath and shampoo. He’s miserable too! Even though, as we established, he chose the other path to Achilles.”
“He also took nine years too long to get home, so it’s kinda on him.” Sof smiles at Madison, but she just gets a little mad, which is adorable on her.
“That’s-! …A fair criticism! But!” Flare searched for something to follow it up with for a moment before giving up and rejoining Mads. “The thing about Supergiant’s Odysseus that makes him really interesting to me is how he’s different to the Odysseus from his source material. With Achilles they sort of just… extrapolated. Extrapolated really well, mind you, though not always accurately, but they didn’t change all that much.
“But with Odysseus they made him depressed! Sure, he’s sad about his men dying, and upset about Penelope’s suitors, and dejected and trapped on Circe’s island, and so on, but he’s never depressed. Homer writes- orates him too wise for that. Athena’s blessing means he can’t be depressed. The structure of the epic as a whole makes it impossible for him to be depressed.
“So!” It sounds like Madison is building towards a point she’s proud of, so you listen as best you can, finding it a lot easier than you thought it would be. “The Odysseus in Hades II must be from a version of the Odyssey that is a tragedy.”
“Must be?” You hear the gap she left for a response and filled it as well as you could.
She nods, smiling wide, enjoying being able to talk to anyone - or maybe even especially you and Sof - about this.
“Yeah! There’s a few lines in the game from him about finding Penelope and Telemachus in the afterlife, and how they decided to go separate ways, which implies the big emotional reunion at the end of the epic just didn’t happen to this version of the family, but the biggest reason why I think this is because he’s the main strategist of the war against Chronos.
“One of the big themes of the Odyssey that we know, and probably still for his version, is about the cycle of violence and war. It’s about how easily war begets war, and harm against others reflects against you. One big example is that when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and runs away he can’t bear the idea of the credit going to ‘Nobody’ so he calls his real name back at the cyclops who gets his father, Poseidon, to make sure all of his men die under his care.
“Another example is from the end of the story: when Odysseus does the bow thing, and then the arrow-through-Antinous thing before murdering everyone who wanted to marry Penelope, the families of all the suitors are obviously very upset, and want to kill Odysseus. He, essentially, starts a war for the throne of Ithaca. Which Athena then stops. It’s only through her intervention that the cycle ends. But what if she didn’t interrupt it? Or couldn’t?
“Odysseus being at the centre of the Crossroads in Hades II and leading the shades’ efforts against Chronos means that war hadn’t settled on simply chasing him home, it kept chasing him after. He ended up in another, endless war like the Trojan war, but this time he doesn’t have a family to go back to. It’s only really Zagreus’ intervention of Melinoe’s cycle of war that eventually frees up Odysseus’ task, but even then through the limitations of a rougelike’s plot he’s stuck leading the cleanup effort for all eternity anyway. I wonder if we’ll get a Hades III, but there’s not really much you can do in a story paralleled to Oedipus that Supergiant’s audience would be open to…”
Sof leans over, smile still plastered over her face, to whisper, “I think that’s her steam all spent.”
Your empty mug sits on the table in front of you, scarfed in your lust to experience one of the first good things you’ve felt today while your adrenaline strength sapped away and left you leaning your full weight against another focus of comfort. You feel yourself being held up only by your sister’s grip on your shoulder, but you really, really want to lie down.
“Oh, wow, you almost need a nap.” You can hear the smile in Sof’s voice.
You shake your head as best you can, “No, I just need to lie down…” The stress bleeds out of your mind in a happy sigh halfway to a yawn.
“Okay… how are we doing this…”
Sofia eventually gets you all rearranged, placing herself at one side of the sofa so your head can rest on her thighs and placing Madison at the three-quarters mark so the crook of your knees can rest comfortably over her lap. You’re a little too sleepy and also dazed from the brain fog to argue too much about the princess treatment, but your one protest about wanting to not bore the two of them is mitigated ahead of time as the monitor is turned on with low volume so that Madison can continue to play Hades.
It’s incredible how quickly you become comfortable with the setup.
Comfortable until you get too warm… You can feel it starting, especially with Sof’s raised body temperature against your head.
Glaring in focus at the TV screen Madison singles out Sofia, “Ivy and I had our turns, Sof, now it’s your turn.”
“What? My turn to what?” There’s a laugh on the tip of her tongue whenever she talks to Madison. It always sounds like it belongs there.
“Infodump, talk forever, I dunno.” A flash of damage crosses the game screen. “Fuck! Theseus! You bitch. You’re almost done with Princess of the Forest, right? What’s next?”
“I’m not sure…” Her face turns thoughtful and, if only a little bit, stuck.
You turn your eyes up to her, “I think you should write something original.”
“I don’t really know how to do that.” Her eyes meet yours, glittering like grey steel in the reflected light of Madison sucking ass at Hades. “What would I write?”
“Well, think about the themes of the Mononoke adaptation. What drew you to that?”
She smiles, but stays quiet. You answer for her.
“Self identity, lesbian love, the worth of love even if reaching for it hurts, not being defined by terrible, obsessive thoughts.”
“Girlstink,” Mads adds, still mostly focused on the screen.
“Just write more of that!” You finish.
Sof pats your head as she turns to her tiny-statured crush, “I did not write it just to obsess over girlstink.”
“I dunno!” Mads chimes, enjoying the teasing. “It’s pretty prominent in the story…”
“Because they’re wolves.”
“So why were you drawn to them, then? If not for the unparalleled allure and stank of a girl who doesn’t wash herself basically ever?”
“Because,” Your sister huffs out the word, her baited frustration sitting playful on her tongue, “The implied unwashed-ness is a representation of San as a member of the ‘other’ that Irontown rejects, which is part of the queer allegory. The allegory you helped me refine.”
“Hey!” You call out quietly from your spot in the middle of them, fighting the warmth that is slowly becoming unbearable. “I helped too!”
“Yeah, you helped a lot!” Sof agrees, grinning that frustrated grin at you. “But you aren’t trying to brat your way into an early grave.”
“I’m not saying girlstink is a- motherfucker! Theseus! I hate this boss…” You look over and see the game’s death screen fading away to black. Madison carries on like nothing happened. “Girlstink isn’t a bad thing, far from it. A story based entirely around it would be really fun to read. Hello Hypnos, goodbye Hypnos.”
“Entirely around it?” Sofia’s tone hits a particular set of instincts in your mind. Your body reacts to the intensity and familiarity of the attitude by helpfully flooding your cunt. “Your brain, especially, ms. Art History major and classics nerd, would rot reading that book. You need more substance than that.”
“It’s also not always great,” You add. Madison looks curiously at you, Flare’s seriousness peeking through the veil of Mads’ playfighting. “It’s not always helpful to know if someone showered in the past three days or if they got fucked really good last night.”
Mads’ grin grew outwards again, closing the veil. “I’m not talking about helpful, I’m talking about hot!”
“It’s not always hot, either.” You laugh when you say it, though. Because there is a part of you that loves having that inside knowledge.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve smelt on someone so far, then?”
“Worst in what way?”
“Okay, most distinctly out of place.”
You take a moment to think, as Mads and Sofia discuss the tactics and the build of the next run. Sofia suggests the Aphrodite keepsake, which makes sense for her, and Mads is so eager to make her happy she accepts the suggestion without comment. You draw a blank on Madison’s question. The heat in your body, and the nausea wired into the feeling like a cable-tangled, action movie bomb, had spiked really badly and got in the way of your thoughts.
“There’s always something out of place, so nothing really feels out of place.” Your answer is obviously unsatisfying for Madison, and you hate the look of disappointment on her face. You elaborate as you start to wriggle out of your jeans to free your overheated legs and avoid the risk of throwing up. Fuck it, it’s dark enough she won’t be able to see much. “Before I changed there were scents like that. Things stood out. Like if someone pissed in a stairwell. But now I smell everything from much further away that I’m basically smelling everything around me at once. Obviously, the strength varies, but still. If there’s piss in a stairwell I can smell it outside the fire escape door.”
Madison nods, half focusing on the screen and taking chip damage that Sofia jokingly berates her for. Maybe that’s why she’s so bad at the game.
“What I mean to say is that, while the stairwell shouldn’t smell like that, what happened to me means that scents don’t really have a place to be out of place in any more. They’re just… everywhere.”
“That’s really interesting.”
“It’s a fucking pain is what it is.”
Madison looks strangely hurt, like she wants to say something she definitely shouldn’t.
“Are there no good bits to it?”
“Oh, obviously!” Sofia’s scent, the remembered wisps of previous meals that add slowly but surely to the smell of the apartment, the way bodies react to emotions and send out endorphins. “But it’s a pain in the same way having eyes would be a pain if it was constantly midday and everything was painted a couple hues more saturated.”
“You need sunglasses for your nose,” Sofia jokes.
“Unironically, though. The only problem with medical masks is instead I just smell my own mouth in that detail. I could get used to it, or I could get used to not wearing the masks like I have been.”
“Have you two had covid?” Flare’s question is a classic, neurodivergent jump in topic - logical but unpredictable - so it’s well suited to you and Sof’s conversation style.
“We gave it to each other, actually. Pretty early, too.” Sof answers, taking point on the conversation while you let your mind wander.
The brain fog is slowly leaving, which is wonderful to feel, and you are finally cooling down again.
The feeling of your bare skin against Madison’s thighs is dragging some complicated endorphins out of the tiny girl, who is still trying desperately to not notice the bite marks running down the inside of your thigh which are yet to heal, and the conflict in her head is drawing your attention. You hadn’t thought there was enough light in the room for her to notice, but the TV is glowing enough to give her glimpses.
The most obvious of your marks is the bright-white, adhesive dressing you put over the spot where Sofia’s teeth had broken your skin. It was there to help the wound recover and to help with the constant pressure and chafing on the area, but it still left you rather distracted at times when you clamp your thighs together hard enough. And now the white fabric sits as a beacon for Madison’s attention in the darkness.
The poor girl is struggling so hard to not ask about it, and you’re trying not to find her mildly panicked expression and endorphins adorable. Easy to do, when your anxiety wakes up from its migraine-nap.
What if she’s uncomfortable? Should you move your legs? This was a dumb idea.
You try and shift some weight off of her and she lowers her arms to rest them on your legs while she plays.
Flare interrupts the conversation after clearing a room to glare at you, “Stop moving, dumbass. You need to rest.”
“Wow you play really well when you want to swear at someone.” Sofia chuckles. You relax back into the contact.
“I play really well all the time, thank you very much!” Mads’ voice is aggrandising and entertainingly proud, but you hear a quiet whisper afterwards. “It’s just distracting when you’re watching.”
You bump the bottom of her elbow with your knee to get her attention back on you and the knowing smile you can feel crossing your face.
“Sofia’s not that distracting.”
She blushes and glares at you, before curling in a little bit and whispering, “She is to me.”
“Why is that, Mads?” You make your smile a little more merciful, but not any weaker.
“Aren’t you able to smell it?”
You could. The saccharine crispness of uncanny-valley green apple and basil, the closest things your brain can register from the hormone. It’s strong, complex, and deceptively heavy. It slots easily into the wilting orange blossom that is part of her unique smell, but it’s a very recognisable smell. One that’s the same in basically everyone: oxytocin.
Madison is overjoyed just to be here with Sofia, to be spending time with her and relaxing like the time will never end. But her heartbeat is hammering in her body loud enough that you can pick it out beneath the intentional sound effects of Hades and the low-whine of accidental tones caught in the music or emitted by the laptop.
Madison is very warm as well. And fidgety. She keeps looking over at Sofia while she thinks your sister won’t notice.
It’s nice to see from an outside perspective, even with how different you are from both Mads and Flare.
You respond very simply and softly, “I can.”
That was not the answer Madison was hoping for. She pauses the game and sighs, retreating into herself while you hear her heart doing backflips behind her ribs. She breathes slowly, and you can hear the emotions catching on her breaths. Flare recovers first, and decidedly ignores you to shove the controller into Sofia’s hands.
“Here!” The expression of harmless frustration gets most of her roiling emotions to settle. “You’ve been talking so much shit, Sof, let’s see how good you actually are.”
“I’ve never played with Coronacht before,” Sofia starts.
“Then learn.” Flare wasn’t budging.
“This is heat sixteen!”
“And? This is your punishment for saying I’m terrible. You get thrown in the deep end.”
Sof gives in and holds the controller in an awkward way to not rest her arm on your face, readying herself to play.
“You can put your arm down,” You say up to her, since you don’t like her being uncomfortable at all, “I don’t mind.”
Your sister looks down at you like you’re teasing her, and then sees your expression. “You’re genuine? No, I’m not doing that.”
She instead shifts around so she has her hands draped over your chest like she’s a safety bar on a roller coaster, which gives you room to breathe and see while also letting her rest her arms’ weight on you. Good enough.
You turn your attention back to Madison, feeling a little too lost about the game.
“Fill me in?”
“Hm? Oh, yeah, sure.” Madison considers for a moment and then fully turns to you, ignoring the screen. “So I’ve just given Sof an impossible task.”
“I might surprise you!” Sof calls out from the side of her mouth while she struggles.
“No you won’t. But anyway. ‘Heat sixteen’ means that I’ve got sixteen, out of a maximum sixty-four, levels of extra difficulty on this run - though only like two people ever have beaten sixty-four heat so it’s not really the effective maximum. Coronacht, the bow, is especially bad for Sof because it has a strange learning curve. And she doesn’t have much time to learn because I’ve already taken a lot of damage this run, and I’ve turned on the difficulty modifier that gives you a time limit, so she can’t just stand around wondering what to do.”
“Ah shit!” You feel Sof frantically mash her fingers into the controller. “I forgot about that!”
“All this to say I’ve been struggling because I made the game harder but received banter like it’s on the base difficulty. Now I get payback.”
It seems like good payback since the frantic stress on Sofia’s face only gets more and more intense. She dies very quickly, and Madison laughs softly at her.
“You’re forgiven now. You can play without heat.”
“Oh, thank you, my magnanimous princess.”
The chemistry is really nice to see. You’re really glad Sofia has someone to talk to like this, it feels really healthy for her. And especially on the days where her pain is unmanageable and she’s just stuck at home waiting for you to finish your work it’s comforting to know that Madison is always only a message away. She’s been there for your sister through a lot.
The smiles on their faces are wonderful as well. But you wonder whether the play fighting is actually how they want to interact - and not just something that gets in the way of them growing closer.
It’s a nagging feeling, based on Sofia’s tone shifts throughout the afternoon, and how she keeps dragging herself back into the box you’ve seen on display.
It makes you a little melancholy, but it’s easy to move past. You trust your sister to take any opportunities that pop up to express her affection. She did it to you really well. She’ll find a way to get through to Madison.
The tiny girl, on the other end of the sofa, has been returning to the tone like raising a shield. It seems more like a face she’s willing to show, but there’s plenty more behind to explore, if she ever feels safe enough to let Sofia in. The way her heart is still misbehaving in her chest is a clear sign of that.
As you’re listening to Madison’s heart there’s a moment where its rhythm suddenly spikes. Madison chews at her bottom lip, and fucks with her now-empty hands on top of your legs, while her eyes are rooted on a dark, shadowed spot away from both you and Sof. You smell something sharp and acrid float off her.
You put your hand on her arm. It’s just a gentle touch, enough to ground her if she needs, and enough for you to feel how light she is beneath your touch. Like her bones could shatter if you touched her wrong.
Her heartbeat calms again, and she pulls her eye away from the patch of nothing to meet your eyes, and what greets you is not the panic that has been coursing its way through her body, but instead is a deep and grateful relief mixed with a vexing twist to her lips over how well she you read her. Mads and Flare’s individual responses, blended together.
You’ve done a little reading and a lot of talking with Sof, so you’ve figured out that Flare is a classic ‘protector’ alter, and now she’s questioning - either subconsciously or not - whether she needs to protect Mads from you. But Mads accepts the contact willingly and just smiles down at you.
“Thanks, Ivy.”
You smile back, and keep your voice quiet and non-confrontational. “What happened?”
There’s a complicated look that crosses her face, there and gone in a flash. Like a faster-than-words conversation that happened beneath her eyes. Mads continues.
“It’s okay now. You should worry about yourself.”
She looks over at Sofia for a moment, while the music swells and a boss fight starts. Life glitters in her eyes like candles fighting to stay lit in a gale, sheltered as best they can be against a hurricane of thoughts and hopes and predictions. She stares at your sister with a half-held breath and a yearning whine in her throat that you pretend to not hear.
But you can’t let that look go without comment.
You whisper, trusting in Sof’s hyperfocus on the game to make your words inaudible to her, while you speak.
“She really likes you, Madison.”
You fill the words with the kindness you’re overflowing with and a hint of the wisdom that comes from an outside perspective, as well as a fair chunk of hindsight. Mads turns her eyes away, amber glow filled with almost-tears.
“She won’t-”
Your stomach grumbles incredibly loud. Enough nausea has faded to let your hunger wake back up and scream it’s angry growl, upset that it has been ignored for too long today. It follows the noise up with a demand for food that slides like an iron lance into the centre of your attention deficit and twists your focus, through the bruising impact point on your soul, fully and wholly onto food.
“I’m really hungry…”
Sofia pauses the game to look down at you with concern and confusion, “What actually was your lunch?”
“Sichuan fried noodles.”
“With a migraine?!” Sofia looks like she wants to grip each side of your head and shake you until some sense falls out of you: percussive maintenance at its finest. But she’s too careful around your head while you have a migraine to try. “Well… that should have been enough food anyway.”
“Oh, uh… I didn’t finish it.”
Sof looks a step closer to flipping your brain on its head like an SD card that went in the wrong way.
“Okay,” She starts shifting around, gathering her energy and pushing her muscles’ ache to the back of her mind, to get up, “I’m starting dinner. You need something solid to eat.”
“Yay! Thank you, puppy!” Your use of the matching pet name makes her grin wide, but you realise belatedly that Madison can also hear. Oh well. “What’s for dinner?”
“Eh, I can invent something as I go. We have that mince and a few veggies, so maybe a pasta dish?”
Sofia seems to finally get enough of her energy together and heaves against the pillows of the sofa to lift herself up, but gets interrupted by Flare.
“Hold on! Wait, wait, hold on a minute. Sit back down, Sofia!” Sof follows the tiny girls’ order. You’re grateful to get your head’s pillows back. “You don’t have to be the one to cook, I can do it.”
For some reason that offer seems to duck through some shortcut in the complex labyrinth of your heart to end up closer to your core than should have been possible. You built it halfway around Sof’s presence in your life, so feeling someone else navigate you so easily is a shock.
She’s willing to cook for you. Willing to cook so that you can stay close to Sofia.
The frustrated glare Flare is using to keep Sof in place, comforting you, takes on a new, fiery charm.
Madison is not just here to spend time with Sofia. She’s trying to take care of you, too.
“But also!” She continues. “We don’t have to cook anything! Your cooking is incredible, Sof, and very comforting, but with a day like you’ve had,” Flare looks at you, “And the migraine you’ve had to deal with, and the way I know even through Sof that you deny yourself nice things even when you deserve them - today is a delivery day if anything. You deserve good, indulgent food that no-one around you has had to work hard for. You deserve something free to enjoy.”
A smile and an avoidant blush had crept onto your face, and you relent after a moment. “Okay, okay! We can get delivery.”
“Good.” Flare nods and relaxes back into the sofa to match Sof, and drags out her phone. “What are we getting?”
Both Madison and Sofia look to you, silently prioritising your cravings. You think for a moment, before your stomach takes over and growls again.
“Whatever it is it needs to arrive quickly.”
You study your hunger and focus on the craving. It’s more of an extra hole in the absence of your hunger than anything distinct, but it’s shaped like the inverse of chocolate, or cocoa. It’s dark and heavy and rich, like a coffee bursting with fruit notes, but solid, and chewy. It feels uncaffeinated as well. You don’t really want to be more awake for this. The relaxed, almost-sleepy vibe the three of you have is really comforting.
A thing that comes to mind is one of those Chinese dishes that are caramelised and soaked in rock sugar, balanced by rice beneath, but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.
The thing that does fill it, though, is surprisingly, “Dried dates.”
Sof perks up at your non-sequitur before turning to Madison. “Is there a Middle Eastern place nearby?”
“There’s a lot of kebab places…” Mads trails off and turns to you, and you shrug. One of those places might make something to fill out your craving, but the app isn’t that tuned to giving answers you want.
“Hmmm… Try looking up ‘adas polo.’ Or-”
“Ah, I found a place! I looked on google instead, much better results.”
She tilts the phone towards you both and Sof approves, “Oh wow, that’s perfect! Good find, Madison!”
You watch as a small, hesitant shade of a smile creeps into Madison’s expression, a little peek of something vulnerable around the edge of her shield. You expect her to respond to Sof with a barbed comment or two, but she stays quiet on that front the whole time she plugs in your order. Her more sensitive smile stays as well.
The comfortable, warm feeling stretches out languidly after the food is ordered, and small topics fill the space to pad the difficult, spiky points of your migraine and the slow, tentative trust Madison is expressing.
Noticing it, reading her so well, is really nice. You can feel everything going through Sofia’s mind just by having your head resting against her skin. The tiny feedback on touch would be all you need to follow her mind’s footsteps, even without your highly-tuned sense of smell, and you’d be able to pick out every small moment of pride and challenge she’s facing and overcoming while learning to play Hades.
But Madison… You don’t know her that well. You properly met her a little after getting back from the coast, and have only really interacted with her in small moments since then. In the past week or so she’s hung around a little longer while you’ve been present, which was interesting to see, but it’s been nothing like this.
You remember how awkwardly she just… stood there when you got home, but now she has her hand curled around the outside of your bare thigh like it belongs there, and she’s smiling with a less-guarded joy than even an hour ago.
It’s delightful.
You want to tease more out of her, but that’s not what she needs. You understand, maybe only a tiny bit so far, why Sof had said a while ago that she and Mads set each other off.
You hug her as best you can with your legs as you wait for the food to arrive.
You could get very used to her company.
Her care.
But that involves telling her about you and Sof.
Oh, now it’s your turn to fade from the conversation and have a small panic attack.
She’s kind, and playful, and soft, but Flare is reactive and hyper-protective of Mads and Mads herself feels very easy to hurt. It’s not impossible that telling her about your relationship with Sof would shatter something fragile inside her. Fuck, you don’t even know if she’s poly. You had been assuming, and maybe Sof had already told you and you’ve forgotten, but what if she’s not?
Well, if she’s not then the relationship that’s shakily forming between her and Sof would have to break, one way or another, and from what little fragments of her life she’s let slip, accidentally hinted about, or conveyed by Sof there are very few good things in her life. Sof is one of those few things.
Would she hate you for taking away that hope from her? Monogamous thinking doesn’t come all that naturally to you, you’ve never sunk into it the way people around you have, but you also don’t know polyamorous thinking that well either. Do they have an easy answer for this situation?
Now that was a funny image. Calling up one of the poly podcasts that end up in your feed now and then with the dilemma: ‘My sister is falling for someone monogamous but doesn’t know how to let her down without saying she’s already in a relationship with me! Help!’
“Hey- Ivy…”
Sofia’s voice, like crystallised honey and warm, worn-out bass strings, brings you so easily out of your spiral. She pets your head, running her fingers through your beach-bleached brown hair with endless kindness and patience. Her touch sends electric shocks of dopamine through you, scattering the cloud of anxiety. You feel your heart rate settling.
You smile up at her, calmed and tamed and happy.
“Hi Sof.” You hear how in love with her you are in your voice. It’s sickly sweet and perfect.
“Dinner’s here.”
You sit up like you’ve been struck by actual lightning, or an incredibly angry golf club straight to the stomach wielded by your hunger, and see that Madison had freed herself from your leg-hug at some point and is accepting a bag of spiced, sweet food that fills the apartment so easily with its heavy flavour.
“Oh, fuck yeah, gimme!” You call over to Madison who takes forever to walk over, so you impatiently meow at her to speed her up.
“That’s not what foxes sound like.” Madison responds.
“It’s what hungry Ivy sounds like!” You parry. “Now give. Give!”
Dinner marks the blending of afternoon into evening, the time only getting more relaxed and casual with the veritable feast you bought and then only half-ate. Full stomachs and soft company does wonders to finish the flip of the day from ‘horrible’ to ‘wonderful.’ You feel so happy. Happy and looked after.
Mads allows herself to become slightly more cuddly as time goes on, and the high-octane feel of Hades is eventually put away for an emulated, old Animal Crossing that Madison plays as she curls up against your arm.
You share a few knowing, appreciative smiles with Sofia over her warming up to you like a shelter puppy or a wet cat.
But it inevitably gets late. You all get tired. And you half expect Sofia to offer for Madison to stay - just for a warm bed tonight. Maybe something more when you’re all recovered tomorrow. But Sof sees your thoughts on your face and sends an expression back that’s half a shake of her head and half a shrug. It feels like she’s asked her in the past and it’s not been accepted.
You look back at Madison and see an warring twist of feelings from Mads who clearly doesn’t want to leave, and a deep, shaky fear from Flare that’s pulling her up to standing and towards the front door.
She’s awkward as she leaves, but you make sure she knows how much you appreciated her company and care tonight. It makes her smile a little lighter. Then she takes one last look at you two before closing the apartment door behind her, heading off into the dead of night.
This story is a commission for a lovely reader - message me if you'd like to commission your own work!
CW: pretty severe and targeted transphobia from parents
Anxiety sits in my throat and festers, hot and horrid, restless in the din from half-fermented thoughts still stuck in the dripping mud pit of the base of my mind, crying to be let out and saved from their long, drowning death. Crying to be released.
A bubbling, cloying heat sits beneath, occasionally sending sulphurous geysers of righteous and betrayed anger spraying up to damage the heavy serenity of the bog. The release is fast and never satisfying, the weight of the mud collapsing in over the vents too quickly to let enough out.
The sky above is calm. Fetid, from the stench of decomposing words that will never be spoken and the acrid anger flinging itself around on the wind, but calm.
Because I know better than to let it show.
The weight of it all makes it easy to push down. And the hollowness of the few days I’ve spent turning all the events over in my head makes everything desaturated.
Good.
Even panic, as my phone lights up with a message from someone I thought I’d never have to look at again, is a distant, sloughing landslide that barely rumbles along the horizon. I know the feeling is there, but my heart’s not really in it.
The text message announces an updated arrival time for the conversation I wish I wanted to avoid, but which I can’t bring myself to feel the indignation required to call off. She was bringing a bag with all the things I had been too upset to remember while I was being shouted out of home and warmth.
The thought is still there, though, that if I could bring myself to sink waist-deep into that slow-tidal swamp I could summon enough anger to still turn her away. I could plunge my arms into the depths of the freezing mud, brush past cold and rigid limbs of thoughts I’d yet to process, and pry open a vent wide enough to break the serenity I was currently sheltering in. I would scald myself in the process, breathe in who knew how many toxic compounds forged only in the abyssal depths of my soul-planet’s mantle, but I would be free of her. I would be feeling something.
And that would be worse than suffering through the coming meeting.
So I wait.
I study the wood grain of the cafe she chose, pushing the smell of coffee and pastries I suddenly can’t afford out of my nose, and put all my focus on the task of not letting my leg bounce. I don’t want her to see how stressed I am, because that might make her panic and run away, and I need my stuff. I need to be controlled, because she has so much power over me with no proof she wouldn’t misuse it. And after I trusted her so deeply three days ago.
I don’t think about it.
I’m pulled out of my thoughts as Natalie, a few minutes later than she said, very loudly struggles against the soft-close mechanism on the cafe’s front door. She’s stuck for so long, between the duffel bag so unevenly filled that it looks like it’s cosplaying a murder victim and the backpack so laden that it looks like a turtle shell threatening to smack into the side of the door frame, that the barista twists out from the cramped counter to pull the door open for her. She thanks him politely and quietly before looking for me.
I make myself emotionless as her eyes meet mine, because if I was to try and follow the script perfectly I would need to smile at her, like none of this is her fault and I’m genuinely happy to see her. If I tried I would start scowling or crying.
But Nat does smile. It’s twisted by guilt and shame, and the difficulty of not knocking anything over as she navigates the tiny cafe, but it’s a smile. Small but still there.
The air starts to feel thin. My panic gains more control. I smother it.
I watch as Natalie carefully places the bags at my feet, despite how heavy they are, and then proceeds to stand in the middle of the floor awkwardly. Dozens of emotions, hundreds of things to say, cross her face, but ultimately she turns to leave with an expression of sadness that is incredibly satisfying to see.
“You’re just going to leave?” My voice comes out hoarse and scratchy, too deep and heavy, and with too many little fragments of emotion stuck to it as it dragged itself through the trenches of my emotions. The words are chased by dozens more trying to tailgate through the gap the script has left, but I swallow them like glass shards and settle the ulcer of heartburn as Natalie turns back to be in surprise.
“You want me here?”
Want her here? Of course I don’t fucking want her here! She’s the reason all this happened in the first place! If she just didn’t tell our parents I wouldn’t be homeless right now, but that’s not the script. And I’m following the script so that if I want anything else out of that house I have someone to get it for me.
A flickering, breathy hope suffused her voice and I tried not to recoil from it as I drowned this new batch of anger.
I breathe, trying not to make it noticeably deep, and say, “I can’t talk with you if you leave.”
Natalie smiles at me like I’ve given her more grace than I have before drawing out the chair opposite me to start the task of squeezing herself in between the bags and the faded, wooden wall. She settles before growing anxious again, unsure of what to do next. Or, sure of what she needs to do but unsure of how it’ll be received. She worries with her sleeves underneath the table.
“I- Uh, I’m sorry,” She pauses, unknowingly giving me time to suffocate the rising tears at the apology I hadn’t let myself hope for while she processes something behind her thin-framed glasses and restless, brown eyes. She tries again, softly and delicately, like she’s expecting me to get angry at her, “What should I call you?”
I respond with silence for a moment.
“Just, um… I know I probably don’t deserve to,” She swallows so hard I almost trick myself into hearing the noise of it bobbing down her throat, “To know it, but- I just- I don’t want to keep calling you-”
“Nina!” I spit out the word, then repeat it softer. “Nina.”
The daunting, inevitable approach of my deadname made me blurt out the first name I could think up, but I despise the idea of our parents knowing it. It aches like a fresh burn blister in the sump of my heart where their love was supposed to be. It seeps watery pus and threatens to pop, but I cannot be out of control right now. I’ll probably change the name in a few days, but I’m stuck with it for this conversation.
But then she smiles, and her lips quirk like she wants to call it cute.
Getting to watch the anxious fear bleed from my sister is not something that happens very often. Even seeing her so anxious and hesitant to intrude on my space is strange, and caused me to force-correct the script. So, as the panic melts off her posture and that comfortable, steady expression starts to come back to her thin face, I can’t help but remember the previous times she’d let me see the unfinished side of her.
She had kept herself collected the whole way home, tears shed in tiny streams that barely touched her makeup and bare feet that braved the pavement for a quarter mile, but when she saw me it all fell apart. She had sent some messy texts which led me to sit out on the porch to wait for her to get home, but the sight of discarded stilettos and angry tears on my collected sister’s face was truly strange.
She never crumpled, her coherent anger was clear in the midnight silence, but it was a level of dishevelled that I had never seen from her before. I suspected that if our parents were anywhere nearby she would have closed off, so I gave her the space she needed to tell the story of a friendship betrayal that stank to high hell of breakup jealousy and didn’t tell the family about her being a lesbian the next day.
The minimum, for that level of trust.
I also didn’t tell them when she purposefully came out to me.
I didn’t tell them why she kept sneaking out or staying too late at her girlfriend’s place.
I didn’t let on when they wondered loudly if she would stop the strange, rebellious phase.
I didn’t out her.
But here she was, showing me the weird and shaky side to her, still letting me into this secluded part of her heart like I belonged there. Like it was all normal now.
“Nina,” She says the name and my heart betrays my head with a butterfly flip. “Nina, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I’m really sorry.”
She says it so earnestly, and I have no choice but to believe her. I know her too well, I know how she lies. But waiting for an apology was also not the issue. My anger and cloying hurt is not a result of Natalie not being sorry: I knew she didn’t want this to happen. The problem is she told them without knowing what the result would be.
I knew what they would say. I saw all the signs. It’s why I had started taking hormones in the closet, all black-market and self-monitored. I knew I’d get nothing close to help from them.
But I realised, after a few months of emotional changes, that I couldn’t do it alone. So I had told Natalie.
And Natalie had told our parents that night.
“What did you think would happen?” My words slip out before I can stop them while my heart hammers away at the half-beaten spot of my ribs just above it.
Dinner was forgotten immediately, the shouting and abuse sparked to full throttle. They tried their best to strong arm me back into someone they could stomach being around, but since the cat was already out of the bag I had no way of appeasing them that wouldn’t make my skin crawl. Oh, I could have tried, forced myself under the cookie cutter and let the blunt edge slice through my soul with all the oppressive force they knew how to apply so well. I could have made an attempt. But I would have killed myself very quickly.
They didn’t see my fear of death, though, they only saw me disobeying them. So they quickly cornered me, offering that same conditional existence or homelessness. I took the obvious way out.
“I don’t know,” Nat’s confidence had taken a hit, she had obviously expected the next part of the script I never voiced.
“Why did you out me?”
“I hated them saying Seb- Uh, your deadname. It hurt.”
I felt my anger slowly waking up from its smothered grave I had forced it into. “So you corrected them.”
“I thought it would go okay…”
“How the hell was it supposed to go okay? Why do you think I never told them?!”
The script was completely ruined, but I could feel the itch of sulphur in the back of my nostrils as I breathe out. There was no stopping this. My heart felt like the wound it took that night had been sewn shut with barbed wire.
“I’ve never heard them talk like that-”
“Because you’re the golden child!” I felt my voice rising. Everyone in the cafe would be able to listen in if they wanted to, but fuck it. “You’ve suited their image of you since day one! You excel at college, you have a thriving social network that behaves enough for them to let the socially-acceptable rebellions slide, and you have been the image of mum’s beauty since you hit high school. You’re her ego and dad’s dangling bait for a future, rich son-in-law because their actual son turned out to be an utter failure! They can’t risk your future by traumatising you.”
“That’s not very fair…” Natalie’s voice sat so quiet in the space between us. Her eyes were turned down to the table I was studying earlier, covered in part by her chestnut curls. They made it hard to see her expression, but I hoped it was miserable.
I drop my volume back to normal, “I’ve always been a failed project. Something to salvage for what little value I can still offer. What you heard then, Natalie, was what their disappointment sounds like, and they’ve never been disappointed in you.”
Nat was silent for a while, and the quiet let the nauseous weight of my bone-deep fear settle back in place, the weight of it enough to close the gaps that my outburst seeped through. The feeling that I had overdone it was just as heavy, but for that brief moment the cyclical feedback loop of confused anger and hopelessness had some way to escape. Relief and dread in equal parts filled me.
I wished I had said it to my parents instead, the full-body flinch I saw from Natalie quickly lost its satisfaction, but I had said it and some base, animalistic part of my brain was relieved it was no longer carrying some of the burden. The dread set in when I realised I was pushing Natalie away. Something equally instinctual hated the idea of turning my nose up at the olive branch she was extending.
I was probably silent for too long because Natalie shook off some of her wounded expression and began half-prying herself out of her spot. She was thin where it helped, and athletic and flexible where she really needed, but her coordination had taken a holiday as she still almost tripped over the tangle of bag straps and chair legs. I expected her to leave, but she took a steadying breath that was far more shaky than her outward coordination had already betrayed, and asked me something I truly didn’t expect.
“What do you want to drink?”
Her tone was as casual as anything, like I hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary in the past five minutes, and she was looking over at the counter of the cafe like I was something she was safe to not be constantly watching. It was weird, but very effective at getting under my guard.
I wished, when I responded, that I hadn’t sounded like I was halfway to tears.
“Uh… Whatever you’re getting.”
Nat studied me for a moment, worrying at her bottom lip in a way I knew would stain her teeth slightly with the black lipstick she never leaves the house without, but then suddenly moved away to order.
I thought about our mother while she was gone.
The woman is white as a sheet at her healthiest, cursed to always burn and never tan in the sun, and stares at the world through sharp features. She floods her face with colour and softens her sharp lines where she can. She dyes her hair to look light, she wears colours that make her stand out just enough to blend in, and she makes herself look soft and pliable in any way she can, because that’s how dad likes his women - manipulable.
Natalie is almost a carbon copy of her. But her hair curls and shines in a healthy way that contrasts the bleach-damaged, bright-blonde strands that have survived too much abuse, and desaturates her face with pale foundation and rich black accents to make her look sharp and observant. It’s a look that suits her, and in combination with her thin-wire, silver, round glasses and mostly-black outfits she makes herself visible in a group. She loves the attention.
Me on the other hand, I look like our dad, which hasn’t stopped hurting to think about since I noticed.
Heterozygous fuckery from genetics of Eastern European origin with some strong roots in the Mediterranean sun and Black Sea saltspray left me with tan skin, a square face, and an inclination to appear dangerously thin. I ate plenty as a teenager, but it all went to my height first, so I had been trying to eat enough to both getting some form around my skeleton and for HRT to make the form what I wanted it to be, but now that I’m not sure where my next meal is coming from that tactic is kinda screwed. I dodged some bullets, though. I got enough of mum’s face structure to avoid dad’s bio-coded scowl, and while his hair texture is a bitch to deal with I didn’t get his colour. I was grateful for any silver linings I got. And it made me look a little similar to Natalie, if you wish to squint.
If I looked more like her I would be stunning.
And I’d show off the freckles she got from dad and religiously covers with foundation.
My yearning for better genetics got interrupted by Natalie coming back with a table number and folding herself back into her spot with far more grace than she had while getting out of it. She sent a small smile my way before thinking better of it and stared at a random point in the cafe instead.
“Thank you, for the coffee.” My words made her flinch a little bit, though it seemed to have shaken free some of her sullen anxiety.
I couldn’t let her stay like that. The whole thing was hurting me a lot, but I had a chance to make her feel better. Something in me feels a little cleaner afterwards.
Nat took a breath and started forming thoughts several times, before finally, “I thought it would be different.”
“I don’t know how you thought that.” I spoke the same words as earlier, but I decided to be kind as I said them.
“They know I’m gay.”
I scoffed before I could stop myself. “As if. They’re probably just ignoring the obvious signs.”
“I told them months ago. They’re okay with it.”
Oh, that stung really badly. So they were fine with Natalie not fitting the mould, they’d change the conditions of their love for her, but for me? No, I was a failure already, falling outside of the painted lines on too many counts. They treated me being trans like a signal flare, a symptom of something too fundamentally wrong with me to fix.
“It’s been…” She sighed, “Work - and I probably should have seen that as the sign it was - but I’ve made progress. But they accepted what I taught them and seemed to absorb it. We’re working on undoing the anti-trans stuff.”
“This… doesn’t explain how you thought it would be okay to out me.” I didn’t know if I was getting angrier or feeling more isolated. It was a terrible mix. “This is honestly just evidence that you should have known better.”
Nat cringed away from my quiet scathing, almost choking on her words. “I- Yeah- Yeah… But they were willing to change for me. Willing to learn. I thought they’d be better than that, but I think they’ll come around. I can turn them around for you.”
“No. You can’t.”
My voice was steeped in painful confidence. The authority in my mind sat like an iron spike pierced through my spine, and weighed down my face into a copy of our dad’s immovable scowl. I glared at her without much hate to her, but with all the well-earned disdain our parents had put in me.
“They might…” Gods, her voice was so quiet. So unsure of itself. I make my expression and my voice softer for her while she dropped her gaze to her hands wringing around each other in her lap.
“No, Natalie, you can’t. As much as they want to be politically aligned with you, they don’t really know how to do that past performance. They want you to think they’re accepting, and to do that for how they’ve treated lesbians in the past they genuinely truly do need to change. If you believe they are accepting, then they are. But they aren’t accepting of anything else. They’re able to fake the rest without you noticing.”
“I- That’s-” She didn’t have the energy to continue her interruption.
“Let me put it another way,” I soften my voice further, “They aren’t being forced head-first into their biases against trans people the way their conditional love for you is forcing them to face the first half of the acronym. They’re bound by those conditions just as much as you are, though they have the ability to change them. Me? I’m already outside the bounds of what they can accept. They’ve been treating me like a burden and a financial drain for years. A charity case, from people who think charity is an unbeneficial investment instead of actual kindness.”
“I don’t want to think about them like that…”
“I know you don’t, but I have no choice.” I had no idea how I was keeping so calm.
“I could still try!”
Natalie looked up at me with eyes so wide and hopeful, wishing with all her heart that I could come back home with her. That I could still be in her life.
“It’s not going to work, Nat. They made it very clear in their texts who that spot at home was for.”
Before Nat could speak again we were interrupted by the very silently-apologetic barista, who clearly knew they were interrupting something important, who placed two mugs and a bacon and egg roll on the table before politely running away. I look at the items, confused, knowing I only asked to get the same as Natalie, but the drinks are clearly different.
Nat sniffed, fought off tears and a hysterical, badly-timed giggle, and slid the chai to her side while explicitly not touching the cappuccino or the roll. She mumbled something about messing up the order, but not having any room to eat.
I recognised the tactic, and it made my eyes sting with fierce and warm gratitude. I brought the food close and slid my unlocked phone across to Natalie.
“Take a look if you want.” I bit into the roll and enjoyed the taste of barbeque sauce and egg yolk that tasted a little muted. I knew the flavour was rich, but my stress wasn’t letting go. I still let the tiny pleasure seep into my voice, “Fuck, how did they produce you? You’re so nice…”
The omnipresent taste of tar and bog-mud that had been clinging onto the back of my throat, promising or threatening some violent purging of my stomach at all times, was slowly replaced by something genuinely soft and nice and still so vulnerable as I worked my way through the gifted food.
* * *
I put my mug down as gently as I can with my subtly shaking fingers and pick up the phone that was passed over to me. It feels wrong that I’m let into her secret world so easily, after what I had done to her, but I saw a side of our parents that I had never seen before last week, and I needed to know what was behind that mask.
I pulled up messages and was immediately met with the juxtaposition of me at the top with a normal photo from a few years ago and two conversations beneath with pitch-black profile pictures and the titles ‘bitchcunt’ and ‘dickheadsucker.’ I looked up at Nina for… I don’t know, awareness? Awareness of what she had called them in her contacts, but she was devouring the breakfast roll I got her with all the immaculate, hammer-space ability she has to inhale food at any given pace. My reflex to defend our parents was easily overridden by how grateful she clearly was to get fed.
I turned back to the texts, opening up our mum’s first. Dad could be harsh, and over reactive, so maybe if I started with mum I could still believe they were good people.
I’m not met with kindness.
Where have you gone? Come back.
You don’t have anywhere to go. Why would you choose that over us?
What did we do to you for you to choose this? What did I do wrong?
I thought I raised you smarter than this. Come home, Sebastian. We can talk about this, find a way through.
Please stop hurting your body.
Is it because you couldn’t go to UW? If you come home we can figure out remote attendance. We can’t help you if you don’t come home.
We can’t pay for your education if you leave.
Please come back.
Who did this to you? Who told you this would be okay to do to yourself?
The messages had all come in one quick flood, a few minutes after the argument I had felt was loud enough for the neighbours to listen in to, and it showed a level of disconnect with Nina that really hurt to see.
I really hated reading her deadname.
It was the same pain I had used for the mistake I desperately wished I could take back. It was that heartburn reflex that made me cringe.
But I had been trying so hard to get them to be better in the one way I knew they weren’t great, so I spoke before I thought and betrayed my new sister.
I kept reading.
There was a large gap in time before the next messages, and she came back with three links to various articles: a study into increased cancer risk for hormone replacement therapy; a news article about high suicide rates in the trans community; and a biographic article of a detransitioner talking about how difficult it was to deal with the long-term effects of HRT. The pie graph from the middle article had been conveniently taken from the article as well by our mother and sent after the links, all bright, dangerous colours and showing very little of the pie chart as ‘safe.’ I immediately knew the pitfalls she fell into, and knew that this collection was only convincing to her because she wanted it to be.
I felt so angry at her, but I still looked at the texts that followed.
You’re damaging your body. Irreparably.
You’re taking on so much risk. It’s so hard to undo. So many people kill themselves rather than try.
Please stop while you still can.
You’re never going to look like a real woman, that will follow you everywhere you go.
Why would you want that anyway?
Being a woman is terrible. You never get anything you want easily, and no-one respects you. Natalie manages, but I grieve for her every day.
I almost put my phone down at the mention of me, used to try and get Nina to fold herself back into a box that would hurt her. I wanted to stop reading. But I owed my sister for how much I’d hurt her.
You had the chance she couldn’t get, and you’re trying to throw it away.
Please come back. I wish I could have raised you better but there’s always still time. It’s never too late.
I want my son back.
It wasn’t the tone she ever used with me. The coiling, backtracking bargaining was so alien. But the more I read the more I could clearly imagine the words falling from her lips.
And then it was done. Not a single message more since that night. Not an ounce more effort.
I swapped to ‘dickheadsucker.’
You’re not a girl. You can’t ever be, so stop pretending.
You’re pathetic, running away like this…
I’ve always tried hard to be your role model, to show you the kind of man you should be, but you’ve ignored each and every lesson I’ve tried to teach you.
Your degree has been a waste.
Mum has worked hard, struggled to help me pay for it since day one, and all it’s done is turn you into a
I stopped reading. The slur sits caught in the corner of my eye, burnt into the rods and cones that picked up the letters before my focus could catch up. I never want to think of Nina like that.
You’ve made your mother cry.
She’s distraught.
She’s always been too soft.
Why would you do this to her - why are you pushing her away? She poured so much effort into you, despite how much you’ve disappointed her.
You need to take responsibility for this. It’s your job, as our eldest, to set an example for Natalie.
She’s already a dyke, she can’t think this is okay.
What the fuck? So even my effort into making them accept me was wasted? I couldn’t even change them?
No wonder Nina had no chance.
I sometimes wish she was older than you. Maybe that way you would have turned out closer to okay.
We only have one daughter, and she’s so much better than you.
I look up to my sister across the table.
She’s finished the bacon and egg roll I ‘accidentally’ ordered and is halfway through her cappuccino. The comfort of the coffee, ordered that way because she can never quite trust most cafes to do anything else well, has drawn a weak, slight smile to her lips. Her rich brown eyes and expressive stare have been studying me as I read, and maybe the karma I was experiencing was entertaining. She had certainly earned the view.
“Finished?” Nina asked.
“Not quite.” My voice comes out pathetic and mumbled. She deserved better than that, better than my skimpy bravery could muster. But she wasn’t getting anything else. She deserved what she could get.
I took one last look at her face, trying not to see how the golden light streaming through the window was only made more beautiful by the gorgeous tan of her skin, and read the last message from our dad.
You can’t run away from this forever, Sebastian. We’ll have a space for you ready for when you’re willing to face this, once you’ve stopped taking those meds. We want to support you, son. Don’t turn your nose up at us.
I disagreed. She would run and run and never look back. I knew she’d be so much better off without them. I just wish I had been able to get her there in a safer way.
I really fucked up her life. She deserved so much better.
We have found a new home, and have settled in to it. All our boxes are unpacked and the space is starting to feel like ours. We have a contract for six months that will turn into another contract for six months basically every single time we want to extend.
We're safe!
Thankyou so much to everyone who supported this sudden and shaky move. Every donation or commission (including the ones that aren't public) made such a difference to this going as well as it did!
So what's next?
Well, I've been enjoying commissions a lot, so I'm keeping them open! I didn't know what to expect when I decided to open them, but the response was amazing, and was really good practice! So keep the ideas coming!
However that's not to say I won't be abandoning ASC. Far from it. I love the story, and I want to show everyone what happens next.
So I'm going to be writing ASC while I have no commissions in my to-do list. (Though if that's too long to wait I'm very happy to write it at half-price so I can put it on that list!)
But let's look further to the future for a second!
Writing has been a wonderful boon for my mind in the boredom of the increased shifts my wife has had to take to keep us afloat, and I have plenty of ideas about what I want to do once ASC is finished, so I thought I'd share some snippets here.
A few of you have read Princess of the Forest, but not a lot of you know that it was a project that took three years. The version on AO3 is not the final version, either. I'm currently getting a cover made and am going to be formatting it properly, so that an .epub version of the final edit will be available.
Since it is what it is I will not be able to sell this version. So instead it will be a free sample on a website that will hold all my novels.
But that immediately leads us to the question of what other novels will I write?
I have a very good idea of the emotional spine of that next book - centred around dimension-hopping, mechanical girls - but I have very little practice writing my own plot to then follow. (PotF was, obviously, not my own plot at the start.)
I'm sure I could muddle through, but why when I could write a different story, released much like ASC, that helps me refine my plot-following skills!
So, once A Sister's Care is finished I will be diving into a world of Arthurian-political intrigue that starts with a plot to put a knight into her half-sister Princess' position of next in line.
But that's not going to hit paper for a little bit :)
I hope you'll stick with me, and I'm so grateful you did while I struggled so much!
(thankyou to my wife for having atrocious title suggestions)
“Shit…”
Margot’s voice fails to break the stifled silence in her cramped office. Her words are drained of their resignation by dusty tomes that drink up the character like ancient sponges while her volume is eaten away at by the piles of half-disintegrated newspapers that loathe anything newer than them. Texts in Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Welsh, and dozens more languages that either lost their names or were never given them to begin with begrudge the husky-accented English its place in the air for barely long enough for Margot to hear herself think.
The mage - or occultist - or crazed spiritualist, depending on how kind or arrogant she feels towards herself in any given moment - reaches out on instinct to bring a mug of tea closer to herself, hoping the presence of something warm in her stomach would quell the frustration. She discards it immediately after, remembering that she didn’t make anything fresh today and had grabbed one of the half-solidified mugs that litter the office with the same perpetuity as the newspapers that they leave ring stains on.
Margot breathes out, long and shallow, tantalisingly desperate for the emotional relief of a well-earned sigh.
“That’s really what it is, isn’t it?”
There’s a horrible temptation to reject the diagnosis. Say it’s something easier to fix, provide some placebo, send the girl on her way. Hope she works out some way to manage.
But no, that would only hurt her.
Magic is ramshackle at best and often callous otherwise, with the wrong person behind the metaphorical scalpel or scrawled sigil, but Margot cannot imagine living with herself after making a mistake with this case.
A stranger, come to her through word of mouth or some suspicious fluke, would be easy to fix even if everything else was the same. Margot’s done it before, for a girl with irrational anger and blood pressure approaching mundane danger, and could do it again for almost any demon that was carried to her door.
But Eloise, Margot’s sister, was the host. She brought one latched onto her sense of desire. And she wasted a lot of time before getting here.
Old, half-rotten desires that pushed Margot to run from home raise their ugly heads for the first time in years.
-🕯-
“A what?!” Elsie lags behind Margot as she’s lead from the crowded front room and through the apartment’s crowded hallway filled with too much eccentric life piled into mundane cardboard boxes. The thinner girl has a much harder time navigating it than Margot, since the space essentially grew around her habits.
“A demon.”
“That doesn’t explain anything!”
Margot sighs, practiced lines tumbling to hurried stops as composure threatens to fail her. An ember of disgust fights with a fluttery hope in her abdomen, and she feels even less of the occultist than she hopes on her bad days to be.
“It’s a thing with desires, that can become sentient given time, and dealing with it incorrectly can lead to disastrous consequences. Those are the aspects that influenced the Christian myth of demons.” She defaults to something that could be graciously called a definition, and feels like she’s hiding behind it. “You won’t sprout horns, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Margot opens a door at the back of the hallway and pulls Elsie into a room that feels like it hasn’t been touched in decades. The wallpaper had peeled into crumbling strands years before, only leaving strips of brittle glue on the plywood beneath as evidence, and there is an old, structurally compromised box in the corner filled with too many things to name and labelled in scratchy pen on the outside with items that it clearly hasn’t contained for a while. The only other thing in the room is a double mattress, bare and forgotten beneath a beaten-up window overlooking a wonderful view of the next building’s brick facade.
Elsie shivers as she gets pulled into the isolated room, not liking the sound of the professional detachment Margot is relying on for her tone.
“That sounds dangerous.” Elsie continues when Margot gives no reply. “How do we get it out?”
“That’s the life-defining question, isn’t it?” Margot’s professional demeanour betrays her as she falls back on it, turning the difficult situation into an appropriately wry grin. She twists away, rifling through the box for a capsule of a red-grey liquid, that she can’t remember if she made from cow’s blood or lamb’s, and a device that looks to Elsie suspiciously like a whiteboard marker broken apart and reconstructed by Frankenstein. “We have two choices.”
Margot talks as she straightens up and slots the cartridge in place, watching the feeding needle sink colour into the felt tip.
“We either starve it, or we overfeed it until it explodes.”
She checks the flow of the liquid before moving to the door frame, where she starts drawing a trail of symbols and words along the wood that Elsie would take years to work up the courage to try and decipher. Margot doesn’t think about the timer ticking down on Elsie’s freedom of choice.
“What are you doing?” The unexpected question suddenly makes Margot feel much more observed than before. The guilt grows hotter while she continues her scrawl.
“Making a threshold.” The stream of letters finishes its loop by crawling along a patch of missing carpet that Elsie just assumed was worn through with age. “Your demon is the thresh. And you, by extension. If I don’t do this your passenger will try and look for a host at some point.”
“Won’t it jump to you, then?”
Margot shakes her head and moves across the room to the window, purposefully not looking at Elsie much. She knows what she would find.
A thin form dressed in office friendly pants and blouse, buttons of her shirt undone down to the middle of her sternum and making obvious the mistake of a forgotten bra when, in her dishevelled state, Elsie threw on the closest clothes to her when Margot said she would help on the other side of the phone.
Her black hair, shiny and still behaving despite everything she’s going through, matches black eyes that are unsuited to the uncertainty that also runs anxious habits through Elsie’s limbs. Her curated athleticism fills out her hips and makes her tits obvious even as her nipples stand hard against rain-kissed fabric in the chilled room. Her lips are cracked and bitten with worry.
Margot doesn’t turn back because she would see the lust on her sister’s face, and the disgust flaring in its wake.
Everything she desired, handed to her on a silver platter many years too late.
Elsie watches Margot, while the mage starts on the window’s design, and notices more than she ever bargained for.
Margot quickly tucks her hair behind her ear, pulling the salt-and-pepper strands back from a set of eyes married to deep-purple bags of exhaustion, which look a little closer to bruises than pure tiredness. She stands with a hunch, and with a lazy analysis to her gaze that makes her perpetually appear to Elsie as if she’d just dropped an overstuffed hiking bag and inhaled half a pack of cigarettes.
She looks strong. Her height over Elsie always gave an aloof, gangly quality that she wasn’t truly able to inhabit, but now as more of her arm is exposed by the coiling, graceful, contradictory penwork she’s able to see how much her form has been filled out with muscle. Elsie works hard for her athleticism, and is proud of the results of her effort, but the way every muscle sits together in habit makes it seem like the sturdy layer coating Margot’s body is casually there - simply a result of her work.
It’s when a slip of stomach is exposed by Margot’s writing, sending a glance of stick-and-poke Greek and sturdy, warm muscle to her eyes, that Elsie wonders how much their parents were protecting themselves when they described Margot’s life as easy.
Or perhaps she just hasn’t told them.
Elsie straightens her gaze when she realises her sister is almost finished. She ignores the skin she shouldn’t have been drooling over and instead buries her stare in her sister’s grey-striped hair. It should have been jet black. Margot’s only thirty-three. Elsie refuses to believe her own will look that way in four years.
“No, it won’t jump to me. It’ll struggle to even notice me.”
Elsie slowly recalls what they were talking about, but decides to go further back.
“What does starving it look like?”
Margot breathlessly laughs, realising that a portion of her ability to compartmentalise might not be entirely self-taught. What a stupid family trait. “Two weeks to a month, inside the threshold, while not doing anything that could keep the demon hanging on longer.”
“Alone?”
“I’ll be on the other side of the door, but…” Margot turns to face her sister. “Yes, alone.”
“And, ‘not doing anything?’” Elsie is met by a flat expression that reads as ‘guess.’ She shakes off the feeling. “You mentioned disastrous consequences. What’s the ‘monkey’s paw?’”
Margot resist the urge to correct her sister, to say it’s only a possibility, but she knows Elsie’s demon is too settled in. She gives a straight answer.
“It will use up the part of your soul it’s latched onto like a fat reserve. The part will be desiccated and will struggle to ever recover.”
“So, what, I’ll be ace? That doesn’t sound too bad.” The relief drags a dismissing shrug from her even as she imagines a month of chastity with her new arousal. Elsie has to admit to herself she was imagining worse. That would be manageable.
Margot levels a stare at her sister with a calmness that displays the simmering concern roiling in her heart better than if she had tried to express it directly. Elsie realises it’s the lack of that omnipresent dark humour that sells it. It’s the way her eyes have stopped drooping.
She realises it’s warranted when Margot speaks.
“You will find it hard to feel any kind of desire. Eros, yes, but also storge, agape, pragma- Fuck, even philautia.” Margot stops when she realises Elsie doesn’t recognise the terms. She sighs, mumbles to herself about being too much of an expert to notice, and then switches track. “Artistic desire, desire for friendship - philautia is self-love. If that goes it’ll mean I’ll have to babysit you until you care enough about your own well-being to eat without being told, and to look both ways before you walk into oncoming traffic. I hope its roots in you aren’t that deep… But we’re running out of time.”
Margot closed herself off years ago, a decade and a half by rough count, right after she discovered this supernatural talent and expertise that was on full display in front of Elsie. But in this moment Elsie sees through a crack towards the true Margot. The image of fractured stained glass in a church long forgotten is difficult to shake.
“That’s… bad.” Elsie’s eloquence surprises even herself. But it seems to drag a tiny chuckle out of Margot, and the illusion fades. She’s back to her usual, shut-away self. Elsie hides a dry swallow. “What’s the alternative?”
“You let the desires it’s putting in your mind run free. You let it gorge itself until it bursts, like a mosquito with eyes bigger than its blood-sack. It shouldn’t take more than a day, if we’re lucky.”
“And the consequences?”
“Everything dimmed I mentioned before is now overly reactive and sensitive. You’ll feel the same as you do now, if not more, for a few days. But it will be you deciding to feel it, not the demon. Which will be better.”
“It turns me into a slut.”
The utilitarian tone sits light as a lead balloon in the room, filled to bursting with distress-ridden hydrogen waiting to leak into the room and send them both mad. Elsie feels like the building is struggling to keep its feet as much as she is.
All Margot manages to say is, “…Temporarily.”
Elsie’s breathing is harsh. Her voice feels ragged and insubordinate, the torn edges of words lodging themselves in her throat alongside the promise of bile surging up from her stomach. What her sister is suggesting butts heads against her desire to pop out the other side recognisable, but it seems like that wasn’t really an option anyway once the blasted thing chose her to host its disgusting fantasies. But then again, the scenes felt so familiar, perhaps it was just breaking down the walls Elsie had relied on all her life.
She’s sure that someone else in her place would be able to pick the starvation option, but something deep inside the untouched parts of her soul knows what she’s going to choose. The experience is nauseating.
Margot isn’t faring much better on the opposite side of the room. The hourglass in her mind is emptying fast, and the feeling she’d eventually need to choose for Elsie settles more concrete in her heart. The last thing to choose is which technique - to force Elsie into maddening isolation where only her self control could secure an outcome, or to force herself onto Elsie, to touch her in a way she should have never wanted. To trap her, or take advantage of her.
She realises she’s just buying time in the hope that the selfish part loses.
Elsie speaks, unsteady for the first time since that improvised phone call, “What else do you need to prepare?”
Margot puts her pen down to inspect her work around the window and door, finding herself satisfied in the design’s security, before responding.
“Not much - simple things. Just to grab some water and sheets for the room, and cut a flap into the door so I can get you food if you choose to starve it out.” Margot turns back to Elsie and finds herself staring down eyes that should have been black but were now some shade of deep brown. “You’re not choosing to starve it, are you?”
“No,” Comes the brief, solid response - spoken in a voice rotted out from the middle by lust and obsession - before Elsie closes the gap between the two of them.
Giving in to the cloud of arousal that has been weighing down her mind feels so good to Elsie. It paints Margot in such vivid colours, draws her attention to the way she braces for impact - reactive and agitated at first, before overruled by a cocktail of relief that softens her arms and helps Elsie lean the half-foot of height difference up to her face.
They both react badly to the kiss. It’s rushed yet intense, and awkward in deciding who will lead. Elsie finds the texture of her sister’s tongue exhilarating and unpleasant in equal parts, her stomach immediately fighting the instinct to throw up as her demon chews happily away at the weak foundation of that disgust. She presses herself further into Margot’s mouth while her sister struggles to keep track of the wandering hands finding the gap between her shirt and her jeans. The question going through both their minds is whether Elsie would want this even without the demon.
Neither are sure.
While Elsie’s tongue learns the tricks to making its home within Margot’s mouth she runs her hands along the skin of Margot’s stomach, her fingers playing with the texture of soft skin interrupted by corded muscle and knotted scars. They plant lines of heat across Margot’s abs, teasing at sensitive spots for bare moments before moving on, each motion ravenously hungry for every seemingly insignificant part of her, but still eager to learn the whole. It makes Margot feel analysed, studied, segmented for the benefit of some soon-to-be expert.
They lose track of time in the kiss, until Margot feels the hands brush under the strap of her bra and is almost shoved backwards into the wall as Elsie’s slow and deliberate pace is overruled by a need to dart upwards and take Margot’s tits in her hands. The rough handling - almost starving in its intensity - draws a strained gasp from her lungs. She’s so sensitive, and they’ve barely been touched since she got them. Her magical meddling in the effects of her HRT are the obvious culprit, but knowing the owner of the hands treating her like a panacea could also be the reason she’s reacting so intensely.
Margot struggles to catch her breath against Elsie’s ravenous tongue while the buds of her breast growth are squeezed, rolled between needy fingers, or crushed against her ribs in a way that made her feel like she would explode before the demon does. But, unlike it, she has an easy outlet.
Elsie has created a warmth in her that sinks like dense air down from her chest and towards her groin, where it flares bright and impossible to ignore. She feels her cock growing, straining against her jeans and throbbing with every hungry swipe of Eloise’s tongue. She twitches and feels the urge to beg before she loses all control.
Margot places her hands around Elsie’s waist and drags her the final little distance that was still held between them. The pressure of hands against her causes a shaky moan to slip out of Elsie, and the pose she’s forced into causes her to be almost bent backwards by the possessive posture of Margot above her. But the thing that takes her breath away, which is so incredibly obvious even as her tongue is forced back into her mouth to make room for her sister’s diving towards the back of her throat, is the sheer size of the stiffening dick that’s now pressing into her stomach.
Elsie’s hand drops without thought. Her right palm clutches the shape Margot is making through the jeans while her left still toys with the nipple trapped between forefinger and thumb. She feels Margot’s body temperature rise a fraction of a degree, and lets out a little giggle when Margot growls down at her through the kiss. She presses down a little harder against her sister’s cock and gasps in joy as it twitches in her grasp.
Her sister’s cock.
The thought resurfaces, bringing full clarity of the situation with it, but Elsie’s hand doesn’t stop. It doesn’t even let up. If anything, she opens her mouth wider, groaning for more of Margot’s tongue, and clamps her hand down tighter.
None of that original disgust remains. It’s been eaten away and fragmented, the shards dissolving away before her soul’s eyes. The only thing left intact is the taboo, which Elsie finds incredibly arousing. She undoes her sister’s jeans and slips her fingers beneath her underwear to better hold her cock, seeking out the clarity of warmth that comes from the direct contact.
Elsie pulls away from the kiss as she grasps the intensely warm length of Margot’s girldick against the flat of her palm, taking in both the stunning width of her, and the artistic combination of the tuft of dark pubes and the sight of panties made of a rich purple, transparent lace. They’re deeply stained with precum and clearly the right size for Margot’s hips but not nearly enough for what she’s tried to shove into them, but the sight is so much more endearing than arousing - despite how wet it’s made Elsie - that she looks back up at her sister with something she might try and convince herself isn’t love later.
What Margot sees, with her cock and tit clamped in the gentle hands, is a look she tries to convince herself isn’t anything close to affection set into eyes that have changed once again. The rusty, damp red soil of the Australian desert after intense summer rains forms a well around irises blown too wide. She’s being stared at with obsession that sits too similar to the shade of hate that a previous demon looked at her with. She made herself so despicable for that girl - how desirable would she make herself for her sister?
What turns her sister on?
The thought is stunning in its clarity, sharp and keening in her mind like a razor catching the wind - she needs to know, and Elsie is far too preoccupied to stop and answer. The only way Margot will find out is through experience. And by the sound she made when Margot dragged her closer…
Elsie practically jumps out of her skin when Margot’s hand darts up to the back of her neck, and then struggles to not collapse to the ground in eager anticipation when she starts being forced to her knees. Her legs turn to jelly as she finds herself on the floor, suddenly keenly aware she wouldn’t be able to pull herself up if she wanted to, and barely stops herself from shoving her hand between her crotch and the floor to have something to grind against. Not for any presence of self control, but because she’s too distracted by the cock she’s slipping out the side of the gorgeously inadequate lingerie.
Elsie swallows hard. She’s surprised by the extent she’s drooling at the sight of her sister still stiffening in front of her, but desire to try and succeed is overruling any other thought in her mind.
Margot makes a high-pitched grunt as she’s roughly handled and watches her tip be guided to her sister’s mouth. Elsie’s tongue is lolling out, barely noticing as drops of saliva slip from her wide-parted lips down into the gap in her blouse and onto the skin of her tits.
When her lips touch the tip she’s shocked by the softness of her sister. Experience told her Margot’s foreskin would be almost rough, a practical layer of skin, but as the hair-trigger nerves of her lips find contact she’s met with delightful sensitivity and a joyful give - even with the stiffness beneath. Elsie kisses it deeply, blissfully half-aware of the hand that has woven its way into her hair, and revels in the taste. It’s salty and unique, wet already from the precum that hadn’t been properly absorbed by the panties that are now haphazardly tugged to the side, and so full of arousal. Elsie darts her tongue towards the tip to get a better taste, and her eyelids flutter shut at the sudden intensity-
Eloise yelps out a moan as she’s tugged back hard by her hair, but Margot keeps a sturdy grip, calling out to her to get her lust-addled mind to focus.
“Elsie? Elsie! Keep your eyes open. Look at me when you can.” Margot makes sure the order has been absorbed by her sister, knowing she needs to keep track of the effects of the demon, but is surprised when she watches in real time as her iris’ hue takes a step towards half-dried blood. She drops deeper into her voice’s gravel as she speaks, “Oh, you like it that way, huh?”
Elsie barely manages to nod, her hair bundled so tight she can barely move her head for Margot’s iron grip.
“Good,” The occultist is no stranger to putting on a show, but this one fits her like a glove. “Now, I’m going to set the pace. You go any slower or faster, or forget to show me your eyes for too long, and I’m correcting you again.”
She demonstrates with another tug of hair that makes Elsie whimper. She’s staring up at her sister with wild abandon.
Without another word Margot drags her sister back to her girlcock and purposefully waits for a moment of hesitation from Elsie that never comes. She was hoping that her sister would wait for some kind of signal, like Margot’s hand pulling her forward, to indicate some kind of pace which would allow Margot to ‘punish’ her for being to slow, but the moment Elsie’s lips meet her tip again almost a third of her shaft disappears into the girl’s mouth.
The warmth is immediate and wonderful. The texture of an adventurous tongue against the base of her too-ignored cock is intense and relieving. The sound of a surprised half-gag at so small a portion of her length is familiar and sadistically inviting.
Margot lets out a happy groan and revels in the sensation wrapping around the end of her cock, but still remembers that she has a job. She puts slight pressure into Elsie’s hair and guides her into the kind of tempo she expects Elsie will struggle with, intending to selfishly speed up to the tempo that will work best to make her cum.
Elsie focuses hard on opening herself up for her sister, and struggles to keep herself under control as the taboo runs an addicting shiver of lightning up her spine whenever she remembers who exactly she’s pleasuring. She takes the cock as well as she can, despite the girth that stretches the back of her throat. She fills her mouth with saliva and gives just enough resistance to give Margot something to push against when her hand guides Elsie along the shaft. She enjoys every small or big noise that comes out her sister as she works the her throat as hard as she can manage.
Every man Elsie has pleasured this way has been unaware or inconsiderate to what she could get out of the act, which quite often turned out to be nothing, but with Margot she finds herself teased and taunted further and further onto the enormous length of her cock by the tight bundle of hair that sends sparks of pain into the pleasure centre of her brain whenever she tries to pull back. She’s eased further and further onto it with tiny, encouraging tugs, like she’s being told that no, she can take it, and she will. It’s a form of arousal she’s never experienced before, and combined with that brutal, cruel order to keep making eye contact even while she’s struggling to even breathe, Elsie finds herself wet enough to feel it crawling down the inside of her thighs.
Margot watches as, after a particularly rough half-choke that Margot tried to extend by not pulling out, her sister drops her hands from their useless position propped against Margot’s thighs to run friction against the outside of her pants. Elsie grips her cunt through the fabric, desperate for any relief, but keeps her focus on swallowing her sister’s cock and attempting eye contact.
Irises the colour of freshly spilled blood set in a face coated in overflowing spit and a deep flush of arousal stare up at a woman churning her mind through analytical study of Eloise’s every desire for the best way to drag them forward and overwhelm them. The physical pleasure is there too, fused with the expression, but being treated as a puzzle that is rapidly unravelling makes Elsie’s body clench in impatient anticipation.
She tries to shove herself forward, to suck Margot’s cock far deeper than she’s managed yet, but is jolted to a stop with an aroused whine by Margot’s hands. Her head is tilted back to let her sister’s other hand join the one threatening to pull several hairs free. She’s forced to look up at Margot. Her hole clenches around nothing as her hand continues to struggle to do anything to make herself feel good.
“Stop.” Margot’s order runs through her body like hot iron. Elsie stops, ready to follow any other task given to her. Margot smirks down at her. Her cock twitches. “Undo your belt. Slide your pants down. Panties too… Good girl. Good sister.” Elsie twitches at the title. “Now continue, while fingering yourself.”
Elsie rushes her hand to her exposed cunt as her tongue lands on the skin of her sister’s cock. Her sense of touch meets slickness, both from her previous work taking the pulsing, hard girldick into her mouth and from being so aroused by the demon in her head and the ludicrous acts she’s using it as an excuse to want. Her fingers slide in so easily, and the immediate pleasure relaxes her throat or distracts her mind enough that she slides all the way to the base of Margot’s shaft.
“Whoah! Elsie! Gods-”
Margot almost buckles as the addicting warmth of Elsie’s mouth suddenly finds itself wrapped entirely around her cock. She’s stunned my the immediacy of it, and then rams herself back into the girl’s mouth before realising the pleasure of pulling out was so intense that she whited out for most of it.
Elsie chokes around Margot’s girlcock when a gag and a breath try to happen at the same time. She clamps down around her fingers, digging in her cunt for that magic spot she knows so well but can’t quite focus on finding, and finds herself growing wetter and wetter with every thrust of Margot’s hips. Or, was it Margot’s hands pulling her head back and forth?
And all the time she struggles to keep showing Margot eyes that are twisting towards a passionate scarlet.
Another urge rushes through Elsie’s throat as this time she tries to swallow around Margot’s length. She sends a surging pressure down the near-half of Margot’s cock that’s finding itself habitually shoved into Elsie tight throat and causes a wave of pleasure that darts up Margot’s spine ending in a vast spike of pleasure as the travelling sensation reaches her tip.
Margot groans in pleasure, unable to focus enough to warn Elsie of how good that made her feel, and finds herself suddenly unable to pull out any more than an inch from Elsie’s throat. She follows an instinct, deep and needy, that has decided that she will cum in this tight, warm hole, and it will not let her pull out until she does.
She gives in. She holds Elsie in place and practically grids herself into her sister’s throat, letting the slight movement against the muscle still uncontrollably jittering from too many instincts do the remainder of the work. She listens hard, for any sign of Elsie properly losing her breath, but the pornographic choking noises that flood Margot’s ears only makes the possibility of having to pull out harder to face.
Elsie furiously crushes her fingers into her cunt. She ignores the screaming of her lungs and submerges herself into the desire coursing through every vein in her body. She feels herself thrum with it, feels the walls of her hole ache with it, and she does everything in her power to fulfil it.
She opens her throat as much as she can. She’s ready to accept Margot’s cum. Ready to taste how disgusting and degrading it will be. Ready to find it arousing.
Margot grabs the back of Elsie’s head and yanks her as far onto her cock as the poor, fiend-ridden girl can manage, and cums harder than she’s managed in years down her sister’s throat.
Her girlcock throbs as she cums, pressing out even wider against Elsie’s taut throat, and forcing a shock into the girl’s body that threatens in equal parts to become a gag or a moan.
A warmth floods Elsie’s stomach in a few bursts, making her feel sated in a minuscule way, before a gag wins out and half the girlcum is sent surging up past Margot’s cock to coat the back of Elsie’s throat, surprising her with the taste.
Its salty profile runs over her tastebuds and disguises a layer of gorgeous sweetness and a unique quality to the form that Elsie could spend months parsing and never find a more accurate name for it other than ‘Margot.’ It tastes like a gift, and a jigsaw piece that had been missing from every other attempt to enjoy oral.
Elsie feels another few pumps of girlcum fill her throat before, without any warning, the hands holding her up let go.
Elsie falls backwards in a rushed slump, her legs unable to support her until she’s much closer to the ground, which leads to a rushed, uneven, and hard swallow as she finally stops. A breath rakes past the clinging cum that refused the demands of her bobbing throat and bruised palate and fills her brain with oxygen. Something in her that hungers for more suffocates the fear of drowning in girlcum.
It also belatedly realises that she came around her own fingers somewhere in the whole process. The memories are fresh and hot, indistinguishable from emotional static, but the feeling of her slick clinging to her hand as she shakily extracts them is unmistakable. Her cunt feels callously used and suddenly empty. The hunger latches onto that feeling.
Margot barely gives her sister any time to recover before she crouches down and grabs Elsie’s jaw with all her hand’s strength and forcefully tilts Elsie’s head up to make eye contact easier. Saturated orange, like an established coal glimmering in a sandstone sconce, attempt to stare back at her but keep rolling back into the girl’s skull as aftershocks rock through her body.
Margot leaves her to struggle with the pleasure as she strips herself down to nothing and exposing dozens of protective strings of glyphs and wards tattooed over vital organs - some repeating others where the originals have been broken by old injuries or faded from clarity with time.
The occultist then turns to her still-shaking, still-spaced sister and drags the girl over to the bare mattress. She fights the subconscious motions of the lust-addled girl in order to strip her of her ruined, soaked clothing, and waits for some semblance of awareness to come back to the girl.
When there is only the gentle chill of the room and Margot’s skin contact Elsie is able to focus her mind again to find herself splayed on her back with her sister towering above her, sporting a wry grin of guilty enjoyment. The woman’s cock is resting on Elsie’s stomach, occupying itself with occasional throbs and the task of spreading a thin layer of precum against the soft patch of skin just under her belly button.
Elsie is shocked that she managed to fit it all inside her throat, but is too fascinated by the fact to question whether it’ll fit inside her cunt as well to stop her body from immediately begging for it.
Margot laughs and slides her hips back to props her tip against her sister’s entrance, enjoying the hiccupy gasp sparked in the girl by the simple contact, and begins to press herself in slowly.
Elsie feels her entrance forced open faster than she’s ever managed by Margot’s warmth, and the intensity of the stretch is eased both by her overflowing arousal and the locked-away masochistic desires that her demon has managed to set loose inside her mind.
The room is filled by the combined noise of Margot’s groan of pleasured focus and Elsie’s squeal of increasingly anticipatory apprehension. It’s a wonderful noise and a beautiful contrast in her mind as she takes more and more of her sister’s painfully large girlcock, addicted to the wait for the feeling of Margot’s hips making contact with hers, and the difficult balance of opening herself up enough to make it happen.
Margot forces herself in with a single, smooth thrust which Elsie finds every inch of painted in her mind in dazzling detail. The way Margot gently gets wider after her tip, and curls slightly towards herself along the entire length, and is so hard there isn’t a moment of give along her entire length, stuns her. Eloise feels spread open in every moment, filled in search of her breaking point, but still that point is further ahead than she predicts, so the process keeps going.
Breathing gets harder with the intensity of the feeling, and her hands find something - anything - to grip onto while it happens, so it’s a sharp-clawed and lightheaded flinch that happens when she feels the tip of Margot’s cock press fiercely against her cervix before pushing hard into it for a few more inches before Margot bottoms out inside the girl, stretching Elsie’s cunt to its limit.
A breathless scream tumbles down the mountain of intensity towards a parseable phrase as Elsie feels the muscles of her hole ache in time with her heartbeat before easing and relaxing in tiny increments around the enormous invasion of her sister’s dick.
“Oh God, oh- God-”
“Wow, you managed to- Fuck, haaaah…” Margot’s voice curls between the small space between them with a saturated bliss before being interrupted by a hoarse moan, “-to take it all… I couldn’t help myself, Elsie, sis, it’s like you were… made for me.”
Elsie feels herself clench around her sister as the taboo is invoked again, and finds herself unable to control her grinding hips afterwards. She begs, with her body and soul, to be fucked. She stares out at Margot with amber flecked with lost gold and bronze.
The relief Elsie feels as Margot pulls her hips away and releases the pressure on Elsie’s cervix is overwritten as the slick friction against the occultists’ cock replaces one storm of static with another. ‘Filled to bursting’ is replaced with the feral pleasure of sex: nerves with an open highway to the centre of her brain are flooded with comfortable wool; the vacuous retreat triggers pattern recognition for the thrust back in.
The pull out is slow, like before, but the thrust back in is fast and desperate.
Elsie gasps as Margot spreads her apart like a javelin of warmth, the passing speed sparking the wool running her nerves into a coursing river of fire, the source of which erupts like a volcano to coat her soul in fire as Margot’s cock rams into her cervix with enough force to send nebulae spinning in Elsie’s vision.
Coherency leaves her further as her sister keeps fucking her. The strength of the thrusts only gets stronger, and the pace only gets faster, so Elsie decides to not keep track and simply enjoy what’s happening to her.
Margot on the other hand is too amazed to let her attention slip.
She’s never met anyone able to take her this easily, and with so little preparation. It’s always been brave partners and ample stretching - which led to enjoyable sex, of course, but it was a struggle. She’s always wished to simply be able to enjoy her size. And then along comes her sister, forced to embody desires that have been locked away in Margot’s heart for years, taking her ludicrously easily.
She started slow, expecting some harsh resistance to stop her, but watched in amazement as her sister’s cunt swallowed every inch Margot was brave enough to give. And now she isn’t able to control herself.
She’s never had anyone take her like this: she’s going to make the most of it.
None of that is to say it’s a cakewalk to fuck Elsie. The girl is tight, fiercely hot, and clamped around Margot’s cock with intent, so pulling out or fucking back into the girl’s cunt takes all of Margot’s strength. Which is another reason she’s so amazed. But, as she speeds up and vigorously encourages the muscles to loosen, the fascination takes a back seat to pleasure.
She pulls herself down to keep her face barely an inch away from her sister’s, feeling as the pattern of her thrusts and Elsie’s breathing go in and out of sync, watching her face as the patterns course rough and desperate expressions across Elsie’s face when they’re conflicting.
Sometimes Elsie is able to look back, shining an electric gold up at Margot, but often the difficulty breathing, the moans running their course through her body, or the kissing get in the way of her maintaining that crucial eye contact. Margot doesn’t really care, there will be other ways to tell when it works, and she’s too focused on fucking Elsie to try to predict it any more. All she knows is it’s going very quickly.
The emotions painting Elsie’s face do something wild to Margot. They’re hungry, masochistic, and delirious. Margot finds them intoxicating, or addicting. She does everything she can to make more of those emotions.
The occultist, much taller and stronger than her sister, uses her body’s advantage to further trap Elsie and stop the quivering and squirming. She curls around to her sister’s neck and runs a tongue down the line of sensitive nerves placed just above the vein in Elsie’s neck, and enjoys the hitch of breath that escapes the girl as she goes.
She toys with the play of sharp teeth against her sister’s delicate skin, and groans deep as Elsie suddenly gets tighter and more active beneath her in response to the tiny, nipping bites she used to test the water.
One of the girl’s hands finds the back of Margot’s neck, a limb filled with shaky digits and distracted arousal, but she pulls on the back of her sister in a wordless beg or half-conscious gift of permission.
Margot wraps herself further around Elsie, and pulls more muscle into her mouth. The girl whines as the occultist warms her jaw - and her bravery - up, but her arousal beats them to the punch and she finds herself sinking her teeth into Elsie’s muscle.
Hot and comfortable waves of chaotic pleasure are scoured away by the sharp and distinct static of the pain in Elsie’s shoulder. Harsh breath shears through a constricting throat as the urge to scream is interrupted by the sheer weight of the pain rushing straight into her brain. It’s only when the teeth start to loosen that the sound escapes the girl’s throat. It’s a release that’s immediately followed by an orgasm.
The moment seems to last forever, but Elsie recovers from a roiling boil to an infinite simmer as soon as Margot’s teeth pull away from the heavy indents and developing bruise and replace the focus with a deep and hungry kiss.
Margot feels her tempo slow as she digs her tongue deep into Elsie’s mouth, and decides to lean into it, grounding herself in a gentler, more-loving pace as she allows the endorphins in her body run through her addled brain. But she certainly doesn’t stop - Eloise feels too good for that.
The realisation is very delayed. It’s only once the sisters break the kiss to catch up on breath and Margot pulls away far enough to focus on Elsie’s eyes that she fully works it out.
She almost pants the words, “I think I came in you…”
Elsie’s immediate reaction is to clamp around Margot’s cock again and to open both her eyes and mouth in shock, which gives Margot a very clear view as Elsie’s irises shed all their saturation in a gradient from incandescent gold to near-blinding off-white.
“W-what? You did?”
“Yeah…” Margot nods as she keeps her hips moving, letting the exertion bleed out of her body but keeping Elsie warmed up enough to keep going for as long as they need to kill the demon.
“Well,” Elsie bites her lip as she tries to tame her shifting hips, attempting to return some semblance of maintainable speed to their fucking before it inevitably goes off the rails again. She also finds it satisfying, to some newly exposed part of her heart, to see Margot’s face flush with ebbing pleasure. “At least there’s no chance-”
Eloise cuts off her sentence as she sees the embarrassed expression creeping over Margot’s face. It’s weirdly proud, as well.
“About that…” Margot shies her eyes away. If she was watching she would have seen the tone of Elsie’s eyes grow true white, but instead she stops her hips and pulls her weight ever so slightly off of Elsie.
“Tell me.” Elsie’s words are shaken by lust.
“I’m the world-leading expert in magically-enhanced hormone replacement therapy.” The words feel practised, like she’s been looking forward to an opportunity to say them for a while, but lilted in an awkward way given the situation. She says it to the wall. “Which is to say… The fusion with internal perception heavily affects what impacts are exaggerated or- diminished… And I get really, really turned on at the idea of breeding someone.”
There’s a pop beneath the layer of perception Margot used to think was the only one. It’s like a sneeze, or the clearing of a pressurised ear, or a submarine succumbing to the reality of never again returning to the surface in one very brief moment. The energy fills the room with a potent scent that sits tangential from roses, blood, and lust, waiting for one of the thresholds to be broken so the space can be aired out. But it’s clear what has happened.
Margot looks back at her sister and finds the family’s dim, black irises sitting in an expression of intense arousal and taboo desire.
Elsie is biting her lip very hard, staring down at herself and clearly thinking about the risk they just took. When she looks up at Margot, she hopes beyond hope that the question in her heart is clear and obvious to her sister, but when nothing happens for a few moments she masters her shaky voice and whispers.
Find the full story here, without coloured text or the previous chapter
A big thankyou to Symphony for commissioning this chapter <3
Porco Rosso plays in the background. You vaguely remember putting it on: the food caught up to you too fast and you fell asleep on the couch lounging in well-fed comfort. You missed a good chunk of the story: they’re travelling back to the Adriatic, experiencing the calm before the storm of the movie. Nowhere near anything loud enough to wake you. Enough to lull you back to sleep if you want.
But the hands running gently over your face and through your hair are so calming, so nice, that you want to be more awake to experience them better.
You’re lying across the couch and curled up into your sister, warm fabric and the soft pillow of Sofia beneath you are trying to seduce you back to sleep as well, but you’re too excited by her closeness to let yourself drop again.
You all but beg for more, and melt into her calm attention as her fingers massage into you. They bleed away your anxiety like its physical stress, drawn out from your jaw muscles and cheeks like a bad oxytocin hangover, left by who knows which happy emotion currently ricocheting around your skull.
She kneads awareness and wakefulness into you. Your sleep makes one last valiant defence as it clings an arm around her like you do when you’ve slept together, but it is eventually overrun, and you wake up fully.
A giggle bundles its way up your body and reaches your mouth at the same time as an unbidden but well-deserved smile.
Sof looks down at you as she joins in the laughter. There’s no real need to clarify what you’re both thinking of, it’s very obvious.
You’re being held by your sister! As your lover!
“Why did it take us so long?” Your voice sounds musical and dozy, even to you. “It feels so natural…”
“Like it should have happened years ago?” Sof echoes your thought so naturally.
“Yeah.” It’s a bittersweet smile you send up at her, a cleansing contrast to the saccharine high you’ve been floating on for the past half-day. She gives a very thoughtful one back.
“There’s plenty of reasons. A chunk of them actually good…”
“But why did we ever care about them?”
“You have an anxiety disorder, Ivy.”
You sputter, “Wah! Yeah but…” You drift off into a mumbling growl that you tend to when Sofia makes a very good point. The purr of annoyance chases off the last of your distracted mind and leaves you fully aware of Sofia.
“I don’t blame you for that. And I had a lot of trauma around transitioning… I already had everyone back home talking about me, I didn’t want another chunk of small town gossip to spread around if I told you… And then uni friends took a lot of focus away.”
You nod, letting her continue.
“We both had things in the way. And you were too important for me to lose at any point. So… I was just never brave enough.”
“Neither was I.” You grip her closer as she trails a much softer, more anxious hand through your hair. “I’m still worried about what will happen to you if people find out.”
“Yeah, I know. I don’t think you have to worry too much, but I understand.”
“Can you…” You can feel the anxiety spilling, reacting to the attention on it like an interrogation lamp. You take a steadying breath that’s a lot more effective than usual, pressed up against Sofia’s side. “Can you help me with the anxiety?”
“What’s it saying, specifically?”
“That everyone will abandon you when it gets out.”
“That’s not true.” So matter-of-fact, so calming. It works so well, and she’s not done yet. “I know pretty well that Madison wouldn’t leave, and I’m not really in the circles of queers who will throw each other under the bus to seem ‘acceptable.’”
There’s a rant behind her eyes she’s not letting spill out. You’re grateful to keep the focus on the both of you for the moment. And on your anxiety.
“How are you so sure?” She is sure, and that helps, but if you have some logic you can repeat in your head you can stop the fear from getting worse while she’s not around.
Sofia laughs, almost a cackle. “I think it’ll be okay. I’ll show you her tumblr eventually.”
“That’s ominous.”
“There’s more on there than I think I should share about her, but she’s very outspoken about incest.”
“…Does she know?”
Sof makes eye contact with you, tilting her head in that quizzical, canine way she does every so often. You find it adorable and endearing.
“About us? No. About me being in love with you?” She hesitates, thinking hard. When she speaks again she takes it slow and carefully. “…I’ve never said but she has a pretty strong imagination, and Flare’s pretty perceptive. Maybe she’s worked it out.”
“Flare? Her partner?”
Your sister’s look intensifies as she tilts her head further. “Did you forget?”
Forget what? “Maybe?”
“Madison is plural. I told you ages ago I’m pretty sure.”
“Oh, then yeah, I definitely forgot.”
Sof smiles at you and relaxes, “All good. Yeah, Madison is both, Mads and Flare are alters. They consider themselves twins.” She gives the last sentence a flirtatious note that sells it to you.
“Ah… And that’s why they’re going to be so supportive.”
“Yeah, but ‘she.’ She often doesn’t like how separating plural pronouns feel.” You let out a curious noise at the correction, finding it interesting but not really relevant right now. Sofia makes her point again, knowing you have more context now. “I’m not going to be alone if it gets out, and we’re not going to share it that openly. It’ll be okay.”
“Are we going to share it at all?”
Sofia looks away, staring off into the distance at a blank bit of wall above the TV. She does this when she’s focusing, stuck on something difficult she needs to chew on; writer’s block, or writer’s mental first draft; a story someone’s telling her which she’s imagining in way too vivid detail; a difficult puzzle.
“I want to tell mum and dad,” Your voice surprises Sofia, and shocks even you a little, “But not right away! I don’t think, just… eventually.”
“Okay.” Her voice is smooth and assured. Calming. “I have to tell Madison eventually if I want to continue getting close to her.”
You nod. “I think it would be nice being seen as a couple sometimes… Despite how much work it’ll be.”
“We could move to another city, something actually on the coast,” Sof jokes, and scratches the top of your head. “But you’ve got too much research lined up here, and we’ve got too many friends.”
The few moments of silence between you are warmed by the sound of the movie in the background and the heartbeat travelling through Sofia’s torso and towards your ear.
You’ve loved her so long, and been living alone together for almost four years. This almost feels normal for you, wrapped up in her arms and seeking skinship. But the way you blushed and grinned when the worker at the takeaway place in your building referred to you as Sofia’s girlfriend… The way she’s holding you a fraction closer than normal… It all feels like a breath of fresh air after weeks trapped inside. When did it start? How long had it been like this?
“When did you know?”
“Oh, uh…” Sof immediately moves to answer our question, and struggles to keep her thoughts caught up to her tongue. “I should probably clear something up. Remember how I explained how I worked out I was trans?”
You nod up at her, seeing her eyes glitter with the reflected movie as she makes eye contact. She looks a little embarrassed, and a little lovestruck. She has your full attention, but you’re not sure why she’s bringing it up.
“Well,” She continues, “I only found that discord server and those girls in search of… permission? Permission to transition. Permission to be brave. I went on that search because of you.” She takes a breath, settling herself. “I started to crack when you came out as a lesbian.”
You’re starting to pick up on where she’s heading, but you’re happy to give her the space to weave the story the way she wants. It still surprises you to hear.
It wasn’t exactly a smooth moment for you. First year of high school, thirteen and unsure of yourself, you became fascinated with a girl you were taking advance classes with. She was quiet, and kind, and surprised you with a very loud reaction when you asked her out. Middle of lunch, middle of school, there was no way other people didn’t hear. And with your tiny town’s rumour mill, which doesn’t spare the school, it was heard by everyone else by the end of the week.
Sof heard it through the rumours first, came to you straight after, asked if you were okay.
“That’s a lot earlier than I thought…”
She shrugs, “Yeah, but I wasn’t too worried. I wasn’t too dysphoric then. When it really started was a couple years later, at Lily’s eighteenth - Edie’s sister. I was so preoccupied catching up with Lily, stopping my old crush flaring back, that I lost track of you. You’re so extroverted I thought you’d just pop up eventually, but it took so long I went looking. Found you almost draped over Edie and got very intensely envious.”
Edie was soft, and had been teasing you for months in a way that kept egging you on to be more, say more, think more. You’re still not sure exactly what was happening between you, you suspect she was working herself out through you, but she didn’t point and laugh at your sexuality. She pointed and beckoned, in fact.
“You were looking at her with so much adoration and this little… habitual spark of desire. Your hands were so casually across her shoulders but I could see how energetic your mind was. Your eyes wouldn’t sit still. And you held her closer than you ever held me. I couldn’t stand it, and didn’t know why, so I left the party pretty soon after.”
Sof going home, trusting you to get back on your own, was the push Edie needed to ask you to fuck her that night. Your relationship never went much further emotionally, and only barely more physically, but you still appreciate her for the time you spent together. Small town relationships and all that…
“The whole time you were together,” Sofia starts, some shade of that old envy coming back in her voice, “I was so confused about why I wanted you to look at me like that. Because it wasn’t purely romantic or sexual - I wanted the lesbian part of it too. I wanted to be seen by you as both a woman, and as someone attractive.”
“That must have been confusing,” Your kind words take up the slack. Sofia calms a little.
“It was certainly a way to realise… But my gender identity kinda took the focus after that. I couldn’t tell you I loved you, not least because of how I looked to myself, but yeah… I realised I was a woman because I wanted to be someone you could love.”
She ends lamely, her voice trailing off. You respond the only way that feels right.
“I do love you.”
She wiggles with joy beneath you and smiles very wide. The spell of her cloying memories is fully broken even before she responds, “I love you too.”
You decide to take a moment to think. You stare off into space, just like Sofia, to help yourself concentrate. Did you pick that up from her, or did you learn it from the same person? Doesn’t matter. The important thing to find out right now is when it started for you. Sof didn’t ask back, but you want to narrow it down for her anyway.
If your sister had told you when she came out, you’re not sure you would have taken her seriously. There might have been some pretty unkind thoughts. But that changed, and changed dramatically. For a long time you’ve known that you’ve loved her for a long time, so it was already going strong before you barely noticed. Which doesn’t leave much of a window.
“Moving with me…” You start slow and soft, hoping to give the words weight and yourself time to feel the breadth of the emotions that are carried with them. “Moving with me was probably when it started, subconsciously. It meant a lot. It meant so much. I was so grateful to have you as I started uni. An important part of home I didn’t have to leave behind…”
The thoughts have started, no way to stop them now.
“I had seen you transition, find your aesthetic and your hobbies, but you really flourished once you had a space of your own. You went crazy decorating your room, spent so much time in all the new op-shops we had access to, found friends who could better relate to you than I could at the time… And at the end of the day you still chose me.”
“I was in love with you, what else would I do?” Her smile is halfway proud, finally able to accept her feelings.
“But you shared that love with me, in the ways you could. And that was really endearing.” You pause to lift yourself up the cuddle a little so you can plant a kiss on your gorgeous, overthinking-prone sister’s lips. She melts into it easily and holds you the way you’ve yearned for and have gotten so much yet nowhere near enough of today. You break the kiss and get comfortable again. “When I started to notice was, I think, when you took on cooking as a task for you to mostly do. And then especially when it turned into a hobby, and you picked more and more complicated or interesting things to make. I think the first time I properly thought it, as words in my head, was when you made that carbonara-”
Sofia laughs, cutting you off. “Oh I fucked that up so bad the first time! That’s really what it is?”
“Yeah!” You attempt a serious face up at her, but the joy you’re swimming in makes it difficult to do anything but smile. “It’s because you fucked it up. How many times did you attempt it?”
She shrugs.
“I don’t know either! But it was once a week every week until you got it right! You tracked down guanciale for it!”
“It was just the IGA-”
“The IGA known for having weird and hard-to-get food. Don’t dodge. Fuck, Sof, you bought Roman pecorino for it!”
“It’s traditional!”
“Yeah, for Italians, and we’re not Italian. You bought a mortar and pestle so you could grind pepper the way one chef did in one recipe.”
“We didn’t have one,” She’s beginning to smile now, “And it looked like a nice flair.”
“It was! And it’s what made me realise I love you.”
Sofia grows quiet at the same time as you. Your face had been heating up for a while, but you watch the happy embarrassment cross Sofia’s cheeks in real time as she looks back at herself and sees in a new light all the things that made you fall for her.
“I do have one more thing to talk about, though.”
Anxiety floods Sofia’s face and she looks down at you like you’ve told her nothing in the past day is real. Too many terrible thoughts are coursing through her mind, and you feel terrible for bringing this up now and ruining the mood. But it has to happen eventually, and while all the secrets are being spilled, now sounds like a good time.
You rush to comfort her, “It’s okay, I just don’t want you blaming yourself for it any more.” Sofia’s confusion starts to outweigh her panic, and her scared imagination gets a little weaker. “You were so careful when you first got infected, so scared of all those warnings the doctors gave about infectiousness. But you were fine. You did everything right. I didn’t get infected from your toothbrush.”
“What do you mean?”
You can’t look at her face right now, too scared for what might be there. Her voice sounds calm and gentle, though.
“I did it to myself.”
“Wha-?”
“I infected myself.”
“How?” Concern, worry for you. All the kind things you’re used to from her. A high-pitched ringing of bloodflow, anxiety, and tinnitus fills your mind with sickly webs.
“One of the first nights after your fangs grew in you fell asleep early, and… I was obsessed with them - your fangs. I- I still am.” The way you’re laying over Sofia makes it very obvious to you when she gets aroused. You try and shut out the smell, block the sounds of her breathing hitching, lift your thigh from where its draped over her hips so you can avoid feeling her get hard. Now’s not the time. “I wanted to get a closer look… But I got too close, and drew blood. That’s how. How it happened.”
Sofia’s breathing shifts further. More arousal and more intentional self control. Her scent floods your nose and drags your attention by its leash to the feeling of your cunt growing hot, and how little personal space you’ve left each other.
When Sofia speaks her voice curls around the stem of your brain like a honey-sweet vine.
“I had a dream I bit you that night. The taste of your blood was really vivid.”
You expected her to be upset at you, with what you confessed. You expected her to be ashamed, considering what she said. But arousal is front and center in her mind as the words glide over her tongue like nectar mist.
It’s so easy to see the image passing behind her eyes as she speaks: her fangs piercing your skin and your muscle bruising at her teeth; the taste of your skin spiked sharply salty and iron-rich; the joy at overpowering your instinctual fight to get away; the same fantasy going through your mind.
She almost shivers as she brings up the taste of your blood.
You expected anything but the intense arousal that floods her body beneath you. The sympathetic reaction in you almost takes out your self control at the knees.
“O-oh, You’re not upset?”
Sofia swallows hard before shifting. You’re slid gently off her and into the back pillows of the deep couch while she twists place herself just slightly above you. Her arms sit on either sides of your shoulders, and she’s staring at you with a dedicated look drenched in desire. You feel pinned by her.
“No. Well- Yes, I’m still upset that you got your lycanthropy from me - however it happened. If I hadn’t gotten it we’d both be fine.” She’s rambling as she’s keeping you trapped, but with every word comes a tiny flash of sharp fang glittering out from her soft lips. You find your eyes dragged to them, and Sofia notices with a low growl of an entertained chuckle. “Thought so. No, Ivy, I am not upset that you love my fangs enough to risk infection.”
Sofia closes the distance she had been clearly careful to maintain so you could be baited into staring at her fangs. You feel trapped and caught and stared down and there’s nothing you can do but squirm and wait for whatever she wants to do to you.
She kisses you. She teases your jaw apart to shove her tongue into your mouth, filling your senses with her taste and the texture of her tongue. Still soft, despite the new muscle, but adventurous and dexterous beyond what you ever expected of her. A moan courses through you as you crush your thighs together, an instinctual response to being pressed into in not quite the right place.
And then she pulls her tongue out.
You whimper into the kiss that’s still going, begging her to fill your mouth again. She does, but only briefly, and you feel some frustration building inside you that’s more enjoyable than you want it to be.
Her tongue presses past your lips again, in that same darting, teasing motion, and you finally notice her doing something weird with the tip of it.
Sofia fills your mouth with warmth and taste and sensation, she curls around your tongue to run her taste buds along the smooth muscle beneath, and then darts back into her mouth as soon as she reaches the tip of your tongue. It strangely feels like an invitation.
The next time Sofia’s tongue glides along yours you decide to press yours forward, into her mouth. Sofia lets out a hum of approval that lets you know you got it right, that she’s happy with you, and you find yourself suddenly more lightheaded than before. Your arms are up on her back, holding her down and close, and you clutch onto her harder, desperate for more of her, but you still let her guide you.
She pulls your tongue into her mouth before nudging it to the side and forcing your senses to paint her fang in vivid detail.
Your legs grow even weaker as you run your nerves along the jutting shape of her canine that stands proud against the smooth and regular pattern of the rest of her teeth. It’s sharp and obvious, and feels like it’s ten times larger than it should be - your arousal making it impossible to keep track of anything.
Sof lets you play for a while, until a random moment where you’re running the tip of her fang against your tongue, when she presses hers in from below. A gentle pressure, but enough to be a threat that she could pierce into your tongue at any time, draw blood from you whenever. You make a pathetic, pleading, needy noise and are rewarded with a happy growl you can both hear and feel through your chest.
You twitch and shake beneath her, holding onto her shirt for any hope of resurfacing but keeping your tongue in her mouth to beg for the chance to never come up for air. You know you have to stop eventually, but the exact moment comes far too soon.
Your delayed breaths come as heavy, dizzy pants that are matched by the sounds coming from Sofia above you. You struggle to focus your eyes but you can see a manic, enticed grin spread across Sofia’s face as your body struggles to catch up. She slides a hand down to your waist and laughs at how immediate and intense your reaction is to the barest touch. She’s finding so much joy in you, in your body, and it’s sending jolt after jolt of pleasure through your spine in time with your heartbeat.
The regularity of the feeling goes haywire as you feel her fingers against the skin of your hips. You realise, after a moment of delirious pleasure and tingling skin, that Sof’s hands are easing your shorts off you with the intent to leave you in nothing but your loosest, most comfortable crop top. She’s planning to leave you displayed and reclined out on the sofa like Olympia - to mirror a woman who knows she’s being observed and enjoyed.
You lift your hips to help her strip you, knees barely strong enough to take even that portion of your weight away, your mind on the edge of too sensitive to stay focused as her fingers run warmth down the outsides of your thighs. You feel like you’re shaking slightly, some bone-deep fire of need coursing a hypothermic reaction through your muscles. How hot does a body need to be to experience hypothermia in room temperature?
“Gods Ivy, you’re so warm.”
The words curl into your mind in time with one of her hands running along the length of your legs. She’s unceremoniously discarded your shorts into a pile on the floor somewhere behind her, and now her full focus is on your skin glittering white-gold in the warm lighting of the living room. Sof’s skin teases against the soft and sensitive patch of your inner thigh as she gently moves herself into the gap she’s forcing between your legs. You’ve lost track of what your voice is doing, but you’re certain it’s desperate.
She pauses suddenly in her admiration - her worship of you, like she’s forgotten something, before pulling away slightly to get her t-shirt off. When she comes back she pulls in closer and you feel the skin of her shoulders against yours.
It’s such a simple thing, the contact on her shoulders, but it feels so intimate. She did it on purpose, knowing it would feel good for you, knowing how sensitive you are. You love her so much. You feel your temperature raise a degree, shaking harder in more tantalising anticipation.
Her hands are placed differently, now. They curl instead around the soft padding of your thigh and hip, grasping on with deliberate strength as Sofia twists her head towards that same patch of skin she was worshipping to plant a kiss.
The texture of her lips sends a shock of adoration and suddenly-focused arousal through your mind. They’re soft, playful, slightly damp, her kiss plummeting the feeling of heat in your body in that one spot for barely a moment before the flow of your blood and her own warmth bring it back. She quickly plants another one, an inch closer to your hips, that delivers a rough and loving lick from her tongue in the wake of your pleasure.
When she plants the next kiss you find yourself twitching in anticipation. Every muscle below your waist reflexively contracts, leaving a tension in your body that only gets worse as she runs her tongue along your skin again and forces you to twitch more.
It fills your abdomen with an ache - new and barely tested, your cunt clamps down around nothing and begs your legs to squirm and your voice to whimper. The tension in it is strange, the slight waves of minuscule pleasure passing through it twist and turn in uneven and desperately sensitive ways. Your sister’s fingers felt so good, exploring and experimenting with you, but the question of what her tongue would feel like is still unanswered.
The slight grazing of Sofia’s teeth against your skin stops your thoughts in their tracks.
She opens her mouth wide, wide enough to find a small section of your delicate skin between her fangs, and places a tiny amount of pressure on them. A threat, a promise, a request.
You meet her eyes and stare into that even grey that has turned sharp and glistening. You feel like your throat is closing up. You’re struggling to breathe or sit still. You nod.
It doesn’t take much pressure to fill your nerves with the most beautiful pain you’ve felt in your life. It’s sharp and grounding and so intense you have no choice but to focus on it and nothing else. She doesn’t even break skin, doesn’t even use all her fangs, just keeps her mouth slightly tilted to the side so it’s only one pair, but it’s already so much to handle.
It’s a challenge to take it, so you open your mind to the feeling and let it scour through your mind. You’re nothing if not willing to please your sister.
The bite ends and you feel your voice crash from a strangled, wailing moan down into addled gasps and heavy breaths. The room smells drenched in arousal and sharp, released stress. One of your hands is clutching the pillows of the sofa, white-knuckled and strained and tugging the fabric into a tight bunch, while the other is on the back of Sofia’s head. Your conscious thoughts are all but gone, but the creature of desire riding in the back of your mind pulls her head back towards your thigh, somehow begging for more despite how intense it was.
Sofia brings her mouth fully around this time, ready to bite you with as much of her mouth as she can. She’s close enough now that the hot, humid air coming out of her throat in heavy breaths is finding its way past your folds in intermittent pulses. Any closer and her cheek would probably be pressing against them as well. You feel your clit throb in response to the waves of heat passing over you. You feel desperate and hopeful.
Then she bites you again.
It starts as a kiss wide enough for her to press the flat of her tongue against you, before she pulls it back to suck a portion of your flesh into the gap made by her teeth. Just the enveloping warmth and sharp suction is enough to make you quiver, but when her jaws close in your mind goes blank.
White-hot static tinted with rose, purple, and red surges up your spinal column to crash full-speed into your brain. It’s crushing, piercing, teasing, and getting stronger by the second. Sofia is growling into your leg, enjoying herself while you’re trapped in your ocean of indistinguishable sensation. The blur between pleasure and pain is growing wider, encompassing more and more of the damage Sof is causing to you as both. You’re lightheaded from the heat inside yourself, balanced precariously on the edge of an orgasm caused by nothing but pain.
Your skin parts without much warning, and the feeling of her fangs digging into your muscle and your blood spilling out onto her tongue rips the orgasm clear out of your control. You shiver against her grip, now fiercely held around your thigh and pressing you down into the sofa against your hip bone. You’re not moving, but you struggle and scream a moan while you wait for it to end and hope it never does. You feel a wetness flood your cunt, and the new aspect to your arousal mixes with the scent you had already been pumping into the room - joined by the tang of iron as small drops of blood spill out of Sof’s mouth. The combination hammers into your mind, trying to make you drunk, but the coursing river of pleasure coming from your thigh has already beaten the scent to it.
You can almost hear it when Sofia swallows, but the shifting tension around your damaged skin is far more obvious. You definitely hear a sound from her that could be nothing other than her enjoying the taste of your blood. You feel proud of yourself, which spikes your arousal even further.
Sofia gently extracts her fangs from you, careful not to hurt you more than she wants to, and takes a look at what she did to you. Your eyes aren’t that easy to focus, and the involuntary tears make it even harder, but she barely looks at it for a moment before bringing her tongue to each of the four puncture points to lick them clean.
It feels so stupidly gentle and caring after such an intense moment of pain, but you love it for that. Love her more for it.
When she’s done she clears her throat and looks towards you, “Was that okay, Ivy?”
Your sister is staring up at you, making sure you’re okay after such an intense experience, but the problem is she’s made you too aroused to think while she’s accidentally breathing down onto your clit. All you manage to do in response is jut your hips forward to press yourself closer to her mouth.
She smirks, and then wastes no more time.
Sofia runs her tongue along the line of your folds, cupping your clit with the flat before trailing along it, gently pushing the protective skin aside to gain direct contact. The feeling of her against your slit pours lightning into your skin, trapped in your body with nowhere to escape, channelled through a lance of molten gold straight from her tongue and piercing towards your heart.
“Oh, fuck, kngggggh-!” The first dose of pure pleasure does wondrous, transformative things to your voice, not least of which the ability to make words for the first time since your sister pulled you free of your clothing. But other than that you sound high-pitched and needy, angelic and rough, a whine given more delicate form. “Sis! Sis, please, gods… Fuck!”
The sheer clarity of the sensations are surprising, and so deeply euphoric. You want to do nothing but this for hours.
Sofia shows no signs of stopping, so you might just get your wish. She laps at you with a burning hunger and drags tonguefuls of gasps and writhes out of you. She holds you down to eat at you with all the energy she can muster. She presses her tongue into you as far as it will go and laps up every drop she can find of your arousal.
The pleasure she sends surging through you arcs and coils down that molten gold vein before grounding and expelling itself into your heart. The rhythm of your heartbeat gets pushed faster and faster as it fights against the tide of energy. The excess arcs through stray muscles and nerves, pulls your breathing into a ragged pattern, and tricks your mind into believing it’s in free fall. Your hands clutch onto anything within reach with every ragged scrap of distracted strength.
You’re far from a pillow princess, but you’re being treated as one. Trapped as one. Kept as one. Treated like a sex toy, or an altar, to soothe some desire bigger than any possible pleasure Sofia could get from you.
Her prayer makes a mess of you and that neat vein of gold now fragments out into a root network web that latches onto all your muscles to yank them inwards. Pleasure is delivered at each searching tip, sparks spread throughout you as an orgasm hollows you out from inside to make more room for itself. You’re being filled to bursting with it, and still your cunt aches to be filled more than her tongue can manage. You feel insatiable. It’s addicting.
Sofia keeps up her pattern, barely giving you any room to breathe, enjoying your sudden spike in sensitivity. You feel caught in the net of gold, your whole body reacting to even the slightest movements from Sofia.
She curls and coils and flicks against your clit in the way she learnt how to do months ago, learning and relearning as she goes to better send you further into bliss. She sucks and drinks at the opening of your cunt to taste the evidence of the pleasure she’s making in you, sending her tongue in in darting expeditions to let more of your cum free, before her main task occupies her again. She grips onto your thighs to keep you in place. She puts up with the crushing pressure you’re clamping down on her head with.
She knows what she’s doing to you, and she’s enjoying doing it.
The next orgasm is harder to predict. The first time you had been filled like a basin lake by a vast waterfall, the emotion landing in a churning, violent twist that crashed against the shore and spilled over all at once. But now you’re retaining it, the mass of the water bringing its level closer to where the edges sit. It takes much less than before to cause a wave big enough to spill over, but it comes nonetheless in the form of Sof’s hand lifting from your left thigh and slipping its fingers inside you to replace the intermittent tonguefuck.
They plunge deep into you. The relief from that absent ache is astonishingly bright. It cuts the yearning free and boils it away as exploring fingers curl inside you and towards the strip of nerves Sof discovered the unique behaviour of the day before.
You feel yourself twitching and clamping around her with that wondrous new instinct while you gush more cum along the length of her digits, rendered too-big in your mind for realism, than you thought yourself capable of producing.
Your web of gold explodes once more to envelop every single neuron in your brain. There’s no longer any escape.
You barely manage to breathe in amongst all the tension and snapping relief in your body. The gasp rips through your throat and staggers into a lustful hitch halfway down to your lungs before all your breath floods back out.
“Sh-aaaaaah! Oh, fuck, Sof- Soooooof!”
You’re trying so hard not to completely crush your sister’s head as she eats you out and fingers you, but as the pressure caused her fingers lifts slightly the energy contained within them gets unleashed on you and your focus is suddenly taxed.
And still her tongue never stops.
You feel like she’s doing everything she can to make it difficult for you - to push you as far as you can manage to hold on. You feel toyed with - a thought that makes your focus even weaker as you imagine what you must look like, splayed out on the sofa with your eyes screwed shut, heavy and uneven breaths gently shaking free your crop-top from its purposeful position balanced delicately to provide modesty over your tits that are bouncing with every jolt and plea and orgasm running rampant through your body.
You’re filling the space with a cacophony of instinctual noises, but even beneath your dishevelled keening you can hear Sofia’s enjoyment.
She’s not making the noise on purpose, like her growls or giggles before, but it’s something that catches in her throat every time she breathes out. It’s a hum, a little quiver in her throat, that sounds so content, deeply aroused, and happy with herself. It sounds like the motivation to keep going until either you collapse or she does.
“Ah- Ah- Ah- Fuck-!”
Your noises keep going, Sofia’s tongue obsessively toying with your clit, her fingers still fucking deep inside you. Another wave arrives, and you shiver hard in Sofia’s dedicated grip, not even given a slight drop in sensation to allow you to orgasm properly.
You’re not sure how long it lasts, but you realise that the lake inside you is sitting at level with the shoreline - any tiny wave is enough to send your mind reeling, and the ones you are dealing with are not tiny in the slightest.
Your mind melts back into static after having that thought, letting itself rest after doing it’s exhausting job of barely thinking. You feel adrift in your own body, only kept scarcely anchored by the raw and used feeling your cunt and clit are developing. There’s only so much your body can handle, but you have no idea where that limit is. You’ve never been filled to that point. Are you going to find out today?
The wild churn of the waterfall drags you under water, and at that point you have no frame of reference. You have no idea where one orgasm ends and the next begins. Or, where your body ends and the one pleasuring you starts. You feel whole and gloriously abused with Sofia’s fingers inside you, and you can’t help but feel like you’re doing something you were made for - taking your sister.
It’s a wonderful thought, and a simple enough one it doesn’t really need to involve your brain to have. It’s currently preoccupied with the flood of endorphins and neurotransmitters that are sitting pretty in every gold-plated synapse in your skull. You feel like you have some emotional inertia that’s keeping your mind stuck in place in the waterfall’s spout. There’s no room in your nerves to feel anything else, every receptor is taken up. You’re just waiting for either every synapse in the chain down your spine or lodged in your cunt to fill up the same and for you to burst, or for Sofia to decide she’s done with you.
It feels incredible and divine in its own, imperfect way - a splash of bitterness to make the sweetness pop, or a dousing of overstim and forced orgasms to make the ocean of love shine. But still the question of how much you can take lingers.
It’s difficult to tell which whether Sofia sees some sign that you reached your limit, or found her own, but the waterfall stops twisting you around and you slowly surface to a waterline sitting calmer than before, and to gentle arms that are holding you with all the patience in the world.
Love envelops you as the biggest ripples tumble onto your shore, and you hold your sister with every scrap of attention you have left. You hear her voice, praising you, telling you that you did a good job, that she really enjoyed doing so much to you, and dozens of other comforting phrases, but you doubt you’ll fully process the words until much later.
For now you decide to lay here on top of her, like how you were before, and breathe in her scent. To let it guide you back to your body as aftershocks and lingering orgasms run through your muscles.
Your thigh aches with overuse and four sharp pinpricks; your cunt begs quietly to be filled while you recover; your heart pounds away in your ears with love and desire.
The first thing your voice manages to do is tell your sister you love her, though it’s a very mumbled phrase.
She holds you tight and wonderfully.
You smile and decide to enjoy the subspace of your mind for at least a long while longer.
