Drin opens the screen door of the cabin, sets down a grocery sack, and glances over at the figure sitting at the cramped little table beside the bed. Dance has fallen asleep with his head down on his arm, on top of an open binder of music scores. It looks like he’s going to have a painful crick in his neck muscles if he stays that way. He doesn’t even stir as Drin starts taking things out of the bag, putting them away. Drin sighs. Dance looks tired, even in his sleep, and he’s clearly losing weight again.
Drin makes a face as he puts new tubes of lidocaine ointment and lubricant into the drawer of the nightstand on the other side of the bed. They’ve been going through the lubricant at an amazing rate, and still getting sore from so much intercourse. He thinks other people have noticed they’re starting to walk a little funny. Yawning is right out too, all of them have been overdoing it on sucking off penises that just won’t quit.
Dance has taken to nursing ice cubes when it’s particularly hot, in the evening, ice and sex are the only things that cool his hot venom glands. He’s certainly putting out something interesting into the glasses that go into the locked fridge and get picked up four times a day now. Merely kissing Dance with his mouth open a little is enough to give Drin an instant hardon, and it makes Emma grab the nearest available part and rub it between her thighs, moaning. He’s enjoyed watching her make Dance climax simply by stroking his tail between her thighs. She’s stopped rubbing herself on it to an equally hard climax, because it’s a little rough on the kind of intimate tissues that have been getting quite a workout.
They’ve been using the washing machines a lot–simply being in the cabin, smelling the laundry with Dance’s dirty clothes in it, is starting to make them all react.
Drin has just finished changing the sheets on the bed, tucking in fresh bedding, when he looks up and sees Emma coming up onto the porch, reaching tiredly for the screen door.
The sweaty odor that rolls off her is like a wall: Astonishing, dense, and intimidating.
Drin blinks, and is not surprised to see Dance’s head jerk up in surprise.
Emma opens the screen door, steps in, takes a deep breath, and sighs. How she can smell anything as mild as the accumulated odors baked into the cabin, how she can smell anything at all past the heavy swamp of odors rolling off her body, Drin can’t think.
“Oh, this is nice,” she says, leaning down to take a deep breath of Dance’s hair, and then she kisses him on the forehead, and saunters past into the bathroom, stretching. A moment later, they both hear the shower going.
Dance blinks, and little membranes flicker at the inner corners of his eyes. “Wow,” he says, sitting back in the chair, looking up at Drin. “I kind of wondered what that’d be like–”
“Yeah,” Drin agrees, looking at the open bathroom door.
Emma is humming a little, all blurred pink and white movement behind the cheap clear plastic shower curtain. It’s usually sexy to watch her move around in there, washing her hair. Come to think, it’s fun to watch Dance in there with her, too, both of them giggling and splashing and making fat bottom-smacking noises, with Dance kissing her and washing her hair for her, dark hands moving all over her.
Drin blinks, looks away at the sober dark face looking up at him. Dance’s nostrils flare wide as he breathes.
“You okay?” Drin asks quietly, shifting over closer to him.
Dance turns his head, leans his face into Drin’s belly, breathes deeply a few moments. His hands come up and grip Drin’s thigh for a moment, and then he sighs, and nods, and lets go. “Okay,” he says, sitting up straight. “Just needed my man-fix there, I guess.”
Drin smiles, brushes back Dance’s hair from his eyes, kisses his forehead just as Emma did, and he goes back to making the bed. He finishes tucking in the sheets at the bottom of the bed, using hospital corners, although they’ll probably end up kicking everything out of order in a short while anyway.
Dance blinks at him, rubs at his eyes, shakes his head. Then he leans his head into his propped hand, looking at Drin. He just sits there, knees wide. He doesn’t even bother to move when the lips of the cloaca sprawl open and his penis juts out, hard and curved upward, pushing blindly, stubbornly against the inner curve of his thigh.
Drin smooths out the blankets on top of the sheets, throws the pillows back on it, and sits down on top of the blankets just opposite Dance. “What do you feel like?”
Dance looks at him. The end of the tail flicks up around his own knee, slides in between his thighs, and curls around his penis, stroking up and down it in slow, deliberate movements. “I feel like making you happy,” Dance says then, softly.
Drin smiles a little, wryly, opens the drawer by the bed, and lays back on the very edge of the bed, with his knees apart. “Come have fun. Whatever you like.”
Neither of them lasts long. Dance gets pretty wild when he’s the one penetrating somebody else. When he’s being penetrated, he can last longer, but he’s learned tricks that reduce Drin to total rubble in moments.
Dance has learned the very fine trick of timing, closing down the cloacal tendons until he’s gripping Drin’s penis in two places at the same time. The amazing double grip is astonishingly effective at reducing Drin to shouts within a few crucial strokes. Dance seems to like it just as much, he says he likes the rubbing motion on the skin over those tendons, as well as Drin’s penis pushing in and out of his anal sphincter, as long as it’s all properly lubricated and relaxed.
They’re sprawled out on top of the blankets, still messy, by the time Emma comes out of the shower with her hair wrapped up in a clean towel. She sits down on Dance’s chair, naked, and looks at them. She still smells different. She looks tired too.
“Did she spank you?” Dance says then, with a tired little thread of amusement in it.
Emma shakes her head. “No, she didn’t have to. I lost track. It’s sort of like the way kissing you, Dance, is exciting, and dangerous, and way more of a ride than a person has any possible way of anticipating. I mean, neither of us knows…knew…what to expect. Like you, when you’re learning things that you just didn’t know your body wanted to do.”
Dance grunts. His head is heavy leaning into the ribs of Drin’s upper chest, but Drin doesn’t mind. The weight feels good. Drin just strokes back Dance’s hair from his neck, trails his fingers through it. Dance always seems to find that kind of touch soothing, and his eyelids begin to droop toward sleep.
Dance murmurs, “You want to go back and do it some more?”
Emma looks at them. “I…don’t know. She kind of…got done with me and dismissed me. ‘Sending me home to the boys’, as she put it.”
“I can smell her on you,” Dance says. “It’s one helluva turn-on. Of course, everything is, right now. No, don’t, we’re all wiped.”
“To be more precise, she said she was ’sending me home to slow down the boys in heat.’”
Dance’s eyes open wide. He meets Drin’s steady gaze. Dance says, “What is she meaning?”
“She said her mouth glands might produce something to cool off your heat, but she thought it ought to be diluted onto me first, let you smell it first, see if you could tolerate tiny little traces of it,” Emma says, slowly. “It’s not quite the same, with her, but she… she said she hadn’t run into anything quite like this before. She said the smell of Dance’s heat was coming off my skin and hitting her pretty hard too. I wasn’t tracking really well, about then.” She gets up, comes over the bed, crawls onto it with them, and rolls onto her back, knees wide.
If Dance could ever resist that invitation, it was days ago. His tail is sliding across her thighs first, and then he’s in her arms, kissing her, and his spine is arching up.
What astonishes Drin is that Dance pulls himself up on his knees, panting, and holds himself away from Emma’s body, and he gasps. “Condom,” he says, lowering only his head, and kissing Emma’s breasts, rolling her nipple in his mouth.
She flinches across her whole chest, clearly sore, and he pulls up his head, looking at her. “Sorry,” he gasps, and kisses her cheek. “I’m sorry,” and he is hugging her, still holding his pelvis well away from her, with the tail sliding around agitatedly between their legs, roving up over Emma’s ribs. “Are you okay?”
She winces, nods. “I’m just feeling a little mauled, it’s not bad. It’s just my nipples are tender from last night, too. You’re not hurting me, it’s okay.”
He gasps out a laugh. “That’s not making me feel good about mauling you now.”
Drin gets his hands in there, then, providing both a condom and some lubricant, smoothing it over Emma’s pubic hair and then down between her thighs, sliding inward gently a degree. “Okay?” he asks, watching her expression.
She nods. “Lick me down deep,” she says then, meeting Dance’s eyes.
He surges up and kisses her deeply on the mouth, licks his way down her body, chewing on her skin gently sometimes, and then he’s kneeling between her legs, licking her intimately.
“Ahhh,” she says sighing, and closing her eyes. “That feels good. You want to climb on top of me a lot, don’t you?”
Dance growls a little, his tail is sliding about all over her legs, caressing her, gripping along her buttocks, lifting her hips higher for him to get at her. He’s not particularly careful about where he’s licking her, and he turns her onto her side, licking up her butt muscles and her back and spending quite a lot of time at the complex knotted spot just above her pelvis, where her back pain always starts.
There is unmistakably some sort of muscle relaxant going onto her skin, it’s clearly easing the pain. Drin can see the tightness in her belly muscles relaxing, her spine sagging gently as Dance’s tongue wets her skin. He’s taking a long time about it, rubbing his front teeth into her skin sometimes, and sometimes kneading at the tight spots with his fingers and the flat pads of his palm, clearly ready to work on her back all day, if that’s what she needs.
Drin smiles, watching Dance’s neck and shoulders work, watching his tongue sliding across Emma’s pale skin.
Dance would probably describe his behavior as selfish, demanding that she accommodate his sexual needs instead of letting the poor woman go off to sleep. But of course Emma is going to rest much better when Dance has got that knot untangled for her, and he’s taken her off into an orgasm, or three, to make sure it stays that way.
“Oh, that’s better,” Emma says, sighing. She lifts her upper thigh and opens her knees to him, with a little sigh. Dance slides in between her legs and slides his condom-covered rigid penis into her with a little slurping noise of fluids meeting. Laying on their sides, with her knee flung over his hip, he puts his arms around her and kisses her on the face, licking her cheeks and along her neck and down her breasts.
Then he lifts his head and kisses her on the mouth, drawing her toward him, until he’s rolled onto a pile of pillows to protect the arch in his back, and Emma is on top of him, straddling him.
Emma draws her mouth away from his then, props herself up, lifts her weight away off him, sitting up on her knees, straddling his hips. She grins, and looks down at his flushed face. Her pelvis rocks in place just a little bit, muscles ripple in her belly, and he pants.
She grins and says, “Oh, I know what you need,” and looks over at Drin, and she smiles. They’ve done this before too. She puts out her hand, and finds Drin has been ready for awhile now.
They don’t put a condom on Drin’s penis. It’s a risk, they all know it. They have agreed that oral sex with Dance is probably riskier for a bite than for passing diseases back and forth. They’ve decided he can have them bare, to give him the taste of genital fluids he seems to crave.
Dance moans, reaches out to both of them. The very idea of getting his mouth on Drin makes his body tremble and his tail climb around, stroking up and down Emma’s back, caressing her breasts.
Drin slides his knees on either side of Dance’s head. Drin holds still, holding his main weight well away from Dance’s face, so Dance can move his head freely. What he wants to do is get Drin’s cock somewhere far back into his soft palette. Drin can feel odd soft shapes pressing against either side of his penis, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t jostle into them. He lets them move gently along his length, with Dance’s tongue cupped maddenly hot and close and excited against the equally eager underside of Drin’s penis.
Emma puts her arms around Drin, too, rubbing her hands on his nipples, sliding her palms up and down his chest, and then around onto the slopes of his butt muscles. She cups his buttocks, and then slides her hands under his thighs, up onto his testicles, just where Dance’s lips meet her fingers. Drin groans when she grips him there. He doesn’t dare move, but they can move on him, and they do. Dance’s tongue makes a skilled effort at pleasuring his penis. Drin groans some more, at length, letting them know they’re driving him crazy.
They’re moving for quite awhile, gently, with Dance’s tongue moving agitatedly along Drin’s penis, when Emma finally says, softly, “I think Lacey’s venom traces are working on us. I’m not coming, and judging by the last few days, I ought to have exploded a couple of times by now. You’re not coming, Dance is still hard as a rock inside me. It feels great, but he should’ve been coming so hard he threw both of us off the bed by now.”
Drin pants, “You getting sore? You need to stop?”
She gasps. “It feels great inside me, but my knees are going.”
Everybody stops moving. Emma complains she feels completely ridiculous, dragging herself off of Dance’s condom-covered stiffness with messy slurping noises that speak very clearly about how much she’s enjoyed entertaining the man in her parlor. She flops down on her side, and rolls round onto her back with a groan.
Drin looks down, holding still and staring his question at the face that is drooling around his penis. He is about to pull himself out of Dance’s mouth, when Dance’s tail slides around between his thighs, grips his testicles ever so gently, and encourages him to take a more active role in moving his hips. Then the tail lets go, pleased, and does something else instead.
Emma chuckles at whatever it is. Drin hears condom-wrapper noises.
He is not entirely surprised when something touches his ass, curls around in a businesslike manner between his butt cheeks, and proceeds to request politely to penetrate him. Something about all of that is astonishingly effective in making his cock harden up even further. He’s quite happy to hold still and let it poke him, let it press stubbornly inward and enter him. It’s slender, and not at all painful, and quite well-lubricated, and it has a slightly preoccupied movement which makes him think that another part of the length of Dance’s tail is frantically busy hanging onto the upper end of the condom, just in case. It makes him smile.
It eventually pushes enough thickness up into him to hunt for his prostate gland, and find it, and press very deliberately into it.
Drin grunts, astonished at the flare of nerves all over his pelvis, and when it presses him there a few more times, finally he comes in Dance’s mouth.
Dance hangs on, sucking him, and by all the evidence, finally climaxes himself.
Drin thinks Emma’s got her hands in there helping Dance, too, but it’s all a little confused. He feels the tail withdrawing out of him, carefully drawing the condom away with it, and a larger curl of it loops up along Drin’s back, steadying him when he wobbles until he can shift his knees around and clamber off Dance and lay down next to him, panting.
Dance is breathing hard too.
“You swallowed,” Emma says to Dance.
“I always swallow,” he says, laughing a little. “Goodness, I finally got some good long taste of Drin going down my throat. I never last that long–whatever Lacey dosed you with, Emma, it is a very amazing kind of inhibitor, all right.”
“I’m not gonna say, ‘Oh dearie me, thank God’,” Emma says, sadly, “but my knees may thank her for it.”
Drin turns his head and looks at both of them.
Dance looks at him, a little anxious. “Was the tail-fuck okay?”
Drin smiles. “The tail-fuck was what finally worked, got me pushed over the edge. To quote Emma, thank God! Figuring out how to hang onto the condom must have been the fun part.”
“I’m going to have to buy teeny tiny condoms to cover my tail, and have everybody laugh at me, thinking it’s my dick that’s tiny,” Dance says, in a pathetic little voice which makes both of them laugh.
Emma says, “Is this as kinky as I think it is, or am I just being prissy and excited again?”
“Honey,” Drin says, with a groan, “if you can get excited after that, you go ahead and fuck me with anything you want.”
Dance says, “Yes, we lay like the lump and let you do me as long as you want. But excuse me if I go to sleep and snore, okay?”
Emma chuckles.
Then Dance sighs deeply, his tail flops around a bit, and then he just gives up. “You’re all too heavy, I can’t pull the blankets. Me, I am going to die here. Pretend I meant to look like this.”
“Looks good to me,” Emma says, and Drin hears the bedside drawer opening. “C’mon, lazy, gimme that thing, I’ll put some more oil on him.”
Drin stares at the ceiling. “Is it still peeling?”
“A little bit,” Emma says, in the muffled voice that means she’s peering closely at it. “Is that better?”
Dance mumbles agreement. “You want me to keep tongue-fucking you even when I’m not in heat?” he says then, sounding half-asleep.
Emma lifts her brows. “Dance, I like you doing what you enjoy. If it makes you feel good, I’m happy with it. If it’s just wasting your time, then–”
“It’s never wasting my time. It makes you feel better, things like rubbing your back, then that makes me relax too. Really, it does.”
“Okay, so you’ll let me know if it’s making you feel okay too, right?”
“Besides, I like how you taste,” Dance says sleepily. “I like how Drin tastes.”
“Do you like how Lacey smells, on me?” Emma asks then.
Dance’s eyes pop open. Then he frowns. “Em, you do like the tough questions at bedtime!” He thinks about it. “It puzzles me, more. I like her smell on her, a lot, but smelling it on you… that’s odd. Like there’s a bit of… scent-marking about it. Marking your territory, or something. You haven’t been having any problems with the biker chicks, have you?”
Ema frowns. “No, they’ve all been polite. Not asking me to join the party, but more like I’m off in my own little world and they’ll deal with me if they need to, just…not quite one of the girls.”
Dance grunts. “They talk to me like I’m Drin’s other bitch. Which, hey, true enough.
She grunts. “It’s a little hard to argue with people who can smell everything you keep doing.”
Drin turns his head. “Why would they care?”
Emma looks at him. “Clueless,” she says, astonished.
Dance snorts. “There speaks a man of privilege, no?”
Emma sighs. “Yeah. Or from a lot more liberal place.”
Drin looks at them, silently reaches out his hand and cups Dance’s face, stroking back his hair.
Dance rolls onto his side, flopping more of his tail into Emma’s lap, and rests his head on Drin’s belly. “Drin, you are too sweet sometimes,” Dance says, and rests his arm along Drin’s leg, fingers stroking the long strap of muscles down Drin’s thigh.
Drin says, puzzled, “Why don’t they assume I’m your bitch? Or Emma’s bitch, for that matter? I mean, if I was in bed with Lacey, who’s a pretty dominant personality, nobody would have any doubt who was running things and who was asking politely to get fucked when it was convenient, right?”
“Yes,” Dance says, with the amusement clear in his voice.
“Ape troop hierarchies. They hear Fozzie consulting you. You are the man with answers, you buy things, you decide things, you get to make informed guesses. And let’s not forget the girls know where the money comes from.” She waggles her eyebrows.
Drin sighs. “Well, most of the money-raising effort has been riding along on its own momentum. Useful to experiment with automatic systems to get one that works if I ever have to take off for some time. I didn’t want to perturb that by tinkering with it, maybe making my presence traceable.”
Dance says, quietly, “There are many things we have not asked.”
“Yeah,” Drin says.
“Things maybe we were afraid to ask about,” Emma says, looking at Dance, and then putting her hand on his back.
“Things maybe I don’t have answers for either,” Drin says, sadly, and then he feels big, hot tears welling up in his eyes. Absurdly, as suddenly as that, he’s crying. He’s not even sure why. For things lost, for people he doesn’t expect to see again, for trust that may never come back fully into Emma’s eyes, for the freedom of Dance laughing and kissing him freely, rolling around happily on the floor in a world without bug boys and venom sacs and cold boxes full of tubing and restraints that have scarred Dance’s cheeks.
But no, now they’re living in the world where people like Lacey exist, struggling from day to day, patiently managing the support for people whose bug mods were so extensive that removing the command centers and the sensors and the drug systems leave them as damaged as children with birth defects.
Dance turns his head. “You’ve been working with Preacher a lot, right?”
Drin nods, eyes shut. He knows Dance smells that on him, every time he drags back to the cabin, but Dance hasn’t said anything, probably hasn’t wanted to upset Emma.
“Stripping bug mods out of those two guys that Fozzie captured at the restaurant,” Dance says.
Again he nods. Drin blinks, draws in a breath, finds his voice. “And five more that Fozz took down along the local truck route perimeters around here. There’s about a dozen more who didn’t survive running into Fozzie’s truckers. Probably a mercy, to be honest. I’ve never seen bodies that colonized before. Those guys are coming out of some near-cleanroom environment. They’re totally killer for two days, then they’re moth-eaten. Wild fungi from the local mud, here, gets them inside ten days. You just can’t yank that many those mods fast enough. Well, they wouldn’t have survived Preacher going into their heads anyway. He knows it too. But it makes him mad.”
“Where did you learn to yank bug mods?” Emma asks, stroking Dance’s tail.
“The war. Same places I learned about Kiplings, and illegal black-market copies,” Drin says, tired to his bones. “And war Librarians.”
She nods.
“You can’t yank the mods out of a war Librarian,” Drin says then, opening his eyes and looking at her. “That stays, forever.”
She looks up at him, eyes wide.
“Thank God,” Drin says then, feeling tears run down his cheeks. “I’m just so thankful for that, I can’t tell you. Your earlier self got us safely back here, Emma, and once you were here, without any real memory of what used to be, you still found Dance, so you could be there when all this–when all this stuff happened. Nobody could guess what might have happened if you–if you hadn’t pulled it off.”
Emma frowns a little. “I can’t speak for my evil twin Skippy, who seems to have caused a right lot of uproar all round, but did you and I work with Dance before? Do you think we knew him back during the war or something?”
“I don’t know,” Drin says, blinking. “I just don’t know that. Too many wipes, too many edits taking classified material out of both our brains. Some of it came back, on mine. Not enough.”
“Not enough to sort things out now,” Emma says.
He nods. “Not enough to know exactly what was done to grow Dance, or how he should have been, and isn’t. Because I know he isn’t remotely like whatever design they thought they were doing, in those military labs. Not at all.”
Emma smooths her hand along Dance’s back. “Do you know what he might become instead?”
Drin blinks again. “Well, that depends. What do you think Lacey is?”
“She’s about as close to a classical Gorgon as you’re going to get, bar the stone-turning gaze. I have no idea how old she is.”
“Oh, she has the stone gaze too, if you’re counting a laser mode that can fry rocks, when she’s in open combat,” Drin says.
“How do you know that?” Dance asks softly.
“No idea,” Drin snaps.
Emma sighs. “She also squeals if you tickle her, and she says she likes seeing frilly batiste underthings on her girl lovers, and I know she has a terrible soft spot for babies. Any kind of babies. She has an amazing touch with the horses, which is weird, because most horses are terrified of snakes. I suppose if she was pissed off, she’d be a good match for an image of Kali, too.”
“Yeah,” Drin says.
“Do you think Dance is a male Gorgon?” Emma asks then.
“No. But they might have borrowed a lot from that tradition. Lacey isn’t supposed to exist, never was. Illegal as all hell–I know, back in that place, you can do prison time for decades and get all your memories edited out just for modifying growth tanks like that. It’s not a small operation, either. That’s probably why they didn’t use adequate tank sizes when they grew out the Nagas. Guys like you really ought to be massive, Dance. Of course when you’re smaller, it’s easier to pass as human in various places.”
Dance turns his head slightly, still stroking his hand along Drin’s thigh. “You know all that stuff, and you still… let me near you.”
“And you want to?” Drin says then, wiping his eyes on the back of his wrist.
“Um, that’d be a big yes,” Dance says then, smiling. “Maybe cause I like how you smell, or I like watching you and Emma fucking like the rabbits, or I just like somebody who gets gamer dork jokes, I don’t know. That’s the other thing we’re missing here–no computer worth snot, no tv shows worth watching, no games unless you snitch the stupid little controller away from the roving packs of baby dorks in the main house, and no internet. Boy, I must like you, putting up with all that just so I can get laid. Suppose Lacey would fuck me too if I asked nicely?”
Emma says quietly, “Is somebody a little upset by my behavior today?”
Dance lowers his head a degree, opens his mouth, and bites down gently on Drin’s thigh. They both look at him, blinking, while he chews gently, rolling Drin’s skin between his front teeth. Then he kisses the skin, and rubs his cheek against Drin’s thigh, and stretches his arm down over Drin’s shin-bone, cupping the calf of his leg in his fingers. “I don’t know,” Dance mumbles.
“Or do you think the inhibitor is doing some strange things to our emotional states?” Emma says then.
“It certainly might,” Drin says.
Dance’s tail rolls up onto Emma, and curls around her waist as if an arm hugging her. She strokes it, and the tip makes a little petting gesture in reply. Emma strokes more oil down the underside of Dance’s tail, deliberately running her hand up into more personal places, while the tip of it coils and shifts along the bed. Dance shifts further onto his side, pulls his knee forward to open more of his genital area to her touch. He looks around at her. His penis lies arched in her hand, a little tumescent but not fully erect, with his testicles loose and relaxed.
They all know this would be impossible just a few hours before. Emma couldn’t have touched him there without having him come up hard, thrusting into her grip.
Dance draws in a deep breath, and sighs it out. “Well, Lacey’s venom is giving a nice break for my brain cells to be waking up and waving. Emma, you have every right to do what you want. If she turns you on, hey, she does. But Lacey just… she makes me nervous sometimes.”
“I think Lacey finds you extremely attractive, Dance, and we all know she’s very powerful physically,” Drin says then.
Dance blinks up at him, surprised. “Maybe that’s why it makes me nervous. I mean, I never worried about silly pissing matches with any great big drunk guys getting aggressive, or something. No big deal. Lacey’s a very big deal. Lacey gives me the feeling she knows everything about martial arts that I ever learned, probably from people who were a lot better at it than anybody I ever knew, and she thinks it’s all just… cute.”
Drin blinks. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“Or is that all just faked-up memories, where I think I know things, but I don’t really, and nobody by that name ever really did those things at all?” Dance says then, looking up at Drin.
Drin thinks, again, how hard it is to look at those very human eyes. It would be easier if questions like that were coming from somebody with Lacey’s inhuman gold stare.
Emma surprises both of them by saying, “It wasn’t faked one bit when you did violin solos and performed in those quartets at the library. That was as real as things ever get, you performing in front of everybody like that. You’re a musician, Dance, don’t ever think that was faked.”
Dance turns his face down into Drin’s leg, kisses him. Drin lifts his tired hand, rests it along the line of Dance’s spine, strokes outward across his shoulder blades. Then Drin makes the effort, pulls out some more of the difficult truth. He strokes his hand across Dance’s back muscles and says, “I didn’t know a lot of this stuff myself, when I first got here. It was just like you guys, I had perfectly reasonable memories, or it seemed like it. I was just living my life… and I gradually started dreaming about things. Remembering things that didn’t fit. Finding out about the records that conflict about what I was doing in college, or in the service, or whatever it was. I had capabilities that didn’t fit the requirements at my job. I had… a lot of angry dreams about what must have happened to you, Dance.”
Emma reaches out and touches Drin, rests her hand flat on his leg near Dance’s face. Dance is looking up at him silently, head leaning on him, the beat in his neck artery hard and fast enough that Drin can feel it pulsing against his leg.
“I had visual memories that weren’t connected to anything else until I saw things like the bug boys, or some of the same kind of pumping equipment used for …. for illegal growing tanks. I knew it wasn’t just bad dreams when I started waking up with faces, names, dates things happened. I checked, when I could. I saw things happening in the money end of things that were…provocative. Company names, where I asked Emma to look into them a little bit, and she tracked down what they’d been doing with shell companies. Things started matching what I remembered. It was like a paranoid’s fantasies coming true.”
Dance looks over at Emma, swallows, brings up his other hand to touch Drin’s leg. He’s begun to react like that whenever he’s nervous. He keeps wanting to lean on them, to smell them, giving them a quick kiss that touches his tongue lightly to their skin, tasting them. Emma sighs, pats Dance’s tail lightly, wipes her hands on a tissue, and rolls around until she can rest her head on Dance’s belly. The muscles along Dance’s shoulder blade tense as he moves his arm, stroking Emma’s hair. She gives a little sigh, as if the contact helps her, too. Then both of them look at him, waiting.
The immensity of what he hasn’t said, what he hasn’t told them, how much of the vastness out there he simply doesn’t know and has to guess at, overwhelms him for a moment. Drin takes a deep breath. Jumping at the void almost randomly, he says, “When that woman started stalking us and taking pictures, I honestly had no idea what provoked her to do it or who she was selling her material to, or what they were looking for. She set everything off for me. I started hunting for Fozzie, trying to piece it all together from the bad dreams.”
Emma frowns. “I have had a few questions for awhile now. Who put Dance here, with all that background, playing first violin in the symphony?”
Drin feels the hard knot tighten in his throat. He takes a couple of breaths, blinks hard. Then he says, quite steadily, “I think I did.”
They both keep staring at him.
He blinks again, and tells them, “I’m not as good at setting up records as you, Emma, and I can’t edit people’s memories at all. I think I must have asked somebody… somebody like Preacher, but this was a woman… to go in to other minds that she knew, to find old people who remembered things from the distant past, gather things that would work, and bring memories to Dance, and make him a past that he could… that he could live in. That he could be happy in. That other Preacher-person found… she found the music in there, in Dance’s mind. She found things she could build from. She told me… she told me to build him a place that would let him make his music. And I left him there with her, to get… shunted along.” Drin is crying in earnest, with big hot tears rolling down his face, and the pain of that grief is just as fresh and jagged inside him as ever, with half the details blurred away and the knowledge of how it was done all smudged away.
He doesn’t know how the records were altered to create a little cradle of history for Dance, he doesn’t know how they altered some mathematical parameters to slip some sort of coherent information like a personality, a body, a genetic aberration like Dance, from one billowing unstable panel of time to another. He knows it got done, that it was expensive, and that it left ripples that can be traced, if the authorities are careful and determined and clever.
He knows that’s probably how a determined woman, a War Librarian, followed Dance here.
He’s still not sure how he ended up wandering along the same chain of traces, wandering around with his mind half-aware of the problems, his memories edited, attracted even when he didn’t really know why he was drawn to them.
That expensive tweak of physics got used by other people. It’s probably how the bug boys found this world, set up their labs, started selling bug troop services, spreading like a deadly phage.
It’s also how the zoomorphs got here, sent over to refuge with Lacey and Fozzie and to other places like it. Somebody has smuggled out sentient beings from labs where they were going to be destroyed, where they were never people under the law, and could not be defended. No guarantees, either; all of the freaks sent to Fozzie and Lacey got judged, quietly, as the three of them got judged, without their knowledge.
He hasn’t talked to Emma and Dance about what happens to the rejects, the ones they can’t manage, they can’t help, they can’t keep.
He’s not sure exactly how much of that he manages to tell them, but some of it, struggling with the awkward tears. Drin finds himself lying on his side between them, weeping into Dance’s shoulder, with Emma curled up close and warm at his back, hugging him around the waist.
“Drin,” Dance says then, with his fingers gripped in Drin’s hair. He gives it a tiny little jerk, waiting until Drin has focused his eyes. “Drin, look at me.”
“Muuuhhhh?” Drin says, snuffling for air.
“I’m right here,” Dance says quietly, staring back into Drin’s eyes, with his nose about half an inch from Drin’s. “Right here. Not lost back there in bad dreams and messed-up memories. Here. I’m playing music every night here. Asking you to fuck me every time I get a chance. Eating fish that I caught. I’m alive and out of that goddamn nightmare box, and I know when things are good, and if you brought me here, there’s not a thing in the world I can do to thank you enough for that. I’m alive, Drin. Emma’s here, alive.”
Drin takes in a deep, difficult breath, looking back into the human eyes staring intently into his.
More softly, Dance tells him, “It’s a hot night and I’m sweating again and I think you and I really need to get showers and get some rest before my stupid heat picks up again. I don’t think Lacey’s venom stopped it cold, I think it just cooled me down enough to give us all a rest. We need rest. If I see you crying any more I am losing it too, and I just do not have a good idea how to handle me going to pieces.”
Then Dance turns his head and kisses Drin, opening his mouth, tasting Drin, licking the saltwater off his cheeks, breathing across his face, leaning into Drin’s forehead. The scent of that strange cinnamon-like bark is very strong, both on his skin and in his breath, and his tongue tastes positively spicy with it.
The taste of him jolts Drin, jerks him back into his own body, into feeling how Dance’s body is pressed desperately against his, how Emma has thrown her arms around them both. Her breasts and thighs press hard against his back.
Drin draws in a deep, unsteady breath, and another one, and then he is kissing Dance back, tasting him back, feeling the determination in Dance’s muscles that he will stay calm and do what Drin needs from him, that he will be steady, that all the dangerous parts of his body will stay completely relaxed and lie calm, for Drin’s safety, even if Drin is frightening him by being so upset.
“It’s okay,” Drin says, taking in another deep breath, and sighing it all out. “I’m okay. I– I guess it just–all piled up. I’m surprised how– upset– it made me.”
“Mmm,” Dance says, and kisses his temple, and just above his beard, and along his neck. “I know kissing somebody doesn’t fix everything, but at least it lets you know somebody else is here with ideas on what you ought to do about it.”
Drin feels himself snort unsteadily. “Like get a shower,” he says.
“You’ve been living with all this for months, I don’t know why we’re surprised. It was nice enough to wait to wallop you between the eyes all of a sudden,” Emma says into the nape of his neck, and kisses him.
“Probably the upset is just leftovers from Lacey’s venom,” Dance says then. He lifts his head. “You want to shower with us too, Em?”
“Yeah, I’m all messy again, and it’s hot enough, it’ll feel good. Grow moss behind my ears in this climate, I swear,” she says.
“You two don’t have to hold me up in the shower like I’m drunk or something–” Drin says.
“But we want to,” Emma says firmly, and tightens her arms around him. “Let us do that. We love you, you big softy, and we don’t like seeing you hurting like that.”