[PRP] Spoons Little and Small (Calder/Zar)

[MoonKitsune]

Calder laid curled in a satisfied bundle under the covers. His nightgown, damp, was laying over the back of a chair and was still dripping with slime. Not bothering to wash off, he laid in the bed, content with the heat being shared between them.

Sharing a bed with someone put him at ease and allowed his usually restless and nervous mind to settle. With Zar came security in having another set of eyes and ears watching over them while they slept. The new cabin had put him too much on edge and old prey instincts meant he could barely keep to a light nap without jumping awake at the sound of a creaking floorboard or a rattling window pane.

Now, he simply focused on Zar's scent, his breathing, and moved in to feel the warmth of his body.

"I know you said you didn't sleep, but thanks for staying in bed with me anyways. It helps." He whispered, looking up at the incubi and curling against him.  

[Baneful]

Zar had almost slept now and then, plugged into someone's emotions the way he was, when they went under it was so tempting to just go under with them. He had resisted this time, mainly because the cabin was still unfamiliar, he was still in danger and he still couldn't be entirely sure about whether the kelpie was entirely as harmless as he seemed. In the world of demons someone seeming too good to be true meant that they usually were.

Still, he enjoyed the warmth, coils thrown around the other boil and dressed in nothing at all. He felt better without clothing, it was simply a fact, his skin was almost painfully sensitive and clothes even now were often uncomfortably irritating to wear. The sheets did not cross that threshold.

He had his arms around the other boil as well as his tail, the pulse of his twin hearts able to be felt alongside his breathing. "You don't need to thank me." he said. "I enjoy being here, it is calming and if there is something that I can always use more of, it is calm."

Zar's own emotions were just as he said, more level and cool than they had been before, it had taken some time though, after sex he always took a good bit of time to unwind and to relax the desire to devour and to calm himself back down to normalcy.

 

[MoonKitsune]

He rested his head against the other boil, listening to the double thud-thud thud-thud of his hearts. It was nice resting against something that was alive. Most often when he was in the company of undeads, their lack of heat and silent body matched with their chemical smells made him uneasy.

Warmth was what he liked best, and while he could survive in cold running waters, warm swamps had always been his natural habitat. More agreeable was living in-between someone's embrace.

The tail moved against his legs, crossing the border between equine hairs to sleek skin, and he wondered if it was just as content as he was or would try again, He hoped not, as he simply didn't have the energy to let it roam and try some of its interesting abilities out again. He could only hope it would settle once they went to bed else he would simply be a passive participant to whatever mischief it got up to which didn't seem wise.

"I like when you're calm. You tail...that link....you seem worked up a lot. It makes me nervous when you're worked up too. More than I already am in a strange place."

He turned his face into Zar's chest, trying to nuzzle into the heat.

"I can't sleep when i'm alone in a new place. I always had my parents around to rest with me when we traveled." He mumbled, waving in that world between awake and sleeping where you could still talk. It felt safe here, especially with Zar's wings surrounding him.

"Your wings cover up like Barth's thorns." He muttered. "...all around me."
 

[Baneful]

"I am almost always worked up." he admitted with a shallow sigh. "It is very, very difficult for me to unwind or relax. I am usually either trying to repress or control the urge to ******** people, eat them or both. If I am not then usually it is the crippling sense of self consciousness that has me. I don't get the peaceful middle ground often at all."

He didn't stop Calder from nuzzling against him, simply resting his chin on the other boil's head. Curling his wings closer, he pulled him near, indulging in a little bit of comfort for a change. Calder was not part of the games he played with Barth, he was a lot simpler.

"My parents never slept around me. They would not even sleep around each other. My father would sleep in the hive if he slept at all and my mother would sleep in her own rooms. I had my room and a very uncomfortable bed. I was not encouraged to sleep if I could avoid it either. "

It was not so much the new place that made him nervous as all the dangers being in the "open" entailed.

 

[MoonKitsune]

"That's a shame. I wish you could relax more often. You don't seem very happy when you over-think sometimes. Doesn't seem to be a great state to be in every waking moment, and especially as a demon like you with so much to be confident about." Zar was smart, educated, high-class, and a incubi with both power and beauty. Seeming to be self-conscious just seemed silly, but he didn't say that to Zar.

Calder reached out to let his fingertips graze one of Zar's wings, something Calder neither wanted for his own but never had an opportunity to really touch.

"I wish your parents had been friendly. Demons seem to get a short stick with that. My parents have been always close to me. I hope you can meet them someday. They would like you." Then again, his parents were often easy to please - aside from his mother. She tended to be a bit judgmental of anything that wasn't a kelpie.

"Sleeping is a great thing. Being warm next to someone and feeling safe. I don't feel safe when I sleep alone sometimes. Just kinda flutter sleep. Even deep in the water is hard sometimes. Don't know what will come over and swallow you up."  

[Baneful]

"Relaxing is the most difficult thing in the world for me." Zar said. "And I over-think everything because I want to avoid making mistakes as much as possible. I can't stand the thought of injuring my own pride." He looked grim at the comment that he had a lot to be confident about. "There really isn't that much for me to be confident about you know, I am a failure of a demon, my parents will murder me eventually, I am in a relationship where I seem to mostly be a roadblock."

He exhaled and his wings moved into Calder's touch. "I am just over twenty and I have almost dissipated permanently once. I am not doing very well for a creature which is supposed to live for millennia"

Calder's parents sounded pleasant at the very least, anyone who had raised someone as overall easy-going as the kelpie by extension had to be decent. "Yes it would have been pleasant to have some manner of support. I suppose demons do not get close to their offspring because their offspring so often displace and conquer them."

"I never feel very safe, even here I do not feel particularly safe. I don't know why I help even a fraction with your worries, if something dangerous came along I would not expect that I could beat it or protect you. I am not very strong."

He tried not to think about the term swallow you up too hard.

 

[MoonKitsune]

"Demons and your pride. Everyone has pride. It's just natural to make mistakes. You can't avoid it. It's how you learn." Calder turned slightly, showing his hip were a few scars were lightly crossed on his pale flesh.

"These are from me learning to swim in rapids. I made plenty of mistakes. I learned from em. You learn from yours too. That's how you become stronger. You can't be a great monster or a great demon without just experiencing mistakes." He turned back to nuzzled back into Zar's embrace.

"And dissipating nearly is no thing. I dissipate all the time. I've nearly died a few times too. Once I even died from hunters trying to make me a weapon. It's hard to avoid sometimes, but you're alive now and I don't think there is anyone here that would want you dead. Um…except Christof, but don't think too hard on that. We'd keep you safe. Barth is doing that now after all. He doesn’t want any harm to come to you and neither do I. It's why I want to be strong. I want to protect my herd."

And then he turned to prop himself on his elbow, looking at Zar. "You need to stop putting yourself down. Barth loves you or…whatever it is you two have. He wants you with him. He said so during dinner. You're part of my herd too. You are protected and you have a lot of things to be happy about. You sport the best pair of horns around, you have gorgeous features that I have to keep competing with you, your educated and fancy and have all the smarts of a demon upbringing and get a lot of stuff I don't. You're strong, fast, and can swallow things whole. You got neat emotion abilities and your tail makes tasty slime." He reached over and booped Zar's nose. "You are not a failure. You are Zar. Our Zar."

Calder turned to lay back down. "You make me feel safe because ….you're getting familiar. I don't know you, I don't get you, but you are not a stranger to me. You are not just a friend to me. You are close to those I love and part of the world I'm in and will be in. You're strong and observant and have powers I don't have too. Sometimes it's nice to just have someone watch over you too, right?"
He said, looking up at him.
"Do…I make you feel safe?"
 

[Baneful]

"Mistakes can be avoided." Zar said. "It simply takes caution and forethought. One cannot simply careen through life without looking before one leaps." He did eye the scars with interest, in the instant slightly aware of his own, subtle enough as to be almost invisible, a braille map of subtle claw marks that were all self inflicted. He did not mention them. "Some mistakes are simply too difficult to recover from."

He did not correct Calder either that the kind of dissipation he meant was not the usual kind, a result of classes or whatever peril they faced at school that week but the very permanent voluntary sort where his fear would have gone back to the world around them and he would have ceased to exist. There was a dip of deep sorrow in his emotional pulse as he considered this, an echo of the complete and utter helplessness he had felt in those darkest of days. Fortunately his mood picked up at the mention of Christof, a deep and bitter blackness of mood surging up to the fore. The hearts picked up their pace and in that instant it was evident that Zar meant Christof harm in kind. "It is hard to protect a group of individuals who would rather the others were dead."

Calder's reassurances and flattery did not seem to make much difference to Zar's weary and defensive mood, he could not believe that anyone would genuinely feel that way, even while he was able to undeniably feel it. Once again he seemed to rankle at the amicable possessiveness in the kelpie's tone. He did not belong to anyone, that way lay danger, that way lay hurt, he was his own demon, being attached led to nothing but ill.

He exhaled heavily, closing his eyes as Calder went on to recount his feelings towards the demon. "I should not make you feel safe." he said, the anger bubbling up and then sinking away into something desperate and hopeless. He didn't know how to deal with the kelpie, his honesty and earnest desire to be loved were completely alien to everything the demon knew. All of his instincts said that someone saying they were attached and that they wanted to like you was someone trying to control you. So too did compliments, compliments were always a means to sink ones talons into prey, to seize them by their ego and draw them in.

He didn't think that was why Calder said the things he did. Honesty was so very un-demon-like and forcing himself to profess the same degree of honesty was like asking him to jump a 50 foot fence, it would be nice to do but that did not mean it was feasible.

"I am here." he said, and it was the distilled meaning of all the things he could not and would not say. He intended to stay, he did not intend to leave, he was here in this place, in this bed and had not closed the link, reassurance was wound up too in the statement, any number of things lay layered into it.

"And I am not afraid of you." And in that statement was the answer, Zar's enemies were not predators, not the creatures outside of him but instead the people who got close enough to speak with him and know him, those were the real threat to his safety. He was not afraid, therefore by extension he was safe.

It was the best he could do.


 

[MoonKitsune]

He smiled with slight embarrassment at being lectured. "Yeah, I …guess I shouldn't be leaping ahead so much. I kinda forget about that sometimes." To him, just acting sometimes came on the many impulses he had, but usually he was far more mindful of those around him on what he should, shouldn't, and what was best to do for those all around. He put a lot of thought into it, but when it came down to basics like fighting or taking action, he usually did the doing before the waiting around. Waiting was Barth's field. Calder liked to see progress and was far too curious to move to the next step.

It was a bad habit – but kelpies just naturally wanted to go fast sometimes.

Other times, like now, it was nice to just go slow.

He guessed he might be going a bit too fast for Zar even though they had just done something intimate several times before. Since Zar felt that was natural, maybe he should still consider them on first base? He wasn't sure, but Zar didn't feel as if he could trust him and that said a lot. But, as of right now, he did say he was here and not afraid and that meant a lot to him.

Giving a small smile, he tried not to frown again with concern at the roller coaster of emotions that was tugging at Calder ever few seconds just by being this close to the incubi. It was giving him a stomach ache and this was just through the link. He couldn't imagine how upset Zar's stomach was by feeling like this all the time without a break for a nice nap.

There had to be a way to calm him.

"Thanks…for that." He said, and then thought of what calmed him down when he wasn't feeling good.

Scooting up, he moved to bring Zar's head closer to his chest. "I wanna try something." He said, and then went to stroking Zar's hair slowly. It was something Calder's parents did for him when he had trouble sleeping or felt sick. It made him feel comforted and safe. He could only hope it didn't turn Zar on.