Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/597182.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Gloria_Union
  Relationship:
      Ishut/Pinger
  Character:
      Ishut_(Gloria_Union), Pinger_(Gloria_Union)
  Additional Tags:
      Mating_Cycles/In_Heat, Adolescent_Sexuality
  Stats:
      Published: 2012-12-18 Words: 5195
****** toms and queens ******
by feralphoenix
Summary
     You just leave her alone and let her go.
     Or: The practical concerns to being a chimera.
Notes
     (your breathing changed as you kissed me in your sleep)
     Fond of fighting, impetuous at loving.
     -Ann Currah, The Cat Horoscope
They talked about it—in several sessions, and at length—when they first
realized that this was going to be a Thing. Ishut listened, mostly, and asked
questions sometimes too: Uncomfortable and uncomfortably aroused and trying,
unsuccessfully, to disguise his stiff dick and the tent it made in his pants
with his shirt, or by sitting with his legs folded up. Pinger was extremely
practical about the whole affair and if anything could’ve killed his boner it
should’ve been that, but he was thirteen and a half and she was thirteen and a
bit and puberty had smacked into them both like a tidal wave, bowled them right
over and sucked them into a relentless undertow of hormones.
The marm at the beach house where he’d spent his childhood since washing up on
the island, though, had taught him since before he could jizz that a real man
always thought with the head on his shoulders and not the one between his legs.
She’d branded it into the head of every kid in the orphanage that be you prince
or pirate, you were a gentleman so long as you respected the consent and wishes
of your partner, and that those who used their sex to harm the hearts and
bodies of others were trash. No exceptions. She’d waggled her wooden spoon and
rested her other meaty hand on an ample hip, and the kids had chanted “Yes,
marm” in one voice, with feeling. They’d all learned the fear of god from the
threat of that spoon.
So during those talks Ishut did his best to not mind his dick and keep his sex
thoughts on the inside of his skull. Pinger was practical about it, but he
remembered that when she’d been littler she used to cry about her patchwork
body, and so he felt wrenchingly guilty about being so turned on. Mostly,
though, he felt awkward as hell and horribly, awfully sorry for her. He had to
keep that in, too—Pinger was even prouder than him; she’d hate his pity far
more than she’d be offended over his boner.
He hated the alchemist merchant who’d done this to her, too, but that wasn’t a
new feeling, so he kept a lid on it too.
For her part, Pinger picked at a cattail and talked evenly and brightly, like
this was a normal conversation and he hadn’t previously walked in on her with
her hand down her underwear, they hadn’t tangled each other up like idiots and
rutted their crotches together with all their clothes on until they’d both
noisily cum their pants.
“So my body’s totally different on the inside too,” she said. She was even
smiling a little. Ishut could not tell for the life of him if this was really
no big deal to her or if this was all a façade. “That makes plenty of sense,
because I was supposed to have been changed at every level, right, what kind of
alchemist would that woman have been if she couldn’t do that much—and if parts
of me had been left totally human or been made totally animal, I think
complications would have shown up right away. I would have gotten sick and
died. That might actually have happened to some of her other experiments; that
would explain all the medical examinations she kept doing right after she
finished up with me.”
“Makes sense, I think?” he said, trying to prompt her to go on. Pinger had
narrowed her eyes and her ears were starting to slant backwards. She always got
a little angry when she talked about Tracey.
She shrugged. Her ears swiveled back to their usual position. “Basically as far
as I can tell, my uterus is even a whole different shape. I’ve talked to normal
doctors and stuff when marm brought us to the clinic up north and it they said
it might even be in a horn shape.” She held up her forefingers in a V,
illustratively. “My clit even has these little baby spikes like a real cat
dick, now.”
When he raised his eyebrows, she raised hers right back and looked at Ishut
with eyes half-closed. “Why are you looking at me like it’s absurd that I would
know the difference? Don’t even try to claim that you haven’t been fooling
around with yourself since before you knew what you were actually doing beyond
‘it feels nice when I touch my junk’.”
“Yeah, okay,” he admitted, because she was after all right.
“So my point is that my actual reproductive system isn’t a hundred percent
human anymore, and it makes sense that my hormonal cycle and what my hormones
do isn’t a hundred percent human either. Cats go into heat off and on through
the warm seasons, and people get hornier during the points in their hormone
cycle that they’re most fertile, so now that I’m old enough to have periods I
go into heat too. It’s about the same length of time as a period, a couple of
days or a week.”
By that time Ishut’s mouth had fallen open a little, and the seam of his fly
was pushing a painful line into his dick, but he didn’t dare squirm around in
his seat lest Pinger notice and get uncomfortable. Because he was thirteen and
a half, the first thing he thought to ask was, “What does it feel like?”
“It’s awful!” said Pinger, rolling her eyes. “Imagine being horny literally all
the time, but it doesn’t go away when you jerk off, it just gets a little bit
more bearable for a couple hours, maybe. Your brain gets stuck on pervert mode,
you can’t stop thinking about sex things, and even bumping into other people
starts to make you feel weird. Even jerking off with things that aren’t your
hand doesn’t help since you can’t always reach the best places with them. I
think I could deal with it for a day, but after that it starts feeling like
there’s something wrong with my brain, that there’s something wrong with me for
feeling like that.
“I mean, periods are unbearable and they hurt like a bitch, but when I get to
leave Constant Boner Town, Population Me and finally get on one it’s kind of a
relief.”
Ishut couldn’t really wrap his head around it a hundred percent, but he knew
from observation that periods seemed to be agony, and a thing must really be
horrible to suffer through if back and stomach cramps with a side order of
blood coming out of one’s junk was a desirable alternative. His dick finally
curled into itself a little.
“That sounds like it sucks,” he said, because he couldn’t think of what else to
say. Pinger’s tail curled and writhed on the sand like a snake firework.
“Yeah, it does,” she said. “Right now, after what we did—this is the clearest
my head’s been in like half a week.”
Ishut considered that. “But you said that doing it yourself didn’t really
help.”
“Yep,” said Pinger. Her face was, amazingly, not even red. Back before he’d
known her, when he was little, he’d wondered if dark-skinned people didn’t
blush at all, or if it didn’t show up on their faces when they did. Pinger was
pretty candid and didn’t blush much, but he definitely saw her face turn red
when she did. It was just as apparent against her tan complexion as it was
against his pale one. He’d gotten used to thinking she was the same as him
after all, but then again she had cat ears and a cat tail and now there was all
this talk about heat. It made his head spin a little.
She went on, not sparing the time for him to be too confused. “That makes
sense, though, because the whole point of heat, and of hormones and periods and
everything, is for sex with another person to happen, with the end result of
babies.”
That was the deathblow for his boner. It shriveled up and lost all its heat as
Ishut’s face went white. They had kept all their clothes on, so it probably
didn’t count as The Full Sex, but marm had told him just like she’d told every
pubescent kid that if cum had the slightest chance of making it into a pussy,
the chance could not be zero. And they’d both stained their pants right
through.
“Cut that face out,” Pinger said immediately. “I can’t have babies with anybody
who’s human. I might not even be able to have babies with another beast-person,
even though I’m probably never going to meet another one in my whole life. The
eggs and sperm aren’t compatible.” She scrunched up her nose, pinned her ears
back. “The doctors talked about it in a lot more sciencey terms, but I don’t
remember them and I didn’t really get them in the first place anyhow.”
Relief warred with that same wretched kind of sadness from before. Combined,
they threatened to become a headache. Ishut made a face.
“Well, is there anything I can do to help?” he said at last.
Pinger looked at him for a long while. Her gray eyes were round and considering
and piercing, and he couldn’t tell at all what she might be thinking, but she
looked like a grown-up lady instead of a skinny kid with baby breasts making
mounds under her shirt.
“Probably the older I get, the worse the heats are going to get,” she said.
“I’ve been having them since I was twelve, but they’re worse now than they were
last year, and when I’m actually really old enough to legitimately have a kid I
don’t even want to think how awful this will be. One day I might not even be
able to help myself at all, anymore.” She made a face, then stared at him
intensely again, her ears pricked forward and her tail standing lazily up. “I
don’t want to just have sex with any person for the sake of making it go away,
then regretting it. I’d rather do it with you—if you’re okay with it and all.”
He was thinking of marm’s wooden spoon, and was pretty sure she was too.
“We’re thirteen,” said Ishut. His brain felt scrambled like an egg. His dick
felt pretty confused, too.
“Yeah, but I think what we just did counts as sex,” said Pinger helpfully.
Ishut felt his whole face heat up all at once. “But, like… there wasn’t any
sticking anything into anything!”
Pinger shrugged and looked away from him. “I don’t know, I don’t think there’s
any kind of magical line where sex stuff turns into The Full Sex or anything
when you cross it.”
They sat in silence for a while.
“My point is, though,” she said, “if at some point I literally become unable to
function once a month without having sex then I’d rather do it with somebody I
like and trust and wouldn’t mind sleeping with anyhow.”
Ishut squeaked. Then he cleared his throat and looked away.
“W—well, it’s not like I’d turn you down, but are you sure you want to say
something like that now? That’s, uh—a pretty big offer to make. You’re sure you
don’t care if it’s with me?”
“As of right now,” said Pinger, “you’re the only one I’d want to ask.”
He looked back at her. She was smiling, a little, and the look on her face
suggested that she was trying not to.
“Besides,” she said, “we have to discuss this stuff when I can think straight,
so that you know what I’m okay with and what I’m not when I can’t.”
He swallowed. Sure, this discussion was about things that probably wouldn’t
start happening for quite a while, but it felt really weighty, and blood was
rushing back to his dick with a vengeance.
“You can always change your mind, you know,” he said.
This time Pinger really did smile.
“That’s why I like you,” she said, and she leaned in and kissed him, one hard
smack of lips against lips, and suddenly Ishut felt weirdly okay about
everything that had happened that day.
 
The Gloria is a big ship, bigger than anything else Ishut’s ever sailed on, but
it’s also populated with way too many people, and there’s no privacy. Most of
the time he doesn’t mind that. He likes everyone on board because they’re all
fun, crazy people. It’s only inconvenient when somebody’s got an itch to
scratch, because everybody bunks close together, and the only places where
anybody can get any privacy at all are the captain’s room and the showers.
Nobody can get into the captain’s room without the captain’s say-so, and
everybody bathes at weird-ass times in concert with their chore schedules so
that there’s not too much competition, but it does make it hard to get a good
wank sometimes.
Everyone bears with it, like some kind of unspoken code. The showers are
sacrosanct: if the Occupied sign is up, you don’t go in. For one thing, anybody
who opens the door on a bathful of naked girls is risking a flogging by those
girls (Zazarland has already promised not to intervene); for another, you never
know who’ll be in there, so you could always be opening the door on a very
scarring image; for an addendum to the first thing, anybody stupid and unlucky
enough to open a door on Elisha or Yggdra with her hand up her skirt would get
shot, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. “Do unto the privacy of others what you
would have done unto yours” is stamped proudly amongst the ten commandments of
the Gloria, and everybody obeys those commandments like—well, like they would a
marm with a hard wooden spoon.
There’s the crow’s nest too, of course, but half the crew can’t take the
height, and half of the other half seem to refrain for fear their voices would
carry or out of practical clean-up concerns.
“A ship with a sexually satisfied crew is a well-run ship,” Zazarland has said
on more than one occasion. Crew members around when he says it usually tell him
to shut up and stop flapping his mouth about embarrassing things, but everyone
seems to agree well enough that the showers are held to be sacred ground.
It’s a pretty good arrangement, or at least as good an arrangement as Ishut is
sure they’re going to get anytime soon. The upside to the shower room also
being the sex room means that it’s always kept very clean, and there’s a nice
stock of condoms and lube in a crate in the corner. The crew has plenty of sex
or elsewise they keep their own gears oiled very well, and mostly people don’t
step on each other’s feet, and nobody’s contracted any venereal diseases yet.
Pinger, though.
They haven’t talked to Zazarland about it yet, and they won’t unless they have
to, because there are just some things that ought to be kept private for as
long as they can be. Pinger’s hormonal cycle is (and he cringes to know it so
well; that has to be some awful breach of boundaries) irregular and
temperamental besides. She’s had three-month drags between periods sometimes,
and has mild ones that last for a month others. Her moods and the changes in
her body can’t be fit onto a calendar. She knows when they start, and that’s
all.
The ship makes berth frequently for both business and partying purposes, and
then everyone will get separate inn rooms or at least there will be convenient
haystacks and grassy knolls to hunt out. But there are occasions that the ship
doesn’t make berth at the right times, and, well.
He and Pinger wind up in the shower room together a lot—sometimes to plan
strategies for the next long stretch of heat, sometimes to just go ahead and
take baths, and sometimes to enjoy some casual sex. Elisha and Ruru seem
suspicious sometimes, but it’s not his place to tell them before Pinger
specifically wants to. The cover story they’ve put out is that as childhood
friends, they’ve been seeing each other’s naked bodies since before they knew
nakedness was a big deal (which is true), so they don’t find it a big deal even
now (also mostly true).
The sex maybe isn’t as common as Elisha would like to think. Pinger, when she’s
normal, likes long foreplay and cunnilingus (her clit really is bumpy, a
texture kind of like the seeds on a little wild strawberry, and he always tries
and fails not to make that comparison while he’s sucking on it), and gives
blowjobs that are like wet slices of heaven. Pinger, when she’s normal, calls
all the shots and never lets him forget it. She teases him, and she makes him
beg, and he never complains because it not-at-all-secretly makes him hot. They
know each other’s bodies perfectly, they’ve been having sex for so long; they
can and have gone for hours, in the dead of night when nobody else is awake.
That’s why the sex isn’t as common as Elisha would like to think, though.
Pinger in her right mind is nothing like Pinger strung out on hormones; even
Ishut isn’t stupid enough to miss it. And thinking about that hurts.
She’s his best friend, he loves her, and she really does need him, so what can
he do? Even if he didn’t want to do this anymore, he wouldn’t be able to say so
at this point.
Ishut has got the signs burned into the inside of his skull, and checks them
off every time.
Pinger’s playful by nature, she lives to needle everybody around her, but
there’s a note she gets in her voice when she’s distracted from her usual reams
of innuendo and high-handed digs at incompetence. She stops enjoying it as
much, sort of; she pulls her punches sometimes because the complete bullshit
coming out of her own mouth gets her riled.
Nobody else has noticed this. Nobody else, Ishut thinks, has been around Pinger
for long enough to know when she’s holding back, when she’s off her game.
Once it starts, she gets really possessive of the crow’s nest. It’s good,
private space, and he knows for a fact she takes this and runs with it so she
can finger-fuck herself half the time she’s up there. She actually manages to
masturbate and still keep a weather eye out for enemy ships and islands, which
is fucking incredible and also a testament to just how great a pirate she
really is.
This, Ishut thinks, she does a good job of camouflaging because she’s always
pretty possessive of the crow’s nest. But then, when she’s not easing into a
heat she’ll let herself be persuaded every now and again if someone really
wants the job; when she is, she’ll offer cheerfully to fight the other guy for
it, and they’ll realize she’s not joking and back off.
(“You’re gonna give yourself early arthritis or something,” he said once when
they were on late watch alone and she kept flexing her hands. “Shouldn’t we at
least, I dunno, try to buy you a dildo or something the next time we’re on
land? I think they sell ones now that, like, vibrate and stuff. Maybe there’s
one you could keep in under your clothes or something.”
She looked at him pityingly. “Aniki, dildoes are a very poor substitute for
penises. Dicks are hot! They are pliant, and they twitch around and pulse.
Dildoes are stiff and hard and cold. I know this because I’ve already tried
them. They wouldn’t be a solution even if they were comfortable, though, since
my body won’t calm down unless it’s exposed to cum. Besides,” she added,
stretching, “even if we could sneak away some money to buy one, most islands
won’t let you buy sex toys until you’re eighteen.”
He hadn’t known what to say to that, and had just shut the hell up.)
At about the same time, she’ll start avoiding getting in close quarters with
other people. She takes baths with the other girls every now and again, but if
she’s in heat when they ask she’ll refuse. Too touchy, she’s told him. He
knows, a little, what that’s like now—Ruru’s intensely tactile, innocent as a
little kid, and sometimes when he’s been low-burn horny for a couple hours
she’ll come up and pat and stroke and hug at him, her big plush tits will
squish against his arm or his chest or his back, and he’ll have to suck his
breath in and bite his lip and hope she won’t notice his dick’s as big and hard
as a rail spike. It’s fucking unbearable, and he does his best to shake her off
so he can find a dark corner to fuck his hand before his brain and his balls
both explode.
(This was behind one of the most memorable haystack instances, during his and
Pinger’s service on the Gloria. They were stuck on an island for a long hot
week and most of the girls had camped out on the beach in swimsuits, he
recalls. Pinger was on the downswing of a heat then and he was almost as
desperate as her, and they wound up fucking each other’s brains out all night,
six whole rounds. She was glassy-eyed and purring by the end of it, and he
spent most of the next day asleep, only waking up in the afternoon to find
Pinger the perkiest she’d ever been at the beginning of a period.)
But, so, the girls are casually touchy and skin-on-skin contact is a little
much for Pinger when she’s constantly biting back a roaring need to get off.
It’s never happened (yet, she’d say) but she worries a little that if somebody
touches her when they’re both naked, she’ll either jump on them or roll right
over and beg them to fuck her.
There’s a part of him that thinks Pinger’s overestimating herself. There’s
another part of him that can imagine it happening, and maybe somebody else’d
think that was sexy—hell, he’d think that was sexy under other circumstances,
like if Pinger decided to do that of her own volition—it mostly makes him feel
tired and sad.
Her abrupt refusals of community bathing time, she reports to him, are excused
because she is a cat, and cats are moody and fickle. She laughs a little
hollowly at that. It pisses him off. It makes him want to grab her by the
shoulders, grab everybody by the shoulders, and scream that Pinger’s not an
animal, she’s a person. But that probably wouldn’t do anybody any good.
And finally, when she’s really getting close to her limit, she’ll start tagging
along with him everywhere. Nobody bats an eye at this behavior either: they’re
childhood friends, best friends, and it’s normal to see them following each
other around the ship when they’re bored. He’s the only one looking close
enough to see her pupils are dilated, her lips are swollen; he’s the only one
who knows her well enough to sense the hunger in her closeness to him.
Or if anyone does, they mistake it for ordinary horniness, because they do kind
of orbit the general shower area. If asked, they’d both answer primly that
after so much sea breeze, they want to wash off the salt. It’s an excuse
they’ve decided on ahead of time.
But when the signs rack up—when the counter hits zero and they walk past the
showers and there’s no Occupied sign there—
She stands still, tense, ears tilted back and tail bristling, until he gets the
door shut and locked and then she peels all her clothes off in a rush, wrapping
around him.
It’s difficult, getting pants undone and kicked off when she’s locked arms and
legs around him, working her hips in tight little circular thrusts over the
peak his hard-on makes. They’ve been fucking since they were barely kids, but
that doesn’t mean he’s immune to acres of smooth brown skin, to bare thighs
with the littlest hint of rippling muscle, to perfect apple tits with their
dark nipples puckered and hard, to the sheer waves of heat rolling off her.
She moves like the waves, and her grip’s like a vise; she’s moaning low in her
chest. The only thing still on her is the thick leather collar, and the bell
makes faint noises in the same rhythm her breasts jiggle.
“Need you,” she says, over and over and over like a mantra. “Need you inside.”
She’s so blunt, like this, her polite veneer stripped down to instinct and
lust. It kind of scares the fuck out of him.
Once he’s naked from the waist down she starts to whine, and yeah, he’s whining
too—the head of his cock’s running up and down her labia. She’s scalding hot
and drenched, like a porno. He’d grab onto her ass and sink her right down onto
him, but fucking standing up’s a shit idea, especially when she’s like this.
She’ll knock him over and he’ll break something.
He feels around for a chair, plants his ass in it, and spreads his legs so his
thighs are hooked around the corners. Pinger’s arms are tight around his neck
and he can’t see her face, just hears her breath rushing next to his ear. Her
hips dip—his head sinks straight into her pussy with no resistance—she wraps
herself all the way around him like goddamn ivy and arcs her head back.
“Ishut.”
“Yeah.” Fuck. “I’m—I’m here.”
“Ishut,” she says again, low like a croon, and she starts whipping her hips.
He sees stars, and is fairly sure he’s drowning. She’s clamping down on him,
soft and wet as silk but with all the force of a fist, and with every thrust
she takes him all the way to the root. She’s limber, is Pinger, and even
gripping him and the chair she contorts her spine so that every time she pulls
back his rim brushes against the inner lips of her pussy.
And she’s a wreck. Her insides squeeze and flutter, and through the triangle of
her legs when she thrusts he can see that his dick’s shiny with her. She makes
a wrenching, guttural noise and cleaves to him and starts grinding instead,
hips moving up and down, her clit pressing against his pubes as hot as a brand.
He could lose his mind like this, with her clenching and loosening around him
like a heartbeat.
He knows when she’s on the edge because her legs start to twitch: He rubs his
hips up against hers awkwardly and she orgasms like a thunderclap, pussy
squeezing and drawing him in. The cry she makes isn’t human at all; her ears
tickle his temple as she swivels them forward, tightening and tightening in
pleasure.
“Ishut,” she says, gasping: “Fuck, fuck—” And she writhes against him like an
eel. She says his name, swears some, and undulates. The muscles in her thighs
are spasming too hard for her to thrust, he figures, and he clumsily lifts her
up and feels blindly for the wall.
When he pins her to it—when he starts to stroke his dick into her slow and
deep—she screeches, grabs his shoulders so hard it hurts, and hooks her legs
over his arms. The angle of her pussy changes, and he fucks up into her with
more vigor as his breath goes short. Her body’s all folded in on itself,
wetness streaming down her flanks as all her pent-up lust breaks against him,
and he wants to bite her mouth and her tits but that’d spill them off the wall
and onto the floor. Her tail is twitching drunkenly.
She comes again, screams, sobs on his name. Her pussy near crushes the head of
him, and she convulses, gasps and looks at him with eyes vacant and demanding.
He lets his legs fold, carefully so that they don’t come apart, and rolls her
over onto her back on the smooth wooden floor. She lies spread out for him,
breasts shaking a little as she breathes. Her fingers knead at the joint of his
shoulders and neck, right under the nape, and her toes are curling and
uncurling. Her hair is starting to stick to her face in pale little curls. His
balls are cramping fit to kill him.
“In me,” she says, “in me,” repeating it like a spell. She lets her legs fall
wide, arches her hips up so he sinks back inside her. He grabs either side of
her waist, hitches her up and starts fucking into her with urgency, orgasm
building up for both of them now. Kisses her, this time; she scrapes her teeth
against his lips and fucks her tongue against his.
He shifts his hand a little, runs the edge of his thumb over her clit, and he
feels the muscles in her stomach tighten and shift down as she lets go, one hot
burst of fluid that soaks his pubes and his balls. He gives up holding back,
and slams his cum into her with thrust after thrust, not even stopping when his
dick starts to soften, only sliding out when her pussy stops fluttering and his
knees are starting to hurt.
Pinger doesn’t immediately clamber back up, so he figures this has probably
done the trick for now. Deciding it’s safe, he flops down onto his butt and
looks at her.
Her tits are still shaking when she breathes, but her breath’s rattling in her
chest now, some facsimile of a purr. Her vulva and her hooded clit are blood
red and still twitching a little, and the mouth of her vagina is filled with
sticky white semen. Her skin’s gilded with sweat, and one hand is laid low over
her belly. Her eyes are closed, but he can see her eyelids moving. She looks
sated. Relieved.
Ishut’s legs are aching, his knees have decided they hate him, and his limp
dick is still thrumming dully with the aftershocks of pleasure. Physically he
feels great, loose and limber and ready for a nap, which he is probably going
to need—both because mentally he feels awful and because Pinger will be built
back up again in another day or so.
He watches her lying on her back. There’s a part of him that wants to just fuck
her again, right now; that part’s at war with the part that wants to just throw
a blanket on her and go to the ends of the earth to find the other beastmen, to
find a cure, to find some kind of magic that’ll make this bearable for her, or
even take it all away for good.
“You came a lot,” she says. She sounds so goddamn calm, is what gets to him.
“Help me clean up.”
“Okay,” he says, and reaches out to hold her hand.
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