Chapter 20
Previously: Obsidian: Ash and Moonbeams – Chapter 19
No fair.
Hungry.
Hungry hungry hungry.
It wanna feel good, too.
Monster got fuck and food.
It wanna, too.
Why is he mean to it?
It was good.
No fair. Bark! Pout!
~
“Here I thought I knew what having your brains fucked out meant,” he muses while he tries to figure out what’s going on.
She’s… all puppy now? That wasn’t a particularly ‘person’ noise just now.
“Be good,” he tells her. “You’re the one who said no biting.”
~
It was good!
It wants to be good!
But hungry.
So hungry.
Please?
It knows its ears are droopy, the hunger hurts.
Him saying no, hurts.
~
Awww, shit. Those are the saddest puppy eyes he’s ever seen.
And usually, that kind of thing doesn’t work on him, because he doesn’t give a shit, but, it turns out… he gives a shit.
He tries to think this through, which is easier post-orgasm.
Her concerns had been about blood exchange, right?
He licks the blood from his teeth. It’s not a lot. There’s messy smudges and half-moons in the shape of his teeth on her shoulder of it, but the underlying tissue seems mostly healed already.
He didn’t as such drink any of that. Yeah, he got some in his mouth, but it can’t have been more than half a spoon full or something?
And the way she was talking about it, she wasn’t exactly sure how her blood magic worked, but it didn’t sound instantaneous.
He can’t ask her any of this, because she’s clearly non-verbal right now. And he doesn’t know how to fix that state, but her non-verbal self wants at his blood.
Her non-verbal self could also turn fog to get out of his grip and go for his throat, but instead she’s just sitting there pouting at him.
So she’s not a danger (what a thing to consider… He likes it!).
“Alright, since I don’t know how else to fix this state of yours, and I don’t think this is going to immediately do the thing you don’t want it to do… Go for it.”
He releases her hair and tilts his head to give her his throat.
Which… is a bit of a thrill to trust someone with.
~
Monster is nice after all!
It knew it was good.
Good means saying thanks.
It licks at his neck, nuzzles him, hugs him.
Talks to him the proper way, too, so he knows it feels good with him.
He tastes so nice!
The hurt gets less.
Finally, finally…
All happy, all sleepy now.
Yes, it can go back to dozing, no bad hunger anymore it needs to protect from.
~
When did she start biting him? Night! Did she berserk? Did he bite her harder than she thought?
But also, he tastes so good and she was so hungry and he’s just holding her, not fighting despite her being able to tell that that’s not a hunting bite.
Still, she doesn’t want to be bad for him!
Reluctantly, she kisses the bite shut.
“Calidear, sorry, did I hurt you? I can’t remember. My drac must have decided I’m too hungry.”
~
Whatever the emotional equivalent of ‘tail-wagging puppy’ is, Caliban’s pretty sure he just felt it.
Also, the apparently quite unpleasant pain of her hunger.
And also, a shift to a… not different emotional landscape, but a more complex one, which must have been the point where she got her mind back.
“Naw,” he assures her. “You just went full puppy and non-verbal, so I couldn’t ask you how to get your brain back, and you were pouting really hard about biting me. I figured that blood magic you were talking about wouldn’t kick in right away and I didn’t have a lot of your blood, so it should be fine. Was that alright?”
~
“I’d rather accidentally marry you than hurt you! Of course that’s alright. I’m sorry, I must have misjudged how hungry I really was. My drac just wanted to protect me, but… it managed to remember you are dear to me, that’s rare.”
What is her healing doing? She cranes her neck to look at her shoulder, that looks pretty much done.
As she looks at her shoulder, some movement catches her attention. Turning more, she realises she wouldn’t have had to, she just would have to stop being worried for him, because tail wagging would have solved that mystery.
Worrying is really, really difficult to do right now, no, squealing makes so much more sense.
“Calidear, your blood gave me a tail! That’s so sweet of you!”
~
“My blood did what now?” He leans forward to look over her shoulder (which has his softened cock fully dislodge from her), and, yeah, that’s a tail. A blond and fluffy one.
“What’s that all about? And, yeah, no, your drac was being perfectly cute and well-behaved.”
~
“Good, I don’t want it to be mean to you, especially when you give me something so perfect.”
Can she intentionally wiggle it? Yes she can! Best dhampir effect yet! And now she can bounce on him with glee without worrying she might break him, so she does.
“Do you see anything else? Dhampirs metabolise the blood we drink. When I drank from the siren, I could swim and I had membranes between my fingers and toes. And silly fae make my hair go white.”
She has an urge to turn a circle around herself, but then, she’s also cradled into his lap and she’s less hungry now, so her urge to be cuddly wins out.
~
He catches her chin to hold her still for a second so he can look properly at her eyes, and yes: “Your eyes are blue now.” He lets go to run his gaze, and then his hands over her shoulders and back. “And… that’s more muscle than was on you ten minutes ago.”
That’s… fascinating, actually. If she gets effects from the blood, that has to be the Aesir. “Huh. those must be the Aesir blood. Tail’s got to be hulder.” He peers at her teeth, but those don’t seem to have changed.
His hands linger around the curve of her hips and back. It’s not a bad look on her at all.
Actually… is his heart beat kind of heavy? He swallows. Is his mouth watering?
Experimentally, he sticks his nose close to the side of her face and inhales. Of course, there’s the scent of skin and sweat and sex, and he can’t smell anything new as such, but… There’s a simmer in his blood that feels a little soon.
“Maybe some of the hulder pheromones. I’m feeling hornier than I should this soon after a very good orgasm.”
~
Now that’s an effect she doesn’t mind. Doesn’t mind at all, as she tells him with a smirk.
“Only fair if I smell a bit nicer to keep up with you!” As fun as that is, though, she loves the tail the most, and, hm, could that help? “Let me check if those Aesir of yours are finally good for something!”
Turning bat, the small one, she tries to flap up from where she’s sitting, gets a little bit into the air, but it’s still so hard that she couldn’t get herself to any distance if she tried, let alone both of them. So she lets herself splay out on his chest, blast is he huge against her like this. But she can’t talk like this. Meh.
“No fair, still too weak to fly.”
~
He scratches his nails along her back and down into the fluff of that tail. “Too bad. The gravity here is quite a bit more than on Midgard, but maybe you can train yourself up to it eventually?”
It’s definitely gotten much easier for him to move around, but he doesn’t know if a Midgardian’s baseline is too far from Muspellheim, or whatever.
~
With the hunger and the horny having receded a bit, she finally feels like she has enough brain together to think strategically. Lounging herself into his lap, she wiggles her tail as she thinks about what to do.
“John is the one who does all the working out. With me… I think my drac learns faster. I got stronger with my drac, not so much with exercise. So how do we train my drac? Your blood helps, but to the best of what I know, it’s not cumulative.”
Training her drac, well, she did a lot of that with John. Testing what she could do with Daddy, too. And her drac seems to like Calidear so much it doesn’t even snap at him when she forgets herself. But that is risky.
There has to be something more. Calidear knows more about this planet and, wait, he said something to her earlier that they didn’t finish discussing.
“You said something about that green stuff when I kill something. Helheim magic? Any idea if we can use that?”
~
“I’m not a mage, puppy,” he reminds her while he lounges down a bit lower against the wall. It’s almost comfortable, with her curled up on top of him and tangled up with his legs. “So… really don’t have any definite answers here. But… usually something gets stronger when you use it, right? And if you’re death aspected and that is Helheim magic, and you’re absorbing it… that could mean it’ll make you more powerful?”
~
“So Helheim does something death-y. I’m half-dead, sort of.”
It’s not much of a clue, let alone plan, but, well, there really is no downside to it. Actually, better than that. Much better than that. Yeah, now she’s grinning hard.
“Want to go on lots of hunting dates with me so I can feed my drac that hell magic stuff and make it grow up into that Fenrir wolf you mentioned earlier?”
“Sounds fun!” he agrees with a grin. “So, worst case scenario, we weren’t bored even if it doesn’t work.”
“As if I could get bored with you around!”
The idea is so absurd to her that she snickers, has to hold her drac from how adorably confused it looks, then hugs Caliban tight because, aw, fun dates, she’s looking forward to it!
“I’m so happy to have you with me here! We’ll find something nice to hunt to make our… nest better, too! Just you wait, I’ll make us comfy while we figure out how to get out of here or while we wait for my swarm!”
Yes, much better, so much better now. She’s not feeling lonely anymore and the horrible last week is fading away.
“Thank you for being my dog fishie!”
~
He scratches his nails down her sides, just to feel the give of skin and muscle. “I’m glad you landed where you did, and that I decided to follow you, too, puppy. Muspellheim is suddenly looking a lot more bearable.”
Which just goes to show that you shouldn’t dare the fates to laugh at you, because the moment he’s finished speaking, there’s a soft scrape and clutter of stones from above, at the top of the opposite wall, and he looks up to see a roundish shape against the dusky sky, and a pair of large pincers and one long, segmented leg coming over the edge of his little dent in the mountain side.
“Speaking of hunting dates…”
Fuck his life, why’s there a pincer-spider here? He’s only ever seen them down on the valley floors.
And yeah, he’s handled them before, but they’re fast and strong and venomous, and not usually alone. He’s feeling a little potentially cornered, and also, he’s got a pleasant post-orgasm lassitude he’d prefer to enjoy.
~
Right now?
Uh, sure, why would Darcy mind? Although, he kind of looked concerned. It’s a bit of a twist with how she’s hidden in so much man but she can follow where he looks and… oh, oh, he meant going hunting with friends!
“Calidear, why didn’t you tell me?!”
She bounces up to her feet and runs over, not too fast, spiders can be so shy.
“Aw, aren’t you a big one! So pretty! Hi, I’m Darcy!”
~
That’s… not the reaction he was expecting. Which maybe he should get used to, and really, he likes very much, but also: “…Tell you what?”
~
“That you have friends here and that you wanted to invite them on the hunting date!”
Stretching a hand out towards the spider with a chirp, Darcy gives a little curtesy as the spider introduces itself. That’s just being nice. She tries twice before she gets the sound exactly right, but her drac is there so she can just start chattering at her new friend, occasionally turning to Caliban because it would be rude to exclude him. “She asks if we mind if she and her kids grab some of the food we left in the valley? I don’t mind, it tastes bad fresh, it can only taste worse now.”
~
Caliban stares at her for a long moment. “…Are you talking to the giant spider?” He stands up, slowly, looks at the giant spider in question. “Is the giant spider talking to you?”
~
“Of course Cl’rr-kng is talking to me! She said it’s dark out so she had her nice typical evening stroll to see what is up in her territory and felt that a new friend must have arrived.”
Darcy giggles, she’s heard that story a few times now. Still, she has to squint out into the sky to so much as guess that the lighting changed. Her night vision must have thought daylight here already was so muted that it was dark.
No problem, her friends will always tell her things like that.
Oh, right, Calidear doesn’t know. She asks if it’s okay, first, consent is extra important with night friends, but then she starts petting her new spider friend.
“She came out at dark, that means she’s one of my night friends. They can always sense me. If I get upset, everybody comes running to comfort me.”
~
“Okay, that’s a new one for me,” he admits. And he’s not about trying to pronounce whatever that sound was that’s apparently the name of this particular spider, but he still offers it a: “Nice to meet you. And yeah, sure, have at the food left down there.”
~
“Aw, thank you! Isn’t she just the cutest? I always wanted to pet a spider that’s big enough not to get hurt. They’re such fragile little things normally. She’s all fuzzy!”
Marcas obviously had no clue, no clue at all, what he was doing when he banished her here. Sure, it stinks, but there’s a Calidear here, and night friends! This isn’t bad. This is half a vacation! She likes it. No barony work, no annoying humans, no Gregory!
“Oh, also, she wants to show me around. Can I go, Calidear? Please? Maybe she knows some nice places.”
~
Caliban steps a little closer, carefully. While he wouldn’t call a giant spider cute, it is pretty fearsome and impressive.
“Can’t agree, you’re the cutest,” he informs Darcy with a grin. “And you don’t need to ask me for permission? Of course you can go if you want to. And if you can talk to the local wildlife and get a tour of the place, all the better.”
~
Even while she preens about him saying something so nice, she tilts her head because she didn’t really mean to ask for permission. Wiggling her tail, she’s trying to figure out where words fell short again, but finally shrugs. “I just didn’t want you to feel as if I don’t care if you get bored. You said that was so bad before I arrived. And, well, we were talking about round three… Just, Calidear, how did you think we could get at any lube when it’s halfway up my belly?”
Now she’s snickering because it’s kind of embarrassing and kind of fun, but it’s also true. “I’ll ask my new friends if they know of anything we might be able to use. This is silly! It’s a silly problem to have.”
Speaking of silly problems… There’s another one.
“Oh, and if it’s getting dark, you probably have to sleep. I won’t be able to sleep, there’s no soil of my motherland here.”
That could get bad, and that worry must show, because her new friend is nuzzling her supportively. “So how about I go out with my friend while you would sleep anyway? I’ll bring us nice new things for the nest.”
~
“Ah, okay, yeah, I don’t mind if you go. I’m not going to be bored as long as you come back.” Which, since she can turn into fog in an emergency… Yeah, he’s confident she will.
“And you’re right on those logistics.” He scratches his beard, grins at her. “I was planning to come on you, not in you, but then I felt so good I forgot.”
~
“Don’t expect me to complain, you fucked and bit me drac-brained!”
Somehow she thinks Quincy wouldn’t think that’s such a good thing, but it’s okay, she’s with a fellow monster, between them it’s okay. Also, he said he wants her to come back, that deserves a jump hug!
“Of course, I’ll come back to you! You’re my dearest dog fishie! Monsters together.”
She has to use her sticking power to climb up on him from the jump hug, but it’s so worth it to shower his face in kisses. Much better than just telling him. And the thought of maybe being able to surprise him with some nice things for their nest makes her wag her tail again. Best thing ever, having a tail now even outside of John’s dreamscape!
~
He catches her mouth for a leisurely, deep kiss, then pats her arse and wagging tail.
“Alright, puppy. You have fun, I’ll get some sleep, and then we can see about everything else. Lube and sex included.”
~
“Like you!” She wants to chirp more at him, but she thinks he would probably feel pressured, so she won’t, she’ll wait until her drac has dug its paws in so she can say it properly!
For now, she should get ready for having a fun trip with her new friend. Tail like in the dreamscape… Hm, she’s long stopped wearing things there. John told her she’s his wolf-girl, wolves don’t need to put on dresses. Maybe she should put her boots on at least, but the thing that tried to eat her first made vibrations in the ground. What if she misses it? Also, she kind of really doesn’t want to. There’s nobody here to reprimand her. Her night friends won’t mind… Can she please just be a monster without having to think about any silly etiquette?
Maybe a quick clean at least? There’s no water here, it’s one of the things Calidear wants her to look for, but he does show her some sand close by. She’s never thought of it, but then, she’s seen some of her rodent friends use it. And that would mean being smaller, too, less to clean. Okay, roll roll roll in the dust it is. It cakes on the drying body fluids and that makes it really easy to just gnaw the clumps out. Paws over her face, once, twice, ooh, good back leg scratchy, too.
Yes, much better, she feels cleaner and somehow also more fitting for this place. She loved the dress but it doesn’t belong here. No, she’d rather deal with her feet having to adjust to where she lives now. She’s a monster, not a princess.
But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t squeal when her spider friend lets her ride her down to the valley!
~
Caliban watches the pale shadow that is her skin and the dark shape that is her new friend disappear in the murky reddish light of what passes for night time here, finds himself still chuckling over her rodent cleaning display. Always with the creative shapeshifting use! Then he crouches for a few handfuls of the sand to scrub himself clean, too- grins at the feel of the spunk caked against his groin and chest, the traces of blood in his beard.
This… definitely wasn’t what he expected when he got up this morning for another day of grumpy survival. Fuck, he feels… good. He’d feel better with a proper bath and soft towels and clean clothes and a real bed, but he feels good.
And it isn’t just the sex, either.
It’s the promise of more sex, and the puppy, and her happy tail-wagging at his everything.
Once he’s as clean as he gets in this place, he returns to his make-shift bed and stretches out on the straw- wonders what Darcy is going to learn about this place from her new friends, and whether it’ll involve something luxurious like a bath. Or edible food.
He allows himself to drift off, only wakes once to more animal noises than usual coming from down in the valley- Darcy having a party with her new friends, he wonders in amusement, and falls back asleep with a grin.
Because it’d certainly be like the puppy.
~
There would have been one good thing about actually putting her dress on: pockets!
Or even more so what is in her pockets, because she didn’t trust fae. Didn’t want to take any of their so-called hospitality.
Not that the sandwiches and her little canteen of water lasted through the week. Even she eats more than that.
But she can use the canteen now, her friends told her where she can get water. Good water, they said, not the bad water they’ve seen her Calidear drink. They thought he was a bit silly for that, but also too big to take down. Understandable, but she still told them very sternly that they can’t be mean to her Calidear.
Obviously, everybody listened.
And everybody helped.
She can get so much silk from her spider friends, that’s going to make things softer! But first she is going to run back to the den her kind-of-fox-like friends invited her into. It’s far too small for Calidear, so she had to say no to moving in, but it goes deep, deep enough to have water!
She didn’t actually see him drink at all the whole day, bad her, she needs to take better care of her man!
Luckily, she can! She got water and even something her papa would be so proud of her for considering important to bring back! The water wasn’t just a shallow puddle, there’s whole cave systems with flowing water down there. And that means things growing in and around the water!
She got them vegetables. She just wishes she had any idea how to prepare them.
Not that she has a kitchen.
Not that she is good at cooking even when she has a kitchen.
But at least among the things she is good at, is doing things with string. No way could she have carried the mushrooms and the watergrass with the algae otherwise. It’s all gooey. It might even work as lube, sort of, she’s desperate enough to try.
It’s a start to taking care of her man.
She has such plans for their nest!
Well, not this one. The next one, that they might pick together. Maybe she can even dig them a den.
Darcy!
Or maybe she should squeak at her drac. Domestic fantasies, really now? But then, she’s been just like that with John, and he’s so good for her. Calidear will be the same!
That thought makes her bounce and skip back into his camp, even though skipping is harder than it has any right to be.
With a chirp, she sits down next to him and leans in to kiss him awake.
~