#cumdrop

Sure, Sunshine still makes tea at the same time every morning. Swiss is still loud in the corridors at hours that should be illegal. Aether is attentive, maybe too much so. The siblings move through their days with the easy rhythm of people whose normal hasn't been interrupted, and Cumulus moves through it with them, and it's… fine.

She has things to do. She has her own rhythms, her own work, her own reasons to be in each room she walks into.

It's just that her rhythms were also built around her pack, and most of that pack is somewhere outside of Kiruna right now, and the space where they all fit together has been slightly, persistently off for a month in a way she can't quite name and hasn't tried to.

She'd been putting her shoes on when Cirrus texted something she'd interpreted as bus is close. She wasn't rushing. The return is always loud and chaotic and after the first leg she learned to wait at the edges of it — let the reunion happen, let the energy settle, find her pack in the quieter moment after.

She's good at the edges.

She knows how to wait.

There's a knock on her door, loud and quick enough to make her jump.

She's halfway through saying come in when the door opens anyway.

Dew stands in the doorframe looking like he's just finished dismantling the tour bus with his bare hands — rumpled, road-worn, hair in a state that suggests he stopped caring about the results somewhere around the thirtieth time he ran a hand through it. He finds her immediately, like he knew exactly where she'd be standing, and his expression settles into something that, on him, looks almost like relief.

"Hey," he says.

She blinks at him. The shoe in her hand suddenly feels irrelevant. "You just got back."

"Yeah." He steps inside and the door closes behind him, the click of it very deliberate. "Special wasn't even in park yet. I don't think I actually waited for the door to open all the way."

Cumulus sets the shoe down.

He didn't wait for the bus to stop, she thinks, and doesn't know what to do with that, so she looks at him instead.

There's something in his energy she can't immediately categorize — not distressed, not the particular flavor of wound-up that tour leaves on all of them. But he's focused. Pointed in her direction in a way that does something inconvenient to her pulse.

"Rain—"

"Is fine." Easy. Certain. "Rain knows where I am. Rain also offered to bring my bag in, so." He crosses the room with the certainty he always carries. "I'm home now."

"Dew." She tips her chin up as he reaches the edge of the bed, something defensive gathering in her chest even as the rest of her is already doing something embarrassing. She'd been waiting for Cirrus. For Aurora. For someone who would make sense. "Don't you want to see Aether? You could just—"

"Could just what?"

"There are others," she says, and hates how it sounds out loud. "You don't have to—"

He kisses her.

Thoroughly.

One hand coming up to cup her jaw and she feels the rest of her sentence dissolve because he kisses her with such complete attention — like she is the only thing he came home for and the trip was worth it just for this.

When he pulls back his eyes are dark and he looks, frankly, a little smug about the state of her.

"I don't want anyone else," he says. "I want this. You. Just you." He tips his forehead briefly to hers. "Stop arguing."

She doesn't have anything left to argue with. He didn't wait for the bus to stop. And she can't do anything except feel it, warm and strange and a little overwhelming, settling somewhere under her ribs next to the thing she hasn't been naming for a month.

⛧

He takes his time despite the neediness that carried him across the Ministry at speed, which she finds both characteristic and quietly undoing. Hands moving over her like he's relearning something he'd been holding in memory — the slope of her shoulders, the soft weight of her breasts, the warmth of her ribcage under his palms — and every time she surfaces enough to say something he does something with his hands that dissolves the thought before it can form.

"You're doing that on purpose," she accuses.

"Obviously." He mouths at her throat. "You were going to say something I'd have to argue with and I'm busy."

"I was going to say—"

"Something self-deprecating," he says into her skin, quiet and certain. "That I was going to have to take apart. I'd rather just show you instead."

She wants to protest that but she can't quite get there, because his palms are spreading warm and wide across her stomach and he makes a small, genuine sound against her neck like touching her is something he's been looking forward to.

He gets her out of her clothes with quiet efficiency and then slows back down completely. His hands move over her like he's got all the time in the world now that he's here — the curve of her belly, the weight of her hips, the place where her waist dips and flares. Learning her all over again. Like she's worth the investment.

She's been moving through a full Ministry for a month and she tried so hard to not let herself feel absence until right now.

She could handle loneliness. Lacking is another thing completely.

"Dew—"

"I'm appreciating something," he says, preemptively.

Despite herself, despite everything, she almost smiles. "You always say that."

"I'm always right about it." His thumbs trace slow arcs into her sides and he looks up at her, bright-eyed and entirely serious underneath the lightness. "Do you know how many times I thought about this? About you? Your skin. The way you feel under my hands." He presses his mouth to the swell of her stomach and stays there, warm and unhurried. "I was lying in my bunk thinking about it, completely useless to everyone."

"You had—" She tries. The words feel flimsier than they did at the door. "There were plenty of—"

"Options?" The word comes out dry. "I wasn't thinking about options. I was thinking about you."

He slides down before she can respond to that, and the full-Ministry-empty feeling dissolves into something else entirely.

⛧

He opens her up with his fingers first, slow and deliberate, and makes a sound low in his throat that she feels more than hears.

"Dew—"

"You're so wet," he says, and he sounds delighted about it, genuinely pleased in a way that has no performance in it at all. "Did you—" He does something with his fingers that interrupts his own sentence. "Okay. That's— yeah. That's for me."

"Don't flatter yourself—"

"I will," he says, and withdraws his fingers. She makes an embarrassing sound at the loss before she can stop herself, and then another when he brings them to his mouth and tastes them, tongue wrapping around the digits with its own wet noise. His eyes close briefly, something in his expression goes a little undone. "Fuck," he says, quiet and rough. "I was thinking about this the whole way home."

Her face is hot. Her heart is doing something she refuses to name.

He puts his mouth on her.

She stops thinking in straight lines almost immediately — he is good at this in a way that has always been unfair.

His mouth works against her, tongue finding her clit with the accuracy of someone who pays close attention and forgets nothing. Her hand finds his hair and grips. He hums against her like she's done him a favor and the sound of it goes straight through her.

He's vocal throughout. Groaning against her when she gets wetter, making small pleased sounds when her thighs tighten around his head like it's a reward he's been working toward, surfacing in broken fragments to say things like there you go and yes, exactly that and I missed you and then going back down before she can do anything with any of it.

It's too much. It's too specific. There's no room in it for the voice that's been quietly telling her for a month that she takes up too much space, that the edges are where she belongs, that she couldn't possibly push through to be where she actually wants.

He didn't even wait for the bus to stop.

She's trying not to think about that and failing completely.

"You really could have—" she starts, because she is nothing if not stubborn, because some part of her needs him to understand that she knows she's not—

He stops and looks up at her. Patient. Fingers still.

"Don't," he says quietly.

"I'm just saying—"

"You're not just saying anything." Not unkind, but maybe a little impatient; she's keeping him from his meal. "You were on the outside after the first leg. Stood there waiting for everyone else to finish having their moment." He raises an eyebrow. "I noticed. I've been thinking about it this whole leg actually, and it wasn't going to happen again."

"I didn't want to—"

"I know," he says. "That's why I came to you."

The thing is — she believes him. That's what she doesn't know what to do with. He's not saying it to be kind. He's not saying it to smooth something over. He was useless in his bunk for the entire last leg. He didn't wait for the bus to stop. He means it, the way he means everything, because he might be hellspawn but he's certainly not a liar.

"Fine," she says, which comes out wrecked in a way she wasn't expecting.

"Great."

He ducks back down and she gasps immediately, his shoulders shaking against her thighs, the absolute menace, and then he gets serious and there's nothing left to think with.

His mouth works against her with intent now — no more pausing to make points. No need when the point is being made comprehensively with his tongue and his fingers and the full focused attention of someone who has been waiting a month for exactly this. He finds the angle that makes her thighs tremble and stays there, relentless, and she stops trying to be quiet because there's no version of this where that's possible.

He responds to every sound she makes. Adjusts, reads, gives her the next thing she needs before she can think to ask. His hand spreads wide and warm across the soft curve of her stomach and she feels held, wanted — and it's that, the wanting, that undoes her as much as anything physical.

"Dewdrop—"

He surfaces just enough, breath still hot, voice wrecked.

"I know. I've got you. Stay with me—"

He goes back down. She feels it move through her like something that's been building for longer than just the tour.

"There," he says against her, triumphant, fingers curling, "there, come on, give it to me—"

She comes apart.

Not gracefully. Not quietly. Her thighs lock around his head and her hand fists in his hair and she shakes through it in waves, wet and completely undone, and he groans like she's giving him everything he's been starving for — working her through every wave until she's trembling and oversensitive and pulling at him weakly.

He surfaces destroyed. Hair ruined, chin slick, mouth wet, and he looks smug about every single part of it. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth without breaking eye contact and drops his chin onto the soft curve of her stomach with boneless satisfaction.

"You're perfect," he says. "I missed you."

She stares at the ceiling. The full-Ministry-empty feeling is completely gone. Something else has taken up residence in its place — warm and a little terrifying.

"Shut up," she says weakly.

He presses a kiss to her stomach. Then another. Mouth still wet against her skin, unhurried, like he's not even close to done.

"Specifically you," he says, quiet and certain. "Just so we're clear."

She blinks slowly.

Okay, she thinks, and feels something in her chest finally, carefully, exhale.

Okay.

He can be right for once.

Still, Dewdrop gripes through the remainder of the shaving session. Cumulus only goes up to his knees, the hair on his thighs fine and blonde and easy to ignore. He tucks his stiffy away between those thighs when it comes time to climb out--Lucifer forbid she sees how much he really enjoyed being pampered.

Dew wraps a towel around his waist, Cumulus kisses his cheek and then she's flouncing into her bedroom. The pale blue lace teddy she's sporting barely reaches her dimpled thighs, and Dew does not stop himself from staring, not even for a moment. A wolfish whistle has her giggling and kicking up a heel, flashing some fang over her shoulder while she shakes her ass.

"Keep goin' like that and were both gonna need a cold shower," Dew tells her, gathering his damp hair into a tight knot, and Cumulus waggles her eyebrows. He rolls his eyes but still smirks, turning away to finish drying off and applying the specific lotion Cumulus picked out for him. His lower legs feel so soft, and Dew swallows hard.

He has to take a few extra minutes to make sure he's completely soft and not accidentally dribbling before sighing, tossing his towel onto its designated bar. Standing naked and proud in her bedroom doorway, fists on his hips.

"Ready?"

She nods eagerly, already snug under the covers, and Dew nods. Strides over to the bed while she lifts the duvet to reveal silky pearl-white sheets. Dew sighs at the glimpse he gets of her beneath the blanket, all warm curves and welcoming softness, and groans deep in his chest when he slips between the sheets. Snuggles up until they're chest to chest and he can bathe in the rosy scent of her perfume.

Only once he's settled does he notice it.

"Oh."

Dew wiggles his legs against the silk bedding, amazed by the way his skin glides over the fabric. It feels incredible, cool and smooth and he doesn't even know he's purring until Cumulus giggles again.

"Told you so," she lilts, bumping their horns together. Dew can't deny it, and finds he doesn't much want to try.

"So soft," he rumbles, scooching closer still until he's got one arm wrapped around the ghoulette's waist and his face buried in her curls. She hums, pleased, nuzzling into his chest. Dew drops a kiss at her crown. "Thanks for bullying me, Lu."

She laughs, chiming and bright, and Dew makes an embarrassing yipping sound when her fangs find a nipple.

"But wait, there's more," she murmurs, playful, and then her legs are tangling with his. Somehow hers are even softer, skin so creamy smooth it should be criminal, and Dew lets out a happy little chirrup.

"Spoiling me," he mumbles into her hair while they act like a pair of restless crickets. It just feels so nice.

"You deserve it, princess," Cumulus teases, and Dew decides he can wait until he's a touch less relaxed to pay her back for that little comment.

He heads into the kitchen, setting out coffee grounds and tea bags. Since no one is watching to tell him not to, he uses his fire to heat the water in the kettle rather than the stove. Soon the scent of chamomile and drip coffee float through the room.

When both drinks are ready, his with a splash of milk and hers with a bit of honey, he brings them to the coffee table and settles in next to Cumulus on the loveseat. She tosses her blanket over the both of them before taking a sip of her tea and sighing happily.

“Whatcha working on?” He nurses his own mug.

“Hmm, just unraveling something I changed my mind on. Then I’ll make socks I think. Just can’t decide what colors.”

Dew parses through her basket of yarn balls and withdraws skeins of electric orange and lavender. “It's for Solaris right?”

“Yes.” It's tradition at this point for Cumulus to make any new summons a blanket and socks as a welcome gift. “Good thinking, these should be perfect.”

At some point, the growing yarn ball from Cumulus’ half unraveled project falls out of her lap. Dew retrieves it and begins wrapping up the slack for her.

“Thank you sweetheart.”

It makes the process faster, not having to unravel and wind it all herself so it’s not too much longer before the yarn is contained again. Tossing it aside, she grabs the skeins Dew has picked and starts planning out how to make a striped pattern for the socks. As she casts on, Dew helps by slowly unwinding the yarn coils as she needs more slack.