[ For a second the turn of her face to meet him evokes a tumble of dreamt memories, expectations queueing up behind them. He's surprised that she'd even entertain it— and then she crushes into him, takes her teeth to him, and the exclamation that accompanies the puncture of fresh holes is far from unhappy. His blood smears between them like the inky mess he's making of her ribs, her nails biting at him too, and it's perfect. It's honest.
He's not fucking a memory. This is no alternate timeline, no conjured reality where either of them are better than they are. He had resisted being here with everything he had, spent weeks avoiding it. She, already committed to it now, expresses her resistance with his pain.
There's no attempt to withdraw. Stephen pushes into the sting, gifts her more of himself to devour, mouth hungry and open and wanting as he shifts under the water, wedging foot and knee against the edge of the tub to find a new angle, new leverage to drive up into her. He holds her tight, keeps her close, relinquishes nothing of his greed for her as he starts to curl himself in deeper, more intently. Each movement more deliberate, each breath more strained.
This can't last much longer. He'll give her everything he can while it does. ]
[ he anchors himself and drives up with sudden, startling force to meet her, and nami's lungs empty into him. it rattles her. not just the movement, but the sense that he has seen something she hides away and it makes him want to scour and reach some deeper part of her, lose himself in it.
her reservations, her hesitations, are well lost to her. floating on the distant horizon, vanishing from view. she will remember them later, after, and feel uneasy for how much of herself she's given. but in this moment, she holds nothing back. loses herself in the tingling oversensitivity created by the ink he spills on her skin, until every brush of his fingertips on her ribs feels like it's across raw nerves. she is responsive, sounds of pleasure weaving into her labored breaths, fingers curling in his hair to hold him close, steady.
she is his until the end, when instinct wins. she tightens around him, wringing him in her arms like she could strangle him like this, and buries her face in his shoulder instead of letting him see her cry out. her climax overwhelms her, a shuddering fracture that curls her in on herself, turns the pace of her movements erratic and sharp until it suddenly stops. ]
[ It's a miracle he makes it to the point of tipping her over. One day, when he knows to credit it, he'll have to give thanks to the fluid that leaks from him, tainting the water, making an instrument of her skin. For now when she shatters he's suspended, flash blind, pleasure bright and her voice felt in the meat of his shoulder while somewhere, inexplicably calm, he starts to catalogue each little sign of her undoing.
The wrenching cling of her. The violent, stuttering shifts. The sound, as heard smothered so close to his ear that it both muffles and amplifies. His first real memories of their bodies in relation tuck neatly alongside a cloth taken to an unsteady ankle, a roll of her eyes, her back to him in the dark.
Then time catches up to him. It hits once she's already stilled, breath locked painfully back in his throat as everything seizes, hips churning up unbidden through one, two last frantic searches of her— and then his face is pressing against her hair, mouth open, shedding sound like skin as he lets himself go. He's an echo of her in that moment, arm tight and grasping, face hidden, hips driven high until the edge goes fully crested and he can finally - light as a feather, heavy as lead - settle them back down to the floor of the tub.
If there's any water left for them to sit in, that will be a miracle too. ]
Edited (don't ask me why i preferred this basically identical version of the same sentence I Just Did) 2023-12-13 23:43 (UTC)
[ she remains tangled in him while her breath evens out. while the water cools. tells herself it's the weight of her limbs and the trembling in her thighs that warns her not to try to lift herself up. that it's not the heat of his body against hers, and how she has missed it at night, because you can't miss what you've never had.
she has it now. even uncomfortably slotted into the makeshift bathing tub together in the middle of a stranger's room in the fucking boarding house, it's better. her heart pounds in her chest, strong enough that he must feel its frantic cadence too.
she doesn't want to separate. doesn't want to pick herself up and return to aloneness. there is comfort in tricking herself into being able to depend upon him. there was a reason the void had given that to her.
there comes a point, though, where it's inexcusable. unjustifiable. she turns her face towards him, briefly, forehead pressed to his cheek, nose along his jaw. breathes in. then— ] Your beard itches.
[ A gust of breath. It's a laugh, warm, throat just too lazy now to catch it with sound. He gives it a second, rifling through a rolodex of possible comebacks - ]
Your teeth are sharp.
[ If we're having a your physical trait has caused me the greater discomfort competition. Though in her defense, unlike his beard her teeth have only menaced a single part of him tonight. His hand, where its fingers had pressed little grooves into the skin of her side, loosens up to trail its fingers lightly up along her back, over her shoulderblade. Though they drag what remains of an old mess upward, nothing new leaks from his palm to coat her skin.
Reminded by his own comment, his tongue sneaks out curiously to prod at his lip, taste the saltmetal and hiss in a breath. This one, too, gusts out in a ghost of a laugh.
He's not in any great rush to ask her to vacate his lap. ]
[ she points this out a little ruthlessly, but given that she tongues at her front teeth and finds them loose, it feels better to put him on his heels than to engage the changes to her body in a more meaningful way.
she doesn't really want to think about what's going to happen when this set falls out, like her own teeth had when replaced by these. she lifts one hand from his back, stares at it on the rim of the tub and wonders if she's imagining that the webbing between her fingers is smaller now.
likes he needed arlong further embedded beneath her skin. she closes her eyes, breathes out slow and frustrated. then she reaches into her mouth to wiggle at her tooth. blood spills from the gum. yeah. it's definitely on its way out. she takes her hand from her mouth and starts to pick herself up off of him.
they might have dreamt of being married once, but that level of intimacy had not been the real them, and it certainly had not involved pulling teeth during the afterglow.
her body is a mess of black ooze, though the bathwater has it running down her sides like it's bleeding away except for where it catches in the dips of muscle and bone. ]
[ It's a fair comment, and with it bursts the bubble: they've moved on from peace and holding and back into an easier - more difficult - alignment. The next outward breath is a sigh, bidding the last stretched handful of moments a regretful goodbye as Nami prizes herself up to her feet—
And Stephen's brow furrows as he remembers - or at least resumes an awareness of the implications of - why he'd been in the bath in the first place. She's covered. It trails off of her in sheets and streams of stained water, but there's still too much for comfort. ]
You should stay. [ He realises how that sounds after he's said it. Knows instinctively what kind of reaction he's likely to get now she seems to have crossed the threshold of tolerating closeness. ] I can refill the tub. Give you some privacy if you need it.
[ Redundant as that was even before this, and especially now. But the point is he'll get of her hair if it means she can clean off. ]
[ she whips her head towards him again, briefly bewildered by the offer. but of course it's not a real offer. he was as distant as she was. as unused to relying on others. this is borrowed knowledge, she thinks—or maybe just observational. he doesn't seem to make a secret of his isolation.
it never occurs to her that it's out of respect for her own. ]
I didn't realize we were on watching each other pull out teeth and scales terms.
[ she opts to hook her finger between her lower lip and her gums—not to reveal the bleeding, but to at least indicate that she is worrying at them. the black ooze gets on her gums, too. numbs them, strangely enough, where it had done the opposite to her skin. ]
[ Oh. Attention homes in past his concern about his own impact on her to the places where whatever she was becoming might be starting to come apart. The mouth she draws his attention to, the patches where he remembers scales. Her gills. ]
I'm not squeamish.
[ Firm. A broad enough statement that it might speak for more than just the debriding of the monster from her body. ]
But you need to get that stuff off of you. I don't know what it'll do.
[ That stuff. Him. She needs to get him off of her, as soon as possible. ]
[ she tongues at her tooth from inside. feeling it out. how much will it hurt to just push it out the rest of the way now? how long will it be before her own teeth come back in? ]
It's inside of me.
[ no sense in not putting that plainly. she hasn't stepped out of the tub yet, however. she just hovers over him, as she had when she'd entered. dripping, now. ]
It doesn't hurt. [ she drops her hand from her mouth to instead feel at her ribs, where gils are starting to pucker and close between them. ] It feels ... weird.
[ It's inside of me. Concern hardens in an instant, something in the tension around his eyes, in the way his gaze dips to where else he was just inside her - darts up when she moves to where her fingers trail over her ribs.
[ He ignores the snip, too focused on important information, attention fierce. His focus slips as she answers his question, going far away as he goes inward, connecting easy dots. Almost to himself even as he addresses it vaguely to her: ]
It's interfering with your nervous response. [ Shit. She makes it sound harmless for now, but where does it stop? It's not him, it's the it he was on his way to becoming. He doesn't trust that to not get worse. ] Where?
[ Somewhere in this his hand's found its way back to her calf under the water, wrapped in a loose hold. Comfort she doesn't need. An anchor he maybe does. ]
[ but as she looks down at herself, she has to admit that much of the black liquid has started to wash away into gray trickling. it's not as evident where his hands have been — on her breasts, her thighs, her cunt.
she reaches up with one wet hand, pushes sweaty hair back from her face. the salt and water keep it together a little, half-holding it. ]
Everywhere you touched me. [ her hand moves up to rest at her chest. ] Are we really doing this right now?
[ Everywhere he touched her, also known as most places. God.
But the problem is, he doesn't know what this is. Because he doesn't know what he is, what the creature is when all's said and done, can't anticipate the progress of its infection - if it is an infection. Most importantly, doesn't know the cure.
So instead he sits there, scowling up at her, frustration plain and unfairly targeted— until he pulls his legs abruptly back from between Nami's, clearing her so he can abandon her, standing with sudden determination and stepping out of the bath.
An instant later the water's clearing, the murk of it dissipating until it's clear enough to see the bottom of the small metal tub, warming where it had started to cool. ]
[ nami is stubborn. she stares at him, annoyed. annoyed because she is not more stubborn than she is smart and self-preserving.
she would have to be stupid to step out of the tub. to stomp out like she wants to. to refuse his expertise, his investigation. he's concerned about the unknowns, and that should make her concerned too. she can trust him that far, at least, and it's her life on the line.
she sinks down with some annoyance, folding her arms over her bent knees and looking away from him. she pushes her fingers in her mouth to worry at her teeth—looser, now, and one of them rocks free with a wet sound. she drops it into the wash bin with her. ]
Next time, I'll bring rope. [ her scathing tone is only half sarcasm. ]
[ Lesson learned. He's not doing this again. Not knowingly putting her or anybody else at risk, not holding out until the last possible second in hope of reprieve and smearing the consequences of his actions all over her skin, under her skin, inside.
Nami's pulled a tooth clean out of her mouth. Stephen watches on, made uncertain by distance and ignorance, face set with concern.
But this isn't a time to freeze.
Kneeling, he reaches down into the water, submerges his hand. A quick trip of fingers and what's left of any more stubborn residue starts to slip from her skin, swallowed up into the glass-clear of the bathwater as though it were never there. And still Stephen's frown persists. It's too late for this, he knows it is, but he has to start somewhere. ]
[ what else can he do with that? the magic startles her, straightens her back, has her looking down at the water like it's something foreign. she runs her fingers across the surface, but it stays clear. nothing is revealed. the ink (venom? poison?) is just gone.
she redirects her gaze up at him. ]
What exactly is it you think you can do about it now?
[ A brief display of additional tension - his fingers frozen under the water, a tightening around the jaw— then his hand goes limp, breath pushes out in a huff through his nose, and he doesn't quite meet her eye. ]
I don't know. [ Words he really hates to say when he's operating in his own wheelhouse. And they aren't reassuring either, so he wrangles himself enough to meet her eye. ] I'll figure something out.
I'm gonna need something more substantial if it involves me staying in this tub.
[ it's perhaps a little unsympathetic. it's probably scary for him, realizing the strangeness of his own body. but from nami's side, it seems like inventing problems — whatever outcomes he fears have yet to come to pass, and the stuff is cleaned off her skin for the time being. ]
[ He's frowning, small but certain. But she's right. He doesn't know what's next, and there's nothing more the water can do for her that not staying submerged to slowly prune won't. So he finally settles back, arm limp where it hangs over the side of the tub, a ceding gesture. Body no longer an active barrier.
[ she raises her eyebrows at him, as if challenging the gesture, was that so hard? then she gets to her feet, resting one hand on his shoulder as she steps out, wet feet on the wood floors. she grabs someone's towel, bundled near the foot of their bed. ]
You'll be the first to know if there are any lingering side effects. But hey, maybe you got lucky. Maybe — [ she starts to draw a breath to continue the sentence as she towels herself off, but it hitches. her lungs won't expand.
she blinks at first, like it's just something caught in her throat. puts the towel in her hand to her chest in momentary confusion, then looks at him like she's ready to laugh it off. no laugh comes.
the discomfort starts creeping through into her expression. the silence unnerving, suddenly. ]
[ For a moment he doesn't understand that anything's happening. Then her sentence hasn't carried on for a beat too long and he turns to look, catches her on the edge of humour, and he thinks it's a joke. A trick, a nudge in the ribs for being precious about a little numbness, a little heightened sensitivity.
Then it's been too many moments and the expression on her face isn't giving way to the laughter it implied and he moves almost before he can think, snatches her up under the knees and around the shoulders, pulls her to him for as long as it takes to turn on his heel and move the two steps back to the bath, lower her back in just carefully enough to not have technically dropped her. Half crunched over the edge of the tub himself, arms still around her, making sure she's submerged.
The water. The gills. That's all he can think of, all he can hope. If it isn't them, if it's him, if he's impeded the neural relay to the respiratory system— ]
[ she is too startled to stop him, fight him — and what would she do? she doesn't know any better than he does how to make herself breathe again. but her whole chest shudders with the effort, sternum heaving without any matched effort from her lungs.
the gills have largely closed, by now. little cuts in her skin that are not longer real flaps, that don't respond in any way to the water around her ribs. when she realizes this, she reaches up for him, grabs at his shoulders, pawing at him like holding him close will do something for the fact that she still can't draw air into her chest.
panic hits her. eyes wide, she searches him. when she parts her lips to try to say something, she just gapes like a carp. there's no sound. no air to pass in or out of paralyzed lungs. whatever black ooze had left her skin tingling, alternately numb and hypersensitive, it had seeped into her gils and run through her respiratory system, settling inside her chest as her detransformation settled in.
she can't die here. in that moment, she's not thinking about the people who call it impermanent or the rituals or the duchess. she's thinking only of nojiko and coco village and the people counting on her. the people who she'll have abandoned if she can't figure out how to just fucking breathe. ]
(cw: magically approximated medical ventilation, blood)
[ Ventilate, he needs to ventilate, but how is he supposed to ventilate her in this fucking place? There's no time for the clinic, for help, he has to fix this. Now.
Thoughts turn to magic, grasp for it, search for the simplest solution. He has his lungs, but all they have to offer is the stuff she doesn't need.
So change that. Change it.
He pulls his arms out from underneath her, behind her, frees them up so one can grip her firmly by the jaw, thumb holding open her gaping mouth. The other he holds out of the way, ready to move fingers through the theft of carbon right out of their breath as he passes it back and forth between them. He worries at his already tattered lip to target his focus as he recalls the right pattern of spellwork, anxious to be specific, no margin left for error.
Blood's already beading as he leans down, presses his mouth over hers, and empties his lungs. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
He's not fucking a memory. This is no alternate timeline, no conjured reality where either of them are better than they are. He had resisted being here with everything he had, spent weeks avoiding it. She, already committed to it now, expresses her resistance with his pain.
There's no attempt to withdraw. Stephen pushes into the sting, gifts her more of himself to devour, mouth hungry and open and wanting as he shifts under the water, wedging foot and knee against the edge of the tub to find a new angle, new leverage to drive up into her. He holds her tight, keeps her close, relinquishes nothing of his greed for her as he starts to curl himself in deeper, more intently. Each movement more deliberate, each breath more strained.
This can't last much longer. He'll give her everything he can while it does. ]
no subject
her reservations, her hesitations, are well lost to her. floating on the distant horizon, vanishing from view. she will remember them later, after, and feel uneasy for how much of herself she's given. but in this moment, she holds nothing back. loses herself in the tingling oversensitivity created by the ink he spills on her skin, until every brush of his fingertips on her ribs feels like it's across raw nerves. she is responsive, sounds of pleasure weaving into her labored breaths, fingers curling in his hair to hold him close, steady.
she is his until the end, when instinct wins. she tightens around him, wringing him in her arms like she could strangle him like this, and buries her face in his shoulder instead of letting him see her cry out. her climax overwhelms her, a shuddering fracture that curls her in on herself, turns the pace of her movements erratic and sharp until it suddenly stops. ]
no subject
The wrenching cling of her. The violent, stuttering shifts. The sound, as heard smothered so close to his ear that it both muffles and amplifies. His first real memories of their bodies in relation tuck neatly alongside a cloth taken to an unsteady ankle, a roll of her eyes, her back to him in the dark.
Then time catches up to him. It hits once she's already stilled, breath locked painfully back in his throat as everything seizes, hips churning up unbidden through one, two last frantic searches of her— and then his face is pressing against her hair, mouth open, shedding sound like skin as he lets himself go. He's an echo of her in that moment, arm tight and grasping, face hidden, hips driven high until the edge goes fully crested and he can finally - light as a feather, heavy as lead - settle them back down to the floor of the tub.
If there's any water left for them to sit in, that will be a miracle too. ]
no subject
she has it now. even uncomfortably slotted into the makeshift bathing tub together in the middle of a stranger's room in the fucking boarding house, it's better. her heart pounds in her chest, strong enough that he must feel its frantic cadence too.
she doesn't want to separate. doesn't want to pick herself up and return to aloneness. there is comfort in tricking herself into being able to depend upon him. there was a reason the void had given that to her.
there comes a point, though, where it's inexcusable. unjustifiable. she turns her face towards him, briefly, forehead pressed to his cheek, nose along his jaw. breathes in. then— ] Your beard itches.
no subject
Your teeth are sharp.
[ If we're having a your physical trait has caused me the greater discomfort competition. Though in her defense, unlike his beard her teeth have only menaced a single part of him tonight. His hand, where its fingers had pressed little grooves into the skin of her side, loosens up to trail its fingers lightly up along her back, over her shoulderblade. Though they drag what remains of an old mess upward, nothing new leaks from his palm to coat her skin.
Reminded by his own comment, his tongue sneaks out curiously to prod at his lip, taste the saltmetal and hiss in a breath. This one, too, gusts out in a ghost of a laugh.
He's not in any great rush to ask her to vacate his lap. ]
(cw: teeth/tooth loss gore)
[ she points this out a little ruthlessly, but given that she tongues at her front teeth and finds them loose, it feels better to put him on his heels than to engage the changes to her body in a more meaningful way.
she doesn't really want to think about what's going to happen when this set falls out, like her own teeth had when replaced by these. she lifts one hand from his back, stares at it on the rim of the tub and wonders if she's imagining that the webbing between her fingers is smaller now.
likes he needed arlong further embedded beneath her skin. she closes her eyes, breathes out slow and frustrated. then she reaches into her mouth to wiggle at her tooth. blood spills from the gum. yeah. it's definitely on its way out. she takes her hand from her mouth and starts to pick herself up off of him.
they might have dreamt of being married once, but that level of intimacy had not been the real them, and it certainly had not involved pulling teeth during the afterglow.
her body is a mess of black ooze, though the bathwater has it running down her sides like it's bleeding away except for where it catches in the dips of muscle and bone. ]
no subject
And Stephen's brow furrows as he remembers - or at least resumes an awareness of the implications of - why he'd been in the bath in the first place. She's covered. It trails off of her in sheets and streams of stained water, but there's still too much for comfort. ]
You should stay. [ He realises how that sounds after he's said it. Knows instinctively what kind of reaction he's likely to get now she seems to have crossed the threshold of tolerating closeness. ] I can refill the tub. Give you some privacy if you need it.
[ Redundant as that was even before this, and especially now. But the point is he'll get of her hair if it means she can clean off. ]
no subject
it never occurs to her that it's out of respect for her own. ]
I didn't realize we were on watching each other pull out teeth and scales terms.
[ she opts to hook her finger between her lower lip and her gums—not to reveal the bleeding, but to at least indicate that she is worrying at them. the black ooze gets on her gums, too. numbs them, strangely enough, where it had done the opposite to her skin. ]
no subject
I'm not squeamish.
[ Firm. A broad enough statement that it might speak for more than just the debriding of the monster from her body. ]
But you need to get that stuff off of you. I don't know what it'll do.
[ That stuff. Him. She needs to get him off of her, as soon as possible. ]
no subject
[ she tongues at her tooth from inside. feeling it out. how much will it hurt to just push it out the rest of the way now? how long will it be before her own teeth come back in? ]
It's inside of me.
[ no sense in not putting that plainly. she hasn't stepped out of the tub yet, however. she just hovers over him, as she had when she'd entered. dripping, now. ]
It doesn't hurt. [ she drops her hand from her mouth to instead feel at her ribs, where gils are starting to pucker and close between them. ] It feels ... weird.
no subject
Shit. The water. What was he thinking? ]
Weird how?
[ Tension in his voice too. ]
no subject
[ she huffs, glancing away. she doesn't do this. she does slipping out quietly and avoiding conversation.
and now she fucked her roommate. ]
It's messing with my senses. [ she's just going to stand here, naked, dripping water and explaining. ] Numbing. Hypersensitivity. Back and forth.
no subject
It's interfering with your nervous response. [ Shit. She makes it sound harmless for now, but where does it stop? It's not him, it's the it he was on his way to becoming. He doesn't trust that to not get worse. ] Where?
[ Somewhere in this his hand's found its way back to her calf under the water, wrapped in a loose hold. Comfort she doesn't need. An anchor he maybe does. ]
no subject
[ but as she looks down at herself, she has to admit that much of the black liquid has started to wash away into gray trickling. it's not as evident where his hands have been — on her breasts, her thighs, her cunt.
she reaches up with one wet hand, pushes sweaty hair back from her face. the salt and water keep it together a little, half-holding it. ]
Everywhere you touched me. [ her hand moves up to rest at her chest. ] Are we really doing this right now?
no subject
[ Everywhere he touched her, also known as most places. God.
But the problem is, he doesn't know what this is. Because he doesn't know what he is, what the creature is when all's said and done, can't anticipate the progress of its infection - if it is an infection. Most importantly, doesn't know the cure.
So instead he sits there, scowling up at her, frustration plain and unfairly targeted— until he pulls his legs abruptly back from between Nami's, clearing her so he can abandon her, standing with sudden determination and stepping out of the bath.
An instant later the water's clearing, the murk of it dissipating until it's clear enough to see the bottom of the small metal tub, warming where it had started to cool. ]
Sit down.
(cw: more tooth gore)
she would have to be stupid to step out of the tub. to stomp out like she wants to. to refuse his expertise, his investigation. he's concerned about the unknowns, and that should make her concerned too. she can trust him that far, at least, and it's her life on the line.
she sinks down with some annoyance, folding her arms over her bent knees and looking away from him. she pushes her fingers in her mouth to worry at her teeth—looser, now, and one of them rocks free with a wet sound. she drops it into the wash bin with her. ]
Next time, I'll bring rope. [ her scathing tone is only half sarcasm. ]
no subject
[ Lesson learned. He's not doing this again. Not knowingly putting her or anybody else at risk, not holding out until the last possible second in hope of reprieve and smearing the consequences of his actions all over her skin, under her skin, inside.
Nami's pulled a tooth clean out of her mouth. Stephen watches on, made uncertain by distance and ignorance, face set with concern.
But this isn't a time to freeze.
Kneeling, he reaches down into the water, submerges his hand. A quick trip of fingers and what's left of any more stubborn residue starts to slip from her skin, swallowed up into the glass-clear of the bathwater as though it were never there. And still Stephen's frown persists. It's too late for this, he knows it is, but he has to start somewhere. ]
no subject
she redirects her gaze up at him. ]
What exactly is it you think you can do about it now?
no subject
I don't know. [ Words he really hates to say when he's operating in his own wheelhouse. And they aren't reassuring either, so he wrangles himself enough to meet her eye. ] I'll figure something out.
[ For her sake or his? ]
no subject
[ it's perhaps a little unsympathetic. it's probably scary for him, realizing the strangeness of his own body. but from nami's side, it seems like inventing problems — whatever outcomes he fears have yet to come to pass, and the stuff is cleaned off her skin for the time being. ]
no subject
She wins. She's free to get out. ]
(cw: suffocation :) )
You'll be the first to know if there are any lingering side effects. But hey, maybe you got lucky. Maybe — [ she starts to draw a breath to continue the sentence as she towels herself off, but it hitches. her lungs won't expand.
she blinks at first, like it's just something caught in her throat. puts the towel in her hand to her chest in momentary confusion, then looks at him like she's ready to laugh it off. no laugh comes.
the discomfort starts creeping through into her expression. the silence unnerving, suddenly. ]
yowls
Then it's been too many moments and the expression on her face isn't giving way to the laughter it implied and he moves almost before he can think, snatches her up under the knees and around the shoulders, pulls her to him for as long as it takes to turn on his heel and move the two steps back to the bath, lower her back in just carefully enough to not have technically dropped her. Half crunched over the edge of the tub himself, arms still around her, making sure she's submerged.
The water. The gills. That's all he can think of, all he can hope. If it isn't them, if it's him, if he's impeded the neural relay to the respiratory system— ]
no subject
the gills have largely closed, by now. little cuts in her skin that are not longer real flaps, that don't respond in any way to the water around her ribs. when she realizes this, she reaches up for him, grabs at his shoulders, pawing at him like holding him close will do something for the fact that she still can't draw air into her chest.
panic hits her. eyes wide, she searches him. when she parts her lips to try to say something, she just gapes like a carp. there's no sound. no air to pass in or out of paralyzed lungs. whatever black ooze had left her skin tingling, alternately numb and hypersensitive, it had seeped into her gils and run through her respiratory system, settling inside her chest as her detransformation settled in.
she can't die here. in that moment, she's not thinking about the people who call it impermanent or the rituals or the duchess. she's thinking only of nojiko and coco village and the people counting on her. the people who she'll have abandoned if she can't figure out how to just fucking breathe. ]
(cw: magically approximated medical ventilation, blood)
[ Ventilate, he needs to ventilate, but how is he supposed to ventilate her in this fucking place? There's no time for the clinic, for help, he has to fix this. Now.
Thoughts turn to magic, grasp for it, search for the simplest solution. He has his lungs, but all they have to offer is the stuff she doesn't need.
So change that. Change it.
He pulls his arms out from underneath her, behind her, frees them up so one can grip her firmly by the jaw, thumb holding open her gaping mouth. The other he holds out of the way, ready to move fingers through the theft of carbon right out of their breath as he passes it back and forth between them. He worries at his already tattered lip to target his focus as he recalls the right pattern of spellwork, anxious to be specific, no margin left for error.
Blood's already beading as he leans down, presses his mouth over hers, and empties his lungs. ]
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(cw: more teeth gore)
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(cw: erectile dysfunction jokes, but also still further teeth gore...)
(cw: references to eye gore... and teeth gore...)
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