Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/471217. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: F/F Fandom: Homestuck Relationship: Rose_Lalonde/Kanaya_Maryam Character: Rose_Lalonde, Kanaya_Maryam Additional Tags: First_Time, Xeno Stats: Published: 2012-07-28 Words: 2680 ****** beguiled by nightly undoing ****** by signalbeam Summary Another contribution to the shrine of “first time teen xenosex” fic. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. They had decided to strip off their shirts for research after a game of Monopoly. Why not, had been Rose’s rationale. She was tired of merely reading. Maybe for Kanaya, a year and a half of swapping erotic novels and then making out on a pile of books—uncomfortable, but worth it—had never gotten her hot under the cool death of her collar, but Rose wanted everything of Kanaya, the skin and the blood and, she supposed, the guts as well. They were on display already, and difficult to avoid. Already Rose recognized the signs of trouble: the naked bewilderment on Kanaya's face, the way she looked at Rose's chest and signaled with her scant eye contact that she didn't know what was doing, she didn't know what to do. She sat on the bed across from Rose with her hands on the top of Rose's shoulders and head bowed just enough that if Rose were to lean forward, she'd lose both her eyes. When Rose first made the mattress, Kanaya had said, "So you've made a spring pile," and Rose replied, "No, it's a mattress," and Kanaya said, "A spring pile sandwich," with helpless confusion. "They're called breasts," Rose offered, because Kanaya's gaze had gone from perplexed to flat-out terrified. She took Kanaya's wrist, and guided it to her chest. Why was she explaining these to Kanaya? She had given Kanaya samplings of romance novels. The heroes in those novels, too, digressed at length about their combined attraction and fear of breasts, as though they were oblivious to the fact that most of their readers would be women, and women who had at least hit puberty, at that. Rose had hoped they'd serve as an instruction manual of sorts. Then Kanaya looked up at her with enormous hope in her yellow-and-black eyes, and Rose realized that Kanaya hadn't gleaned any advice in those long treatises at all, except for maybe some tips on the use of excessive force in kissing. There were two scars on the inside of Rose’s lower lip, raised and keloidal against her gums. When she asked Dave, he said that he couldn’t see jackshit, and whacked his forehead against her cheekbone. "These are very interesting," Kanaya said at last. Her palms had begun to sweat, and the new dampness made Rose consider relocating her hands. But then Kanaya squeezed, and drew her thumb in a straight, steady line that made Rose tense, more with the newness of the sensation than any expert touch. "You don't know what they are, do you." Kanaya watched Rose’s face, the slick curve of her hair shimmering in the low light with uncertainty. “Do they expel acid at unwanted suitors?” "It depends. Do you think you’re unwanted?” “I wouldn’t know,” Kanaya said, irritated now, though it faded when she pushed Rose’s breast up, and watched it drop. She did it again, watching the way the flesh trembled with anticipation, unsettled by her fingers. “It seems risky, having your acid sacs placed so externally.” Acid sacs. Acid sacs. “What do you think?” “I’m not inclined to disbelieve you,” Kanaya said, her smile guarded and eyes hooded. This time she applied pressure, cautious and unsexual. Rose considered pushing her eyes deeper into her head with her thumbs. She decided against it. It probably wouldn't make a difference. She pressed her hand against the long stretch of Kanaya’s stomach, conscious of the way Kanaya’s t-shirt stretched over empty air. Kanaya, without a word, shrugged off her two shirts, revealing the glowing, arctic expanse of her shoulders and arms, the twin line of dim pits that once housed legs. The slow- healing crater, dark and startlingly green, stretching across her back. Sometimes Rose wondered if she could peel it away like a scab, and if Kanaya would fold over in two if she did. More than once, she had woken up with her fist fit into the cave, her fingers damp with a mucous slickness, and Kanaya’s mouth open and breathless. She smiled thinly, and pressed her thumb against Kanaya’s ridged sternum instead. The books had called them “chest bumps,” “rumble spheres,” and “titslingthings.” She had made a few ventures before, tentative and strictly exploratory, and remembered them as oddly smooth and shell-like beneath the skin. She ran her hands across them again, and found them the same as before. “What are these?” she asked. “Chest bumps.” “What do you call camels?” “Nothing,” she said at first, then: “What are camels?” “Bumpbeasts.” Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Kanaya folded her arms over her old, unfilled wound, as though to protect herself from Rose’s inquiries, from her blasts of light. Rose leaned down, and kissed her empty throat. She spread her hand across Kanaya’s chest, and pressed her hand against the bone. Kanaya sighed, and rested her hand against Rose’s shoulder. “At least they would not be called armbeasts,” she said. “Armbeasts?” Rose said, peering up, but all she could see of Kanaya’s face was the precise line of her jaw, the small smile, the unkind sharpness of her nose. “That is what this is for, is it not?” Kanaya said, touching Rose’s stomach and dipping the pad of one fingertip into her navel. “The place where your vestigial arm once formed, then withered and fell upon maturing from your larval stage.” “You’ve got to be kidding me.” “I’m always kidding you,” Kanaya said, distressed. “I am frequently a relative of a bleatbeast known for consuming any object that wanders in its path. If you were given to entitling people with absurd nicknames, then I would be the kidbeast. The kiddingbeast.” “Just take off my leggings, my darling goat.” “Sorry.” Don’t be, she meant to say, but Kanaya had hooked her thumbs into her waistband. The edge of the waistband now was dragging along skin. It was a trial to maneuver herself around those bright hands; her hips moved, half- consciously, for contact, a hand, a wrist, forearm, anything. It’d be easier to take off that red skirt, and full of less aching anticipation. Soon she found herself lying before Kanaya, legs spread as Kanaya let one leg through, then the other. She was slow, too, with Rose’s underwear, and her eyes remained wide-open and fixed on the inside of Rose’s knee. She understood, suddenly, the futility of their original plan. How silly of them to believe that they’d be able to shuck off their clothes, spread each other open, and then go back to bed. She didn’t want slow now, she wanted to get that skirt off, to inspect and evaluate and drown herself in knowing. “Are you all right?” Kanaya said. “Did I hurt you?” The great wizard found herself mortal again before the gawky, nervous vampire; the great wizard had discovered that love was sometimes not transcendent, but gently mortifying, or was the word mortalifying? She was not always conscious of her godhood, but now it seemed to have shut her eyes, plugged her ears, and drew shut every door of the future, so everything was newly present, and in danger of vanishing with a stray gust of spacial wind. “Gravely.” “You are not,” she said, over-serious and fretting over Rose’s shoulders and ribs, anything to avoid looking at the offered space between Rose’s legs. “I’d be able to smell it if you were.” Rose kissed her, eager and edging on a little desperate. Kanaya squeaked at the contact, alarmed, then responded with swelling force, tongue pushing Rose’s lips apart. Rose, determined, set her fingers on Kanaya's hips. Kanaya’s own hands seemed suddenly aimless, as though they had found themselves panicked by the number of choices now available to them and now could touch nothing. Finally they settled at Rose’s waist, and slid down with far more purposefulness than Kanaya was likely feeling. Maybe it helped that Kanaya’s eyes were shut. Kanaya had never struck Rose before as the kind of person who had trouble multitasking, but the evidence was plain before her, now steady on her hips, now parting Rose’s legs, now with one hand on the inside of each thigh. Kanaya broke the kiss, and took a breath, and then said, “I’m not used to this.” “I know,” Rose said, and did her best to not squirm or buck her hips into Kanaya’s framing hands. “Unless you and Jade were able to pinch and prod the fabric of space, and in opening space like that, found yourselves unclothed before one another.” Kanaya’s face pinched in an expression Rose recognized as ‘What You Have Said Made Too Much Sense All My Neurocircuits Are Exploding And Dead.’ “I used to think,” she said, her words clunky as though she had yanked this from a much later point in her internal monologue, “that the clouds would tell me everything.” “Including the proper handling of acid sacs?” “Okay. I don’t think I was ever so optimistic.” “You’re doing fine,” Rose said, pressing a clumsy kiss to Kanaya’s chin. Oops. She had been aiming for the lips. She tried again, and wound up at a cheek instead. One more time, and this time to the jaw. “You’re doing excellently. Don’t be afraid.” She was being selfish. What she really meant was, Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop. “I wish there were a guide to this. I wish,” she said with sudden venom, “I could kill that clown.” “Sometimes I think you hate that clown more than you love me.” “Pity you,” she corrected. She pressed her forehead into Rose’s neck, then moved lower for closer inspection of Rose’s chest. “I let you sneak up on me from behind sometimes. It’s gratifying when you look pleased with yourself because you don’t realize how loud and clumsy you are. How is it that you clang like a culinaryblock when you wear nothing but cloth?” Her fingers were at the slit now, stroking too lightly for Rose to not grab the hand and grind down on it. “I always knew that you were a bulgeless being,” she said, with the satisfaction of a hypothesis proved true. “Hopefully not by staring at my crotch at every available opportunity.” “No,” she said, sulky. “Don’t be so crude. Because you never worry about exposing yourself.” “I think that’s because I’m wearing pants.” “Bright orange ones.” Her nose was pressed against Rose’s breast, and the rest of her face turned down to puzzle down at the flushed color of Rose’s vulva. She licked her fingers, and pulled the lips back. For a moment it looked as though she was about to ask another blindingly insensitive question—she had a talent for those—but she circled Rose’s clit instead, her finger catching against the sensitive underside. When Rose pushed against the hand, she blinked, as though surprised, and then smiled, pleased with herself. A little too pleased, considering that they had barely begun. Rose pressed her hand against Kanaya’s cheek, so it was near a tightened nipple, and then said, “Here.” Then, thinking of trollish psychology, added, “Don’t bite.” She had expected it to feel parental or worse, maternal, but instead there was muscular, intelligent heat on her nipple, definitively sexual and hot. She thought, This is awesome, and then, I really hope she’s not hungry right now. Kanaya’s hand between her legs circled her clit, each move becoming more sure and more certain, easy and wet. Kanaya shifted over her, the light swinging momentarily left, then right, then center again. Now a second hand nudged at the bottom of her slit, smearing the wetness gathered there up. Kanaya stopped working at Rose’s nipple, and lowered herself between Rose’s legs entirely. “I didn’t expect there to really be a hole here,” she said, tracing the entrance with rapt fascination, and Rose had to cover her face with her hands to keep herself from groaning out loud in frustration. “Does it hurt? Would it hurt. How does anything find its way inside without being crushed by your pelvic muscles?” “Oh my god. Can you—restrain yourself,” Rose said. She reached for the clasps on Kanaya’s skirt, undid them, and shoved it down. Something strained for Rose’s hand, drawing a long, dark line across the dark gray of her underwear; that came off, too, revealing a tapering, twisting bulge, and a glistening, wet mound beneath it. Her hand sank into it easily. Kanaya shut her eyes. “Good?” she said. “Did I move too fast?” “No,” Kanaya said, her hair splashed around her face like a mane. Rose felt it in her fingers, its coarse texture, its unnatural weight. “We’re on the same page at last, I see.” She pushed Kanaya to the side, so Kanaya was on her back, eyes blinking like a malfunctioning shutter, and kissed her again. This time she bore down on Kanaya’s thigh, grinding with sweet relief. Maybe she had been too hasty. Kanaya’s movements were timid, and stiff. Rose nearly pulled away, but Kanaya said, “No,” and this time, “Don’t stop,” and then fell against the bed, breaths shallow and dizzied. What was going through her head, Rose wondered, to have precipitated such a change? She was about to ask when Kanaya suddenly sat up, and vomited dark, oblong eggs into a bucket. The mound split open with a wet, heavy sound that made Rose wince, and the inside glistened with a bloody liquid. Kanaya let out a long sigh, and then shoved Rose’s hand between her legs. It felt like blood, too. Her bulge went tight around Rose’s wrist, throbbing and thick with promise. Everything was heat, and sex, and heavy all around Rose’s hand, between her legs, light in her eyes and on her face. It was easy to stimulate Kanaya, far easier than she had feared: crude contact and steady handling was enough to scatter Kanaya’s words into drawn-out, syllabic desperation. Maybe there was some kind of evolutionary advantage in quick arousal. Rose certainly wasn’t complaining. Kanaya’s body twisted, curved, carried itself away on pleasure, and Rose rode on the same wave, chasing after Kanaya’s distorted form—oh, the things they could do later, when they were past this initial fumbling, the fantasies Rose had about sinuous tentacles pushing into her throat, Kanaya’s tongue licking her open with expert knowingness, those seamstress fingers twisting inside her and ripping her mind from her body— Then there was an gush of green liquid splashing onto her stomach and legs, hot and startling. Kanaya’s eyes were shut, but her mouth opened and closed, and her tongue rested thickly against her lower lip, Rose’s name inaudible, and Rose came in calm, molten heat. When she came to, there was a bucket between them, full of eggs and green liquid. Kanaya pushed it at Rose, and then said, puzzled, “Is there more?” “I,” Rose said, blinking. “Oh, you’re referring to… We humans are far more cleanly than you trolls.” “Yes. But you sweat,” Kanaya said. Rose lowered herself beside Kanaya, her breath shallow and even now, and exhaustion filling the rest of her. She clasped Rose’s hand in hers. Then she turned Rose’s wrist vein-side up, and lapped at it with her tongue. Her bulge had retreated again beneath bone, nook hidden beneath the plate. It was like staring at the crotch of an illuminated Barbie doll. Rose chose to be glad that there weren't any teeth down there. “As far as bodily fluids go, I think you have me beat,” Rose said. “It’s true,” Kanaya said, pleased. “I do.” Rose smiled, a little. She wanted, in the post-coital haze, to ask about the clouds of Skaia; she often forgot that Kanaya had been a Prospitean dreamer, and had spent her dreaming life clad in gold. It was hard to imagine Kanaya on that golden planet stalking the streets for a clown and an egg. But she let her eyes unfocus for a moment to think about her tower on Derse. What different people they turned into in the dying rays of the green sun. Dying one moment and alive the next. Now alive and undead together, two friends far from home. Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!