small kitten with internet access

teammates

in which wonderful & terrible things happen to etho's person, but he's not going to let that stop him from recording an episode. for some reason?

(the context for this is that etho's been gay his whole life but a flipped bit in the server code has made him straight)

“Etho?” she says, like that’s a whole question of its own.

He can’t say anything—especially not when she shifts, just the tiniest bit, and the movement makes his body react instinctively. He freezes as soon as he realises what he’s doing, but it’s too late: his crotch meets her thigh, and the world comes to a halt.

Gem looks at him with wide eyes, then glances down at his boner, then back up at him. Somehow, her eyes look even wider, then, like a baby deer’s. They’re the most amazing shade of deep green, and the fan of her thick eyelashes is deeply distracting. When he looks down at her lips—like petals, he thinks, insanely—he watches as she catches the bottom one between her teeth.

“Gem,” he says. Because that’s all he’s got.

Slowly, moving like he’s a wild animal she’s scared of chasing off, Gem anchors a hand on his shoulder and grinds down against him.

The contact is electric. Etho jolts helplessly into it, one arm coming up to wrap around her waist and pull her closer, make the contact more.

“Gem,” he says again, already out of breath, feeling completely crazy.

“Etho.” Her hands scrabble against his chest, his collar, trying to find the best place to hold on as he moves her against him, getting harder as the heat of her body sends sparks through his. Her fingers find the edge of his mask. “Can I?”

He nods, and she doesn’t wait a second before pulling the black fabric down and dragging him into a deep kiss.

It’s nothing like kissing a man. Her face is so smooth and petite, and there’s something distinctively girlish in the plush of her lips. She licks into his mouth and sighs against him, and the noise is unmistakably feminine and for some reason that alone makes it hot. It occurs to him wildly that if he doesn’t get her into bed this instant, he might actually just die. Or come in his pants. One of the two, for sure.

She gasps when he grips her thighs and picks her up off the ground, but she gets the picture, wrapping her legs around his waist and pulling his mouth back to hers.

“Do you want to fuck me?” she says, her wet lips dragging against his. He just nods, because he definitely can’t articulate just how much his body needs him to do exactly that.

She directs him to the nearest building in the fishing town that has a half-decent bed in it even as she’s pulling her own shirt off, and he drops her onto the sheets without any flourish. Looking at her, panting and a little sweaty and definitely, definitely not a man, he honestly can’t really remember why he had never been interested in women before. Because look at her. Framed by her bra, her chest heaves up and down with every breath, and she gazes up at him with those big, deer-like eyes of hers.

“Thought you wanted to do more than just stare, Etho,” she says.

And yeah. Crazily, he does.

He knees onto the bed and makes light work of the rest of both of their clothes. Experimentally, he touches one of her breasts—because women have breasts—and runs his thumb over the peak of her nipple. The skin is kind of alarmingly soft, and she shivers under the touch. When he hesitates to go further, she grabs his hand with a sly grin and pulls it to her—to her pussy.

She’s swollen and wet, and silky soft, and any thought Etho might’ve had about needing lube flies out of his mind as she presses his fingers to her slit. When he slips his middle one into her, it meets no resistance at all.

Gem whimpers softly as he drags his rough finger in and out of her, and adds another when it seems like she’s ready. Honestly, it seems like she could handle all of him right away—it’s Gem, Etho’s certain she could handle anything—but he finds himself wanting to take his time with it. Drag it out. Every tiny sound she makes, every twitch of her body, the way her pussy clenches around his fingers, sends fresh waves of arousal through him. He wants her. Simple as that: he just wants.

So, on impulse, he bends down and, with his fingers still curling inside her, brings his mouth to her slit and licks.

The reaction is instantaneous; she jerks in his hands and turns her face into the sheets as a reedy moan stutters out of her, and her pussy tightens around him as she—orgasms? Probably orgasms. Is this what it’s like when a woman does that? He keeps his fingers moving, rocking them into her slowly, coaxing her through it and back down again, just like Pause always liked.

“That looked—” he starts, and stops, not sure how to describe it. “Was that okay?” he asks.

Gem shoots him a wild look. “Is that a real question?” she says, and props herself up to reach for his hard cock, giving it a couple of motivated strokes. “Come on, let’s see what you can do with this. I want you to ram the soul out of my body.”

That startles a surprised laugh out of Etho, but honestly? Sounds pretty good to him. He manoeuvres up the bed so he’s braced over her and guides his cock to bump against her entrance, dragging it against her slit to get it wet. She shudders and breathes out a thin whine as he finally slides in.

She parts around him easily, letting him all the way in until his head bumps her—her cer… vix? He guesses? She jerks and grips him when he does—like perfect haptic feedback telling him okay, careful, that’s sensitive.

Slowly, he rolls his hips, drawing almost all the way out and thrusting deliberately back in. At least this bit is basically the same no matter what shape of body you’re doing it with. Gem, for her part, makes it easy to tell what’s working and what’s not. He tries speeding up, but finds she’s not nearly as into it as when he goes slow and hard, grinding their hips together as he bottoms out. She shakes like she’s experiencing an earthquake high up on the Richter scale when he does that, and her hand snakes down between them to knead her clit. When she brings herself off—purposefully, expertly—it’s not just the feeling of her clenching tightly around him that sends him over the edge too. It’s her face, scrunched up with pleasure, and above all else the high, girlish noises she makes that go straight to his groin and have him tensing up and shooting into her.

He waits for regret—for clarity—to come to him when he pulls out. An oh man, what the heck did I do that for? But it doesn’t arrive. He leans back on the bed and his eyes rake over the pale curves of her body and all he feels is confused satisfaction and a pleasant, post-orgasmic stupor.

“Here,” Gem says, reaching over the side of the bed to pluck his mask off the floor. “It’s weird seeing you without it.”

“Thanks,” he says, and pulls it back on. It’s weird being seen without it.

“This is going to sound crazy—” Gem turns to him even as she’s still catching her breath. “But I really thought you didn’t like girls.”

“Um,” Etho says, and doesn’t really know how to go on. Because she’s right. He didn’t. And there’s really no nice way to say I think the fact I wanted to do this with you at all means there’s something really wrong with me.

“Really!” she goes on. “Like, I didn’t think you ever even looked at me. It was always Beef, and Bdubs.”

Now that’s enough to kick him out of post-orgasmic stupor.

“That’s not—” he starts. “I mean, I don’t—”

Don’t what? Don’t like guys? Maybe he doesn’t anymore, but saying it would still feel like a big lie, considering.

But Gem’s looking at him like she expects his sentence to have an ending.

“I’m… straight?” he ends up going for. That, at least, is true.

“Etho, I know you know what bisexuality is,” she says flatly.

He frowns. “Obviously I know about. Um. Bisexuals,” he says. “But I’m not one.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, I…” He crosses his arms around his chest, and forces himself to look at her. “Gem, something happened to me, a couple of days ago.”

It takes a lot of explaining to get her to actually understand what he’s saying, but he tries to get the whole story out. All the way from noticing False that day in the shopping district, to the night before, trying to—well, he hadn’t said jerk off in so many words, but he’d got the point across.

“I think you might be over-complicating it,” Gem tells him, clearly trying to sound gentle. “People change. Sexuality’s fluid. Sometimes you just go through weird periods.”

Etho shakes his head, increasingly more worked up, and says, “I’m not overcomplicating it at all. My whole life, until a week ago, I liked men. Now, I like women. No overlap, no both, no complication. Gem, I was—I was gay.”

He snaps his mouth shut as soon as he says it; the words had tumbled out of him so quickly, so breathlessly that he hadn’t even had time to register what he was saying until it was already out there. But it’s… the first time he’s ever said it out loud. To anyone. He’d always denied it to Pause and even in his own head, he tried to avoid thinking it like that would make it any less real.