The birds were quiet among the trees, as if in deference to her debut upon this stage, but she needed no introduction—the rhythm of her footfalls on the forest floor were as familiar to me as the beating of my own quickening heart.
"I thought you left for the City," I said.
I tried to keep my tone calm and even, but I don't think I succeeded. They didn't do this. They didn't come back. Especially not so soon. It hadn't been more than an hour or two since I'd last saw her. I hadn't expected to see her again for years or decades. I wasn't prepared.
"I did," she confirmed. "I got all the way to the pearly gates. And then I turned around."
There was nothing for it. I wheeled to face her and there she was: Indigo, in all her subtle glory. Her skin had turned such a beautifully dark gray-blue and her hair—how had I not noticed that it'd grown a bit long for her taste, the tips of its brown curls dancing along her shoulders? I could have cut it for her before she left, but I guess we'd all been preoccupied in recent days. So many departures.
She'd picked out a loose one-piece jumpsuit, shorts and short-sleeves, in a soft salmon that suited her new complexion and frustratingly hid the results of her anthesis. However curious I was, it wasn't appropriate to ask—even for me. I wouldn't know until she showed me. I hoped she would.
"What about Wilhelmina?" I demanded. "I saw the look in her eyes. She's waiting for you."
Indigo smiled, grateful and wistful in equal measure.
"Wil is as patient as she is kind," she observed. "After everything I put her through, I'm sure she won't mind a bit of time to explore the City on her own. She'll be there when I follow, whenever that is. She told me as much and I trust her with everything I am."
I growled in spite of myself. Was that jealousy? I was supposed to be well past that failing. Who was I to lay claim on anyone?
"Isn't that even more reason to go to her as fast as you can?" I pressed. "There's nothing holding you back, now. You're no longer forbidden from that place."
Indigo chuckled at my apparent frustration and I realized with some glee that I'd woefully underestimated her resolve.
"I told you I'd come back for you, Cinnabar," she insisted. "I didn't know how long it would take, but then I realized that I didn't have to wait. I am here, now, and I am me, now, and I can go where I choose to be, just like you wanted me to do."
She was twisting my words. I hadn't meant to be self-serving. I was supposed to give to them. They weren't supposed to give back to me.
In my desperation, I turned mean.
"And what do you want from me, now that you're here?" I demanded. "One more roll in the meadow? A chance to see me on my knees again? Did you come here to make me beg?"
Indigo wasn't like that and I knew it. She'd demonstrated her values so many times over. But I'd let her into my heart and then I'd let her go. How dare she surprise me like this.
"Cin, no," Indigo scolded, putting her hands on her hips.
Her words were sharp enough to make it plain that if ever she'd seen herself as less than my equal, that was no longer the case. That should have relieved me, but instead it just made me feel helpless.
"You've spent the last five seasons avoiding my questions," she berated me. "You've refused to let me in. You've denied me any chance to really know you, no matter how hard I've tried. Tell me you want things to stay that way and I'll leave. I'll go to the Crystal City and find a new life there. I won't bother you by coming back again."
The look on my face must have told her how I felt about that, because her tone immediately softened.
"I don't think that's what you want," she said, voicing my private thoughts. "I think you're lonely and scared. I know what that's like. You helped me find my way through it. Let me return the favor."
I closed my eyes, searching for the words to stop what was happening, even though every part of me was screaming that I didn't want it to stop, that this was exactly what I'd wanted someone to say for so many centuries. Why did my dreams coming true feel so much like dying?
Was it her?
No. It was me.
"Song told me your secret," Indigo whispered.
Had she drawn closer while I wasn't looking? Could I feel her breath tickling my ears, or was that just my imagination? Maybe it was the wind.
"She let it slip the last time we were together," she explained. "I know you're not just one of the first haoma, you're the very first haoma, just like I'm the very last. You've been around for longer and seen more than any of us. I can only imagine the stories you could tell me, if you let yourself."
It was true. It connected us, whether or not it meant anything at all. Alpha and omega, first and last, the red cry of dawn and the blue roar of dusk.
I opened my eyes and let myself look at her, really look at her. I thought of all the lovers I'd taken across the better part of five hundred years. Was she really any different than any one of them? Would she cut me any less deeply than all the others who had left me behind?
Was any chance of failure reason enough not to try?
I sat cross-legged on the forest floor, letting my dress ride up and expose my burnished red knees. We were in the soma grove, in almost the exact place that I had welcomed her into this new world. There could be no better setting in which to let her in on the worlds that had come before her and we both knew it. She matched me, pose for pose, readily settling herself among the sticks and the dirt. Indigo felt no need to keep herself clean.
I wondered if she'd change her mind by the time I was finished.
"I give in," I said, at last. "I'll tell you my stories. But I can't start at the beginning. I have to start at the beginning of the end."
"Tell it your way," said Indigo. "However you want, however long it takes. I'm all yours, until the end and after."
I frowned. And then I smiled. And then I told her this.
////
The creature in my bed was a dream made flesh. She was nine years late and half a season early, but she was here and she was not the last: four other fruit ripened on the soma trees. I suppressed the feeling that kept creeping onto my face—too much hope was a dangerous thing.
Alpenglow broke through my lace curtains, pulling the bedroom out of blue night, up through lavender dawn and into golden morning. She stirred when the sunlight landed on her pillow. Today, for the first time, her eyes opened when the brightness beckoned.
She blinked at the ceiling, focus hazy but narrowing rapidly as it became obvious to her that the expanse above, however indistinct, was not one that she recognized. This place, however comfortable, was new and strange. This bed, however soft, was not her own.
"Hello," I said.
She followed my voice and found me in the corner, perched atop a tall chair. Confusion wrestled with fear for dominance over her reaction to a stranger as strange as me. I knew that my figure was uncomfortably imposing so I tried, as ever, not to loom, but I could not and did not want to hide. If she was going to see herself, she needed to see me first.
"Where am I?" she asked, voice dry and thin with disuse.
"There's water on the side table," I offered.
She reached over instinctively and her hand caught the sunlight. Her skin, like the rest of her, was richly green, like leaves in spring.
"What am I?" she rasped.
"The water, first," I insisted, as gently as I could.
She took the glass and drank deeply, sitting up a little and letting the covers fall halfway down her chest, just enough to expose her soft and indeterminate pectoral mounds, each crowned by a small, flat disk of slightly-darker flesh. All of her was green except her eyebrows and the hair atop her head, which was bright red-orange and, having had a week to grow, already pooled in waves. She made no effort to cover herself when she set down the glass and sat up higher in the bed, allowing the duvet to gather across her lap, freeing her generous stomach, which was round and full and entirely smooth, unmarked by either stretch lines or a belly button.
I'd poured water past those full lips, gently satisfying her unconscious thirst. They worked on their own, now, pursing and parting, catching stray droplets with a flick of her tongue. My heart ached with the delight of seeing her in motion and I made no effort not to stare.
"I dreamed that I died," she said. "Is this heaven?"
Oh, this one would be trouble.
"Not a dream," I corrected. "A memory. Your last memory from a time and place as long and far away from here as you are from what you were before. This isn't heaven, but neither is it Earth."
She looked down at herself and ran her hands across her skin, across the absence of her breasts and the presence of her belly, across all the parts of her that were the same as what she'd once known and all the parts of her that were so changed. Unapologetically, she reached below her stomach and across the delta of her legs. It was no surprise to me what she found there: all but nothing, a crease that hid a little pocket and, within it, only the palest echo of whatever she'd had there before.
"What am I?" she repeated, as she felt around herself.
"Not human," I said. "We are haoma: an echo of what we were before and altogether something more. Can you tell me your name?"
She creased her brow. I watched her search her own mind, grasping for fragments of who she had been. Even after all this time, I remembered that strange, wayward sensation, to be reborn as a memory of yourself.
"Muriel," she said, after a while. "That's all I can remember."
"That's enough," I said. "Don't try to remember more. You are the same in essence, even if your body is only similar. Trust in that, for now. Your memories will come and they will go but you will go on being you. It is my pleasure to meet you, Muriel. My name is Cinnabar."
I cursed myself for being so out of practice. After hundreds—thousands—of repetitions, I'd lost the flavor of this speech of mine. How did it usually go? I'd thought I would be ready by now, given this one's circumstances, but it turned out that a handful of days wasn't enough to shake off nearly ten years of rust.
"Cinnabar," she whispered, tasting my name in her mouth. "Why?"
"Why?" I repeated.
"Why am I alive again?" she clarified. "Why in this body? Why am I green?"
I had been right about her. These were the usual questions, the ones I'd come to expect, but in all the wrong order. Maybe it was good fortune, then, that she'd come before the others in her inflorescence—or perhaps it was bad luck that she'd have to face these early days alone.
"For that matter," she continued, "why are you red? Why are you huge? Also, where the fuck am I?"
There was no point in hiding anything from someone like this, but I had to give her a choice in the matter. She was in my care but I was not her master. No one was.
"Do you want the hard truth," I asked, "or the easy lies?"
"I had a lifetime of easy lies already," she sniffed. "Always give me the hard truth."
I didn't know her story, yet, but I knew a thousand others. I knew where we'd all come from, in one way or another. She deserved better than this—better than me—but I would do the best I could.
"Let us start with the softest truths," I suggested, "and we'll work our way up to hard. You are in my home—in my bedroom, in fact, on loan to you while you convalesce. Had yours been a regular rebirth, or as part of a regular cycle, you'd be staying in one the roundhouses in the Ashram proper, but for now you're stuck here, with me."
"The Ashram?" she queried.
"My home and yours, for a time," I said. "We stand east of the Crystal City, sole metropolis of the planet Greenhouse, our larger dwelling. We constructed this settlement several centuries ago with a mind to care for the newly-reborn outside the rigors of the City, though it has become a community in its own right."
"Can I see it?" asked Muriel.
"When you feel ready," I said. "You are not a prisoner. You are a treasured guest. But you are also unmoored from your body, your mind, and any passing context for your continued existence. This is not unique to you. It was the same when I was reborn, as it was for every other haoma. Let us be here for you. Let us make it easier for you than it was for us."
A dark cloud passed over her features, even though the sun still shone upon her face. I'd promised her the truth, even if that would make it less easy on her than I would hope for most sprouts. Something told me she wouldn't have it any other way.
"Haoma," I said, as much a prayer as a name. "We were engineered. We were liberated. We were abandoned. That is the short of it. This is the long."
I stepped down from my perch and crossed to the bedside. Normally, I'd have worn a sundress for these first encounters, but there was little that was normal about this meeting. I had the luxury of no protocol and the pleasure of staying in my own house, even if I'd given her my bed. Accordingly, I'd wrapped myself in one of my favorite satin robes, dyed saffron orange, tailored to my exact specifications, gathering but not clinging, holding but not hampering every part of me.
With her eyes on me, I unknotted the belt of my robe and let it slip to the floor.
Muriel gasped and her cheeks darkened, but she didn't look away. There were few living haoma who hadn't seen me similarly exposed, so I knew well the way her eyes would trail. They went down from my lips and across the swell of my tits, over the lithe but fleshy run of my tummy and further to latch and hold fast to my cock. I was not aroused in this moment, but every part of me was enormous nonetheless, so it was not a small movement when I took my cock in my hand and lifted it up to reveal the lips of my cunt underneath.
Much as her skin was vibrantly green, I was a deep, rich red all over, alike in hue by some cosmic coincidence to my namesake stone. My tone was only altered in my most sensitive places: the inner lips of my cunt, like the hooded head of my cock, were more vibrantly pink than the rest of me, while the circles of my areolae and nipples were darker and more brown. My hair, too, was different. Where it gathered in a thick tail behind my neck and in an unruly patch above my delta, it was pure white, paler even than the walls of this bedroom.
"Why do you," she asked, glancing down apprehensively at her own body, "when I—"
"Are you so certain?" I countered.
To punctuate this notion, I ran my hand hypnotically, sensuously up and down the length of my cock, just enough for it stiffen and swell a little more absurdly large than before, just enough to set the mood.
Like magic, her chest began to heave, nipples puffing up and mounds expanding out and down, inflating until they seemed about to overflow her small frame, pressing against the crest of her belly, full and juicy and wonderful. With a shudder, she threw off the remaining covers, spread her legs, and reached both her hands between them. She found her cunt waiting, its edges already slick with ichor.
Muriel gasped again and recoiled, drawing her hands up over her mouth, though her legs opened even wider as she did, giving me a clear view of the brownish folds that even now swelled and pulsed with sudden arousal.
"We were engineered," I repeated, "by entities long parted from us. They gave us bodies that were stronger, more resilient, and in all ways more desirable than human. We were given these forms for one reason only."
"Sex," she whispered from behind her hands.
"Just so," I agreed.
I realized with a mix of amusement and trepidation that, caught up in the moment and not at all according to plan, I hadn't stopped stroking myself and that my cock had by now stiffened more than a little. It stretched out at full hardness, monstrous in both length and girth, angrier-looking than I'd have liked, as it always was. The pinkish head parted its hood with every return of my hand, ichor sufficiently gathered that it started to drip down onto the bedsheets in long, sparkling strands.
"You're saying we were made for this," said Muriel.
I nodded, barely holding onto my veneer of calm.
"In that case," she continued, "is it wrong for me to want to touch you?"
"Not at all," I whispered.
I think she could hear my desperation bleeding through, because a playful smile danced along the corner of those full, luscious lips of her as she bent forward and crawled to me on hands and knees, mouth directly level with the head of my cock. Without a sound, she took me in, lips straining to fit around me, tongue lapping up my ichor.
I shivered head to toe when she drew back off of me.
"Your pre-cum tastes like caramel corn," she wondered aloud.
I resisted the urge to touch her, to bring her back to me. It was too soon and I did not yet know her desires or her limits. I stroked myself and tried to steady my breathing.
"In all ways more desirable," I repeated. "We all have our own flavor. Mine is sweet and salty. Yours—"
I trailed off, but she caught my meaning. She reached down and ran her fingers through her own cunt, coating her fingers with ichor in a spasm of sudden sensation before lifting them up to my lips. Given our comparative statures, I had to lean down to take in her fingertips, but I did so gladly.
"—pure sweetness, like candy," I finished.
"Really?" she gushed.
She drew her hand away from my mouth and ran it over her own cunt again, this time licking her own ichor off her fingers with a wicked smile.
"Ooh, you're right," she said. "Huh. I never liked the taste of cum before."
"Ichor," I corrected.
"What?" she asked, confused.
"We left the c-word behind when we stopped being human," I announced. "It is both distasteful and inaccurate. Your natural lubrication is ichor, your ejaculate is sap. You will find both flow freely and are enjoyed in kind, though not every haoma's offerings may be to your palate's liking."
She looked bemused by my sudden lecture. Had I been too harsh? I was trying to be calm, trying to be aloof, trying to be everything I was supposed to be, but it was so fucking hard. Normally, it didn't go this way. Normally, we talked more before I took my cock out. Normally, it hadn't been so fucking long.
It was too much to bear.
I lost control of my inhibitions and grasped the back of Muriel's head, roughly encouraging her mouth back onto my cock, unable to go any longer without her touch. I felt the muscles in her jaw strain as she took me back in, deeper than before, but she was a haoma: she was built for this. She groaned as she took me even further and the sound held no fear or sense of reproach, only immense satisfaction. With that affirmation, my lingering regrets vanished. I let myself be as I really was.
"Despite our engineers' intentions, every haoma was born free," I informed her. "Our liberators routed them at the cost of many lives while we were still in our arboreal wombs."
"Guh," she said as my cock hit the back of her throat.
"But then," I lamented, "we were left alone. The very humans who fought to free us were called away to other, more important wars. They never returned. We've neither seen sign nor heard tell of humans in the more than four centuries since."
I withdrew entirely from Muriel's mouth, letting her catch her breath. She was flushed and wild-eyed, looking both dazed and hungry. That was good, because I intended to feed her more. I lifted up my cock, flattening it against my stomach, and pulled her face deeper between my legs. Following my lead, she drove her tongue inside me even as her lips mashed against my outer labia. Her movements were clumsy and I had the sinking sensation that this was quite possibly the very first cunt she'd ever eaten out, not just in this lifetime but in her last, as well. All the same, she took to it like one starving, reaching into and around me with such enthusiasm that her technique didn't much matter at all.
For all my intention to mix education with pleasure, I found myself tongue-tied with her tongue inside me, so I set my focus instead on stroking myself to completion. Perhaps that would afford us a break in the action and allow me to tell her more of what she needed to know about what it meant to be a haoma.
Either because she felt the sap building from the inside or because I loosened my grip on the back of her head, Muriel sensed what was about to happen and ceased grinding against my cunt. She leaned back and looked up at me expectantly.
"I am going to climax," I informed her, stroking myself with both hands, now, faster and faster still. "Where do you want it?"
"My tits," she snarled. "Fuck me, but I love the feeling of cum on my tits."
She lifted one in each hand and pressed them together, making a little trough between her chest and her throat. It was an ostensibly large target, but we both underestimated the breadth and force of what was about to come.
I growled as sap raced out from my cock, flying forth in three, four, five hot gouts, each one arcing through the air and landing, more or less, on the span of Muriel's tits, though more of the fourth gout landed on her face than anywhere else and the fifth one mostly splattered across her thighs and belly.
Feeling a bit of a fool but also intent on making a full spectacle of myself, I held my still-hard cock against my stomach with one hand and dove down with the other, dragging my fingers inside myself in just the way I knew I liked, hooking up and twisting down and unlocking the reserves within.
A second spray of sap erupted from my cunt, this one a long and steady stream, showering Muriel in her entirety, scattering and mixing with the thicker cock-sap that already clung to her skin. I realized only once I stopped that I had been roaring like a jungle beast, as if exorcizing a demon by my sap's release.
That latter characterization wasn't entirely inaccurate, I would later reflect. I had been astonishingly lonely those past few years. Fresh sprouts meant fresh chances. An opportunity to do better, this time.
"Holy. Fucking. Shit," said Muriel, face dripping, chest heaving.
She looked like she'd been caught in a sudden hurricane and a small, selfish part of me was a proud of the mess I'd made. But there was more to discuss and those tits of hers, especially drenched in my sap, were far too much of a distraction.
I put a hand on her belly, squeezing and lifting her mass of lovely flesh, and darted another between her legs, jamming one thick finger straight into her cunt, as far as it would go. Knowing as little as I did about her or her past—and not particularly caring besides—I couldn't say what the breadth of her human experience was, but I could say from my own experience with humans that my fingers were thicker and longer than many human cocks. It wasn't a surprise, then, that she shrieked, her low voice jumping a full octave. Her false protest quickly dissolved into a throaty groan, punctuated by short gaps of silence every time my palm slammed into her clit.
Two thoughts contended in my mind. The first: I was pushing her too far, too fast, and this was all but certain to be consequentially overwhelming. The second: I ought to try pushing in a second finger.
Neither thought mattered, as it happened. Another moment thereafter her sap bubbled up and fountained out of every available space between her cunt and my hand, splashing up onto her belly, my forearm, and the increasingly-soggy bedsheet.
Muriel flopped back onto the bed, arms over her head, legs akimbo, skin slimy and glistening with our saps and the sweat of sudden exertion. I swayed on my feet until I relented to exhaustion, taking a seat on the bed beside her.
"Holy," she gasped again, "fucking shit!"
Inasmuch as my goal had been to clear our heads, it occurred to me only now that finger-fucking her senseless might have been counterproductive.
It sure had been fun, though.
"I'm hungry," said Muriel.
I chuckled and located the reserves of strength I needed in order to stand.
"I can do something about that," I said.
Circling around to the other side of the bed, I threw the curtains wide and opened the windows, leaving no barrier between Muriel and the morning sun. It set her aflame in splendor. She looked more green and alive than any living thing had right to be, especially one so pleasure-soaked.
"How is that supposed to—" Muriel began, but cut herself off as her body answered her own question. "Wait. No. You can't be serious."
"For so long as your skin is green," I said, "you will sup on sunlight. In time, you'll darken and you'll have to eat, though never so much as any human—a haoma's digestive system is far too efficient for that. We eat little and expel no waste but water."
"I see," she slurred.
Her eyes fluttered closed. Judging by the way her toes curled and her back stretched, she'd soon be back asleep. I couldn't blame her. It had been a very long time, but I could still faintly recall the feeling of that first embrace of the sun, like being wrapped in a warm blanket from the inside out. All haoma felt a closeness to the sun—it didn't burn our skin, for one thing, so we could enjoy its presence endlessly and without fear—but sprouts felt it more than the rest of us. Some part of me was sad that Muriel would likely be one of the last to ever experience these sensations afresh.
Even as her figure receded, her chest began to rise and fall in the cadence of slumber. Her tits withdrew and and left behind only those indistinct and soft mounds. Her cunt closed up into its crease and pocket. No doubt she would wonder upon waking where they had gone. I would explain it to her then. Perhaps we would encourage her into a different configuration.
It would defeat the purpose of the exercise to pull the covers over her—and, given her current luxury, deny her greater comfort in the act—but I made a mental note to return to her side in an hour or so, once she was likely to have had her fill. I wondered if she would hold it against me that I had been exposing her thusly every morning, ensuring that she wouldn't go hungry while her mind took its time in reentering the world. Would it thrill her that I had studied every bit of her body in the hours I'd spent watching her sleep naked in the sunlight? Would it offend her? I couldn't stand the thought of Muriel hating me, even having only just now learned her name.
A cup of tea, then, to calm the nerves. No harm would come to her in my bed.
I could step away for a little while.
////
A scream in the night caught me sleeping in my chair.
The fire I had set in the hearth had burned down to embers, which robbed my sitting room of its only light; the night was dreary and there was no moon and we were housed in the heart of the woods. No matter. I didn't need light to know the way to my own bed. I leapt to my feet and raced up the stairs, swinging the door open with a soft knock in the hope that I might not startle Muriel with either noise or silence.
"Cinnabar?" she cried out in the dark.
I moved to the beside and leaned in to twist a dial on the wall, just a couple of notches, dimly illuminating the room with amber light.
She lay on her side in the middle of the bed, knees pulled up, arms protectively over her head. When I had last checked on her this morning, she'd still been out cold, so I'd settled her comfortably and covered her over. Somehow in the night she'd flung the duvet and the pillows entirely off the bed, leaving her the only thing atop the sheets.
"I'm here," I whispered. "I'm here, Muriel."
She shivered and shook in a way that had nothing to do with pleasure. I could see beads of cold sweat spread out on across her skin, a poor replica of her earlier state of exertion. Night terrors were not entirely uncommon among new sprouts, when the memories of their past lives raged most strongly. That was one of many reasons we housed them together and encouraged them to intermingle. Few sprouts slept alone in their early days.
But Muriel was alone. I had left her that way.
I threw away any pretense of maintaining distance and climbed up onto the bed, curling my body around hers, pressing my tits into her back and wrapping my arms around her chest and belly. She was cold, yes, but I was abundantly warm.
Not for the first time, I considered that maybe I ought to have taken Kyo and Ekene up on their offer to house her—they wouldn't have had to face this situation alone—but it was too late now to do anything about that. Muriel would have to settle for me.
"I'm here," I repeated. "I'm here."
She pressed back into me, acknowledging my presence, and I felt her body begin to relax, if only a little. As she stretched out her legs and entwined her feet around my shins, she settled my cock between her thighs and ass, grinding against me with firm and steady pressure. It didn't seem intentional—not quite, anyway—but I couldn't help but respond.
"The dark," Muriel whispered, as she moved against me.
"It's not so dark, anymore," I said. "Open your eyes and you'll see."
Her body spasmed and she clutched at her head. There was nothing sensuous about that—it was pain, pure and simple—and I knew its source. Newly-reborn haoma retained vestiges of their past lives as humans, fragments of memories that pulled at the corners of their minds. In all but a few rare haoma, these memories faded entirely by the time of their anthesis, the point at which their bodies settled into a permanent configuration.
In the early days following their rebirth, however, a haoma's lingering memories could be frequent and distractive if not entirely disruptive. Worse, when a haoma possessed an abundance of memories that coalesced around a single potent subject, they had a tendency to all rise up at once whenever they were summoned by their reflection in the haoma's present context. We called that a memory attack.
I couldn't explain this to Muriel. Not right now. It wouldn't have helped, besides: the only way out was through. I coiled myself more tightly around her, steadying her body as the world fell away into a bottomless fog of dredged-up ghosts, unsettled by her brief time in the total dark.
However long it took was too long, so I didn't bother to count the seconds, but I realized with relief that she was coming out the other side when I felt her hands on my cock, sliding in-between her own legs to grasp onto me like a guardrail. She began to rock herself back and forth—clearly intentionally, this time—rubbing the length of me along her ass and between her hands.
"Muriel," I entreated, "you should open your eyes."
"He liked to lock me in the dark," she said, a reply that was not a reply. "I don't want to be alone in the dark. Can you help me?"
"Of course," I whispered, laying my lips on the back of her head in gentle affirmation.
She continued rubbing and I felt rather than saw her cunt open up, giving me new textures to rub through, an enveloping softness that quickly became slick and hot. I slipped one hand down over her stomach in search of her clit and found her cock instead. It was goodly long and intensely thick, enough so that smaller hands than mine might have had trouble encircling it. Muriel wriggled when I gripped her shaft in much the same way she gripped my own, confused by the sudden and novel sensation.
I jerked her cock as she rubbed mine, until she could tell that I could grow no more rigid than I was and I could tell that her cunt was fully primed with ichor. We shifted our bodies in one fluid motion, then, she sliding up and I sliding down until the head of my cock nestled between her inner lips.
"Are you—" I began to ask.
"Yes!" she urged, impatiently.
I pushed into her, forcing her cunt open with as much gentleness as I could muster without relenting. There was surprisingly little resistance for how excruciatingly tightly her cunt gripped my cock and I increased the strength of my grip on her cock to match, eliciting a little gurgling moan amidst the broader sucking in of air and holding of breath that accompanied my journey inside.
When I bottomed out, I took a silent, grateful moment to marvel at the engineered anatomy of haoma that made it possible for my cock to be so far up inside of her that it must have run the length of her belly. If someone could flatten us to two dimensions, I swore that the head my cock would be touching her nipples. That was assuming her tits were out. I'd have to let go of her cock to check, since my free hand was pinned beneath her body, and that wasn't about to happen, so I just smiled at the strange picture in my mind and began to move again, drawing myself out of her.
Given our respective lengths, I couldn't match time between my strokes, but I found a comfortable rhythm quickly enough: for every time I drove my cock all the way into her cunt, I stroked her cock three times from head to base. Her body undulated against mine, languidly adding force to my every movement as she moved in counterpoint. For all her participation, she remained all but silent until her mouth opened and loosed a wracking sob.
I rolled onto my back, pulling her atop me without letting go of her cock or letting my cock slip out of her. When I reached my freed hand up to touch her cheek, I found it drenched with tears. Damn my sex-blunted focus—how had I not noticed?
But Muriel wasn't done with me, yet. She planted her feet to either side of my knees and lifted herself up, taking control and riding me, her shoulders bolstered against my tits, her palms down on the bed to either side of me. I wiped away her tears, then took one of her tits in my hand—they were out, after all—squeezing its bulk and pinching her nipple in time with my strokes of her cock, which grew more rapid as she picked up the pace, bouncing higher with every fall until she nearly hurled herself free of me.
Her climax began as a low earthquake in her muscles and her arms and legs buckled under the sudden strain, dropping her onto me and leaving me to thrust my hips and bury myself the remaining half of the way. I stroked hard and deep along her cock as it began to quiver and then unleashed her sap, flying up into the air and down again onto her cock and belly in a lovely puddle. Just as soon as I could pump no more sap from her cock, I released my grip and took her ass in both hands instead, letting her tits flap freely as I pounded up into her, bringing forth not just my own climax but another of hers.
My sap burst into her very depths and she sobbed again, only this time the balance had clearly shifted from breathtaking sadness into overwhelming pleasure. I held myself inside her as my final few gouts spat forth and she fired back, a flood of sap drenching my cock from within her cunt, spilling out from her delta and over my own.
As soon as my head stopped spinning, I made to draw myself out of her. It was tricky to do, given the extent of her impalement, but was better done now than after her cunt began to withdraw—she was tight enough without shrinking down around me. I slipped out at last with a sloppy pop, flinging a trail of our mixed saps whichever way my cock tumbled. I attempted to set her back down on the bed, but Muriel moved faster than I could move her, spinning around to lie on top of me, stomach to stomach, her head propped on folded arms in the space beneath my tits. I parted my tits as much as I could to give myself a window in which to see her face.
Her eyes were puffy from crying, but they were open, and despite the tracks of tears down her face, she looked happy.
"I can make it brighter in here, if you would like," I offered.
She shook her head.
"This is enough," she said. "So: I can have a cock?"
Muriel had a penchant for non-sequiturs.
"You can," I agreed. "Or a cunt, or tits, or any combination of the three."
"Do I get to choose?" she asked.
"Not really," I admitted. "Not in a conscious way, at least. Your state of mind can affect your configuration, as can the configuration of your partners, but it's never one-to-one and hardly reproducible."
"What about yours?" she pressed. "Did you choose yours?"
I might have forgotten all but the most general features of what my life had been as a human, but I remembered every detail of the day my body had manifested for the very last time. It had been raining. Despite being the first-reborn of my inflorescence, I had been the last to settle into my permanent figure. I'd been hanging around Forward Base, while all but a few of the others had gone back to the Crystal City. I received word that the first of this year's crop had emerged from her pod and something in that moment had broken inside of me—the cage around my heart, perhaps. Instead of falling to pieces, I had fallen into place.
It was much too soon to tell Muriel any of that. It might never not be too soon.
"Not exactly," I said, a simpler substitution. "Our configurations are an honest reflection of ourselves. When the time comes, you will be as you want to be, once you accept what that is."
"Configurations, configurations," she said, toying with the word. "I bet you have names for all of them."
I think the disconcerted look on my face told her everything she needed to know.
"Muriel," I addressed her, "will you be okay staying in this room? The moon will be out in a few days, but it still gets particularly dark every night."
"Show me how to work that nightlight and I'll be fine," she insisted. "It's not so dark in here, anymore, as you said."
I replied wordlessly with a soft, reassuring smile. Reassuring to whom, I wondered. With this one, it was hard to be certain one way or the other.
"I know it's late," she said, "but I've been in bed all day and I'd like to stretch my legs—well, stretch my legs more. We already did a pretty good job of limbering me up. Are there clothes?"
I could barely keep up with her. She bounced from topic to topic faster than she'd bounced on my cock.
"We've had clothes made for you," I informed her. "The tailor dropped by your first set just this afternoon, after I let her know that you'd woken. More will follow. If I may, however, I'd recommend a shower or a bath before you get dressed. No sense in dirtying fresh clothes."
She looked down at herself, spattered in no fewer than four different saps, not to mention the tears. Most of it had already dried or been absorbed into her skin, but she still looked a mess, to put it mildly.
"You have a bath?" she squealed.
If I had known it was as simple as that, I'd have taken her to the bathroom first. I sat up, taking her with me, turning her over and cradling her in my arms, one arm behind her back and the other beneath her knees. One benefit of my size, not to mention a haoma's natural prodigious strength, was that I would always be strong enough to carry them, no matter what size or shape they were. Muriel curled an arm around my neck, more for comfort than support. I gingerly inched across the bed until I could stand up properly, feet on the floor.
She didn't say anything else, but she giggled as I carried her out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. When she saw that the bathtub on the other side was big enough for the both of us, she made another sound entirely.
I'd long forgotten that I was meant to be masking my pleasure.
"What are you smiling about?" she asked, playfully accusative.
Since she'd proven herself adroit at reading my facial expressions, I shot her a look that told her exactly what I had in mind—which seemed to be exactly what she'd hoping for.
It wasn't the whole truth, but she didn't need to know the deeper truths beneath my convenient facade of genuine excitement and arousal. She was just-reborn, facing a world of possibilities that would have seemed impossible in her previous life. There was enough for her to worry about without carrying my burdens, too. Heartache and doubt would mark her future, without question, but so too would companionship and love and all but boundless hope. Her arrival might mark the beginning of the end, but it was a beginning just the same.