In The Open
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He's dreaming.

The world around him is bright and beautiful with the colours of fall, the road under his feet thick with dry, crunching leaves of diverse shades and the softer green of the waning grasses. His brothers are beside him, laughing, and though he cannot feel joy, he is laughing with them. The air around them is cool, fresh with the scent of pine and maple and apples. They are walking together: walking toward home.

And then he finds himself standing suddenly still while they walk on without him, seeming not to realise that he is trapped in a tenuous inertia that he is too weak to break. He pulls and he pushes, but for nothing. Finally, in desperation, he opens his mouth to call them back, and as he does he realises that he has forgotten their names.

He startles into wakefulness on the rich, summer green banks of the river, warm in the light of the dying afternoon's sunshine.

For a minute, he cannot reconcile the dream world with the real one. His head is heavy with sleep, and in the distance he smells honeysuckle and sun-baked mountain lilac on the warm, drowsy gusts of breeze, while further down the slope by the water's edge his cub sings wordless lullabies to the wide, yellow-eyed day. Vaguely, he turns his head towards the cub's gentle splashing.

The cub is naked.

The cub, he realises with slow shock, is not a cub anymore.

Water runs in rivulets down the long, tanned curve of the cub's back, leaving a trail that the sun plays over as if wondering at the beauty of it or the smooth texture of its slithering path, and he finds himself wondering when his cub grew so tall. He recalls three summers ago, bathing the cub in this same river. The path from head to small hips was so short then. Surely it cannot have grown so different in just three summers!

The cub bends, scooping water over the crown of his head in cupped hands, his song pausing to let the water make its way low. His eyes follow it downward past long, graceful arms that have long since mastered the measured movements of an adult, over the subtly widening hips of a fertile cub-bearer, until it runnels off the ends of the cub's hair, which has somehow grown to brush the lower tips of its wetly shining russet mass against the cub's knees when before it barely reached the small of his back. The singing had begun again now, and as he watches, the cub sways to the side to reach under the water and scrub at his long, willowy calves with languid fingers. The wet bundle of hair slides sidewise also, revealing the tender swell of sun-kissed buttocks and the gentle, gradual taper of finely muscled thighs.

His cub is most beautiful.

Made stupid by the easily unconscious show his cub (cub-bearer?) is putting on, he doesn't think to move, and so remains there, half on his side and half on his back like a fish in midleap, while the cub rinses his hair. The water moves around his cub's calves as if its formless fingers are lingering late in their travel to touch him; the sun on the lake starts to dazzle the eyes. Splashed across the sky, the colours of sunset bloom in wild array, brightening moment by moment into a thing that throws the entire forest and all its surroundings into fey, orange light.

The cub finishes and turns toward the bank. Their eyes meet: one calm, the other wide with surprise.

Hastily, he tries to change his expression, but for nothing. His cub smiles knowingly, nearly as if he meant to be watched at bath, then simply ignores him while he wrings the water out of his hair with quick, deft slips of his dripping hands.

He finds himself aching, his gaze dropping to catch on the narrow, half-attending length of his no-longer-cub's glistening sex as it bobs between slim, runner-strong thighs and only moving upward and away when its owner begins stalking playfully toward him with a meaningful question in darkened green eyes that makes the playfulness into something unbearably desirable.

Drawn to the end of his self-control, he launches himself up out of the grass and meets the cub halfway.

They roll together over the dampness of the evening grass like two animals fighting, but there is no anger in the heat that crackles between them. Once, twice, and again he forces his partner to the ground, sometimes flat on his bare back, sometimes pinned on a side or twisted as tense as the shining, dark curls on his cub's thrashing head, and while he does so he cannot help but taste, here a nip at briefly exposed skin, there a lick at a little leaf-brown nipple, not yet swollen into adulthood by the milk that would nurse a first litter. His cub moans and cries, devoid of words, but not voiceless as he was. He revels in the sounds; in the way the cub is moving beneath him, struggling without wanting to escape, the slick, wet skin rubbing against his dry one in the dance that he has always instinctually known yet never thought to experience.

Finally, with pleasant exhaustion glowing in his green eyes, the cub submits. Panting himself, yet not wholly from weariness, he presses the cub's body into the ground with his own and starts to truly explore while the cub whimpers deliciously to his rhythm. The white neck that was before hidden under spills and curls of red-brown hair is suckled until deep blue bruises speckle it; long legs that teased him from beneath the warm summer water twitch under his tongue; the cub's inner thighs prove a spot of pleasure and he nips at them until the cub's small mouth is round with halting, sobbing breaths of need. Drawn at last by the overpowering scent, he allows himself to nose at the place he wanted to discover for himself from the beginning. The cub gulps, breathless.

The fine thatch of hair that has just begun sprouting here, under his quivering, wanting mouth, is damp with water and the deep fragrance of the cub's slick, warm semen, which slips constantly and profusely from the heavy tip of his sex. Reverent, yet shaking with the building weight of his own arousal, he licks at its salty, sweetly musky heat.

He dawdles there for a while, just drawing his cub's scent in to inundate his senses and giving him a lick now and then, but it is not long before his body refuses to allow it. Rearing again to extend himself over the length of the smaller body, while the sound of the cub's gasping breaths fills his ears and the calling of contented crickets and drowsy birds warbles further back in his awareness of the world, he eats recklessly at the cub's open mouth, stretching back to search out a different opening and press two fingers in.

The cub's passage is wet, warm, and relaxed enough for him to get in, but its tightness is still extreme, and the cub clamps down. Frustrated, he growls low in his throat. His wolf's mind is telling him to take the cub anyhow and let him adapt as he will, yet the human part wants only to protect his partner from pain. At last, he decides that waiting will only let the cub's readiness drain out, and, satisfied with this decision, he loses no time in pushing himself into his mate's opening, the natural slickness inside the cub's excited body slipping him along in one smooth thrust until he reaches the very depths of his small interior.

Howling, the cub throws his head back. The muscles of his throat work in shock and pain.

The older Kindred pants-half with pleasure, half with the strain of not continuing at once and further hurting his cub. He knows on some base level that this first time is supposed to be painful, a beginning forged in hard work to make it strong, but he does not want to really harm the cub. His instinct is pulling him in two, telling him to be gentle and rough at once, and he barely knows his own mind for the confusion and the pleasure tearing at it; he wants the cub to feel this pleasure as well, but he isn't sure how that can be possible after the pain he has caused. Whimpering (a thing he has never done since long, long ago in his cubhood), he licks at the smoothly twined ridges that stand out along his partner's exposed neck and holds as still as he can.

Gradually and with much difficulty, the cub relaxes. He licks and murmurs low in his throat, not talking, yet speaking the way a pure-bred wolf might, with the pressure of his tongue against his cub's skin and the sound of his wordless voice: it seems that the cub finds this as soothing as a wolf's mate might.

A mate. Is that what the cub is now? He presses past that thought with a will, taking the cub's softened breathing and loose body as a sign that he should continue. As gently as he can, he slips back out just enough to thrust forward again, that last delicious bit before he comes up against the barrier within the cub-bearer's slender body, and the cub moans but doesn't appear to want to stop. He laps at the film of salt dampness that has escaped the cub's eyelashes, pushing resolutely in and out until his rhythm no longer makes the cub hurt. Moans of discomfort develop back into soft, stilted breaths of something not perfect pleasure, yet not entirely pain, and he, satisfied that the cub is enjoying himself again, lets the deep want within take him over.

His climax rises to engulf him, then shudders to its end, and although the cub never reaches that high peak, the little one's sleepy murmurs as they lie together afterward with the dew-wet grass cool around them are happy; content. He considers, briefly, rousing them both to head back to the safety of their den; then he decides against it. He will think about all those practicalities later, when the glow of happiness that he has waited for so long wears off.

He will think of many things. Tomorrow.

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