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Night has already long since set in when Caim feels the Red Dragon stir at his side. He doesn’t think she’s truly been sleeping, but she hasn’t been awake, either - not like he has.
She doesn’t speak, at first, and Caim is content with that. It’s easy to ignore her gaze as it rests heavy upon him.
“Your fire,” she finally says, in that voice that no human throat could ever produce. “It has died.”
This is true. It was well over an hour ago Caim had placed the last of the wood upon it, and barely even embers remain now.
He shrugs. The Red Dragon rolls her eyes.
“Come here, hateful fool,” she says. “The night will grow colder still. We can keep each other warm.”
He considers refusing, because soulbound or not, he still just can’t quite bring himself to trust the beast before him.
But she is right. He is cold, and the night stretches long before them. It will be hours yet until dawn can begin to unthaw him once more.
If he freezes in his sleep, he will never succeed in his goals.
Logic wins out over faint distrust, and he almost thinks the dragon is laughing at him as he settles against her side, all immortal disdain and mockery.
He ignores her, and closes his eyes to lean back against her side. The scales aren’t as rough as one would expect, not as hard beneath him as the armour he feels under his legs when they take to the skies as one in battle. There’s give, an unexpected softness under the shell.
For perhaps the first time ever, Caim is consciously aware that the Red Dragon lives.
“What is it?” She hisses. “Why do you stiffen so? I sense no danger.”
There are times where Caim has come to miss his voice.
This is not one of them. Closing his eyes and closing his ears, he rolls away from the dragon’s searching gaze and digs deep for sleep, lulled away by the echoing drum of the heart that beats an echo of his own.
-x-
“When you are done with your weapons,” the dragon says, imperious and disgruntled underneath, “you will clean me, also.”
Caim pauses. Cloth wrapped around the blade of a sword, oil and blood staining it through, he stills, and raises a brow at the dragon.
She sniffs. “You use me in battle with the same care as those pieces of metal. Look at me!” Wings flap, spread on display. It’s sort of amusing. “Blood crusting between my scales, and no sign of rain soon to wash it away.” She glares at him, inhuman eyes carrying human emotion. “I will become most unpleasant if you leave me in this state for too long.”
She isn’t exactly pleasant at any time, as far as Caim has seen - good humoured, sure, even edging on kind , sometimes, in a sense of the word that only makes sense to the dragon herself - but she has a point. And there’s no real reason to make his life harder; even without the dragon bitching at him for hours on end, she’s a vital weapon, an unbeatable strength. For now, at least, he needs her healthy.
So he inclines his head, and returns to maintaining his weapons; the dragon behind him settling down to wait, satisfied, now.
When he finally turns his attentions to her, hours later, it seems as if she has drifted off to sleep.
No matter.
She wakes, briefly, when he begins to run cloth and water down her sides - one lazy, slitted eye resting on him with a dazed focus that betrays no wariness, no distrust; it makes him almost uneasy, in a way. After, though - her gaze flicks away from him as her eyes close once more, and the only sign she isn’t truly asleep as he works on cleaning from her the remains of their last battle is the way she shifts under his touch, the faint grumbles she releases.
She runs hot, and when he isn’t dragging his fingers against the grain, her scales feel like hardened silk under his hands. He digs into them, careful, dipping the cloth into every nook and cranny he can find, scraping away every fleck of dried blood.
When he moves to work on her wings, he eases up onto her back, as he would if they were about to take flight. Settling into that familiar dip on her back, her warmth pulsing underneath him, he takes one wing in hand and stretches it out as much as he can - the Red Dragon is apparently awake enough to help him out, because ‘as much as he can’ isn’t actually very much, so she does most of the work there herself.
The membranous skin that stretches across bone isn’t delicate - it’s made of the same hard core as the dragon herself is, no matter how thin - but it looks it, looks delicate in a way that makes Caim think inexplicably of Furiae, which is laughable, because there isn’t a single thing between the dragon and his sister that is anything even remotely close to alike.
“You think deep thoughts,” the dragon says. “Care to share them?”
There’s an amusement in her voice, as well as a genuine curiosity, but she doesn’t dig into his mind, and she once would have, at the start of their acquaintance. Caim isn’t sure how he feels about this change.
Your wings , he says, his mind his only voice now, a speaker just to her, they look...misleadingly delicate .
“More words from you than I am used to,” the dragon says, and said wings twitch a bit. “There is no part of me that is delicate.”
Caim, delicately, does not mention that he first met her in chains.
“Do you seek to know why they look as they do?” She snorts. “Fool. I did not design my wings, anymore than I did any other part of me.”
Caim shakes his head, and reaches across to brush a hand down the length of her wing. It trembles under his touch.
What do they feel like? He asks, and remembers lances stabbing through the skin, the dragon’s shriek of rage. Still, the scar lingers, pale white. I’ve never had wings.
The dragon is silent for a long moment, and Caim turns his attention back to her wing joints, leaning in close to get at the hard to reach places.
His chest pressed against her back, he can feel how they move together, and know they breathe as one.
“I’ve never not had wings,” she says finally. “They feel of nothing. They’re limbs. Sensitive, I’ll admit, but like no different to me than your arms to you.”
Caim hums - he can do that, still, amazingly, voice gone but some sounds remaining. Between his legs, the dragon shifts.
“Are you done?”
Nearly , he says. Your face .
“Oh,” she says. “Right.”
He slides from her back with the ease of long practice, though if you asked him to put a name to the time they’ve spent together, he didn’t think he’d be able to give one. Not enough moons for a full cycle of the seasons, yet, he thinks - maybe not even half.
She cranes her head down to meet his hands, and her piercing gaze watches him carefully this time as he strokes the cloth around the ridges of her eyes, along her snout. He becomes aware of a faint grumbling sound as he works, a vibration under his touches.
He pauses. Are you...purring?
“Your touch is nice,” she says. “Your hands...they are warm.”
To Caim, that seems nonsensical - the dragon is a scaled furnace under his hands - but that logic matters little to the way her words tighten his throat.
“Why have you stopped?” The dragon demands, and automatically, Caim continues on as he was, and ignores the burn starting low in his gut.
Regardless of how often the dragon calls him such, he is no fool. He knows how this pact will end.
His parent’s deaths had taught him many things - high among those lessons was the fact that caring was a luxury. Caim had Furiae, and had to protect her with all he had - which meant anyone else was simply a danger, should he need to cut them down, should he need to choose between them and his sister. Caring was a luxury for those too blind to see reality.
Caim had Furiae. There was no room to be had for the dragon, not when he knows how this ends.
That doesn’t stop him from wanting, and all through the night, curled up against the dragon’s side as the fire dies, that want burns through him like a sickness, and he just might, he thinks, hate himself.
-x-
Days pass, blending into weeks. Time passes, and Caim feels no closer to reaching Furiae.
It’s vexing, to say the least.
The dragon has grown short with him recently, which is, in its own way, a relief. Sure, he feels no closer to Furiae - but in the meanwhile, he could feel himself becoming attached to his pact partner.
It makes no sense - surely he’s not so weak as that? That the moment he’s without his sister, the one thing in this world he’s let himself care about, can bring himself to care about, he’ll simply switch focus to someone else? Is it not enough to be alone?
It’s disconcerting, to feel so unsure of himself, when ‘sure of himself’ is all he’s ever been, since his parents died. It’s not like he had any other choice .
He blames the feelings on the pact, because he refuses to believe it’s simply him, Caim, his own intrinsic weakness. His soul and the dragon’s soul are bound as one. Surely that must have side effects other than the loss of his voice?
The dragon shifts between his legs, likely sensing his unease. They’ve taken to the sky together - for once, just to travel faster, rather than battle. The skies tell of a stormy night on their tail, and neither of them wanted to be caught out in the open.
The idea of sleeping in a shallow cave in the mountain range the dragon flies for isn’t really much more appealing, but Caim has had worse - and if it bothers the beast, she can just deal with that herself.
“Caim,” the dragon says, and he still isn’t used to her calling him by his name. He’s not sure when she started, and that he at first didn’t notice the change is...not comforting to him, when he’s already on edge from, paradoxically, how relaxed he has become around her. “What ails you?”
Nothing .
She laughs, low and raspy, and he can feel the shudder of it under him. “Do not think to lie to me, fool,” she hisses; it would be a threat if not for the mischief that threads through it, so reminiscent of a younger Furiae that it stabs Caim somewhere in his heart he hadn’t realised was still beating. “Even if the tides of your thoughts were not turbulent enough to cause a storm of their own, you think I do not feel how tense you sit? Relax. I shall not let you fall.”
I am not worried about falling, dragon.
“Of course you are not,” the dragon agrees. “You humans are never worried about what you ought to be.”
Are you saying I should be worried about falling?
“I am saying you should be worried about testing my patience much further, Caim,” the dragon says. “I care not for your platitudes and half-truths. You are making a bother of yourself. What ails you .”
You do.
That is not a thought he meant to share, but from the growl that builds up under him, it’s one he shared anyway.
“ Fool,” the dragon hisses -
And then her claws are in his mind.
She shreds him, without care, that blanket disdain and burning hatred for humanity she’s always carried a burning wave of copper choking down his throat as he bites back screams he can’t vocalise anyway. In that moment, whatever bizarre pactborne fondness she’d nurtured for him is buried under the weight of centuries of nothing but scorn and anger for his entire kind, how dare he speak to her so,
She withdraws before she breaks him.
“You are a fool,” she says. Underneath the gravel, that lingering anger, she sounds soft.
Caim slumps against her. More fool you, he tells her, and even in his mind, all that’s left of his voice is a croaking rasp.
“We are as one,” she says. “My desires are your desires, in all things. We share our hatred, Caim.”
Armies march in his head, screaming as the dragon’s fire burns them alive, screaming as his sword cuts them down.
‘We share our hatred,” she repeats. “Just as we share our lusts.”
Caim doesn’t have the mental presence to fully register her words, or respond to them. Like a wounded animal, he curls tight around the core of himself and presses his body flat against the dragon’s, trusting that she won’t let him fall, should his grip fail.
He doesn’t know why he places such trust in her, when she’d just nearly taken him apart on a whim - and damn their pact, their promise, their price, all in the face of her pride, cut low by a filthy human -
But of course he knows why he places such trust in her.
Those same claws that had carved uncaring channels in his mind not five minutes earlier are not gone, after all. Never gone, just as she is always with him.
Only they are not weapons turned against him, no.
Gentle and delicate, those claws cradle him. Like her warmth, they whisper protection. Not apologies - never apologies, not from her, not to him - but understanding.
Hurting, angry, wanting, tired, Caim lets himself go, for the first time since he traded away his voice.
Miles above the ground, on the back of the dragon he wants like he’s never wanted another, he sleeps.
He does not dream.
-x-
The dragon does not change her behaviour around him, but that only makes him all the more aware of all he must have missed before.
His name on her lips. The way she encouraged him - encourages him - to touch her. Her coy voice curling around him, both in his mind and out loud.
She’d said they’d shared all things, as was the nature of their pact - and he has no choice but to believe her. Her hatred of the world outstrips even his own, and in battle they are each as bloodlost as the other to the drums of a killing field.
All things, she’d said, and he knew she’d seen every corner of his mind.
All things, she’d said.
It was a heady thing, to know the one you wanted hungered for you, too.
Still, temptation would have no sway on him - reciprocated or not, he knew how this pact would end, and it would end. No matter how much he wanted otherwise, he couldn’t allow himself fleeting distractions. Not now, not yet, not with his dragon -
The dragon.
He would travel with her, fly with her, fight with her and kill with her - but he would not lay with her.
Not when it wouldn’t just be sating base lust. There was more than that hunger to how he wanted her, and that almost - almost - scares him.
Not much scares Caim, hasn’t since he was a child - but emotions? They were up there.
Like this, they reach an equilibrium. Caim is aware now, but if he ignores that knowledge, treats all things as they were before, then it doesn’t matter. There are other ways to vent their shared frustrations; for weeks the rust of blood lingers in the back of Caim’s throat no matter how well he cleans himself. He finds he doesn’t care, even if the dragon’s demands he clean her come with an electric charge, now.
She’s always calm, under his touch.
“You asked me once,” she says, “what it is like to have wings.”
That was not what I asked .
“I am fairly certain it was .”
I didn’t say it like that.
She snorts. “Fool.” Her voice is fond. “Would you like to find out?”
He pauses. I can’t grow wings .
“I am here, am I not?” Rising from where she reclines, she spreads her wings out to their full majesty. “You have flown with me, but you have not flown with me.”
Why?
“Why? Because I grow tired of your childish games.” Her eyes narrow, piercing through him with her displeasure. “You think to refuse me? To scorn me ? I will show you the full stupidity of your actions.”
She leans down, and stares at him expectantly. “Mount me,” she commands. “Do not think to make me wait much longer. My patience runs thin as it is.”
He obeys, because there’s not much else he can do, because there’s no real reason not to except for the fact he knows this will likely end in another win for the dragon, coiled smug underneath him as her muscles bunch up, tensing to take off -
And then they’re in the air, taking flight.
“Let me guide you,” she says. Her mind brushes against his own.
Up here, just the two of them, he’s reminded of the last time they had connected like that. He’s reminded of the inhuman monster the beast can be when she feels slighted.
He’s reminded of those little glimpses of vulnerability that inexplicably remind him of Furiae.
Caim lets her in.
His eyes drift close, but still, he sees. Through his dragon’s eyes, he sees.
She doesn’t see as he does, as a human does, but somehow it feels natural, and because of the ease with which he sinks into her body as if it were his own, he can’t say how it is different - just that he knows it is.
The dragon’s presence pressed up against him, still in control - he’s simply a passenger in her flight, as always - is a smirk as they twine around each other as one.
Their wings stretch out, catching the wind, and the strain on their muscles is a pleasant burn. Caim has enjoyed flying since they first formed their pact, but in this moment, he loves it in a far deeper sense of the word.
The dragon’s satisfaction hums through him, and with a nudge, he’s back in his own body, reeling from the sensations of once more controlling his own limbs.
“Do you see?” The dragon says. “You cannot deny me.”
You cannot deny yourself .
Their silence on the flight back down is for more reasons than just Caim’s lack of a voice.
That night, he lies against the dragon, as has become their habit, watching the fire he started at the beginning of the evening slowly die.
There’s something different, though, and Caim knows it is that the dragon will allow him time no longer.
You cannot deny me. You cannot deny yourself.
It’s true. Only willpower has held him back before, but even that is on the edge of breaking.
He more than wants, at this point. As terrifying as it is, he thinks he’s grown to lo-
Dragon, he says, and she waits. Leaning into her, he presses his palms flat to her side, feeling the silk and scaled steel of her just breathe .
Meeting her in those chains, he’d thought her a beast, scarred and ugly. He sees, now, why she calls him a fool.
She’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He’s tasted her soul, and thinks she may in fact be the most beautiful creature to have walked the earth.
And so he tells her that, exactly, you are beautiful .
She laughs at him. “Of course I am, my fool,” she tells him. “It does not surprise me that it took you so long to recognise it, though. Humans have long been blind to the truth.”
Well. He suppose he can’t deny that.
He reaches up, to trace her face, around her eyes, and she leans into his touch. She’s warm, and he finds himself growing warm too.
Her eyes are inhuman, but he can read them better than he ever could Inuart’s, or Furiae’s. Can read them better than he ever could his own.
“Will you refuse me again, Caim?”
He wants .
He hesitates.
He chooses.
No, he tells her, and refuses to back down, refuses to regret it. I am with you.
“You are,” she agrees softly. “You are mine.”
A claim of ownership shouldn’t set him ablaze like it does, but from the dragon, his dragon , that alone has him breathing hard, hovering on the edge of an anticipation he isn’t quite sure what to do with.
He knows the depth of her hatred for humanity, after all - it echoes his own. For her to be calling him her own, to be watching him with those eyes, their edges all softened, just for him -
It brings him to the edge of tears. If not for the fact he was already reclining against her, it would bring him to his knees.
“Let me in,” she says softly, “Let me feel you.”
He’s as open to her as he’s ever been, and she rushes in without hesitation, meeting him in the middle. He’s never felt so entwined with her, not since they’d first formed their pact, and the way she curls around him, her head on his chest pinning him down, the way she croons -
Caim swallows hard as the edges of the warmth just starting to coil up inside him, low in his gut, suddenly flare higher, stoked into something even hotter; he trembles against his dragon, both physically and not, and the approving sound she makes drives him crazy.
Let me up, he says. Let me see you. Let me feel you.
“No,” she growls, and he feels her hot breath against his face. “Let me see you .”
He wants to keen at her words, but the only sounds he can manage are rough pants as he presses his mouth to the underside of her jaw, tasting her over and over again, tracing the pattern of each scale.
There are times when Caim misses his voice. This is absolutely one of them.
Her mind wrapped around his is an echo of her own pleasure hitting him back, and though she’s pinned him down, wrapped herself around every inch of him - she’s left his arms free, and he knows that’s no accident.
One hand rises up, and before he can really think about what he’s doing with it, it’s slid its way over her snout and into her mouth, gripping her teeth like a lifeline as with the other he reaches for the strings on his pants.
He hasn’t the patience to untie them - he rips them open without thought, and dips in to reach for where he aches , not fully hard yet but getting there; a gentle, testing touch, and his hips jerk up to meet his hand.
Move , he demands of his dragon, thoughts losing coherency. Let me. Feel you.
He can feel her laughter tremble through them, but she doesn’t argue this time - shifts, just a little, and he shifts with her, working his cock over in his hand as he ruts against her side, their warmth combining as they entwine.
Her soul bound in his, he cannot tell which limbs are his and which are hers, cannot tell whose pleasure brings him to breaking as they lie as one.
The voice, though - hers, no doubt about it, low growls no human throat could produce surrounding him,
And god , he hungers for her.
A faint metallic taste on his tongue as he lathes it over her scales, panting around the words he can’t speak but tries to anyway -
“ Caim ,” she hisses, in the same tone she’d said mine earlier.
His grip tightens, and he whimpers . Shifting forward, wishing he could press even closer, his thumb begins to trace circles over the head of his cock, fingers wrapped around the shaft moving up and down and differentiating pressure as they squeezed, working him over til he hovers at the edge.
He pulls back, just slightly, because when the ground drops beneath him, he wants them to drop together. He wants to watch her fall.
She nuzzles at his neck, those brilliant eyes of hers watching him, unblinking, clouded over and glassy with the heat-haze he can feel building up between him, coiling and pooling in his gut - his nails scrape along his cock, slick with sweat, and next to him she trembles like she is the one being worked over, and oh , wasn’t that a thought, her writhing around him, being unmade by his touch,
He moans, and feels that edge drop out beneath him; he tenses, and curls up against his dragon, shuddering into her as reality weakens around them, and her own pleasure floods him like wave after wave of nothing but warmth.
Sticky, but sated, he breathes, each exhale harsh air panted onto her chest, each inhale filled with nothing but the scent of her.
The dragon curls around him, all of that warmth and a calm Caim isn’t sure he’s ever felt around anyone else.
“I think I could grow to like us,” she says. “Together.”