Multi-Fandom Trash

The animals didn't fear him. The berries didn't fear him. Nestled behind a slope, a thicket of bushes ripe with berries became the cause for his lips to rise into a smile, feet drifting faster through the springtime forest until he crouched before the little treasures.

He didn't need them—not at all—but craved them no less and indulged in the tart sweetness with a sigh on his lips. In his nostalgia, as bittersweet as the berries, this was the first flavor in the world. In that first story, it was Eve who had tasted from the apple, and he found himself wondering what Adam's favorite fruit of the garden had been.

All he knew was his own.

A snap of twigs resounded from the side and he swiftly lowered himself on hands and knees, dangling coat rags and matted hair, sliding halfway behind the bushes as a figure came into view.

A girl.

A young woman.

With eyes of glass.

Carrying nothing on her person except for a dirt-caked linen dress, maroon at the hem, her feet paused their wobbling advance across the forest floor when she locked eyes with him.

Frozen in time, he anticipated her scream, her disgust upon the sight that he was—a creature in rags, stitches forever grafted into his ashen face—but there was little of anything in her gaze. Maybe wonder. And in himself—a spark of something entirely warm, like a sun from within, delivering warmth along the arches of his cold ribs.

A bunch of berries were still cradled in his palm.

She was the first sighted person—since her—who seemed to find in him a target for contemplation and not projectiles.

At once, he offered his palm, hopefully stretching his long arm to cross the distance between them, sleeve slipping away from the thick scar that circled his blue wrist. Although he cowered, she seemed so small to him.

A fawn.

For a moment she stared with those vacant eyes that looked utterly pearlescent in the dance of filtered sunlight, but her hand stirred at last, drawing an arc to pluck a berry off his palm. For a split heartbeat, the curve of her nail brushed along his skin, and despite the shudder that this brief contact elicited, he forced his limbs into stillness.

Gently, but with apathy, the girl held his offering between her fingers, as if she didn't know what to do with it—animated by reflex, not spirit.

So, he showed her. Tenderly bringing one berry to his lips, he placed it in his mouth and slowly chewed.

She mirrored him, and his heart sprung into full bloom.

He blinked—once, twice—and a smile curled into the gaunt apples of his cheeks.

Another berry, then.

Encouragingly, he offered his palm once again, holding it higher this time, inching closer on shuffling feet. For the next berry, he didn't have to show her. On her own will, she placed it between her lips, chewed, swallowed and her lashes fell halfway over her glassen eyes.

A satisfied little grunt formed at the back of his throat, but its successor froze over with the chill of a memory. One of rich, brown eyes and a soft animal snout, feeding from his palm. One moment alive, then severed from the stream of nature by a bullet of man.

Full of fright, he leaped up tall, charging over to the twig- and root-covered slope to peek across the crest of it with wrinkled nose and labored breath. Where he'd feared the barrel of a gun, there was naught but broadleaf thicket and a trickling stream, birds chirping above, building their nests among the foliage. He glanced up, shielding his left eye, then looked over his sagging shoulders with a rattling sigh.

He saw the girl had fallen on her behind from his sudden advance, staring up at him with frightful eyes, claw-like fingers braced against the forest soil. There was fear in her eyes now, and what was fear if not another form of pain?

At once he squatted—in apology and agony—slowly gliding down the slope on the heels of his booted feet, using one fist to brace himself, the other hand held before his face. One down-turned eye gleamed through his fingers, finding her still motionless before the fruit-laden shrubbery, legs pulled toward her chest.

Fabric pooled around her knees, and what he'd taken for dirt appeared to be blood, caked up and darkening the fibers of her skirt. It was on her skin too, her calf, her knee, its ascending path obstructed by the hem of the skirt.

"You… are hurt."

She closed her legs at once, exhaling a sharp whimper in response to his discovery, or perhaps to his voice and its primordial tremor, so different from any of the other voices he'd heard, uttered by travelers, hunters, families… But he tried to speak gently.

"Forgive me," he muttered, for he knew he was frightful even when he didn't mean to be—and he seldom meant to. Created so monstrous, all he could do was try to fold his long limbs into his body and make himself smaller.

"Water?" He pointed over his shoulder, struggling to meet her gaze although he wanted to. "To wash yourself? Blood… draws wolves."

For a moment, she seemed to consider if he was one of them—a wolf—and he hid his face and breath behind his palms until he heard the crunching of twigs, a pair of feet stiffly moving around him towards the trickle of the stream.

On hands and feet, he carefully followed the unspooling thread of hope, flattening himself against the inclination of the slope, leaves and soil poking against his sutured palms.

"I… stand… guard?"

Already, he felt that he would stand guard for all eternity if she let him. The girl blinked, nodded, and the last thing he saw as he stood up and turned around was the way she crouched above the water, descending slowly as though in unspeakable pain.

He still held the berries to share with her later, not a single one squashed by his earlier charge towards the imagined threat.

Water rippled as her hands and feet plunged into its surface, skirts rustling as she folded them over her lap. He heard all of it, heard the silent whimpers under her breath, the stifled hissing as she cleansed herself of blood. How long would it take to heal, whatever it was? He had naught to offer, his friend and mentor gone before he could teach him about all the remedies that he'd never need.

Twigs crunched once again and a hand brushed against his tattered sleeve, or maybe it was the breeze of her passing. Anyhow, he gasped as if he'd been struck by lightning and slunk after her, back to the bushes. She smelled of the forest now, her skirts still stained but the maroon of blood faded.

When he crouched down, she did the same; closer to him now, some of her fear washed away with the river's flow. At once, he offered his palm again, because it was the easiest thing in the world. He let her pluck them freely from it, berry after berry, and even though there were plenty on the shrub, she only chose the ones from his hand.

"You like the red ones?" He smiled, peeking through the curtain of his hair, auburn in the glow of the sun. "Me too."

She picked a purple one next, carefully choosing.

"No," he gently insisted. "We can share. I would like… to share."

Aside from mumbling to himself, he hadn't had a chance to speak since the passing of his friend, so he found himself longing, yearning for it now, his throat aching to form all the words that he knew but had no one to share them with—neither his words, nor his emotions, and there were so many of them, all contained within his bursting heart.

"Can you not speak?"

A memory twinged with pain and frost and his tongue silently formed a name in his throat.

Victor.

If only he had a name to tell her, maybe she would say that, at least.

Tentatively, he curled one finger against her jaws with utmost tenderness, a touch so fleeting it may have been a flower petal kissing her skin. She looked upon him with large eyes.

"It is alright," he soothed, his deep voice flowing gently despite the tightness in his throat. "I will not force you."

The girl, the fawn, lifted her finger and traced it along his cheek. His lashes were pulled asunder by her tenderness, eyes closing as a pained breath escaped his throat, almost a sob, as his cheek melted into her touch.

So long, his scars have yearned for a tender caress, and now finally...

Perhaps he could make peace with the world again, if but for another fleeting moment.

A devil, some may have called him. An abomination unholy.

Anyone who had ever seen a corpse—and who hadn't?—could solve this puzzle, deduced from the stitch-like scars that wrapped in patterns around his body, some erratic, some symmetric, grafting blue against gray.

She didn't fear God. She feared man.

And if God had made him that way, there was nothing to fear, and if man had made him that way, it was the maker who deserved her fear, not the creation.

For how could something be wrong, if it behaved so purely?

How could someone be a devil, if all he did was bestow his never-ending curiosity to the world and to her? So caring in the way he'd dismantled his boots to craft foot wraps for her; so attentive in the way he sought shelter for them every night and cradled her against his body if there was none to be found, making a roof out of his coat and a fortress out of his arms. This gentle devil gazed up at the dancing foliage with eyes so bright and warm, as though the play of nature was the most wondrous thing.

He had told her, he ran away from evil, just like she. And evil, for both of them, came in the shape of man.

"The world is cruel," her voice seeped into the dark linen of his shirt as they lay chest to chest on dry earth and leaves, covered by his coat. A light summer breeze stirred the moonlit night. "But you are not. How are you not cruel?"

"I… cannot help it." His fingers jumped softly across her spine, holding her close to the place where his rattling breaths were born, pouring unwaveringly from the well of his lungs. "You are not cruel either."

"I think I'm not," she conceded, recalling all the times, the uncountable times when she would have had the right but couldn't find it in her heart. "I think I'm still kind. But it hurts so much."

"It does." His gentle voice rolled like thunder across the sky of her world. Tragic and beautiful.

Looking up, she freed her arm and traced the pad of one finger across the crooked slope of his nose, the ever sore scar tissue, then to his temple where hair like snow grew from the side of his skull. Gently, she wound the strand around her finger and watched his lips as they parted for breath, splitting into a smile that blossomed in reward to her caress. He nuzzled her palm as if it meant the entire world to him.

O', to be held so tenderly by someone who possessed such strength. To be cradled at midnight hour and watched over by eyes that carried such a feral glow yet looked upon her with nothing but sweetness.

To live a fairy tale with him, out here in the woods. And why not? Who said life couldn't be that way? Who would come find her out here and tell her she couldn't be with him, her fairy prince, with eyes as deep and kind as the earth?

He called her a fawn—with a scarred smile of pure sweetness as he did so—but it was he who was the spirit of the forest, a mighty, benevolent creature who wore his antlers in the shape of auburn hair, streaked with silver starlight.

Even lying like this, in the darkness, with his large hands along the shape of her back and the front of her smaller body pressed against his own, feeling every ridge and bone in his anatomy through the rags of their clothes, she felt no fear.

He, unlike any man, had never given her a reason to.

Wolves weren't only drawn by blood. They were drawn by the hunger in their bellies, and they liked to feast on the meat of little fawns because they were easy to hunt.

It was one murky night that she woke with a sense of primordial dread, a puff of foul breath against her forehead and the jaws of a predator, teeth and saliva glinting above the apples of her eyes.

A scream. Scaring every bird and rodent from their slumber, the fawn's fingers flexed into the shirt of her sleeping companion.

Then, a crack of bones, a yowl unlike anything she'd ever heard before and the wolf's maws came apart at the seams, its entire body flung into the trunk of a tree from the force that had snapped its skull in half.

She could barely see in the darkness of the night, but the forest came alive with trampling paws and swishing tails, her companion gone from her side, risen from the ground like a gale from the Northern Sea, a howl in his throat that rivaled the wolves as fur and flesh collided.

Among the shadows flew the tendrils of his hair and the ribbons of his coat, like the feathers of a raven, dancing above the battlefield.

And among that, an eerie glow, like a torch had fallen into the disk of his eye.

Something collided hard with the throat of a wolf and the furred creature landed wetly at her side, whining like a puppy before it was whisked away by its hind feet, hurled into the darkness with devastating force.

A roar—neither wolfish nor human—scared the clouds away from the moon, and as the wolves scattered, limping and whimpering, she laid eyes on her protector; his nose scrunching, his arms spread wide as he grunted with quaking shoulders. With the creatures of the night gone, only her hammering heart and his guttural breath remained, each one dredged from his lungs with a terrible growl that could make the hair rise on any man's skin.

He turned his gleaming eye to look upon her, cowering against their sleeping place.

"Don't… be… scared."

She craned her head as he approached her, a whimper caught in her throat when he crouched and cradled her face with large, trembling hands, both of them wet with viscera.

He didn't hate the wolves, he wanted to tell her desperately but words failed him in the quaking of fear. He always wanted to tell them—humankind—that he be meant no harm, that he was a friend who was only passing through, but they would never listen!Always, he ended up gunned down like a beast before given but a chance to speak.

"I… I had to." Panting, his sutured fingers jittered against her jaws and ears. "They were going to hurt you."

His companion trembled, clutching his cold wrists with clammy palms.

"I am… sorry," he begged forgiveness for the sin of being born and the violence he had bestowed to those creatures who, against their will, had been born too, forced to live, forced to hunt.

Her gaze danced across the mottling of blood on his face, her eyes no longer of glass, but his heart had become glassen. With a single word, she could shatter him, and it would hurt indefinitely more than any bullet to his neck, any sickle to his chest. Her mouth, her throat, had become a barrel of unimaginable power—to inflict a wound that would never heal.

But no harm came to him that night, only her hands to his cheeks, thumbs reaching up to caress the sunken shadows under his tearful eyes while he breathed an abyssal sigh, letting his forehead drop against hers.

Since the day she was born, she'd never felt safer. Not even in her very own crib.

She's been looking at him differently since that night.

He had first noticed it the following morning, when he suggested they skin the wolves the way he had seen the hunters do it, so she'd have something warm to wear once winter fell upon the land. With enthusiasm—because truthfully, he'd rather skin himself than let her tender flesh be touched by frost—he had then crouched on the ground and ripped the first hide away from its connective tissue with his bare hands, because a blade was not available.

After, he had wondered whether he'd humiliated himself in some way because she struggled to look him in the eyes. Floundering in the unfamiliarity of what stretched its blossoms across the both of them, he found himself unable to tell what it was. Perhaps, he simply lacked the vocabulary. He knew the words to ask her, but the idea alone filled him with impossible shyness.

The stream murmured away under his hands and his companion caught him staring, raising one smaller hand to wave at him.

Shyness.

The grappling warmth of her attention compelled him to return to his task of cleaning their clothes in the stream with haste, auburn hair whipping over his banded shoulder. She was naked. So was he. It wasn't the first time, but there was a change in the way they carried themselves, something other about the way she sat on that pelt and stretched her legs.

Like Adam and Eve in their garden, it was as though they had finally realized that they were naked. He, however, didn't want them to be cast out of paradise, so it was best to remain poised on the brink of discovery, no matter how tempting it was.

Smiling to herself, she indulged in eyeing the dimensions of his crouching figure, the centipede of his spine running along grafted ornaments of muscles and tendons. Sunlight cascaded down the cold hues of his skin and brought out the warming reds in his locks of tumbling hair. In seemingly idle play, his long fingers drifted across the water's surface, attuned to a harmony that was only for him.

He was ethereal, in a broken, beautiful way. She wanted him, in a way that was equally broken.

She could hardly believe her own body when she'd felt the first twinge of lust in the pit of her abdomen after such long months of numbness. Perhaps she'd found a meadow after the wasteland, but what ruin would they wreak upon themselves if they left behind this almost childlike alliance—existing only as human and human in each other's company—and trespassed the threshold to becoming man and woman?

Her companion hung up the fluttering rags of their clothes, reaching branches that she couldn't touch if she jumped. They drifted like wings at his back when he approached, heavy in the way he moved and his footsteps resounded from the forest ground, a Goliath treading, and yet there was nothing but grace in his long limbs

She pretended that her gaze wasn't entranced by the tapered muscles of his midriff and the suture leading down from his navel. Knowing his tale, she found herself wondering if whoever made him, part by part, had attempted to compensate for a shortcoming of themselves.

Should she maybe angle her hip like so, place her hand here or there to create an appealing silhouette? Such nurtured thoughts; she wanted to absolve herself from them, but they'd been carved into the fabric of her self much like the discolored scars into the flesh of her protector.

What would it cost to be simpler and purer? Like he seemed to be. Never had he looked upon her with lust, and so she felt almost ashamed for the lick of baser instincts, first kindled by his sacrifice of pain when he faced the wolves, so easily given, demanding nothing in return.

But what was there to say in her defense? He measured one and a half times the height of any person she'd ever seen, a furnace of strength powered by the gentlest of hearts. If anything gave her the right for a kindling, she believed it was this.

He sat by her side, knees folding against his chest. He'd been so ashamed to let her see the sallow ravines of his flesh at first, now he turned his head and smiled when she reached for his large hand, pulling his towering frame down to her side on the fur.

"You permit me such a sense of safety..." Sighing, she curled into his broad chest, tracing with her breath the shape where his heart was buried.

"Because I… protected… you?" The darkness of his timbre touched her gently and he blinked with heavy lids, lashes kissing the lines of his cheeks.

"Yes, but…" The truth painstakingly wound itself from her chest. Her gentle Goliath merely traced a patient finger down her naked spine. "So safe that I dare lay my naked body next to you without a concern. I believe it's because you're not a man."

"Not… a man?" For all he knew, he was designed to be one and one of the parts that distinguished them pressed with growing weight against his inner thigh where he attempted to contain it. It made him feel almost… warm.

"The herbivores of the forest don't fear you because they know you're not a predator, that is what I believe." Lifting her face from his chest, she met the docile maroons of his eyes with conviction. "Not like man. Because all they do is hurt. But you are a monster, you've professed it yourself, and monsters don't hunt and hurt. They're merely different."

Whoever had sowed the belief that monsters were evil must have been a man. A monster was what men feared, and men feared everything that eluded their control, like the woman on the arm of the one who prowled the woods.

"I've hurt people before. I've hurt the wolves. And I cannot… unhurt them."

"But not out of malice."

Closing his eyes to hide the salty pearls in them, he so wanted to believe her, but hadn't there been malice in him when he cracked the spine of a wolf on his forearm, when he split one's jaws from tongue to brain? There'd been such wrath pouring red-hot through the cadaverous ropes of his flesh, but only because he couldn't suffer to be without her!

"Are you… a monster, too?"

How hopeful he sounded.

"To some people, I'm sure…" She raised her hand to his cheek, forever basking in the way he seemed starved for her affection, moisture glinting at the corner of his eye. "Not useful enough, not obedient enough. Born in the wrong body, the wrong shape, the wrong mind, everything wrong—"

"Not wrong—!" The growl of his voice rippled through flesh and bone as he rolled on top of her, eclipsing her with auburn hair and eyes of devastating sadness. "Not wrong," he repeated, a tremor to his tone and fingers that performed their galvanic dance above her chest, a fleeting touch traveling from sternum to chin as he fought for words. "Perfect." He swallowed, lashes lowering in agony. "For me? Please?"

"For you?"

"Please…"

"I…" She swallowed thickly. "I think I love you. More than words can explain."

So, it was not just him, then. More than words could say; he wondered if there was another way to express it, another language that wasn't made in the throat.

"Love…" The weight of the word bled into gravity, pulling on his spine, compelling him to lower himself so that he could feel the warmth of her breath, the shape of her chest and the beat of her heart. The towering proportions of him ensured that his pelvis came to rest against the furs rather than her own, a circumstance that he strangely regretted.

"Do you love me as well?"

"I don't want to be without you. It… hurts to imagine it. Is that… love?"

This wasn't what he'd intended to persuade his creator into, but could this be how companionship and love were born—out of a chance encounter?

"What does your heart tell you?"

"I… don't know. I want to be… closer."

Never had she thought she'd ever let anyone close again. She'd have rather been torn apart by the wolves than ever endure a man again, and perhaps that was exactly what she'd wandered into the woods for. But as it turned out it wasn't a man's body that she feared, it was the putrescence of their souls.

"Come closer, then."

Longingly, he fully settled his torso on her smaller chest, welcomed by her palms on the planes of his back. His lips found the pulse of her neck, resting there while the fragmented rumble of his breath rolled against her skin.

The air shifted, her flesh squirming underneath him, baring more of her neck. He pressed his cheek against it, exhaling shakily. The rise and fall of her stomach moved against his ribs, her thighs on either side of his flanks.

"Closer…" she cooed and so he wedged his arms underneath her body, tightening them until he felt a sob prod at the back of his throat. A strange heat seemed to have taken hold of his body and the closer he crawled, the hotter it singed.

The woman who cushioned his torso threaded her fingers into the tangled locks of his hair, whispering again, "Would you mind… kissing me?"

"Kiss…sing…" He remembered the way the old man's granddaughter had kissed him on the cheek, how his smile had deepened the wrinkles on his leathered face into lines of laughter. Of course, he would kiss his companion. He'd tried it on the back of his hand a couple of times and hoped he'd be doing it right.

Ashen lips moved to her cheek, but she turned her face so that the kiss landed on her mouth instead. A graveled gasp sprung from his throat.

"I am sorry!"

"Why is that?" She regarded him with widened eyes and it dawned on him that she'd moved her head on purpose.

"Oh… On the mouth?"

"Yes." The corners of her eyes crinkled like the old man's, but different, lashes falling over her sun-speckled eyes as her fingers drifted over the back of his stitched skull. Their lips met again.

Was that this other language?

Not words but movement. Tender breaths passed from lung to lung, dampness traded from mouth to mouth, faces slanting to slot into each other's sharp and soft angles, tongues peeking out and then rolling until that very rhythm of their mouths spread down the cord of his spine, bringing his pelvis against the furs.

A guttural breath wrenched itself from his chest when the girl's legs hooked behind his back.

"You can use your lips to kiss… every part of me, and your hands to touch me, if you want."

Only his lips—so cold and guiltless—she'd allow to roam across her skin. For a moment, his gaze lingered, round eyes free of sin, until he leaned down with a hum, pressing the traded kiss-dampness of her own mouth to her chin. The blue, sweeping arc of his cupid's bow tickled against her bottom lip.

He seemed eager to explore, mouth traveling to the column of her throat, lips no longer motionlessly resting against her pulse but drifting about. The weight of his large hands pinned her shoulders to the furs but they couldn't contain the writhing of her hips, rolling against his flat stomach.

"Are we like Adam and Eve?" He looked up with concern, raising the broad ridge of his shoulders from her chest. Her heart swelled with giggles.

"I can be your Eve if you'll be my Adam."

And why wouldn't they be? Why shouldn't they make these woods their garden? It was only them out here, following the murmur of streams and the whisper of mice in the forest soil, crossing man-made borders in their wake that mattered not to the weave of nature. The idea of civilization had become irrelevant to her.

Her Adam sat back on his haunches, and what her chest and stomach missed in kisses he delivered with his hands, flattening them in reverie against all the hills and coves that had never known such a devout caress. Below her navel, his dancing fingers paused, auburn locks tumbling over his chest as he stared down at himself.

This time, she had to look, because he did. She dragged her gaze from the marbles of his eyes, down the tendons of his throat, along the width of his heaving chest until it settled upon his manhood. A suture, darkened like the rest of them, curved along his pubic bone and vanished beyond the connective tendons of thigh and pelvis. Hair sparsely covered the protruding bone, and unlike the strands on his head, it was neither auburn nor silver, it was blond.

Fully erect, he stood out so massively that a shadow was cast across her stomach. The crimson of his blood made veins swell against wintry skin, all converging at the swollen head whose dark blue flushed almost purple.

This engorged part of him ached so terribly that even the caress of a breeze of wind brought him to the brink of moaning. Staring at himself, deducing that it had something to do with the language he yearned to explore was as obvious as it could be.

"I don't know what to do," he confessed, tracing her belly with idle patterns.

"Not at all?"

Well, he had an idea.

Which involved mounting her like the beast he had been accused of being, hot-blooded, slavering. He would not do that.

Giving no answer to her question, he let his hand drift to the very edge of the patch of hair that grew between her thighs, watching the blue pallor of his fingers against the lively hues of her. Trembling, he listened for her to tell him to relent, anxious for every millimeter he claimed, but the further he trailed south, the more impatient grew her sounds.

Gripped by curiosity, he ignored his own anatomy that annoyingly obstructed the view of hers.

Skin folded in unfamiliar layers that seemed so delicate, he was afraid to touch them. But it did not hurt her; that much he could tell when he slipped his fingers across those delicate shapes, finding himself intoxicated by the airy quality of her breaths when he dipped into that damp, giving softness.

Much like the inside of her mouth, this was another hidden place which he felt should be touched with utmost care, and he found himself surprised by how snugly she fit around his finger.

"Soft," he breathed, dark voice lightened by the delight of discovery.

This was an explorer's caress, not a mimicry of fucking. The touch of a man who studied the world with his hands, who had no intentions beyond mapping the shape of her body. If she could possibly love him more, her chest would break open and release the garden that blossomed within.

"You are soft, too."

"I'm just made of jagged fragments." Her fairy prince lifted his mournful eyes. "Corpse flesh and cold bones."

"But the whole is soft." The words in her throat fought against the slow pleasure that coiled and grew, her walls molded pliantly around his exploring finger, soft and willing.

Something had broken within her quite literally that day, several months ago. She was sure of it. There'd been no bleed when there should have been at least three, and it was good that way. Where there should have been regret, maybe, she felt a vast relief.

"You do know how, ah, how it's done, do you not?" Every being knew by design.

"I… think I do, but… I'm too big." For whatever reason, his creator had not only built him monstrous, he had also built him incorrectly, because these pieces could not possibly slot together.

While a common man may have commented this with sinister vanity and then forced himself inside anyway, taking pride in a woman's keening, her companion uttered these words with such devastation that it nearly rent her apart.

"Don't let your size trouble you."

It was true, he was big. Everything about him was; like a tree grown from earthy soil. Boldly, she reached her hand down, cupped the tip of him in her palm.

Oh, the sound that came from his throat when the entire mass of his body rocked forward in response.

That was no growl—it was a purr.

More of those sounds she craved, wanted them down by her ear, uttered in feral despair while his wolfish pupil sparked from shared desire. To think that she was capable of such thoughts again…

Eagerly, she closed her fist around his manhood and tugged, utterly enthralled by the way his head rolled back, baring the peak of his throat among the tendons that framed it. When the velvety tip of him nudged her dampness, he recoiled, retracting his hand from her nethers to cup those daring fingers around his cock.

He had not forgotten about the blood that once stained her thighs.

Determined, he lifted his gaze from their conjoined hands to her face, lurid yellow flashing in his eye.

"No."

For some reason beyond his understanding, that only seemed to incense her more, little fingers eagerly squeezing him under his broad palm with which he had meant to restrain her. Whether those squeezing ripples served as pain or relief to his body, he couldn't quite tell but his eyes welled with tears, overwhelm prickling at the very sutures of his composure.

Teeth flashing, he wrenched her hand away from him and pinned both of her wrists to the furs, chest heaving with staggered growls.

"Please!" She pressed the softness of her thighs against his hips to coax the massive frame of him closer. He didn't budge an inch although his cock twitched in response.

"You're asking me to cause you pain?"

"If there will be pain, I don't care about it!" She squirmed against his palms and seemed offended when he released her. "Though so long as you're careful, I don't think there will be."

Indeed, the space between her thighs was no longer just speckled with dampness, she appeared to be entirely sodden with that slippery nectar that still coated his pointer finger. It seemed like a good idea to spread some of that onto himself, so he took himself in one hand—and the dimensions of his hand by no means dwarfed his cock—bringing that aching, swollen flesh against her delicate anatomy.

He really only meant to anoint himself on that moisture of hers, but as soon as the tip of him slipped between the leaves of her center, he found his hips lurching with intrigue; her flesh more giving than it ought to be around such a thick and blunt intrusion. Gazing up with concern, he found her nodding enthusiastically and pressed onward, millimeter by divine millimeter.

The rumbling of his chest soothed her like rainfall on foliage while he stretched her wide on the girth of him, imbued with a heat that his skin often missed. Coming flush with a quaking whimper, he placed his hands upon her hips, holding still as he charted lines on her flesh.

"How do I… do it… right?"

"To be entirely truthful, I… don't really know." She felt shame in confessing that. "No one ever made an effort to figure it out with me."

There had been enough glimpses of pleasure to make her believe that it was possible to crawl toward some finale, or at the very least sing for longer than a minute. Already, he seemed to press into a pleasurable spot and his drifting caress coaxed her pelvis to arch towards him.

"Hmmm…" Rumbling, he let his head roll forward, awarding her with the sight of sweetly furrowed brows and tumbling silver and maroon.

Instead of chasing after what his hips desired, if the way he throbbed within her was anything to go by, he sat patiently on his haunches, draping her thighs over his. He wanted to understand the wonders of her anatomy. Utterly entranced, he bestowed the idle dance of his fingers on areas that had never received such attention or care, caressing every invisible scar with the balm of his attention.

Blue fingertips trailed along each side of the natural seam, split open by the thickness of himself, finding those areas tender to the touch and sodden with the slickness that enveloped him too. Further down, across the shape of her cheeks, then back up to the spot that enticed him the most. A tiny pebble. Every muscle of her body seized upon the gentlest impact—even those that gripped him on the inside.

"You like it here."

"I—It appears so~"

It seemed that he was about to unlock a secret for the both of them.

Continuing that caress with enthusiasm, he managed to draw a whole plethora of rewarding sounds from her throat, each one sweeter than the next, another language indeed; one that was free of the vices of misunderstandings. It almost moved him to bear witness to something so beautiful.

All the while, the throttling pressure of her insides made it harder to contain himself. Gravity tugged on his hips, bringing them forwards in tiny movements that singed him from the base of his spine to his busy fingertips. Fire—once feared, now welcome.

Scrunching his nose, he tried to suppress it, holding a growl at the back of his throat and the flame in his loins.

"No, don't stop—! Keep going," she breathed incredulously, shaken by the way her body burned to receive the monstrous proportions of him, deep and deeper still.

She gave him that look again, pupils jittering from the snarl of his lips to the gleam in his eye, shrouded in the shadows of his dangling hair.

Perhaps, his imposing nature could be of use…

Experimentally, he rolled his pelvis, if just to test how much he could move, to see how delicate she was. The warm, welcoming channel of her body drew him right in; walls turned into honey. Her hands had found his knees, gripping him. Releasing a guttural breath, he pulled back a little further, pushed back in, couldn't decide which part of the rhythm thrilled him the most.

One thing however, he wanted to dedicate his attention to first.

It seemed… important.

Hips rolling onward with light thrusts, his fingertips resumed their figures on the spot she so enjoyed. Patterns in nature were easy to read. The veins of a leaf, the paths of mice. All he had to do was watch, listen and learn. So, he learned how hard to press, which shapes to draw, until the arch of her spine crested like a wave and crashed, her voice so high and desperate as she gave to him the most beautiful display his eyes had ever beheld.

"Was that… right?"

She laughed, hiding her face behind shaky palms. Every tight string of her muscles seemed to have been snapped by the force of whatever had rippled through her so magnificently.

"Incredible," she whispered like she'd had an audience with God, reaching one palm out to beckon him closer.

His composure melted when she cradled his cheek, slipped her fingers to the back of his skull. A tender, golden smile became a growl in the pit of his poached lungs. If it was possible, her nethers had become even slicker, gripping at him from every angle, and no longer could he resist.

He descended on her like a tower collapsing, caging her beneath his chest; joints, bones and tendons all connecting to snap into harmony. Even if he so wished it, he couldn't stop the force of nature that spooled itself from his loins, ricocheting forth against her center until his teeth were laid bare, grunting and growling with quaking breaths as he rutted into her.

"Mine."

Never had he owned anything, not a home, not a bed, not a parent's loving touch.

But he wanted to own this precious fawn, the same way that the roots of a tree owned the soil and the soil owned the tree.

"Yes!" She keened, pulling his parted lips against her mouth so she could drink every growl, every purr directly from its wellspring.

The very forest ground trembled from the impact of his hips; large hands gripping at her flesh, she could all but mewl as she witnessed the ferocity contained within this gentle giant's mind, unleashed upon her in love and heat.

Soon, she had an inkling from the way his narrow pelvis stuttered against her thighs and his breath crawled from his chest in deeper, darker rumbles; the noises of a direwolf. She locked her ankles behind his back and mere moments later, his head rolled back, cast in pure bliss.

The sharp angles of his features softened in the golden light as his face kissed the sun, all that predatory semblance melted away, shape-shifting her fairy prince from wolf to doe in the passing of a bonded heartbeat. A tear rolled down his sutured cheek, curling against her thumb where she held him. His release poured plentiful from the cradle of her body and he shivered so fiercely that all she wanted was to hold him close, let every thread of hers comfort every stitch of his.

Heavy lids rolled open as they encountered each other in the afterglow, still human and human, or perhaps ascended into creature and creature. The birds and deer had all been undisturbed by the coupling of these two beings.

Whatever they'd feared to ruin, it was covered in efflorescence, a sea of flowers craning their heads towards the sun—towards life.

If you enjoyed this fanfiction, a kind comment or a reblog would mean the world to me 💕🦌