Kaizer felt like a lot was going on with him lately; more than he was used to, rather. It had everything to do with Fox, and the proverbial duress under which he had joined. He wasn't the type to regret his choice, or wonder about other options, but the responsibility of his decision was weighing on him now, and the wolf needed a second to adjust. When he wasn't hunting, or annoyingly vying for the alpha female's attention, he didn't quite know what to do with himself and would end up pacing. Back home he'd had his brothers and his cousins for company, all of whom understood him at the most basic level, making him unfairly biased towards those interactions.
The wolves of Teekon, those who had been here a while at least, were inherently different. A fact he would come to terms with eventually, but not before a bit of struggling while getting acclimated to the presently depressed sense of social stimulation in his life. After a short bout of pacing, the wolf dropped to his side and began to obsessive over an itch on his hindleg -- pulling and gnawing on the limb a bit aggressively.
She watched him from a patch of long, brittle grass. She wasn't spying on purpose. Raven had chosen this spot to secret herself away for a mid-afternoon nap. She had woken to the sight of her pack mate pacing nearby. Her yellow eyes tracked his restless movement and she licked her lips contemplatively before sitting upright. Even as she stood, Kaizer dropped and began gnawing on his leg.
"Is everything all right?" she asked cautiously as she finally made an approach. She stretched out her legs as she walked toward him, tail flicking and ears rising curiously atop her head.
Mid-bite, a ginger ear twitched at a soft rustling noise, bringing him pause as his bluish eyes swiveled to find Raven at its source. Kaizer dropped his leg as she came near, his fat tail falling in quick whumps against the dirt as he received her presence. She, like most wolves seemed to do around these parts, wondered about him beyond the obvious; it was something he supposed he would get used to, but for now he'd continue to treat personal inquiries with blatant ignorance. He looked a little amused at the question, his answer coming only in the form of a kind expression that insisted he was fine.
"I'm glad you're here," he said instead, as if he'd thought to look for her at some point. And though it wasn't her, specifically, who he might have gone looking for, Raven was a preferred choice since he at least knew her name from picking it up at their first encounter. "Mind doing something with me?" It wasn't something he would've had to ask back home, and the inflection felt heavy and alien on his tongue, but outwardly the wolf strove to seem as normal and inviting as possible.
He didn't answer verbally, yet his expression sufficed. Her yellow eyes dropped to his leg, wondering if he had some sort of itching wound, but it raised quickly when Kaizer announced that he was glad she was here. Raven's face scrunched into a slightly quizzical look, lips parting when he asked if she would do something with him.
"What?" she ventured, thinking he must have something specific in mind. Raven shifted her weight from foot to foot, freely scrutinizing him, albeit without judgment. She was curious about this fellow and, despite herself, wondered whether or not he had won over her mother yet.
He looked at her thoughtfully, taking what he had seen of her demeanor into the consideration of what they could do together. She didn't seem the type -- physically or emotionally -- to be interested in sparring, or hunting for sport, so that left one of the more gentle past-times from his homeland... "Do you bond?" he ventured, ears perking excitedly. Whether she knew of the tradition or not, he seemed eager to share the experience with her.
Of course, Raven knew the meaning of the word, yet Kaizer's question still managed to throw her for a loop. Her head tilted slightly to the left as she stared at him for a beat before repeating herself, only with a slightly more questioning tone. "What?"
For some unknown reason, she felt a flush of heat start creeping up her neck. Perhaps because she had just been pondering whether or not her mother had mated with him, the question suddenly seemed to contain possibly intimate connotations. And despite her nearness to sexual maturity, the young she-wolf had never really thought in this particular direction.
She repeated the question, the tone of her second ask implying that a slight emotional stress had suddenly replaced the curious tone of her first. He realized that Raven had understood him, but was genuinely surprised by what he'd said; his head canted similarly at her, and he ignored her discomfort. "You groom me. I groom you..." he responded blithely anyway -- and though he didn't smile, his face seemed sincerely amused -- "we can guess where each other has been today." Because he didn't like talking about himself, he didn't mention that it had been commonplace among his family to bond through grooming and taking turns guessing where the other had been or what they'd caught to eat that day.
It wasn't as intimate to him as it was necessary to getting to know someone truly -- he also realized that this might be a strange practice here, but that didn't mean he shouldn't ask for what he wanted. "Bond," he finished spelling.
It seemed a curious practice, once he described it, and the heat beneath her skin slowly receded. She hadn't really engaged in mutual grooming since her childhood, though Raven was no stranger to touching others. It was part of her work, after all. She wasn't opposed to reciprocation, either, especially not when she considered that itch she sometimes felt between her shoulder blades that she could never quite reach with her own teeth.
"Okay," she said tentatively after a few beats. Raven then froze when she reconsidered the words he had said a moment ago. Would she smell Fox on him? Wouldn't that be awkward? She stood there and contemplated it, then decided it didn't really matter. She was a medic-in-training; she could be professionally clinical about these things.
She almost asked how they would go about it, yet Raven figured it required a certain physical proximity. She scooted tentatively closer to Kaizer, then plopped her hindquarters on the cold ground. Quickly, she sprawled forward, forelegs stretched before her and hind legs in the opposite direction. She rolled slightly sideways so that much of her weight was supported by her shoulder and hip, then tilted her head upward toward her companion.
He watched Raven eagerly, his fat tail picking up a quick, thumping beat, as she agreed finally to bond with him; he seemed to be genuinely happy, despite the absence of a smile. Stormy eyes never left her, studying each sleek limb as the pitch bird settled beside him. Kaizer looked to her face then, studying what remained there of her hesitance, before he leaned forward and buried his muzzle into her shoulder. The wolf inhaled sharply, pressing his tongue into downy-black fur and tasting her recent adventures, lost outside the caldera, and plants she spent the most time with. He had pictures in his head, weaving together slowly as he fell into a rhythm of sniffing intently and then licking to smooth the fur there. His nose traveled along the ridge of her shoulder, all of him relaxed and content to be lost in her perfume.
"Mm..." he murmured, pausing at the base of her neck. "You smell like... flowers. Red ones," he finished in a low mumble, ears flattening and eyes closing as he began to concentrate nibbling in the crook of her shoulders. Bluesummer wasn't wise on the names and uses of the plants he saw in his head, but he personally had no interest in such things, so it didn't matter to him at any rate.
He began touching her without further preamble. Raven jumped at the first contact, though she rapidly adjusted in the seconds following. It wasn't just tolerable, it was actually quite pleasurable. The intimacy of it did make her skin prickle with a bit of heat beneath her black fur, yet she tried not to betray any discomfort lest she botch this opportunity to bond with her pack mate.
When he spoke, Raven laughed. "What does the color red smell like?" she asked, making a hmmm noise low in her throat. Only then did she realize she was supposed to be reciprocating. A little gracelessly, she thrust her own muzzle in the direction of his ruff, inhaling before placing a series of amiable nips along the back of his neck. "You smell yellow," she quipped in a lightly teasing tone.
His shoulder lifted slightly, shrugging. "You," he said evenly, as if this were the most logical answer to him. He had always thought red smelled explicitly like gore, but he saw the color now, clear as day -- something softer and yet more vivid -- on the face of a flower he had seen maybe once before. Kaizer felt an odd twinge just then, an actual desire to tell her something about himself. He wanted to say that red was his favorite color; that any varying shade of blood made him feel his own spirit more intensely than any shade of green grass or blue sky ever could.
But he swallowed the feeling whole, completely unwilling to reveal a sentiment that felt too foreign for him to share. Especially with someone he'd technically just met; which was strange considering how backwards he was being -- willing to touch others, even intimately, before getting to know them. She dove her small nose into the thick of his ruff, his back leg beginning to jump slightly at the tease of her teeth. "Yellow?" he echoed, pulling his mouth away from her shoulders so that he might set a blithely skeptical eye upon her face. "Like snow when you pee on it?"
He drew away to look at her and Raven shook her head. "No snow. Just pee," she corrected him with a light laugh. It was true, he carried the pungent musk of urine. They were canines, though, and it wasn't in the least offensive. "If we're going with color codes, you also smell very brown and also a little green." Brown like soil, bark and dead leaves. Green like the last surviving grasses of the season.
Soon her mouth was too busy for talking. Her tongue swiped along the muscles of his neck, mussing up the fur at first before licking with the grain to smooth it back down again. It wasn't long before Raven was methodically grooming every inch of Kaizer she could reach, intent on pulling the bits and pieces of detritus from his fur—including the fur itself, as bits of his undercoat clung to her tongue—to leave him with a clean, smooth, gleaming pelt.
"Hm," Kaizer noised thoughtfully, his mind drifting over to the colors she gave him, and wondering why she chose them. He supposed that the colors came from the most natural things about him -- as he rather enjoyed romping (and peeing) -- but the wolf couldn't be certain. He also supposed that he could ask... but in feeling that he had already asked one question too many, the follow-up queries became fat and twisted in his mouth, unable to crest the curve of his lips without the sheer force of willpower to make them. He sighed, maybe a little frustrated with himself, and resumed tending to her shoulders before eventually taking on the bevel of her spine.
Raven's pelt was much sleeker than his own, and especially more well-kept, making his job nearly twice as easy as hers. He finished in all the places of her he could reach, his tongue slightly numb and visions of plants dancing merrily in his head. Unintentionally -- more so, unwittingly -- he had ingested spores of poppy powder that had been lost to the breeze and had become embedded in her fur like hermetic pollen. It wasn't enough for him to recognize that he felt different, but his energy had slacked somewhat, and further comforted by her touch, Kaizer rubbed his face into her side, as if to tuck himself in, and his eyes fluttered to a close.
What became apparent now was that he had an incredibly low tolerance for drugs.
A companionable silence stretched between them as they continued to groom one another. Bonding, Raven reminded herself even as her tongue swept over the peak of a shoulder blade. She began to move back up Kaizer's neck again, having neglected anything above it until now. She had to shift and stretch slightly to clean his ears and the crown of his head. She hesitated slightly before licking his nearer cheek and then settling back even as he began to curl up beside her like a milk-drunk kitten.
Did it work? she wondered to herself, lips twitching at the corners as he cuddled up beside her. I think it worked. Raven watched his eyes flutter shut and waited for them to reopen. When they didn't, she stage-whispered, "Are you asleep?"
He was swimming in small, red flowers; enveloped and warm -- dare he say, happy? -- feeling every bit of his prime. Frolicking beside him was something black, a delightful and oozing drop of ink. It wiggled amorphously, shimmying and quivering, filling him with the purest sense of mirth, as he watched it. Gold pinpricks bubbled up from the oily blob, swirling until they became eyes, peering at him like tiny worlds full of innocence and kindness, lain bare in aurelian diamonds. The blackness began to spread, taking on limbs and becoming more solid...
Are you asleep?
Kaizer made a slight jerking motion, and then he was blinking at her, feeling unable to pull himself from against her side. "No," he lied, a stupid sort of smile creasing his muzzle. The expression felt weird, and something in the back of his head seemed to want him to get up, remove himself from... whatever this was, he couldn't think... but the voice was distant, nearly inaudible, and he ignored it in favor of counting the rise and fall of her breaths, against his cheek. "I don't want to get up," he said out loud, forgetting Raven was a cognizant wolf and not the happy, shimmering dot from his mind's sleepy eye.
"No," he fibbed and Raven could only smirk, well aware of that telltale jerk. In response to his next few words, she lifted a slender black shoulder in a shrug. "Then don't." She was enjoying this a lot more than she had anticipated. It fostered a sense of closeness and comfort that did not test her boundaries much. It was likely she would steal this practice from Kaizer, maybe even incorporate it into her trade.
"I don't have a train to catch," she murmured, mostly to herself, stretching out to get more comfortable. With her hind legs sprawled behind her and her forelegs in front, she let her chin sink down beside them. She did not close her electric yellow eyes but let them trace curiously over Kaizer's face as he presumably returned to the land of nod.
A reddish ear flicked, registering her words while also fighting a fog of confusion as weariness bound him.
What's a train? How do you catch it? he wanted to ask, but his lips felt too heavy to part. His earlier pacing had taken a toll without him realizing it, and the inhaled spores only sought to help him along on a journey to rest; he blamed his sleepiness on the former, having no true knowledge about the latter. Kaizer blinked his very bleary eyes, each blink coming slower as he studied Raven in much the same way she looked at him.
Eventually he fell asleep, to dream more about his cheerful inkblot hidden in the midst of a red, red field.
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