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Your name is Horuss Zahhak and whatever are these feelings, so sudden, so new?
Her name is Damara Megido and her face is sweet, her smiles dimpled, and you are convinced she needs your help.
She’s so soft-spoken, so strangely foreign, so very vulnerable, you are thoroughly surprised she hasn’t been culled yet. You make a few forays into her lawnring, just to check on her, say hello, be neighborly (though, admittedly, your house is quite a bit farther away than, say, Rufioh’s, so you don’t count as her neighbor. Neigh-bor. Neigh-boor. Yes, that would be you). You think she may have guessed your true underlying concerns, however, because she glares at you and mutters in East Beforan until you leave. You know she can speak regular Beforan, because you’ve heard her carefully pick her way around the words. It irritates you that she doesn’t extend the courtesy to you (it won’t occur to you until much later, until much has happened, that you should’ve taken the time to learn East Beforan instead).
You continue to visit her and she continues to not be a good hostess, and you stay at that impasse for several weeks, it seems, though you think you gain a victory each time you do, because you know of other blue-bloods in the area who must surely have had their eyes on her whom you haven’t seen sniffing around her hive at all.
Then, out of the blue, she comes to you.
Barges in, more like, then shuts the door behind her with a wild look, her strange many-layered robe slipping off her shoulder in her haste. You pretend you haven’t seen the delicate round of her shoulder as she jerks her clothing back into place and instead preoccupy yourself with looking astonished and not getting irritated at the broken wheel spoke in your hands.
“Damara?” you say. “Whatever is the matter?”
She fires off a rapid stream of babble and you hold up your hands.
“Please do excuse me, but I’m afraid I don’t understand it when you speak your native language. Please be courteous and use mine, as I know you can do.” You try not to let any of your venom on the subject leak through. She glares at you, straightening her sash.
“Big idiots come,” she says in a snappish voice. “Try to cull. I run.”
You blink, frown deeply, and step around your workbench, which you’ve set up in your gathering block for the time being.
“That is a very serious thing to run from,” you say. “What made you run to me?”
She shades her eyes, then. You rather wish she wouldn’t—her eyes are quite lovely to look upon.
“Because you bigger idiot,” she says, and your jaw clenches. “Bluer. Won’t bother you.”
While that is true…and you won’t pretend you haven’t been envisioning what it would be like if she ever conceded that fact…
“You came to escape culling in my hive?” you say slowly, trying to gather your scattered thoughts.
“Will you help?” she asks sweetly, fluttering her eyes at you, and you nearly swallow your tongue. She’s so very…she’s…you reach out to touch her cheek, not in a threatening way, though perhaps mildly possessive—
She bites your hand before you come into contact with her skin and you yelp, feeling the points of her teeth, trying to shake her off, and all thoughts of submission and care fly out of your head. You want to slap her, though common sense says she would retaliate and be right to do so. (Not so right, you think sullenly, she did bite you first.) When she releases your hand, you cradle it to your chest, swearing in your own way as she licks—is that a speck of blue?—from her lips.
“Not your lapdog either,” she says calmly. “No one cull me. I fight.”
Yes, she will, you know now. You examine your hand. She barely broke the skin; it’s already scabbing over, but you take your own teeth to the mark and tear it open a little more. You don’t understand anything that you’re doing right now—you only understand the challenging tilt to her chin, the fact that she isn’t running from you, just waiting, watching, hands on hips, robes off her shoulder again.
You smear your blood across that shoulder, a bare blue streak, but there, present. It is ownership, but a different kind, you think.
She backhands you.
“You do not own,” she says. “I am not yours.”
You hit her back, careful of your strength, but hard enough to snap her head to the side and open up a cut on her cheek from one of your errant claws. She digs her fingertip into the blood welling up and paints a streak from your nose to your chin. You get a taste of tangy blood and a nose full of…something…you don’t quite understand, but very much like. Not a smell, not a taste, more like…something in-between.
(Pheromones, your brain supplies later, those are pheromones.)
(Much later.)
(As in, for the first time in your memory there are clothes on your floor instead of in your wardrobe and not all of them are yours.)
(You are going to stare at the ceiling full of hazy satisfaction and confusion for several minutes while she uses your ablutions block before she comes back and punches you in the face. Then kisses you.)