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It began the moment his back hit the mattress — or rather, what once had been a mattress, and then, with the relaxation washing over him, became seabed. Fine-grained, dappled, blessedly warm, the kind of soft sandy terrain that cradled his limbs like it had been waiting specifically for him with a kind of echinoderm euphoria. As the trance tugged him downward, into stillness, then stasis, then something deeper and primordial and moist, his body forgot the shape it once held. His bones dissolved, his symmetry corrected itself. He wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been possible before, but his thoughts flattened, and his lungs no longer mattered at all.
Because somewhere between Hanbin’s breath on his neck and the glint of ceiling light catching in his eyes like the mirrored shimmer of a distant surface, Hao remembered that he was, clearly and ecstatically, a starfish.
Five-limbed, spongy, and nerveless in the way of ocean creatures that he no longer bothered with panic, which was something humane, something obsolete now that he had reduced to only function and instinct. And there, looming above him like some sacred reef structure blooming with colors, was his coral. By his sheer presence, he knew that it’s his mate, his sacred orifice-bearing counterpart, the holy host of his gametes: Hanbin. He didn’t know where he got the name, perhaps a leftover protein trace, perhaps the chemical imprint of some earlier iteration of himself, but it lingered, familiar, like something his body had always known.
And Hanbin, who did not yet know the full implications of what he had mounted, had already begun to slide down onto Hao’s most forward-reaching arm — his reproductive one, which would have meant penis in another, high-developed, overcomplicated species but here simply meant: this one was for depositing.
He moaned softly — Was that even possible? — or perhaps it was just a bubble escaping. He couldn’t be sure. One thing he was sure of, though, was that his pipe coral pulsed around him all the same.
“Pipe coral,” he sighed aloud. “My pipe coral.”
Above him, Hanbin paused mid-motion, his ridged ventrum stretched so sweetly tight around Hao’s outstretched arm, flexing around him in rhythmic pulses he could feel down to the mutable center of his being. He looked holy like that, a beautiful creature, all curves and muscular grip, haloed in a sunken gleam as if the moonlight had passed through miles of seawater to reach him.
“…What?”
Typically, starfish didn’t speak, and especially not in the middle of depositing. But for Hanbin, his sacred host, he made the effort and used words. He would breach the boundaries of echinoderm biology just to offer his counterpart this moment.
“You’re my pipe coral,” he said, breathlessly. “I’m spawning for you, Hanbinnie.”
“Spawning?” Hanbin echoed, a tremor in his voice as his hands froze where they’d been pressing lightly against Hao’s chest. “What the fuck.”
“I know right,” Hao breathed, almost gleeful, not the slightest hint of offense in it. “I didn’t expect you to be so… receptive either. You’re such a perfect substrate, my dear.”
Hanbin blinked down at him from above, though Hao couldn’t possibly see it, not with his vision unhooked from anything ocular, more like some wet, sensory net drifting open in seawater, mapping every stimulation through temperature shifts and the slightest of friction, but perhaps he caught a flicker of Hanbin’s movement in the form of bioluminescent twitch.
But Hanbin, with his face flushed and hips still indecently seated, arching — very much aware and yet unaware of Hao’s current reality, or the lack of it — on top of someone who had gone soft-limbed and pliant in the kind of deep hypnosis that made the body more vessel than person, said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
His body, alas, did not seem to share so much of the confusion of his words. His hands splayed across Hao’s chest, warm and oddly boneless beneath him, no tension and no resistance, just a slow, strange yielding that made Hanbin feel like he was fucking into some beautifully designed mold of want. He kept rocking himself on Hao’s cock as if savoring the taste of doing shame to someone whose conscience had gone to somewhere softer, foggier, elsewhere. Every time he moved upward, or downward, or backward, all tightening around the base the same, Hao would pulse back sweetly, like his cock had always been wired to wait for Hanbin’s hole to wrap itself around all the same.
Hanbin, for all his dignity, for all his logic, and the years of convincing himself he wasn’t a person who’d fall into a scene like this (and the later years of Hao enabling his weird perversion), was still riding him. His thighs burned, and his hole throbbed for the dull ache of being used and coaxed open by someone who wasn’t quite there, whose eyes drifted and whose voice had gone… dreamy and unthinking. And Hao, limp in every limb but the one inside him, made a soft plea.
“Please, don’t move too much,” Hao warned softly under him. “My arm’s inside you.”
Hanbin’s breath caught. “Your what now?”
“My arm,” Hao repeated patiently. “I’m a starfish.”
Hanbin made a strangled sound, somewhere between laughter and disbelief, and very nearly stopped moving from his interrupted rhythm. His hands gripped tighter against Hao’s chest, as if to steady them both, though it was clear that only one of them needed steadying, and it wasn’t the man who thought he had limbs made of tube feet. Hao, however, wasn’t deterred. He was committed to the task of releasing his gametes into the warm folds of what he believed was a substrate. He had given himself a new ecological and reproductive purpose to function.
“You’re not a starfish,” Hanbin stammered and rocked forward again with a helpless clench. “You— your dick is literally inside me!”
But Hao didn’t register so much of what those words meant, or if he did, he interpreted it as an encouragement, a mere eagerness from his own coral. He was drifting too far down to care. The silt had settled over whatever parts of his brain once parsed all kinds of complex objections.
Hao smiled dreamily. “Starfish don’t have brains.”
Which, frankly, was a relief, because then Hao could feel. Every pulse and squeeze of coral ridges, every glugging draw of suction around the tapered base of his arm, was the very proof that Hanbin's form had accepted him, that he was nestled somewhere safe, grippled by folds so supple to coax a creature to completion.
Somewhere in the bed, Hanbin cursed under his breath, a muttered blur of vowels, then planted his knees firmer against the mattress and moved, and oh, how he moved just right. His rim gripped down with every downward roll, exquisitely contracting around Hao’s length with involuntary reverence, milking him with the same aching cadence as before, only now with the added psychic vertigo of knowing that Hao might genuinely believe he was spawning.
And god help him, Hanbin moaned in spite of it. Because it still felt too good, too wrong, too self-indulgent and self-serving of him to keep using the body of someone who no longer knew what his own cock was. His mind buckled on the edge of the thought: What if I’m really fucking a starfish? — not literally, no, but in the sense that all his shame might be folding him into something more primitive and porous, more open to being fucked by some creature who didn’t consider him as anything more than a habitat.
Hao could feel his coral moved again, down, then up, and it was like being polished by a thousand tiny currents. His reproductive arm twitched inside him, fit snugly into the grip and cradled by Hanbin’s spongy, wet passage like it had been designed, over millennia, to seed into this specific warmth. Even if it defied the natural script of what other starfish in the wild would ever dreamed of such internal shelter.
“My coral,” Hao called meekly. “My gamete nest.”
“Oh my god,” Hanbin gasped. “I-I’m not a gamete nest…”
He had no chance to breach Hao’s trance and no way to pierce through whatever sea-deep fantasy had wrapped itself around Hao’s mind, but even to himself, the words didn’t sound convincing. The denial meant nothing when his thighs trembled with the wet, obscene sounds that echoed off the walls with every grind of his hips, and his asshole fluttered around Hao’s cock — if Hanbin could still call it that, if he weren’t already halfway to believing it might really be a spawning arm, swollen and slick, releasing its slow pulses like it had been tricked by Hanbin’s heat into laying eggs.
But his body, godforsaken traitor, liked it a little too visibly that it’s such a relief (and a shame), that Hao wasn’t really here to see, but he probably sensed it either way that Hanbin’s skin flushed hot, prickled damp, and his cock heavy against his stomach, untouched and leaking.
“But you are,” Hao moaned. “You’re holding me so well. I’m so keen on this passive fertilization. You’re doing so amazing. Just stay like that and I’ll—”
“Do not say spawn. ”
“—spawn…”
Hao could feel his arm twitching inside Hanbin then. It jerked into a peristaltic warmth, responding to internal cues that pulsed outward like signals down a radial nerve. The sensation was perfect, so perfect, for the substrate moist and yielding, the current still, and the temperature ideal for broadcast. His reproductive arm began flexing, reaching for its conclusive purpose, and released movements as a reply to Hanbin’s clenching ridges, and two of his other arms reached the tubular structure of Hanbin, the flanks, curling gently around it to stabilize the spawning.
Hao began holding his waist, fingers fanned and firm with what Hanbin had begun to understand to likely be the reverence of a creature trying to secure its place during a critical phase of reproduction, Hanbin braced his own hands on Hao’s ribs, gritting his teeth.
“Gege— No, ngh— let me do this for you.”
As it turned out to be, Hao’s movement was deemed slow and ineffective. Hanbin, frustrated and breathless, leaned forward, intending to push Hao’s hands down, to take control of the pace himself. But the moment his palm grazed Hao’s wrist, something in Hao snapped like Hanbin had triggered a catastrophic biological fatality.
“Oh!” Hao gasped, almost delighted, almost grieving. “Oh no no no. That was my other arm. It severed! It fell off! Wait! It’s gone! Hanbin, what did you do?”
Hanbin’s body jerked in what felt like a climax-adjacent seizure, which supposedly it was, but it wasn’t, and underneath him, Hao let out another mournful, yet strangely content sound, like whatever happened inside him had resolved without needing Hanbin’s input at all.
“What? I’m sorry, I’m sorry— I’m just taking your hand off my waist,” Hanbin said, voice cracking somewhere between exasperation and apology, though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for anymore.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Hao whispered, so sweet with his uncanny calm. “I can regenerate. That’s just what happens to starfish.”
It was the way Hao was very certain with it, like it had always been true. It was true to starfish, of course, but that wasn’t the point. In Hanbin’s reality, Hao wasn’t one, and Hanbin finally understood that he didn’t have to make sense of it; he only had to accept that Hao had, completely, utterly, let go of the human world, and if Hao wasn’t going to flinch from being split apart, if he could regenerate, if his sanity was already adrift, then Hanbin, pinned between horror and arousal, would meet him there, and ruin him for it.
“Well, isn't that right?” Hanbin muttered, jaw clenched, sweat beading down the slope of his spine. “Then you won’t mind if I go a little rough. You can just grow it back, can’t you?”
If something had snapped in Hao before, then what shattered in Hanbin now was far more louder, redder, and raw. He slammed down on Hao’s cock hard enough to slap, again and again, until it was slick with the mix of everything leaking out of him. Hao, delirious and dreaming, moaned like something inside him had been uncoiled and reordered.
“When you dismember me,” he gasped. “Do it properly like this.”
Hanbin laughed, sharp, mean, aroused beyond sanity. “You’re fucking insane, Hao-ge.”
Hanbin thought that Hao was long past his sanity and sense, as if something had unlatched inside him and now all he could do was bear down. Hao wasn’t resisting. Hao wasn’t even there, not as a man anymore, only some twitching, open-bodied thing that begged to be filled and ruptured.
So Hanbin gave it to him, albeit rough but not hateful, just brute with the aspiration of someone trying to fuck a dream to death. If Hao wanted to spawn, then Hanbin would milk it out of him. He’d make that cock — if Hao wanted to call it a severed limb, then so be it — spasm, like a severed one, over and over again. He shifted his angle, forcing more of him down, riding the length like he was, too, a slick, shuddering pipe coral that had been built just to drag his starfish open.
“You want to be dismembered?” Hanbin gasped out, voice cracked. “Fine. Fall apart on me.”
Hao let out a sound like a song and sob twisted together, full of unbearable joy. “Yes. Yes. You’re rupturing so good. My arm’s twitching, my nerve ring— Fuck, Hanbin—”
Hanbin was panting now, twitching, like it was milking the delusion out of him. He slammed himself down, ass trembling from exertion, from the sick pleasure of playing host to something that thought it was laying eggs. “If you’re gonna spawn,” he ground out, voice nearly breaking. “Do it.”
Hao did. He seized beneath Hanbin in a trembling arc, spasmodic with ecstasy, his cock pulsing with thick release that spilled in long, hot spurts, each one a desperate broadcast into what Hanbin only understood now as a receiving chamber, an orifice-bearing surface perfectly evolved to house his gametes. In Hao’s vision, it bloomed outward into a soft tunnel of current, warm and still, like the inside of a siphon tube or some symbiotic reef conduit, where his broadcast could linger, suspended, until fertilization.
Hao could feel his coral clenched again. The entire structure shuddered above him, his ridge-bearing outcrop contracting in a sequence of waves, a full-body spasm that rippled inward toward the crevice where his gametes had settled. He felt the suction intensify, the inner walls of the nest flexing, and from the mouth of the coral came an eruption, a milky jet across his own dermis, over the underside of his ambulacral groove, landing in streaks across his axis like bright threads and beads cast on the spiky surface.
“Cycle complete,” Hao sighed.
The trance began loosening and slipping from his limbs, and his roughened epiderm was peeled away, replaced with something more tender and exposed. The language of humans returned to him in fragments, syllable by syllable, until he became aware, distantly, of the weight of Hanbin still collapsed atop him, the searing heat still locked between their bodies, and the bruised echo and ache of pleasure somewhere deep in his spine. He became aware, too, of his exhaustion, and that his body, though slacked and undone, had begun to feel human again.
And then, after a long beat, a huff of breath, and a sticky trickle of come leaking down the skin, Hao heard it: Hanbin’s voice, hoarse in irritation, rasped and faint, like the air had been punched out of his lungs.
“Zhang Hao, I’m never letting you watch PBS Nature again!”