Ellie
The storm comes down on the canopy like the sky’s got a grudge.
I hear it build from a long way off, a low roll that starts somewhere up at the top and works its way down, closer, bigger, until the thunder’s cracking right over us and the roots shake with it.
Rain finds every gap. It comes through the canopy in sheets I can hear breaking apart on the way down, layer to layer, until single cold drops are pinging off the wood near the nest. The whole world up there is water and noise.
Down here, his wings come around me.
Both of them, doubled, the membrane sealing me in.
And inside that—nothing. The storm goes far away.
There’s his heartbeat and the hum and my own breathing, and the sky can throw everything it’s got at the canopy and not one drop reaches me.
I lie there and work out that the safest I have ever been in my life is inside a monster while the world comes apart over our heads.
A week ago that sentence would’ve made no sense to me. Tonight it’s just true.
Of all the ways I used to picture the end of the world going, I never once landed on cozy.
Wrapped in here, in his heat, I can feel my own body the way I never could up in the light, every inch of it awake and reporting, the tea long gone, nothing left to dull the signal.
And it’s a different body than the one they kept.
Stronger under his hands. Marked where he’s had me.
Running hot from the inside, like whatever he keeps pouring into me has stoked a fire the Cage spent thirteen years keeping banked low.
I lie in the warm dark and take quiet stock of the strange new fact of myself.
And I start to talk.
I don’t decide to. It comes up on its own, the way the memories have been surfacing since the tea bled out—never all at once, just pieces, rising and slipping back under.
But this one I catch and hold, and I say it out loud into his chest, because the storm covers everything and the dark makes it safe.
“There were yellow curtains,” I tell him.
“In a kitchen. Mine, I think. Before. There was a window over a sink, and the curtains were yellow, and when the sun came up it came through them and spread all over the floor—this warm yellow, moving when the wind moved.” My throat goes tight.
I keep going anyway. “And somebody was singing. A woman. I can’t get the words.
I’ve been trying for days and the words won’t come, just the shape of it, the up and down, and her voice. ”
His heartbeat stays steady under my ear. He doesn’t move. He’s letting me.
“I think that’s my mother.” Saying it out loud cracks something.
“I’ve never told anyone that. In the Cage the before-time belonged to them—the old world was broken, the asteroid was a mercy, we’re the lucky ones who got remade.
A kitchen with yellow curtains and a woman singing in it doesn’t fit that story.
So I folded it up small and kept it somewhere they couldn’t reach.
” I push my face into his chest. “I was eight when it ended. They collected me two years after. Everything before that, they want me to believe was a nightmare we all woke up from.”
More of her comes the longer I let it. Her hands, bigger than mine, flour worked into the knuckles, the way they’d cup the back of my head.
The kitchen always smelled of yeast; she made her own bread, in a world where you could still do a thing like that for no reason but the warmth of it.
I can almost reach her face. It slides away every time, the way the words of her song slide away—but the edges of it are warm, and they’re mine.
And then the storm drags up the last of it, the part I’ve never once let myself look at.
Because that’s what the end was. A sound.
Not thunder, bigger, the whole sky coming down at once, the floor jumping under my bare feet, the yellow light going gray in a blink like someone snuffed it.
Her singing stopped mid-word. I don’t have what came after; there’s just a hole where it should be, the part the tea ate and never gave back.
But I have the moment the world broke, and her voice cutting off, and I have known for thirteen years without letting myself know it that the gray is where she stayed.
And then it keeps going, past the gray, into the part I’ve never had at all.
Two years live in there somewhere. The tea ate most of them, but pieces float up.
A long building full of children and no parents.
Cold floors. Gray robes moving between the cots, soft-handed, soft-voiced, the same gentle I’d learn years later to drink out of a cup.
They were the ones who taught us the story, that the old world had gone sick and the sky came to wash it clean, that what fell was a mercy, that the men it took were remade into something holy and the girls it spared were the luckiest of all.
I was small enough to believe it. We all were. You believe the people who feed you.
Then a morning the gray robes packed a few of us into a covered cart, and we rode a long way in the dark.
The doors opened on a courtyard with a fountain running in the middle of it.
A woman with silver coming into her hair crouched down to my height, smiled, called me love, and folded a warm cup into my two hands.
Drink, she said. I was ten. The cup had my name painted on the bottom, though I couldn’t read it yet.
I drank because she was kind, and the cup was warm, and two years of gray rooms had already taught me the kind ones are the ones you do what they say.
That was the last clear morning I had for thirteen years.
I make myself say the last part.
“It wasn’t a nightmare. It was a kitchen. It was yellow. Somebody loved me in it.”
Then I’m out of words, and there’s just the storm, far off, and his heart going under my cheek.
A sound moves through his chest. Low. Not the hum—shorter than that, rougher, pointed. It isn’t a word. But I’ve learned his sounds the way I once learned the Cage’s corridors, and I know what this one is. It means I heard you.
His tail finds my hand in the dark. Wraps my wrist, the lightest hold, the tip settling right over my pulse, like he wants to feel it ticking. Like the proof of me alive is a thing he needs under his touch.
I hold onto him and the storm and the one yellow memory all at once, and for the first time none of them feels like it’s slipping away.
Then his breathing shifts, and the rut climbs back up out of the quiet, and his body and the storm go looking for each other.
He moves in me on the same beat as the thunder.
I feel it the second it starts, his hips rolling up to meet the roll of sound overhead, each deep drive landing as the percussion lands, like the storm’s keeping time for him. The thunder cracks and he drives to the root. It rolls and he grinds slow.
My whole body’s strung between the two of them, the storm outside the wings and him inside me, and there’s no telling anymore which one’s shaking the dark.
I’ve got hands now, and a voice, and a whole language we built down here without a single word in it, and tonight the storm’s loud enough that I use all of it at once.
I reach back and find his hip and pull, closer, and he comes closer, folding down over me until there’s no air left between us at all.
I drag his hand up off the furs and set it flat over my throat, over the bite he put there days ago, and press.
And he understands, the way he always understands, his palm tightening just enough that I feel my own pulse beating up into the heat of his hand.
A growl rolls out of him, pleased. “Grrr.” It says what no word of his could: you ask me for the strangest things, and I will give you every one.
He turns us without leaving me, a slow roll that drags him through me sideways and tears a cry out of me halfway round, until I’m on my side with my back curved into his chest and the storm crashing against the far side of his wings, and he takes me like that, deep and rocking, his hand still spread warm over my throat.
His cock fills me on every stroke, the thick drag of it pulling all the way back and feeding home, and I take it, open and slick, past caring how loud the want in me gets.
The knot builds. The stretch goes bright and full, catching wider at my entrance with every drive, swelling toward the lock.
His tail leaves my wrist and slides down between my legs and finds my clit, circling it on the same beat his hips keep, and I’m climbing fast, too fast, my breath breaking apart, my hands fisted in the warm leather of his wing.
I come on a thunderclap.
And I scream. “AAAHH!”
Full voice. Everything I’ve got. Because the storm’s so loud it swallows the sound before it can even leave the wings, and for the first time since I was a child I don’t have to be quiet.
The Cage made quiet a virtue. Quiet was the tea and the soft voice and the serene face they kept smooth.
Down here, inside the storm, inside him, I am as loud as the thing tearing me open, and nobody is going to come and smooth me down for it.
The sound rips up out of the bottom of me and the thunder takes it and nobody will ever know but him.
His cum jets into me, sealed, the knot locking us, his roar going up into the storm where it belongs.
“RRRAAAH!” And then the knot comes alive against me, relentless, and the first peak rolls into a second, a third, my body coming apart around the fullness while he pumps me full, each wave breaking before the last one’s done, until I lose count somewhere in the thunder.
The storm isn’t done with us, though.
It comes back harder, a second wall of it slamming down on the canopy, and somewhere close a branch goes with a crack like the world splitting, the crash rolling through the wood and throwing me against his chest. His arms lock.
His wings seal tight, doubled over me. And the sound that rolls out of him then isn’t the hum and isn’t the rut, it’s lower, all teeth, the sound of a thing that has already decided what it would spend itself on.
I feel the size of him the way the lulls never make me feel it.
He’s wrapped around me the way the wood wraps the nest—total, structural.
If the canopy came down on us right now, the first thing it would hit is his wings.
Then his back. Then the folded bulk of him, curled over me like a fist around a coin.
And the fear that comes isn’t for me.
That’s the thing that stops my breath—more than the branch, more than the storm.
The branch didn’t hit us; the nest’s too deep, he saw to that months before he had me to put in it.
But the thought arrives anyway, cold and sudden and entirely my own: what if it had?
What if something came through, and he was the thing between it and me?
My hands fist against his chest. Hard. And I don’t have a word for what I’m feeling, because the Cage never once let me have anything I’d be afraid to lose, that’s how a place like that holds you, hollowing you out so gently you never notice there’s nothing left worth keeping.
There’s something worth keeping now. He’s curled all the way around it, holding the storm off it with his own body, and the having and the fear arrived in me in the very same breath.
After, we lie in the cocoon and listen to the weather wear itself out.
I think about my yellow kitchen. Then I think about him, the snapped horn, the cut throat, whatever place did that to him—and the question that’s been sitting in me since the lull finally works its way loose.
“Were you something? Before?”
The storm fills the space where his answer should go. A long time. Long enough that I figure it’s not coming—that the words aren’t in him, or the wanting isn’t.
Then his hand comes up out of the dark and finds my face. His thumb traces my jaw, slow, one side to the other, reading me the way I’ve been reading him. And from somewhere deep, dragged up rough and broken through a throat that’s barely shaped a word in days, he says it.
“Words.”
Just that. One word, and I feel what it costs him—the effort moving through his whole chest to push it out.
I don’t understand it. Not yet. Words. What does that even mean—words? But I hold it the way I held the yellow curtains. Careful. Because I can tell it’s a piece of him he’s never handed to anyone, and someday I’ll know what shape it is.
“Okay,” I whisper. I press my mouth to his jaw, where the bone goes hard under the skin. “Words. I’ve got it. I’ll keep it till you can tell me the rest.”
The hum comes back. It wraps around us both, low and warm and chosen, and the storm moves off east, and I go under with one hand still caught in his tail and a yellow kitchen lit up behind my eyes.