Scene suggestion—anup and sourang 6 (Patreon)

Wow. There were lots of requests for more of Lunsdie and Ckkkrt. I certainly don't mind that, so here's the next scene.

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The twilight dimmed and Lunsdie felt a rumble in his empty stomach. “C’mon,” he said, beckoning the sourang with a wave of his span as he walked from the shop, “I’ll make us some dinner. The best thing about selling produce is that only the farmers have fresher.”

He washed his paws, then the produce, then the cutting board and knives, then his paws once more. Ckkkrt peeked over his shoulder as he worked and rested her head lightly against his neck. This time he barely cringed at all. “What do you like to eat?” he asked.

“Meat,” said Ckkkrt. “The rarer the better.”

With a grin, Lunsdie sliced open a wax-paper bundle and displayed an array of cold yellow cubes. “There ya go,” he said sardonically.

The sourang surprised him by plucking a chunk of raw meat from the paper and popping it in her mouth. “Well,” she said around the morsel as she chewed, “it is not so much that I prefer meat. It is that it helps me.”

“H-helps you?” he asked.

Ckkkrt rested her head back against his neck, chewing very slowly. “Yes, I can better adapt to this environment if I incorporate the DNA of native creatures into my own.”

“You absorb DNA into your genome?” he gasped. “Like how Collapse is hidden in our genes?”

“Yes, much like that,” she said. “It is a survival technique of sorts. “Though not to your benefit in the case of Collapse, you must admit that by changing your DNA, the virus did avoid extermination.”

“I suppose.” Lunsdie chopped some root vegetables and used the side of his knife to crush the fresh herbs. Then with a flick of the blade, he dumped the cutting board’s contents into a hot skillet. Oil in the bottom of the pan sizzled and the herb scented steam made his mouth water.

He became keenly aware of her eating raw meat and a shiver ran down the anup’s spine. “You…”—he swallowed and cleared his throat—“With all this incorporating DNA from the meat you eat stuff,” he whispered, “you wouldn’t ever eat a … person, would you?”

Ever so slowly, Ckkkrt slid her left paw beneath his armpit, her fingers sliding through his short fur until her outstretched paw covered the center of his chest. His heart pounded loud in his ears and he could feel her moving closer, her chest touching his back, then she slid her right paw beneath his other armpit, encircling him in her arms, trapping him from all routes of escape.

She nuzzled against his ear and he listened as she finally swallowed the raw morsel down. “You worry a lot, apprentice,” she whispered, her warm breath in his ear. “Besides, there are other ways to consume your DNA … without eating your flesh.”

Lunsdie’s eyes opened wide and a shiver of excitement ran through his loins at her tease.

Ckkkrt chittered with glee, leaning her face against his neck while she laughed. Eventually she sighed and rested her chin on his shoulder. “You are burning your vegetables, apprentice.”

“What?” he gasped, suddenly realizing that he’d been distracted from his cooking. He flipped the tubers with a spatula, relieved that they had browned only a little more than he had intended. “Heh. You had me going there for a moment, Ckkkrt.”

She said nothing, just held him close, purring contentedly.

“So, did you come to our planet alone?” he asked. “Did you bring a family with you? Pups? A mate?”

“No,” said the sourang. “I have neither.”

“Oh. I see.” Lunsdie sprinkled the meat with salt then scooped it into the skillet. He stared at the dirty paper lying on the countertop. He hated seeing it there and desperately wanted to dump it in the compost bucket but … he was really enjoying being held. Despite how the closeness made his heart race—or perhaps because of it—he didn’t want to pull away. His voice was quieter now. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I had a mate once,” she explained, her voice quiet too. “It did not last.”

“No?”

“It was educational,” explained Ckkkrt. “I learned that in every deal, you must always trade for what you want. You cannot trade a situation with the hope that you will get what you want in the future. That is not good business.”

Lunsdie turned his head slightly—enough that he could see her through the corner of his eye, but not enough to make her pull away. “Taking a mate is not a trade—”

“Every action you take is a trade,” she explained. “Even actions that do not cost you monetarily are still a tradeoff of something else you could have done, apprentice. Taking Rrrr as my mate meant not taking another male. That is the nature of life.”

“Rrrr?”

“Yes, a very appropriate name for one such as him,” she said. “I wish that I had realized how well at the time. He thought that the galaxy orbited about him.”

“I see.”

He didn’t really.

“I wanted to be loved,” said Ckkkrt, “and he wanted to win my love.”

Lunsdie pulled two plates from the cupboard and spooned the skillet’s contents between them. Finished cooking, he turned, and she loosened her grip enough for him to face her, her paws lightly gripping his hips.

She said nothing, so he felt compelled to speak. “But that sounds nice.”

“No, apprentice,” she said, “those are not compatible desires. Instead of understanding what he was seeking, I imagined his goals to be the same as my own. I wanted him to want the same thing, and that blinded me to reality.”

She ran her fingers up through his chest fur and his heart galloped a little quicker. “Once he had won my love, once he had accomplished what he wanted, he did not desire me any longer. He only wanted to win it from another.”

Lunsdie stared at her face for a long moment. She wasn’t ugly, per se, she just looked so very different than one of his own kind. Her muzzle was broader, fur thicker. When she spoke, he saw the orangey skin of her tongue and gums, unlike the yellow of his own people. Her ears were broader than his, but this most striking difference was in her eyes’ sclera. Anup irises were set within a light field of cream, but hers were dark—nearly the same shade as her irises—and only now that she stood so close could even tell where one stopped and the other began.

Before, when he thought she had eyes of one solid color, he found it unnerving but now not so much. Though the palette was different, he could still feel a connection to her, feel that she was a person like any other, with goals and wants and needs. He thought about how she had become just a “conquest” for her former mate, and it filled him with sadness.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, then without thinking about it, he did something he couldn’t remember ever having done before—he reached out and touched her chest with the tips of his fingers. Lunsdie didn’t even realize he had done it, and the sensation, the touch of soft fur sent a flurry of electrical signals up his arm and into his brain, flooding him with endorphins. “He lost out on that trade. He got what he wanted, but you had offered him so much more.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YZMB1p655wSDNtlLsz10Wh5dtaYNGJf-7N-jEhYCn6U/edit?usp=sharing

Not sure what I'll work on next. Could be more of Lunsdie or maybe I'll work on Max. It's hard to say. What do you think?