Chapter Text
That was your first kiss.
You sag against the doorway, fingertips coming up to your still-tingling lips. Cronus leans over you still; you can feel his breath wash over your face, and even that slight contact has your skin prickling. His eyes are very wide, a vivid shade of violet. And you are flushed so, so red right now.
Physically speaking, that is. This mutant blood color of yours, while it makes it easier to sympathize with humans, makes you feel like a stranger in your own culture. You can’t measure up to this highblood, and both of you know it. Still, you feel driven to protect those lower than you in society, and Cronus can’t just treat Mituna like that and think you won’t notice. Mituna deserves better. Better than this jerk who manages to mock him at every turn.
You’re flushed red, but all you can feel coursing through your chest is the blackest of hate.
Cronus stares down at you. You look up at him. The noise of the party, cacophonous around you, has dimmed; all you can hear is the sound of your own blood pusher in your auricular sponge clots. He lets out something that might be a laugh and you want to hurt him. Drag your claws along his back, watch violet clot under your nails, encourage a garden of orchids to bloom under his skin when you press too hard with your fingertips. Everything is muddled. Everything aches. Every part of you aches. You ache around him. You ache for him.
Before you can say a word, he grabs you by the collar of your turtleneck and wheels you into the side room, closing the door behind the two of you. You’ve been in here many times, though never in this situation. This is Porrim’s room, where you would spend hours talking her through the latest nuances in achieving justice for the lower castes, even more hours blocking out her nattering about her pet social issues. Everything in here is very sharp—black and white, clean lines, swirls and geometric patterns and it blurs together for you in the purple-flushed gray of the troll who still has his hands in your shirt as he leans in to kiss you again.
Your body turns traitor on you. Your emotions are soon to follow. Even while in your mind you scream, all that comes out of your throat is a whimper, and all that comes out of your fingers is a blind clutching at Cronus’s shoulders so you can keep yourself upright. He really is a fabulous kisser, because you’re melting under his touch. Perhaps this is what happens when tinder meets flame, because he ignites something in you that you’ve tried to keep from this fire. Everything is going up in smoke and your blood feels hot under your skin.
Cronus understands, or at least seems to. Without saying a word, he reads your body language, starts pushing your sweater up and sapping your body heat with his cool fingers, and you don’t. You don’t fight him. You should fight him and you don’t fight him. Vows are nothing but words and actions speak so much louder but the loudest thing in this room, right now, is the harsh panting breaths coming through nostrils and gills.
“Off,” he mutters, “off, get off,” and then suddenly you’re more naked than you’ve ever been around another person before. Yes, this is the most naked, nude from the waist up, and you shiver but you can’t remember to be self-conscious when Cronus pushes his tongue into your mouth and walks you back away from the door and the backs of your knees hit Porrim’s concupiscent platform and this.
This is. This is going to. You can see the inevitable conclusion from here, and yet you can’t stop it. More to the point, you don’t want to. Call it an exercise in self-control, but maybe. Maybe just this once. Maybe giving in will tamp down the pressure, make it more bearable, and you can return to your former composure around him, but the more he kisses you, the more his hands run along your bare skin, the more you hate. You hate. Hate. Hate.
Before you can register the change in gravity, Cronus has you on your back on the—what do the humans call it—mattress, surrounded by soft linens fragranced with feminine powders. This room isn’t yours. You shouldn’t be doing this. It’s hard to remember that, though, when there are teeth playing at your neck and a skilled tongue persuading gasps out of your throat. Since when can’t you catch your breath? It feels so good, sensation fizzling along your nerve endings and this is meaningful contact with another person, a sin you’ve never allowed yourself to indulge in because this is what happens. This, this dalliance, this moment.
You don’t know how to handle everything coming at you. With the alcohol in your system, everything moves at warp speed, blurring in your peripheral vision. And yet you’re not intoxicated—not truly. You still have faculties enough to resist, should you want. You just want. You want. You want what Cronus is offering you, and you want to see where he’s going with this, because he rears off of you and you try to follow him and he puts a broad palm to your chest and pushes you back down and says “Whoa there” with that horrible speech impediment of his and you want to slug him so hard his teeth fly across the room.
You’re to stay put. It’s difficult, though, because Cronus is taking his shirt off, so hastily that it catches on the tip of one of his wavy horns and a hole gets punctured through the fabric. You hope he doesn’t mind you moving your hands, but he seems to encourage it, if the way he tenses when you touch him is any indication. His core is cold—normal for seadwellers, but you want to feel the heat under his skin. You’re fascinated by the lean planes of his torso, the way his muscles cut under his skin. “Wow,” comes out of your mouth in a nonsense exhale.
“I ain’t gonna break, Vantas,” he suggests. You detest the way the consonant slurs on your surname. That’s all the spur you need to dig your nails into his chest. Cronus hisses through his teeth, and though you don’t break the skin you can see scratch marks forming. You’ve marked him. He is yours tonight, and you are his, and your legs are tangled together and he lunges forward and captures your mouth again and crashes his hips into yours like the sea into the shore and you’re dizzy with the undertow as he pulls you in.
Your fingers have a will of their own, it seems, not just mauling the body he’s so willingly placed in front of you but moving down to the front of his trousers, those utterly ridiculous black leather trousers of his, and there’s enough space between you so you can sneak your palm between your bodies, press against the sheath of his bulge through the fabric. He groans, a sound you can feel in your own chest. Your instincts, it seems, will guide you true tonight.
Cronus brings his hand down to join yours, traps your fingertips against his button, and you fumble with it as he pulls on his zip and he lurches up over you to push the waist of his trousers down over his hips, his rear, and you can see a hint of gorgeously plumped violet behind the black keratin ridges of his bone bulge. Still sheathed. Your hands feel numb, but your mouth, your mouth is open and wet and you prop yourself up on your elbows, lean forward, plant a row of sloppy kisses along the ridge of a hipbone, slither your tongue closer to his still-filled hollow. “Holy shit,” Cronus whispers, his hands twitching at his sides.
Before he can even think about moving them, you grab his wrists, pin them at his thighs, glare up at him purposefully. “I appreciate the sentiment, but there must be a less distasteful way of expressing it,” you say. Your words are rounded around the edges, the sibilant sounds slurred.
Cronus just does that low chuckle thing in his throat, a sound that makes you want to reach up and strangle him. “Just never knew you’d be such a bulgeslut, is all.”
Ordinarily, you’d cringe at language like that. But this isn’t ordinary. Now, with black clouding your judgment and alcohol blunting your senses, it sends a different kind of surge through your body, one that ends with a painful amount of pressure in your groin as you swell even further. No. No, you will not let yourself become so affected by this, but it was a lost cause from the beginning, your body reacting to Cronus’s presence and practically vibrating in sympathy. “Every time you open your mouth I find another reason to abhor you.” It’s nothing but the truth, but the way it comes out of your throat, with that growl behind it, surprises you.
You bury your alarm, following what feels natural. Your tongue runs against the slippery parts of Cronus’s bulge, and you taste him for the first time, and he—he makes this noise you didn’t think possible of him, a desperate moan as he clutches onto your hands. He tastes sour and salty and you’re already addicted. His bulge swells further, further, comes free of its hollow and stands alone, and your mouth follows it from base to tip, savoring the shiver that runs down his spine as it dances across the tip of your tongue.
To your surprise, though, he shoves you away. Before you can stop yourself, you keen in disappointment. “Not now,” he grits out through clenched teeth. You’ve already affected him so much, and you take a sort of pride in your victory. One of the many sins you will indulge in tonight, it seems. But just as you’re congratulating yourself, he smiles, teeth glinting in the low light of the room. “Your turn,” he promises.
What does he mean? Oh. Oh, his hands are at the front of your pants and shucking you of your clothes and he leaves you shivering. Embarrassingly enough, your bulge is already as swollen as his, so greedy for sensation that it’s already twisting in on itself. Cronus laughs. You want to implore him not to look, but at the same time, you like the way his eyes move along your body. No one’s ever looked at you like that before. Still, you’re more than embarrassed. You sling your arm over your head and hide your face in the crook of your elbow. The word that comes out of your mouth sounds an awful lot like “please” but gets muffled into nothing more than a needy vowel.
“Since you asked so nicely,” Cronus mocks you, and you’re ready to tear his hair out before ohgodohgodohgod his finger comes down to gently run over the ridges of your bulge and it’s all you can do not to spill, right here, right now. Because—if you can be honest with yourself—you’ve never. Ever. And this is the first touch you’ve had on such an intimate area and he knows, doesn’t he. “You ever touch yourself?”
“No,” you admit, though it comes out as more of a breathy moan than you’d like. You can feel your bulge straining towards him for a repeat of that slight contact, pulsing with need. God, you need to see. You need him to—
Ah, right there, and your hand slips, first coming down to hide your ruddy face behind your splayed fingers. Then you peer through the gaps with wide, inquisitive eyes as he does it again, that small touch that sets your nerves alight. “Excellent,” Cronus says, and to keep yourself from moaning quite so loudly, from giving him any victory, you plunge your fingers in your mouth and bite down, sucking hard as he lets your bulge twine around his fingers. “Easy, there.”
“Feels so good,” slurs past your knuckles, and you gasp when he tugs away just that slightest bit and encourages your bulge to slither over his hand. He’s wetting his fingers, you realize, drenching them in the slick pre-slurry gathering on your bulge, and it’s too much of a good thing and you feel empty with aching when he pulls away from you. “Cronus, wh—“
The question is drowned in a cry when he presses a fingertip against your—but that’s filthy, that’s your excretion chute, and as slick as his finger is and as wanting as you find yourself he slips in more easily than you want to admit. This. This is what you were aching for, you realize, and your torso column arches off the concupiscent platform as his finger plunges, fills. “How’zat?”
“So good, I hate you, so good,” spills out of your mouth, panting past your fingers still stroking over your tongue. A slight change in angle gets his claw right up against—but it doesn’t hurt, just electrocutes, a shock that thrums straight to your bones and ends in a needy whine from your own throat. “Right there, oh, oh—“
“You nasty bucketslut,” Cronus leers down at you, and you can feel your body burning, responding to his touch and his words. The air is heavy with thick bass backbeats, but overtop is something like a schlicking noise—oh, he’s. He’s fisting his own bulge, moving in you, that’s the sound, and you throw your head back and howl outright when a second finger adds even more pressure in you.
You hate him. You hate him you hate him you hate him for flaying you open like this and exposing your hypocrisy and stirring things in you that you’d taught yourself not to feel. He winds your body ever tighter, tuning you to fever pitch even as you make meaningless aroused noise for him, and you ache, everything aches, everything is throbbing and hot and blunted at the sharp bits and you need. You need.
And he knows, Cronus knows, and he smirks when he takes his fingers from you. “Tell me you want my bulge,” he demands.
“I…” You can barely draw breath, you’re so aroused. Your words come out thin, breathy. “I need it,” is as much as you can say before you flush too hard to continue.
“Need what, Kankri?”
Oh, he is insufferable, and you loathe him, loathe him to the furthest reaches of paradox space and back, that he’s brought you so low and yet continues to build you back up into a creature you yourself don’t recognize. “I—I need—Cronus, your bulge, please,” and the last whine is so pornographic it makes you cringe to hear it from yourself.
“Good,” he says savagely. And then you realize what you’ve said. You’ve given him the most explicit consent you could. There’s no claiming this is a drunken mistake, a hazy memory. Because this has been building, you realize, and Mituna was just the catalyst, the excuse you made for yourself, because it was Cronus, Cronus who you hated for no other reason than to hate, not for what he did to your friends but for the feelings he stirs in your blood pusher.
He takes your legs. Wraps them around his waist. You can feel the slickness of his bulge between your legs, the pressure as it glides past your swelling shame globes, the wrongness-sensitivity of your nook, and then. Seeks. Home. Presses, enters, slides and fills, almost too much too fast if it weren’t for the loud “yes!” that erupts from you at the feel of it.
“Fuck yeah, you fucking whore,” Cronus growls down at you. You can feel every keratin ridge of the back of his bulge as it plunges past, a friction as counterpoint to the smooth movements of his hips. He takes away the solace of your fingers in your mouth, closing his fingers around your wrists and pinning them over your head. “Tell me how good it is, c’mon, wanna hear it.”
“So good,” without a distraction the words spill freely, it’s a problem you’ve always had and you hate him (yourself. him) for it. “So good, right there, oh, oh god!”
Because when he moves his bulge a certain way, flicks the tip of it right there, it makes your entire body jolt, seize up, and you have no idea what it’s called but it could be unpronounceable as far as you’re concerned because as long as Cronus keeps hitting up against it you’re sure to be as drooling incoherent as you are right now. “Shit you’re tight,” he whispers, still slamming into you as hard as he can.
What did he expect? Your sexual preferences, or lack thereof, are common knowledge. He seems to be getting off on it, though, if the way he’s pailing you is any indication. “Yes, yes,” you keep hissing out, “I hate you, you’re so good, I hate you, yes, yes, yes…”
Cronus twists his bulge in you and you forget how to breathe, going cross-eyed as he lands a series of searing bite marks at your throat. “Like how good I screw ya?”
You don’t need to dignify that with a response. The way your voice cracks as you moan is reply enough. It’s overwhelming: his hands sliding down your arms and leaving tiny scratches in their wake, his mouth at your shoulder and threatening you with teeth, his voice resonating in your ears with his threats and taunts, his bulge, his bulge, in you, slicking you, filling you, making you filthy. You cry out when he shoves into you harder, bring your hands up and clutch at his shoulders and slip with your grip and claw your way down his upper arms, and it’s still not good enough to give back even a fraction of what he’s giving you.
“Shit,” he whispers, then “Kankri,” and you like the way your name sounds in his mouth, outlined in black and dripping with lust. “Fuck, keep doin’ that and I’m gonna spill, oh, fuck,” and you realize you’re clenching on him, trying to keep him in you when he draws back and it’s affecting him as much as it’s affecting you. “Want me to spill in you, is that what you want?”
Oh, god. Oh, that’s—that’s—you didn’t think trolls did that, but this, this is Earth, not Beforus, this is Earth, not Alternia, and trolls don’t use filial pails here, no need, no drones, no empire, but you didn’t seriously think—but there’s no reason not to use someone as a bucket when you’re pailing, and while your stomach swoops at the implications you nod, almost imperceptibly.
Cronus doesn’t miss it, though, just groans loud and long as he doubles the pace, slams harder, and you’re almost there yourself, hatred pulsing through you and your bulge twining in on itself for any desperate bit of sensation, and then he’s. That long groan, that sigh of relief, and you can feel it, feel his bulge twitch in you, and it just makes your shame globes swell that much harder, because his. His genetic fluid, his half of the slurry, is slickening his final movements in you, and he howls, and you howl, because you’re close, so close, you need, but he, he—
He pulls back, and you feel empty and open and aching without him in you helping you hold yourself together. You’re shaking, swollen, greedy, and Cronus deliberately grinds his palm into your swollen shame globes, making you scream, before his fingers dawdle up to twine with your bulge again. “C’mon,” he says, and you’re close—
Close but not there, and you know what’s holding you back, even as his material trickles out of you you need to keep a sense of decorum, you know your place, you know what’s expected of you, “bucket, Cronus, get a,” trips out of your mouth, you don’t even know what you’re saying, so desperate to spill but yet trying to hold back if only to salvage your dignity.
“No,” Cronus insists, his voice dark, and pulls at your bulge harder. “Like this—cum for me, cum all over yourself—“
You cry out at that filthy word, the last thing you needed to push you over the edge, and you ripple around him and pulse in his grip and slick his fingers and spill onto your own stomach. Red spurts from you, and the flush falls out of your face, and by the time you fall back to the bed, black has claimed you for its own.