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Alive and Well

Summary:

You push yourself up to a sitting position. "Bro," you say. "Long time no see." You manage to keep your voice almost totally steady, even.

He's sitting cross-legged in the sand, his elbows on his knees, his katana planted point-down next to him. His horns echo the shape of his shades, jagged outward-facing points. You wonder what yours look like, but you think you'd lose points for reaching up to cop a feel of your own headgear.

"Come on. We don't exactly have the high ground out here."

Notes:

For the lovely Giadriana, winner of one of my auction prizes. She suggested a number of pairings and themes as starting points for a prompt, and we settled on this one:

 

Bro/Dave, post-game, some kind of glitch in the reset landed them on Alternia as trolls. trying to figure out what the hell they're doing, trying to cope with how different their feelings for each other are with these weird troll instincts on board.

 

Thank you for giving me free rein to do such fun things, Gigi, and thank you extra for your support of the Archive. :3

(Gender-identity-issues content note: this story has male-identified characters adjusting to hermaphroditic troll bodies & using human terms for troll genitalia; there is little to no dysphoria presented. If you need more detail to know whether this would be trigger-safe for you, please feel free to leave a message in my tumblr askbox with questions.)

Now with a beautiful illustration by hello-cloudy

Work Text:

You wake up with the nagging certainty that something is wrong. You don't even have to open your eyes to be able to tell. There's sand under your cheek and you know you didn't have any beach parties on your schedule any time soon. You take stock: you have a pounding headache, a gnawing hunger in your gut, and a furious need to sink your claws into something.

Wait, what.

You open your eyes to weird low light and the sight of your knobby gray hand splayed across dusty yellow sand. No. You close your eyes and give the world a few seconds to get its shit together, this is not funny, shape up.

"Sorry, bro, but stalling won't make this any easier. Time to get up and face the soul-sucking horror."

For a second it feels like your heart just stopped. There's a rumbling undertone to that voice that doesn't belong there, but otherwise it's familiar as the hilt of your sword. You thought you'd never hear that voice again, even after you won the game, even after you dragged a new universe kicking and screaming out of the wreck of the last battle. You swallow the thick lump in your throat and try to ignore the way your three-four-time heartbeat kicks up. Fuck, your heart beats in three-four.

You push yourself up to a sitting position. "Bro," you say. "Long time no see." You manage to keep your voice almost totally steady, even.

He's sitting cross-legged in the sand, his elbows on his knees, his katana planted point-down next to him. His horns echo the shape of his shades, jagged outward-facing points. You wonder what yours look like, but you think you'd lose points for reaching up to cop a feel of your own headgear.

"Come on. We don't exactly have the high ground out here."

"Right." You look up at the weird moons. "Shit, we gotta find shelter before sunrise." You picked up enough horror stories, between Kanaya's matter-of-fact zombie-annihilating background and Terezi's blinding. You know troll sunshine is nothing you want to get anywhere near exposed to.

Bro doesn't ask you to elaborate, so maybe he has his own Handbook to Surviving Troll Nightmare Planet somewhere. Maybe he's just a big stoic jerk like always, trying not to let you see him freak out. That thought makes weird squishy things happen in your weird squishy troll insides, and you put it out of your mind as hard as you can.

"We'll try for caves in those cliffs over there," he says as you get up. He still has that creepy way of getting to his feet, loose-limbed and just a little bit off, like he's being pulled up by puppet strings.

"On it," you say, and you equip your sword before you start moving. You don't even think about it until you've already done it—you just need to be armed. The better to hack everything you encounter into little bloody pieces, or something. You can taste the desire to do that in the back of your throat and you don't like the feeling at all.

The two of you jog over the sand at a steady pace, the kind of tempo you can keep up for hours if you need to. You're going to need to, given how far away those cliffs are. At one point this pack of dirty white hyena-looking things comes up out of the dunes to pace along beside you, eying you up like they want to know if you're tasty. One of them eventually darts in to go for your hamstring and you whip your sword across and up, take its head right off. The splattering arc of bright red blood on the sand makes something vicious and delighted burst in the pit of your stomach, and you try to shake it off as you leave the rest of the pack behind and keep moving. You're not interested in the joys of troll bloodlust, and you're really not interested in feeling like that around Bro. Shit, can you guys still strife without it turning to murder?

Cautiously, like you're probing at a sore spot in your brain, you imagine yourself turning your sword on him. The troll parts of you recoil from that just as hard as the you parts of you, thank fuck. Instead you feel squishy and weird and shaky-mad when you think about anything hurting him, like it would wreck you (it did) and like you'd have to kill whatever was responsible (you couldn't), like the only possible course of action from there would be all fangs and claws and growling.

When he gives you a weird, sideways look, you realize you're already doing the growling part. You cough a couple of times until you figure out how to shut that off.

You pick up speed as you go, as the green moon sinks toward the horizon and the pink moon climbs the other side of the sky. Gotta make it to shelter before the blistering horror-planet sun rises to destroy you. The cliffs rise up in front of you, not quite the completely sheer fuck-off vertical that they seemed from a distance, but you're still going to have a shitty climb ahead of you to get anywhere.

Or—huh. You lift up off the ground, get a little air, and it feels kinda...off? But hey, your whole body is a brand-new alien wonderland of you don't know what the fuck is going on or what half your parts are called. "Floating weirdly" is way down at the bottom of the complaints roster.

Bro catches you by the ankle before you get too high up. "What the actual fuck, dude," he says, and you falter, not because he sounds pissed—he does, in that flat barely-giving-hints way he's always had—but because he's touching your skin, his fingers closed around your ankle under the cuff of your jeans, and it makes alarms jangle all the way up and down your spine. Part of your fucked-up troll brain is going wow, you don't DO that, while another part is going except he can do it more, do it always.

You sink back down a bit before he can pull you there, because that would be just embarrassing. "Sick ass game powers, bro, you know how it goes. Gain all the levels, get all the power-ups. You should have seen the pajamas that went with it."

He hasn't let go of you, and you carefully don't examine your feelings about that. "Can you take a passenger?"

"Never tried." You hold out your free hand to him, and he lets go of your ankle to take it so you'll both still have your sword arms free. You clasp wrists, and his hands are still bigger than yours, broader—you thought maybe you were growing into something like his size during those three wasted years, but it looks like you still have a ways to go. His skin is warm and rough and your skin prickles all over with his touch. This is some seriously yaoi shit that can stop any second now.

When you lift off again you realize that whatever you've got now isn't like your god-tier floating deal. He's coming right along with you, not hanging from your grip but lifted into the air the same time you are. It takes effort, but you couldn't say how, like you're flexing a muscle that isn't in your body anywhere. Weird troll shit? Yeah. You're going to call it weird troll shit and be done with it. (Later maybe you'll try to test the boundaries. A lot later, sometime when Bro isn't around and watching you fuck up as you learn.)

There's a ledge about four stories up, where a rough cave mouth opens along the cliff face. You aim for that, and get both of you dropped onto solid ground without any real hiccups. The cave doesn't smell so hot, but it goes deep enough that you can't see the back of it and the sky is starting to lighten ominously. Listen to you. Lighten ominously? The pretentious stupid must be hardwired into troll brains.

You and Bro glance at each other—shades or no, you know it—and then duck into the cave together. It's dark as shit, but your freaky troll eyes adjust to that fast. The smell doesn't get any better, but that's no shock.

The shock is the low rattling snarl from behind you, with its accompanying nasty jolt of now-let's-kill adrenaline. You spin with exactly the same quick economy of movement that Bro does, and the troll facing you at the cave entrance is a big ugly fucker but there's only one of him.

"Ain't this a fucking surprise to come home to," the stranger drawls, and it's not Gamzee but there's something similar in the tone of his voice and that ratchets your must kill gauge higher despite yourself. Fuck, you're starting to see why Karkat was such a flailing perma-tantrum. Trolls are just primed to go from zero to catastrophe in two seconds flat.

"We got a problem here?" Bro asks, and with the trollish buzzing undertone you can't tell if he's actually still calm or if he's just strangling his reactions to bluff the guy.

Ugly grins, a whole mouthful of needles. "All depends on if you can keep up, shitblood. Might let you stick around if you don't bore me."

Jesus fuck, he's flirting. "Fuck off," you snarl. "Nobody's interested."

"How about it, hotshot?" Still talking to Bro, totally ignoring you. "You think you can keep up? Make it hard for me to put you on the ground?" He's got some kind of scimitar in his hand now, twirling it in lazy circles with the flip of his wrist, and he takes a step further into the cave. His horns almost brush the ceiling. "Course, if you need a little more fucking inspiration, I could carve up your skinny little piece of palebait there, get his—"

You feel the rush of displaced air and then Ugly's head is rolling toward the cave mouth. His neck stump fountains blue-green with enough force to splash the cave ceiling for a few seconds before the body falls.

You match Bro's flash-step and have your arms around him before your rational brain catches up with the fact that you're moving. Then you panic because Striders don't DO that and also he's a troll now and definitely high on bloodshed and—and holding onto you just as tight, making this rumbling sound in his chest that you can feel where your cheek is pressed against him.

"This is one weird fucking species we've gotten ourselves stuck in," he tells you, soft and amused. You can still recognize the tone of his voice that well. His breath feels warm and shivery and it takes a second before you realize you're feeling it against your horns.

"Yeah, no shit," you agree. You haven't let go. Bro hasn't either. You think the smell of blood ought to be making you sick, but instead it's just reminding you how hungry you are. Grub sauce, you think. Grub loaf.

Nnnnnno. Too gross. Your body's okay with the idea, apparently, but your brain is not ready to go there. No starvation cannibalism unless you're actually starving, that seems like a good rule.

You don't say anything to Bro about trolls' gross eating habits, or their weird ideas about romance, for that matter, while the two of you drag Ugly's leaking corpse out of the cave he won't be needing anymore. The blood looks a lot brighter out in the moonlight. Shit, it looks like—

"You okay, bro?"

You swallow that case of the unwelcome feels and try to put your Strider face back on. "It's cool. Just reminded of somebody for a second, is all. But I'm sure she'd never be as much of a loser as this douche." What happened to Terezi, anyway? What happened to Karkat? Did they get dumped out here somewhere too, or are they off on earth trying to figure out how to be squishy hornless assholes with only half as much junk?

No, okay, let's not think about new and different junk. That goes on the list with hunger. Pretty much everything going on south of your chin is no longer on the table for discussion, thanks for the input, councillor, this meeting is adjourned.

"Totally ready to get some shut-eye, though. Trying to do heavy lifting with just my brain is proving to be too much for my poor frail trollish constitution. I may be in danger of swooning away right where we stand."

The corner of Bro's mouth twitches, and you catch a glint of fang. "You know I'll always catch you if you swoon."

Pretty much your entire no-discussion zone goes warm and tingly at that, even though you know he's just fucking with you, and he knows you know, and you know he knows you know, and it's a regular vicious cycle of awareness on the subject of fucking-with around here. Still, you're standing here with your body doing ooh Mr Strider ooh things and that's just weird.

You stare at each other long enough to max out the awkward meter. Bro's just watching you, not even giving you any shit for being such a wreck, and that means either he can't read you with the species swap—not fucking likely—or he's off his game just as much as you are. Wow, okay, no, that topic also gets banished, it's like a regular totalitarian regime over here in the Autonomous Republic of Dave, no free press at all. Because if you think about Bro being off-balance, being weirded out, being nervous... you get this twinge in your gut that makes you want to cling to him again.

"Fuck this," you say, a summation of the general state of affairs and pretty accurate, you think. The specter of sympathy for Karkat raises its demented shouty head again. "I'm gonna get some sleep and when I wake up I'm gonna tell Auntie Em all about this crazy dream."

You walk back into the cave without looking back but you know Bro's following you. You can't hear him, but you can feel him there, like... your horns are tingling with the motion? How the fuck does that even make sense.

Ugly left a pile of stuff you don't want to examine closely in one corner of the cave, and if you were planning on staying here long-term you'd probably burn it all as a first order of business. You can just ignore it for one night—one day, stupid troll planet being backward—though, so you curl up on the other side of the cave from it.

Bro lies down just out of arm's reach, which is good and the reasonable thing to do and the instinct that wants him over here right now can shut up and get over itself. You are fine, as much as you can be in some of the dumbest circumstances the game has ever dumped you in, even counting that time you were almost soup. Okay, maybe this is better than being soup. Maybe.

You can hear him breathing. You hang on to that part: your Bro is here with you. Alive. Alive and well and literally so attached that he'll kill someone for threatening you. If you ever doubted how much you meant to him—which you didn't, okay, you knew you mattered even if he didn't show it in ordinary ways—if you ever did, though, you wouldn't be able to now. He's here. He's with you. You roll over so you're facing him, so he'll be the first thing you see when you wake up, and then you finally let yourself relax enough to drop off to sleep.

Not that you stay that way. You startle awake after what feels like less than two hours, and maybe your sense of Time isn't as sharp anymore, you don't know, but there's light reflecting on the walls of the cave so it can't have been that long. The dreams you were having are already fading to shreds but you don't think they were anything good. Hunger. Anger. Blood.

Bro shudders and snarls, still caught in the grip of some kind of nightmare himself, and his claws rake the cave floor. Your probably-ridiculously-named troll insides twist up and knot with the need to fix it. You reach for him cautiously. He'll probably wake up the second you touch him, but at least then the nightmare will be over, right?

You touch the back of his hand, really gently at first, and he shivers all over but doesn't wake up, so you try actually squeezing a little. He makes a sound that's half growl and half whimper, and catches your fingers in his. "It's okay," you whisper, hoarse, hoping to hell he's not going to wake up freaking out on you.

He doesn't wake up, just eases slowly into quieter sleep without letting go. You shift a little closer so it won't be so uncomfortable trying to get back to sleep yourself. You realize you can smell him from here, the warm musky spice you remember from when you grabbed him earlier. You shift a little closer than you meant to, because the smell makes your troll lizard brain feel better and there's a limit to how many ways you can tell your new body to shut the fuck up. You're not like...huffing him or anything. You're just being reminded that he's close by. That's a good thing to remember.

The second time you wake up is more of the same, except you're closer to him than you were when you dropped off. You wake up freaked but you can't stay that way because he's there, and you drop back into the realm of weird alien dreams before you've even gotten your bearings completely. The third time you're drooling on his shoulder and he has an arm draped over your waist. You lay your arm across his chest, breathe in his scent, and nod off again.

The fourth time you wake up is for real. The light has changed, turned to the cool-spectrum shade of moonlight, and Bro is awake, too. His chest thrums with the low rumble that always made you tease Terezi about purring, and you always thought that was cute when she did it but now it's playing up and down your spine in a way that wakes up nerve endings you're still not sure you're ready to have.

Ready or not doesn't matter, it turns out. You take a deep breath and everything smells like him and as you exhale you start rumbling back, this sound that comes up out of somewhere in your chest. Bro chuckles and tugs you a little closer, making your breath huff out of you. This should be weird, is weird, you guys were never touchy-feely even when you were little enough to want to be taken care of. But it's making you feel better, between actual-you wanting the reassurance that he's real and your troll body taking instinctive "relax" cues from his closeness.

"Welcome back to the world of the living," he says. "How'd you sleep?"

"I've had better," you say. "But I'm okay." You manage not to say anything stupid about how it feels to have him hold you, because maybe you can keep the awkward at bay if you just don't discuss how intense it is. You think back on all those rambling, infuriated explanations Karkat gave you about trolls and feelings—god, you hope Karkat's okay, wherever he is, cranky little douche is probably falling apart right now without you—and figure you should count yourself lucky that your respect for Bro's mad fighting skills didn't translate into a hatecrush with troll wiring. Maybe you're supposed to be moirails. Looking out for each other, safe with each other, getting cuddly sometimes. And that's the kind with no kissing. Which is ideal, because you don't want to kiss your Bro, right?

...There are some things you should never phrase as questions.

Bro inhales sharply and goes tense, and wow fuck, he's always been able to read you too easily but if he can actually hear what you're thinking now you might have to die of shame. Shame and the horrible, inescapable knowledge that you do want to kiss him, your heartbeat echoing between your legs. "Trolls," you say, as calmly as you can, "are really fucked up."

"Yeah. I'm starting to get that." He's so tense you can feel little tremors running through him. "Think it might be a good idea for you to back off now."

Your purr stutters and stops. "But—" you say, and then you really don't have any good objections to raise.

"Shit," Bro says, grimacing, pulling away from you. The grimace turns into a choked laugh. "It's not you, it's me."

"Like that's really going to fix my heartbreak," you say, because dumb cliches are a currency you're both always flush with.

"Baby, don't be like that," he deadpans, and the air eases a little between you. Trolls or not, you're both still you in the important ways. And after a beat to let you exchange the traditional smirk-and-nod, he gets serious again. "Trying to rein in the instincts my swank new meat suit comes with."

You strangle the impulse to tell him he doesn't have to do that. You strangle all the cracks you could make about mating season. You would strangle the urge to kiss him, except that you're pretty sure if you tackled that one head on it would trounce the rest of you. "Me too. Trolls, uh. The dude who explained it to me made it sound like trolls get romantic with all their most important people." It's more complicated than that, but hell if you want to do the lecture. You can make Karkat do it when you meet up again.

Bro raises an eyebrow over the rim of his shades. "Even family?"

"They don't have families," you say.

"Harsh." You sit there a few feet away from each other, almost-not-quite in arm's reach, staring while the awkward meter fills again. "Just to put this on the record," he says, "I never wanted to do that kind of shit to you as a human."

"Dude, you were fucked up, but you weren't that kind of fucked up," you say. His posture eases a little. Approval, maybe. "As long as we're putting shit on the record, I wasn't spanking it over you back on earth, either."

"Come on, no need to go hurting a guy's feelings," he says. You're going to be okay, both of you.

And you could call it off here, go on ignoring all these feelings and hoping they'll go away. Try not to think about the way he smells or the way it felt to be close to him, or how much you're bone-deep craving some kind of comfort. You lick your lips. "You want me to come over there and make it up to you?" You deliver the line with as much syrupy bullshit seduction as you can.

"Ooh, baby, you know it," he says, just as cheesy, but there's this sharp spike in his scent that makes your mouth water and... possibly other stuff too, weird. But a hot kind of weird.

So you take him up on it. You climb into his lap and both of you start purring again at the touch, and he smells so fucking good you can feel it untangling the stress-knots in your muscles that you'd been pretending weren't there. You push your shades up into your hair and that's it, past the point of ironic excuses, now you're committed to this thing.

When you reach for his shades next, though, he lets you. You look him straight in the eyes for the first time since—shit, maybe the first time you can remember, and they're troll eyes, yellow sclera and a little bit of brown ringing the pupil. This is crazy game bullshit but you have him back, warm and solid, and you put your hands on his shoulders and he wraps an arm around your back and you just lean closer to each other, a slo-mo collision, a big screen catastrophe, and then his lips are warm and dry on yours and fuck metaphors, okay.

You open your mouth and lean into him, really glad that you've had at least a little practice so you don't totally make an ass of yourself here. For a second it's weird that his mouth is warm, when Terezi's felt so cool—is it because you're one too now, or is it another one of their weird blood type things? Inquiry postponed on account of who fucking cares. His tongue teases yours, so fucking gentle it's ridiculous. You kiss him harder, not like you want to make it a fight but just like—he's here, and you still can't believe it, but you'll take a stupid troll world with Bro in it over any world without him.

Wait, holy shit, you might actually have some skills here that he doesn't. Sure, he's got loads more experience than you in general, but you've had some with a troll. You slide your hands up, fingers sliding through the wiry stiffness of his hair, and thumb the bases of his horns.

He makes this sound into your mouth that makes all your pants parts tingly. You rub his hornbeds again and he groans, rocking up against you and pressing against the seam of your jeans.

Then he gets you back, wrapping his hands around your horns and showing you just what that feels like. It's a sense you don't have words for, just this undiluted sensation of yes good more running right down into your spine and into your...everything. You'd be embarrassed by the noises coming out of your mouth if he weren't shuddering under you at the same time.

"How far are we taking this?" he asks, nipping your earlobe. Fuck, why is that so sexy.

"I'm good," you say. You think you are. You know what to expect. You know what you've got and it all feels like it wants more attention than it's currently getting. "Far as you want."

"Hot," Bro says, and you're pretty sure there's no irony there at all.

You climb out of his lap so you can get your clothes off—and hey, sweet, fighting your way out of your t-shirt is a great way to cop a feel of your swank, backward-curving horns—and then as you're unbuttoning your jeans it occurs to you to say, "So, you can probably feel it already, but this is gonna look a little different."

"Show me," he says.

You kick your shoes off and shove your pants down. Your bulge is only partway out, you think—fuck, you hope—and dark red. You run two fingers up the visible length of it and that feels...not quite normal but close. Then a little more of it squirms out of the sheath, and that doesn't feel normal at all.

"Nice," Bro says approvingly. Your bulge eases out a little further and squeezes your fingers. Terezi swore it just did that without instructions, and it's weird to discover she meant it.

"There's more," you say. If you stop to think about it you'll freak, so you don't. You get your pants the rest of the way off and lean back on your hands, spreading your legs. Bro stares, and you can't read his expression and you wish he would just say something. "Well?"

"You've got an alien pussy," he says.

You blush hot. "Fuck you, you've got one too," you say, your bulge squirming around completely without authorization from higher up the brainstem. Bro lifts one eyebrow and then shoves his hand down the front of his pants. His lips part slightly and his shoulders barely stiffen and your nook aches, holy shit, you're watching him touch his brand-new alien junk and yours is campaigning hard for a closer acquaintance. "Bro..."

He rocks forward, into the space between your legs, and you can smell how bad he wants you and you're going to say yes to whatever he says next. He runs his claws up the inside of your thigh. "Can I play with your pussy, Dave?"

"Oh god," you say, which is ridiculous degrees of uncool but you don't care. You sort of hope he never learns the stupid troll words for everything because there's no way they could possibly sound that hot. "Hell yes."

He traces the wet lips of your nook with his fingertips and your breath hitches. Your bulge is smearing red goo all over your lower belly and yeah, it definitely wasn't all the way out before. You think you're actually bigger than Terezi, not that you're the kind of guy who worries about measuring up to his exes oh fuck especially not when you can feel the strange hot pulse of wanting to be filled in a hole you used to not have.

"Okay, you're the expert, dude," Bro says, stroking your folds with a truly maddening amount of restraint. "If I were guessing, I'd think this was a bad spot to get careless with claws, but you tell me. Are trolls into that?"

You don't know. It never came up, seeing as you had perfectly reasonable short human nails before. It sounds like a hatefuck kind of thing anyway. "This troll isn't," you say, and there's a beat where both of you are clearly thinking about how weird that is. "Why don't you stick your—your dick in there," and the stumbling is also not cool but hey, you caught yourself before you said bulge instead and ruined a perfectly good opportunity for dirty talk.

You'd swear Bro's eyes actually glow with hunger for a second. "That's what you want?"

"Yeah," you breathe. "Yeah, stuff me with it." He lets go of you to get his jeans open and you scrape your brains together enough to add, "You probably wanna just take those all the way off. This gets hella messy."

He grins, the kinky fucker, and whips his shirt off over his head almost without snagging it on his horns. You catch the second when he fucks it up and that ought to make you snicker but instead you just feel sort of wobbly inside and want him even worse. He was always pretty ripped, but he carries it differently on this body, familiar and not at the same time, like everything else. When he kicks his jeans off you can finally get a look at his bulge, twining long and thick between his thighs, honey-brown and dripping. A really small part of your brain is going what the fuck, this is weird, but most of you is just listening to your nook, which is pulsing steadily with need.

It's not that weird, you tell the panic voice. You got the parts, you might as well use them.

Bro lowers himself back down over top of you, and having his skin pressed against yours makes you start purring again. Your bulges slide against each other for a second—amazing—and then twine once around each other right at the root—fucking amazing. He makes a breathy, stunned noise that you think he's trying to swallow. "Got a mind of its own, huh?"

"That's what they all say," you manage shakily. You brace your heels and push up against his hips, wanting more, this whole mob of troll instincts going yes yes yes at his heat and his scent and the pressure at the root of your bulge. His tip squirms lower, moving slick through your folds, and then he finds the opening and oh god it goes in so easy, sleek and hot and pumping slowly into you. You cling to his shoulders, dig your claws into his back, try to growl and moan at the same time.

"Fuck, you've got such a sweet pussy," Bro purrs in your ear, and his bulge ripples inside you.

"More," you gasp, grinding your hips into his. "It's good, it's good, need more, c'mon," and you feel each pulse along the whole length of his bulge, from where it's curled around yours through the pressure against your folds and then the writhing heat in your nook. There's a little human-male part of you still weirded out about having a nook, but all the troll programming and hormones are so enthusiastically in favor of this development that it's pretty easy to let that go.

Your bulge has an agenda of its own here, too, twisting and squirming between his thighs until you find the slippery softness of his nook, holy shit. His teeth graze your ear. "Still want more, huh?" he says. "You wanna stuff me with it?"

"I can't, I—I don't know how to control it," you say, letting go of him with one hand so you can reach down there. You'll hold it out of the way if you have to, if he doesn't want you there. Fuck, you hope you don't have to.

He grabs your hand before you can get to your bulge, pulls it back up and pins it to the cave floor, his fingers lacing with yours. "Let it happen, then," he says. "Go on, stuff that big fat tentacle dick up my dripping pussy." You shudder all down your spine and your nook clenches around him, and he laughs. "You like the sound of that, huh?"

"Jesus, yes," you say, breathless, your bulge pressing experimentally and finding the spot where there's give, where it can start sliding in.

"Yeah, there you go. Fill my pussy, Dave, do it," he says, and he almost sounds like he's in control of himself except for the harmonic undertone that your troll brain parses as oh my god fuck me hard, and your bulge slides up into him slick and easy and hot.

Bro moans and it's the hottest noise you've ever heard, low and resonant, making all your junk throb. He rolls the two of you over onto your sides and you tangle your legs together to get better mutual nook-stuffing action going on. You can feel him swelling inside you, thickening until you'd swear he's too big to pull back out again, a sensation you never expected to encounter outside of ironic internet roleplay. Ironic internet roleplay did nothing to prepare you for this.

Your body is going yes yes yes at the sensation, though, and after a minute you realize you're saying it out loud. Your bulge is thick and pulsing inside him, and his bulge is hot and swollen inside you, rubbing up against sensitive spots you didn't even know were there. You bury your face in the side of his neck and breathe in the scent of being safe and wanted and good. "I missed you so much," you say, and your voice cracks, and he holds on tighter.

"You did so good," Bro tells you. "You did so fucking good." The pride in his voice wrecks you, and all you can do is hang on, riding out everything you're feeling right now. It's all part of the same thing, the pride and the protectiveness and the pressure building up in your nook, this messy and overwhelming tangle of feeling that builds and builds until something deep inside you lets go, a hot flood of pleasure and relief. Distantly you can feel him shaking, too, his nook rippling around your bulge.

You lie still in the aftermath, both of you sticky with sweat but still holding on tight. Your blood rushes in your ears, thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump. It's going to take a minute before you can pull your emotions together, much less find the coordination to untangle and get up. Bro's purring. You could do this all night.

Okay, no. Your stomach lodges an audible protest at that idea, and Bro snorts. "Guess that means we have to get up, huh?" he says.

"Yeah, I don't think we can get delivery out here," you agree. "Hey, Troll Domino's, send us two extra larges with pepperoni and mushrooms, hold the grub sauce, to a cave in the middle of nowhere."

"What kind of a shitty planet is this," Bro says, shaking his head. He shifts to start untangling your limbs, and you wince as his bulge comes out of you, because it still feels a little too big to do that easily—and then the messy part happens, both of you simultaneously gushing excessive amounts of troll spooge all over your thighs and the cave floor. You catch the little startled look that flickers across Bro's face, and then he laughs. "Welp."

"If we were proper trolls, we would have had a bucket for that," you say, shaking your head. He raises an eyebrow. "No, it's true."

"So that was kinky sex, is what you're telling me."

"Yeah, I think so."

"Sweet." He looks so pleased with himself and you're still full of endorphins and then you're laughing, because that's so him. For a second he looks surprised again, and then he's grinning back at you, all defenses down. You're in this together, no bullshit left, nothing to hide.

Even if it's the two of you against the world, you like those odds.