Falling (Patreon)

By the third week of October, Alderbeck Shaw had gone properly copper.

Forty-five minutes on the branch line out of The City — past the last terraces, past the allotments and the gasworks, into the soft crease of countryside where the signal drops and nobody can lecture you about anything — the Shaw lay folded over two hills and a beck, six hundred acres of beech and oak and silver birch all letting go of their leaves at once. The bracken had turned the colour of a fox's chest. The beech mast crunched underpaw like breakfast cereal. There were conkers on the path, fly agarics in the moss, jays screaming in the canopy, and somewhere always the sweet, boozy smell of windfall apples rotting in the grass.

Ash loved it out here more than was probably healthy for a third-year with deadlines.

He'd come on the early train with his rucksack and his sketchbook and a flask of tea gone slightly stewed, wearing his favourite flannel — rust and cream check, which he privately thought made his fur look tremendous — dark cord trousers and a pair of trainers that had seen better decades. He was a red fox of middling height and better-than-middling opinion of himself: lean through the hip, deep rust across the back, cream from chin to belly, black stockings to the paws, and a brush with a white tip he was vain about. His illustration tutor had set them an autumn project — decay and renewal, whatever that meant — and Ash had decided it meant toadstools, and toadstools meant the Shaw, and the Shaw meant a whole blessed weekday away from halls, away from his flatmate's dreadful music, away, if he was honest, from the longest dry spell of his young life.

Two wanks before his nine o'clock yesterday and he'd still been half-mast through the lecture. It was getting daft. He was twenty-two, in his prime, and the most action his sheath had seen in a month was his own paw in the dark while some lad three doors down had loud sex through the wall. Rude of him, frankly. At least share.

Focus, he told himself, crouching by a cluster of inkcaps, pencil scratching. Toadstools. Renewal. Get the grade.

But the light kept doing things — that low, honeyed, end-of-the-world gold that only happens in October, coming sideways through the beech trunks — and Ash's thoughts kept sliding where they always slid, and by midday he'd sketched four passable fungi, drunk all his tea, and climbed up onto the old bridleway along the ridge for no reason except that a fly agaric down the far slope, huge and scarlet and flawless, was begging to be drawn from above.

He framed it with his paws. Stepped back for a better angle.

The edge of the bridleway, undermined by weeks of rain and hidden under a drift of beech leaves, gave way with a soft, apologetic crump.

"Oh," said Ash, with great clarity, "bugger—"

And then he was tobogganing.

---

Three-quarters of an hour earlier and half a mile downhill, Bracken had been having a crisis of exactly the sort a lad shouldn't have at work.

He was the assistant warden of the Shaw, twenty-four years old, a red deer stag with a neat rack of six tines, shoulders like a gate and a permanent expression of someone apologising for taking up space. He had a hi-vis. He had a clipboard. He had a little gate cottage with a woodburner and a kettle and a bed he'd never once shared. He had, by any measure, sorted his life out beautifully.

He also had the rut.

It came every autumn and every autumn it was worse, and this year it had crept up on him like a tide until his whole body felt like a plucked string. His musk hung on him no matter how he washed. He'd catch his own scent on the wind — thick, green, animal — and have to stand still with his eyes shut. He'd swiped through the apps until his thumb ached and never once messaged anyone, because what do you even say, and the one time he'd gone to a bar in The City he'd nursed a pint for an hour, said approximately nine words to the barman, and gone home on the last train with his ears burning.

And so, on a Tuesday morning, on what was meant to be a routine check of the boundary fence, Bracken found himself standing under his favourite oak — the big one, fifty paces off the path, hidden by a flank of holly — with his heart going like a drum and his work trousers and his pants pushed down around his ankles.

This is mad, he thought, not for the first time. This is genuinely mad. Anyone could— there's a path, there's a stile, anyone could come over that stile—

Yes, said the rutting, reckless, utterly out-of-character part of his brain, the part that had been getting louder for a fortnight. Anyone could. That's rather the point, isn't it?

His cock was already out of its sheath and aching, twenty-odd centimetres of slim, tapering stag flushed a deep, furious red, pointed at the tip, slick from the first bead onward, curving up toward his belly fur with every throb. He braced one cloven hoof against the oak's roots, leaned his shoulder to the bark, wrapped his fist around himself, and groaned like a dying thing.

"Nnh— f-fuck—"

Just a quick one. Just to take the edge off. He'd be quick, he'd be quiet, he'd be fine. He let his eyes fall shut and his hips start to move, rutting into his own grip, tail giving stupid little flicks, the forbidden terror of it — the path, the stile, the anyone — pouring over him like warm oil. He imagined a stranger on the path. He imagined being seen. His balls drew up tight.

"Oh gods," he panted, "oh gods, oh—"

Something above him went crump.

Then: "Oh, bugger—"

Then a long, accelerating crashing of bracken, and a voice getting very loud very fast going "look out look out LOOK OUT—"

Bracken's eyes snapped open in time to see a ball of copper and cream and flannel burst out of the ferns at the top of the bank, rolling end over end in an explosion of leaves, gathering speed and volume and loose vegetation, directly at him.

It hit him at knee height.

They went down together like a felled tree — whump — into the leaf litter, Bracken's antlers clattering off a low oak branch, a hoof skidding, ankles hobbled stupidly by his own trousers, and they slid the last metre downslope in a tangle of limbs and tail and foliage and came to rest in the drift at the bottom with leaves still raining down on them, gentle as confetti.

Silence. A robin ticked disapprovingly from the holly.

Bracken lay flat on his back in the leaves with the wind knocked out of him, his rack tangled in a branch, his flannel rucked open, and his cock — gods, his cock, still out, still diamond-hard, bobbing against his belly in the open air of his own wood — and draped half across him, muzzle buried somewhere against his bare inner thigh, was a fox.

The fox stirred. Lifted his head. His nose, Bracken realised with the sort of horror that transcends death, was about four centimetres from the scene of the crime.

The fox looked at Bracken's cock. Looked up the long length of him, past his heaving chest, to his face. Blinked leaf-mould off his whiskers.

"…Hello," said the fox.

Bracken made a sound like a kettle swallowing a scream and scrambled backwards on elbows and hooves, snatching at his trousers, which had wound themselves round his ankles like bindweed and defeated him utterly. His ears were flat to his skull. His whole face was scorching under the fur. "I— this isn't— I'm not—" He got a hoof caught in his own trouser leg and nearly brained himself on the oak. "I don't— I don't normally do this kind of thing, I swear on— I'm the warden, I have a clipboard—"

"Steady," said the fox, sitting up, picking a beech leaf off his own ear with enormous dignity. "Steady on, mate. Mind the tines, you'll have my eye out."

"I'm so sorry," Bracken babbled, which made no sense, because he was the one who'd been assaulted by gravity's courier, "I'm so sorry, are you hurt, did I— are you hurt—"

"I'm grand," said the fox. "Bit of a tumble. Lovely soft landing." A pause. His eyes flicked down, and the corner of his muzzle curled. "Very soft."

Bracken finally got a paw over himself, too late, years too late, a whole lifetime too late. The blush was somewhere in his marrow now. "Please tell me you're concussed and hallucinating."

"Not even slightly." The fox stood, brushed leaves off his cords with two efficient sweeps, and extended a paw. Black pads, neat claws, easy grin. "Ash. I draw mushrooms and fall off hills."

Bracken stared at the paw like it might be a trap. Then he took it, because his mum had raised him properly even if the rut hadn't. "Bracken."

The fox — Ash — looked at him. Looked at the hillside they'd just demolished, a forty-metre swathe of crushed copper fern. Looked back. "Bracken. Like the fern."

"My mother had a sense of humour."

"I just rolled through half an acre of you. It's an honour, honestly."

And Bracken — still on the ground, still trouserless, cock still treacherously, enormously interested — laughed. It burst out of him before he could stop it, half a sob, and once it started it wouldn't quit, the sheer hysterical relief of it, until he was sitting in the leaf litter wheezing with his pants round his hooves and tears at the corners of his eyes, and the fox was laughing too, helpless, leaning on the oak.

"Oh gods," Bracken managed, wiping his eyes. "This is the single most embarrassing moment of my life. And I once fell through a fence in front of the whole ramblers' society."

"Then let me make it worse." Ash tilted his head, ears pricked, and looked at Bracken's lap with open, cheerful appreciation. "That's a gorgeous cock, mate. Honestly. Shame to waste it on a wank." He wagged once, slow, the white tip of his brush stirring the leaves. "Want a paw with it? Or shall I bugger off over the stile and pretend I saw nothing?"

Bracken's whole body went still. This was the moment. He could laugh it off, pull up his trousers, write it into the log book of his life as a very funny story he would tell absolutely no one, ever. He could be the warden again.

The rut said otherwise. The way Ash was looking at him — warm, unhurried, like he had all autumn — said otherwise.

"…Don't you dare bugger off," Bracken said, very quietly.

Ash's grin went soft at the edges. "Good lad."

---

He knelt down into the leaves between Bracken's hooves like he belonged there, and the first touch of his pads — warm, dry, slightly rough — wrapping around the stag's shaft pulled a sound out of Bracken that he'd never heard himself make before.

"Ohh— nnh— gods—"

"Sensitive?" Ash murmured, stroking slow, root to tip, watching the pointed head twitch and bead. His thumb-pad swept over the crown and smeared the slick down the length of it. "How long's it been, warden?"

"D-don't ask me that— ahh—" Bracken's head tipped back and clunked antlers against the oak. His hips had started moving on their own, tiny helpless bucks into the fox's grip. "It's— nnh— it's been a while—"

"A while." Ash worked him with a steady, unhurried twist that made Bracken's toes curl inside his boots. "You're leaking like a tap, mate. Look at you." And it was obscene, it was genuinely obscene — clear pre welling out of the slim tip in pulses, running down over Ash's knuckles, stringing off into the leaves. The smell of it, of rut musk and salt, rose off them both into the cold air. "Lean down here."

Bracken leaned down and the fox kissed him.

It was clumsy for half a second — muzzles at the wrong angle, the faint clack of teeth, an antler catching a twig — and then it wasn't clumsy at all. Ash kissed like he did everything, cheerfully and thoroughly, tongue sliding warm against Bracken's, tasting faintly of stewed tea, one paw still working Bracken's cock while the other slid up under the rucked flannel to splay pads across his chest fur. Bracken whimpered into his mouth, mmph— nng—, a great shuddering sound, and kissed back like a lad drowning.

Oh gods, Bracken thought wildly, I'm snogging a fox in the leaves with my trousers round my ankles on a Tuesday. Where has this lad BEEN all my life—

"Hah— hah— Ash—" he gasped, pulling back a centimetre, panting against the fox's whiskers. "If you keep— I'm going to— it's been a while, I told you—"

"Go on then?" Ash offered, speeding up, delighted.

"No— nnh—" Bracken caught his wrist, ears burning hotter. "I want—" He couldn't say it. The rut could, though. "I want more. Everything. I don't normally do this kind of thing but if you stop I will actually die, warden's honour—"

Ash laughed, low and warm, and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "Turn over. Hands and knees. Keep the trousers where they are — I like you hobbled."

---

But first, because he was Ash and he did things in his own order, he ducked his head and took Bracken's cock into his muzzle.

The stag's whole body snapped taut like a bowstring. "AHH— f-fuck— fuck— One hoof came up and braced against the oak root hard enough to strip bark. Ash took him to the root in one smooth, greedy slide — no fuss, no hesitation — and the heat and wet silk of it, the long drag of a fox's tongue along the underside, pulled a helpless, punched-out whine from Bracken's chest: "nngh— hhnn— oh gods, oh gods—"

Ash pulled off slow, lips dragging, a shining string of pre and spit bridging his muzzle and the twitching red tip. "You taste like the whole bloody forest," he said, hoarse and pleased. "Salt and woodsmoke and stag. I could live down here."

He's going to kill me, Bracken thought, staring down his own heaving chest at those green eyes. This is it. This is how I go. Found in the leaves. Coroner won't know where to look. "Please," was what came out of his mouth, cracked and wanting. "Ash— please—"

"Turn over, gorgeous."

Bracken turned over.

Kneeling in the leaf litter with his forearms braced on the fallen beech trunk that ran along the clearing — trousers and pants puddled round his ankles, one hoof still in a boot, rack dipped low, tail flagged straight up like a white flag of total surrender — Bracken presented the single most obscene sight the Shaw had ever hosted, and Ash took a moment just to look. The stag's pale rump patch, heart-shaped and cream, framing everything. The dark furred pucker beneath the tail, already flushed and twitching. His heavy balls. His cock hanging down, drooling a steady thread onto a copper leaf.

"Look at the state of you," Ash said softly, almost reverently, and sank his thumbs into the muscle of Bracken's haunches and spread him open.

"Don't say it, just— nnnGH—"

Ash licked him. One long flat stripe, pads of his tongue dragging over the ring, and Bracken's head flew up and cracked an antler against the log and he did not notice at all. "Ohh— ohh fuck—" The fox pressed in in earnest then — pointed tongue working the tight heat of him open, wet and filthy and patient, the slick little slk… slk… llp… of it loud in the cold air — and the taste rolled over his palate, earth and musk and the green animal reek of rut, and Ash groaned into him like it was a meal, mmph… nnh…, and the vibration of it made the stag's back legs shake.

"Hah— h-hah—" Bracken was panting open-mouthed at the log, drool and pre both stringing off him, ears pinned flat. "Nobody's ever— nnh— gods, your tongue— don't you dare stop—"

Ash pulled off just enough to speak, breath hot against wet fur. "You taste like you need it, stag. Need opening up. Need a knot." He pressed a thumb alongside his tongue, working the fluttering ring. "Is that what you were thinking about, out here with your pants down? Some lad finding you?"

"Yes—" Bracken sobbed it, no shame left in him, rutting back onto the fox's face, leaves scattering under his hooves. "Yes— fuck— I wanted to be caught, I wanted— ahh— ahh—" His cock pulsed and dumped a fresh ribbon of pre onto the litter. "Please— Ash— I'm ready, I'm so ready, please fuck me—"

Ash stood, wiped his muzzle with the back of his paw, and shoved his cords down.

His cock sprang free of its furred sheath — a good sixteen centimetres of tapered fox, angry red, veined, wet at the point, and at the base the knot already swelling, fat and flushed, nearly the size of a satsuma. He slicked himself with spit and his own leaking pre, lined up against that dark, kissed-open heat, and pressed the tip in.

They moaned at the same time — Ash a low "hnngh" through his teeth, Bracken a long cracking whine, "aahh— ahh— oh— oh gods—" — as the stag's body opened and took him, hot and clinging and impossibly tight, centimetre by sliding centimetre, until Ash's hips pressed flush against that cream rump and they were both shaking.

"Tight," Ash gritted, claws pricking into the flanks under the rucked flannel. "Fuck, Bracken— when did you last—"

"Years—" Bracken's voice had gone somewhere high and ruined. "And never— n-never out here, never like this— move, please, gods, move—"

Ash moved.

---

He fucked the stag over the fallen beech in long, deep, deliberate strokes, and the clearing filled with the sounds of it — the wet shlk… shlk… of him driving home, the fwap fwap fwap of his balls swinging against the stag's, Bracken's wrecked open moaning, "ah— ah— ahh— nnh— there— THERE—", antlers rattling against the log with every thrust, hooves gouging the humus. Copper leaves stuck to the sweat on their fur — to Bracken's heaving flanks, to Ash's forearms, plastered into the cream of the fox's chest where their bodies slapped together. Ash's brush whipped back and forth, gathering leaf litter, wagging like a metronome gone feral.

"That what you needed?" Ash panted, snapping his hips. "Hah— Some lad to fall out the sky and give you a seeing-to in your own wood?"

"Yes— fuck— yes—" Bracken's head hung between his shoulders, flannel rucked up to his armpits, mouth open, tongue lolling. Beneath him his cock swung heavy and untouched with every thrust, drooling constantly now — not spurting, just pouring, a steady glaze of pre roping off the pointed tip, spattering the leaves, his whole length twitching and flushed near purple. "Harder— nnh— I can take it— breed me—"

"Oh, you filthy— hah— gorgeous—" Ash reached under him and wrapped his pads around that slick hanging length and pumped in time, and Bracken's voice cracked clean in half. "THERE——"

Something was building in the stag that Ash could feel through his own cock — a deep, rhythmic fluttering, the clench-and-roll of a body climbing towards something enormous. Ash angled his thrusts, hunting, and knew by the way Bracken suddenly screamed into his own forearm — "NNGH— AH— AH—" — that he'd found the swollen spot inside and was hammering it.

It rolled over Bracken like weather.

It didn't crest once and finish. It rolled — a great slow wave of bliss that started somewhere deep behind the root of him and broke, and broke, and kept breaking, his whole body seizing and fluttering around Ash's cock in long milking pulses, ears pinned, eyes squeezed shut, a hoarse cracked "hhnnngh— hhah— oh— oh gods, it won't— it won't stop—" torn out of him as his back hooves scrabbled and his haunches jerked. And his cock — gripped snug in Ash's pumping paw — never spurted. It just drooled, helplessly, enormously, pre pouring out of him in a steady shining stream over the fox's fingers and down into the leaves, pulse after pulse after pulse, his balls drawn up hard and aching with everything they were holding back, his whole body wrung out and shaking and still the waves kept coming.

"That's it," Ash growled, fucking him through every rolling pulse, claws digging in. "Hah— good lad— let it take you— I've got you— and when you've finished shaking apart on me, I'm going to knot you—"

Bracken wailed. There was no other word for it.

Ash's thrusts went ragged, deep, frantic — the knot slapping against the stag's stretched ring, bigger every pass, fwap, fwap, FWAP — "Take it— nnh— take the knot, stag—" and he shoved home with everything he had.

The knot popped inside and locked.

Bracken's head flew back, antlers clattering off the oak, and the second crest hit him like the bridleway had hit the slope — all at once and from underneath — and this time his cock finally let go. "AAHH— AH— AHHH—" Jizz striped the fallen log, the leaves, his own chest fur, great thick ropes of stag spunk wrenched out of him with every brutal inward tug of the knot, spurt, spurt, spurt, his hole clamping in helpless spasms around the tie that held him impaled, hooves drumming, voice gone to a raw animal keen.

And Ash, tied deep and milked by every one of those spasms, folded over his back with a snarl, teeth finding the scruff of the stag's neck, and came.

"NnnGH— fuck— take it—" It pumped out of him in long scalding pulses, flooding that tight heat, nowhere to go, held in by the tie — "take my ink, take it— hah— gonna sire pups in you, stag— pump you full like a hind in season— leave you dripping fox for a week—" and Bracken, wrecked and drooling and still twitching through the last rolling aftershocks, moaned "yes— yes— fill me—" into the log and meant it, gods help him, every word.

They stayed locked like that — panting, steaming gently in the cold air, flannel ruined, fur full of leaves, the fox draped over the stag's back and the stag braced trembling against the log — while the robin in the holly looked on and judged them both.

"Ten minutes, usually," Ash said at some point, muffled, into Bracken's nape. "For the tie. Just so you know. We're… we're here a bit."

"I know," said Bracken faintly. "I read the pamphlet. In school. About foxes. It didn't mention this part."

"Bit better than the pamphlet, is it?"

"…Shut up."

But his tail was wagging.

---

The knot eased eventually, and they came apart with a wet sound and a shared groan, and collapsed into the bracken in a heap — the fox on his back, the stag sprawled half over him, both of them grinning like idiots at the canopy, spunk and pre and leaf-mould drying in their fur. A copper beech leaf was stuck to Bracken's ear. Ash had what appeared to be an entire small ecosystem in his tail.

"So," Ash said to the sky, idly picking a twig out of Bracken's tines. "The warden's cottage. Ten minutes' walk, you said? With a woodburner."

"And a kettle," Bracken said, shy again now, but not the same kind of shy. "And a bed. Which I should warn you has never once been—"

"Bracken." Ash rolled his head sideways and looked at him, green eyes warm. "Shut up and put the kettle on."

They walked back together along the ride, close enough that their shoulders knocked, Bracken's trousers finally pulled up though his flannel hung open and ruined, Ash limping very slightly and looking inordinately pleased about it. At the kissing gate by the path they stopped, and Bracken — blushing again, because apparently that was just his face now — ducked his rack and kissed the fox properly, slow, tasting of salt and leaf-mould and autumn.

"I really don't," he murmured against Ash's mouth, one more time, for the record. "Normally. Do this kind of thing."

"I know, mate," Ash said, stealing another kiss, grinning so hard his eyes shut. "I believe you. You haven't got the coordination for it. You were standing still and you still fell over."

"You fell into me."

"And what a landing." Ash laced their pads together and tugged him towards the cottage, towards the woodburner and the kettle and the bed, leaves crackling underpaw, the low gold light of October going long between the trees. "Come on, warden. Last train's in two hours, and I'm already planning to miss it."

He'd come to the Shaw for toadstools.

He'd fallen for a stag instead — literally, downhill, at speed — and as far as Ash was concerned, it was the best sketch he'd never drawn.