Work Text:
Sumner was everywhere and nowhere, anywhere. The air was chill in her nose but she was warm and held and horrible. She was in a public house just far enough off the docks to be discreet and anonymous, thoughts swept into an opiated swirl, reclined in the arms of the fireplace. She was on board a whaler, snug in her cabin; she had fallen through the ice and her pale skin was lathered in whale fat, reddening. Large hands—the hands of a lover—chafed at her, and the arms of one of the vast white North’s vast white sows held her tight.
She’d been walking, she’d struck out across the ice to seek help or shelter, missionaries or Natives; she’d been caught in a blizzard, and crawled into the skin of a bear. She’d crawled down the wide mouth of a whale hooked dead alongside the ship, unbutchered.
She was warm and held and horrible. Bare, vulnerable, terribly safe.
The place stunk of salt and guts, blood beginning to sour and clot. But the heat kept her own blood beating in hearty gushes, throat to cunt. A paw, unfurred, batted at her face until she turned her head into the bear’s heaving bosom. She chafed her face like a cat against the fine hairs there. Her lips brushed a nipple, thick and brown and livening against her mouth, and she whimpered, suckled, squirming against the bear as it laughed in a voice she feared.
“Desperate fucker, isn’t she,” the sow said, and tucked thick fingers up into her cunt. Sumner suckled and squirmed in the lap of the bear, drowsing and kept, too blown to wonder whether the sow’s question was rhetorical.
Another laugh in another feared voice—gravelly, this one, and no less hateful. “Be a pretty mouth to ride, wouldn’t it, while it’s shut up.”
The bear grunted, censure or assent, and lay Sumner down to float on her back, her tits flattening cold on her chest away from the sow’s full bosom. She slid down the whale’s great tongue; its guts squeezed around her, dragging hot and slick up her body. The scent of it settled under her nose, inescapably thick, saline sour, then filled her mouth. Sumner opened and fed with tongue and lips, suffocating under so much furred flesh. When the sea entered her in a choking gush her feet slipped; she’d been holding her hips up and open, unheeded. But now her mouth was freed and she gasped—whale fat, seawater, guts slicked down from her mouth and over her chilled skin.
Sumner slept. But with the sun came the wind in her ears, and she rushed to cover her face, lest it freeze. The world was white and awake. In the distance a figure, lumbering across the ice. Drax, her furred parka coated in snow. In the flattened waste Sumner couldn’t tell whether she was coming toward her—toward prey—or away, as if from a spent carcass.
She stared up at the fog-cradled sun and waited.