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"I think it's a type of mold" I said as I inspected the residual smears of the substance on my thigh, not yet even close to ready to address the dark, smutty coat of the stuff on my two fingers and the entirety of my dick.

King began to try to rise to his feet, but found his legs were wobbling, and his tail would hurriedly tuck between his legs as he insisted "I need to step outside and purge this from my backside, give me a moment".

King would hobble to the door of the cabin, swinging it open and barely making it down the porch steps before I heard it, the telltale sound of a bottom's aftermath: a loud, wet, rippling, sound followed by a miserable groan from the man as he emptied the sins I had pumped into him out into our front yard. I peered out the window and watched, the "sodomic thing" I was, as he held himself with one hand on the front porch, squatting with his tail lifted as he emptied himself. He was lucky, having no food in his system made the process much easier for him than it was for most of us.

Eventually he would rejoin me inside and avoid all discussions about the things that had transpired in the front yard as he asked "mold?", approaching me to see my fingers and dick were indeed completely darkened with the substance, which I showed him rubbed away with some effort.

"It has the consistency of black house mold, and even has the same musty smell, but I don't feel like it's the same species" I would say, remarking "though I suppose a hot, damp climate like unused internal organs is a great place for a fungus to grow. Though your body is awfully warm, so i'm surprised to see just how well it's growing."

King was at my side as I stood there, inspecting the residue on my fingers, and I asked aloud "I wonder if it's in the rest of your digestive tract, or just your backside?"

"I suppose it could be the entire thing. It's never something i've been aware of, but I assume it came after my curse. Care to check?"

"Check? How?" I asked.

"Reach into me. You liked the back half so much." King would sink to his knees, opening his mouth wide. His muscular tongue hung out his mouth, flopped off the side, and I could see the back of his throat, organic, grey. It seemed, though, that at the very back of his throat, that there was a bit of black staining. I tentatively reached forward and into his mouth, my fingertips grazing at the back of his throat, pulling away and seeing them tinted black with the stuff. I wiped it away, as I did with the substance from his rectum, and sniffed it confirm it smelled the same. I knew then that I shouldn't be sniffing it, though, since it was certainly some type of fungus, but I loved him, and that's one of the strange things love makes you do.

"Do you have a gag reflex?" I asked. He shook his head.

"Okay then," I continued, "hold still."

With that, I wiped my fingers on my thigh to clean them of most of the substance, then pressed my hand to the back of his throat. It was more narrow than my hand, and I had to curl my fingers a bit to allow my hand to dip down into his neck, warm, slimy like his bowels had been. He didn't flinch, so I kept progressing. I could feel his esophagus was tight, opening up around my invading hand, then my arm, slippery but clinging close to it as I eased myself down to the elbow inside his throat.

"You feel...so normal. It's kinda weird, knowing the state you're in. Guess there's no reason why the insides would'a changed just because of a curse..." I murmured to myself as I adjusted his head and straightened my arm, giving him a fair warning before I pushed further, My elbow would pop past the ring of his throat, and down into his throat it went. The sphincter at the back of his throat had given me little trouble, since he didn't have much of a gag reflex, but as I reached into his body I found the lower sphincter was sealed much tighter. I could feel it, though, and I could tell that i was almost to his stomach. I had about six more inches of arm left before my shoulder would be in his mouth, though, and he was still sitting completely still. His breathing was calm, I could tell by how his lungs were expanding and compressing my arm a bit.

"Funny you can take this so easily but you got so messy taking it up the ass..." I remarked, warning him once more to hold still, as I was about to breach the stomach. My fingers applied pressure, and I could feel the sphincter open. The heat that surged from the organ onto my fingers was intense, definitely the most intense I'd felt from him. It seemed to be the core of his warmth, and it was actually fairly uncomfortable, something from which I instinctively wanted to pull away.

"Hold still, this is gonna be quick." I said, and with one good push I gaped open his stomach sphincter and crammed my hand inside. It was painfully hot, and wet, and highly textured. Despite the way he could regurgitate food without digesting it, he certainly had some sort of liquid in his stomach, as well as a strange bit of texture that felt like solid objects of sort.

This, unlike the prior organ exploration, prompted an intense reaction from King, who would reel back and yank his body away from mine, retching. As he did, though, my hands would catch some of that solid in his stomach and pull it upward, out of his body. He began to cough and hack, stumbling to his feet and staggering once more outside, this time producing nothing from his mouth as he had his backside earlier. He did heave, though, and eventually would spit up some bile I assumed had been pulled up as he spit me out of his throat.

I went to greet him outside, to check on him, but also to get a good look at my arm in the light of the setting sun. It was there that I would behold the sight of it all. My arm, from my bicep to my wrist, was coated in that wet, blackened moldy substance. It was matte, speckled, thick in places and only streaked in others. My hand, though, had something much different on it. It was a greenish-grey sludge, somewhat chalky in texture but clearly suspended in slime, and the solid that I had pulled from his stomach was still in the hook of my fingers. I inspected it and found it to be a solid fungus, light, like a solidified piece of the powdery mold that eats old fruit. I would hold it in my hands for a moment as the reality sank in that the specimens in his body could've indeed not been the best to be covered in, and as King composed himself I'd head to the nearby creek to rinse it all off in the water.

King followed me, asking "what did you find inside me?"

As I washed in the creek, it all scrubbed off easily, even the slimier substance on my hand. I washed my dick as well and relieved myself, just for good measure, though I was sure how long it had been on me probably was going to give me some sort of symptoms, if anything.

"You're full of the stuff. It starts at your throat and goes all the way down to your stomach, which is full of something different but definitely similar. I think it's all mold, King."

"Do you think perhaps that's what gives my saliva the numbing effect it has?" he asked. I shrugged.

"Maybe. Didn't numb me, though, I feel fine. Even my hand feels fine." I said. I didn't tell him about the solid piece I found in his stomach. I assumed this was all a result of his curse, his body filling with another living substance since it didn't seem to have the same immune system it had had when he was fully living. I didn't want to risk upsetting him.

"Perhaps it has to be in an open wound. We should inspect this further." he insisted as he stood next to me.

"Tomorrow, then, we'll get to working on it. It's getting late, I'm tired" I said, preparing to leave as King stopped me, grabbing me by the wrist as he'd done before, as I'd told him repeatedly not to do.

"No, let's investigate now. We can sleep at any point" He protested.

"STOP grabbing me like that. I've said it so many times already." I tugged my wrist away from him, snatching it back. "We'll experiment with it tomorrow when it's daylight out and we can see. We won't even be able to tell what's going on tonight" I said, already heading back towards the cabin. I had no intention of having a repeat of the cave, being grabbed and held and forced to cooperate with his strange needs to learn things right in the exact moment he wanted to do so. King would follow, fussing at me.

"You are being purposefully difficult again. Why is that?"

"I'm not, I'm tired and we'll have no light. You wanna sit in the pitch black guessing about what my arm looks like?"

"It would not be that difficult, especially if we had gotten right to it. I don't understand why you act like this so often."

I turned back to King, but kept walking, making sure not to stop and give him an opportunity to grab my wrist again.

"No, I don't act like this 'so often', King. You decide you want something, and you get pushy. You grab me, you get demanding, I'm not putting up with it tonight. I'm tired, i'm not ruining my good night staying up too late and getting chewed on. We'll do it tomorrow."

"Maybe I want to do it now, though. Why don't I get to do what I want to do?" he asked. That stopped me. I turned around, facing King, and raised a finger to point at him angrily.

"King, YOU get to do anything and everything you want to do! You get to bite me when you want, we do all the weird things you want to do, you've nearly gotten me killed GUESSING that some weird snake would grant me wisdom, wisdom YOU wanted me to have. So much of what we do is what YOU want, to the point where YOU offered me a peaceful night where we we get to do what I want because you know how much you've put me through lately!"

At this point I was yelling, fully yelling, and my pointed finger was jabbing in the air at him as he stood there, staring at me.

"I wanted our first night in our new home to be magical, special, PEACEFUL if nothing else, but OF COURSE. Of COURSE you have to try to boss me around because the day ended without you getting to do what you wanted to do! Of COURSE, King!"

King would cross his arms and rise up a bit, stiffening up his posture as if he wanted to assert some sort of dominance over me. I could see the fur on his shoulders was bristled. He was upset.

"I put days of work into preparing our home and gave you the night you wanted, and this is how you act," he'd say, punctuating it with "spoiled, as always."

"You SAID you did those things in return for how hard you'd pushed me lately! But now, suddenly, you did them with the intention of getting MORE out of me? So was it being fucking kind to your partner or was it just to hold as leverage for more of your indulgences? Who between us is spoiled, King?"

"You think i'm spoiled?" he asked.

"Yeah! I kinda think you are!" I barked. "You want WHAT you want WHEN you want it, and apparently you only are kind with the intention that it can get you something later on! What would you call that BUT spoiled, King? You're SPOILED. You're spoiled and you're a fucking ASSHOLE when you don't get your way."

King shook his shoulders a bit, as if he was trying to stretch out a bit of tension that was building in his body. He walked past me, and I tensed up expecting him to grab me, but he didn't. Rather, he passed me, heading toward the house as he remarked "Between that and your talk of hating me not long ago, I'm honestly not sure why I prepared us a home at all."

He didn't stop. He walked back toward the cabin, swinging open the door and walking inside, leaving it creaking itself shut eventually. I could hear it in the distance, our new home was much closer to the creek than the last one was. I stood there in the dusk, in the chilling air, and took in what King had said. I was so unbelievably angry at his attitude, at his pushiness, at how quickly he was to call me spoiled, but something in the pit of my stomach felt strangely wrong, strangely guilty. I felt terrible I'd told him I hated him, and I felt even worse finding out that he'd held onto it. I was sure it only made tonight's argument worse.

I took a while to walk around the yard of the cabin, breathing out the tension I'd built up in my body. As the adrenaline began to fade, the guilt filled the spaces it left behind. I felt terrible for yelling at King, even if I had been angry. I wanted him to know how I felt about everything, but I didn't want him to think I hated him. I just didn't understand him.

I made my way to the house and crept inside, pulling the door shut behind me. King was laying on the bed, I could see his shape in the moonlight coming in through the windows. There were locks on the window, and a deadbolt on the door, but I'd grown so accustomed to sleeping with no sense of protection that I felt no desire to lock them. I knew, or hoped at least, that King would keep me safe if anything happened. He was so still, though, I could see him breathing as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness. I approached the bed and whispered his name, and he responded with a whispered "yes" in return. It sounded hollow.

"I love you" I said as I crawled into bed with him. He was on his side, and I spooned up behind him, wrapping my arms around him after pulling the blankets up over us. His body was so warm, so soft. We'd cuddled plenty in our older shelters, but sharing a bed together felt entirely different. I really felt like we were in a relationship, like he was my partner. I wrapped my arms around his torso and hugged him tight, whispering again that I loved him. He didn't reply. Still, I held to him, and eventually we were asleep, our first night in our new home together.

---

We slept in. I awoke first, still holding tightly to him. We were in the same position as we were when we'd fallen asleep. I gave him a kiss on the back of the neck, slinking out of bed and out the front door to have my morning piss and get some water from the creek. I returned to find him still asleep, which was unusual for him. He almost always awoke when I did, waking after I started moving around if nothing else. He must've been tired. I decided to let him sleep, and instead went to find a pike and hunt us some breakfast. I went about the morning as King slept in, spearing a fish and roasting it over the fire, and as I was turning them over the fire I'd started I would find King at the doorframe, looking down to me from the porch.

"What're you doing?" he asked.

"Making breakfast. Good morning."

"Good morning." he said as he approached, standing by the fireside with me.

"I figured I needed to get my strength up for the experiments we were gonna do today."

"You're still planning on that?" he asked.

"Of course."

Breakfast was had, and afterwards we went for a morning walk together. Conversation was tense, awkward. King was still very obviously upset with me, and though I felt guilty I didn't know how to bring it up. I decided I would apologize when we were in the middle of the mold experiments, which I was admittedly a bit nervous about. We knew his saliva had a numbing agent to it, and something in his throat had a wound sealing property, but we didn't actually know what it would be like applying his substances to open wounds. I had already agreed, though, and now I felt even more obligated to let him experiment with me due to how I had acted the night before.

Eventually, we got back to the porch, and we both sat on the wood with our feet hanging over the edge.

"Wanna test those substances out now?" I asked.

"I suppose."

"Well," I began, beckoning for him to look at me, "we'll start with the throat substance, the black stuff. We'll test that out, and afterward we'll see if we can't get a good sample from your stomach again. Is that okay?"

"Yes" he would say rather flatly as he opened his mouth for me again. I reached forward once more, and swiped my four main fingers against the inside of his throat, scooping up quite a bit of the residue onto my fingers.

"If you bite, the numbing's probably going to set in pretty quick, it's in your spit, so we need to find another way to draw blood."

"Good point," King would say, tapping his chin with his fingertip, "bite yourself."

"What!?"

"You have to bite yourself. We'll only be able to see natural results if you do it yourself."

I stood there, thinking about my options. There was no way I had the guts to bite myself until I bled, let alone enough to bite myself wide open. If I had something sharp, that would be easier. I had the knife, but I didn't want King to know I'd grabbed it or he'd be upset.

"Give me a minute, i'm gonna check the house for something to use" I said as I excused myself back into the cabin, looking around for something to use. I was already starting to regret this idea, as it was looking progressively more and more like I was going to be hurt a lot more severely than I'd expected. I'd agreed, though, and I felt I had to commit to it to make up for how last night went. Searching around the place yielded little result, though. The bookshelf was really the only thing other than furniture in the cabin. I even checked upstairs in the loft, which had a lovely window with a view of King sitting completely still on his knees in the yard but nothing else of note.

Heading back downstairs, I looked around for a while before I came across a poker for the fireplace, a classic, iron poker with a rather sharp point. I brought it out to the yard and King turned to look at me, remarking "oh, that's perfect".

"Yeah, if I wanted tetanus. It's all we've got, though." I said as I handed it to him.

"Hold the tip in the palm of your hand, so it only punctures an inch or so. Do it quick." I said as I took a seat, sitting sideways with my thigh presented to him. King gave me no warning, and as soon as my body was seated in place he thrust the spire downward and stabbed into my thigh. I cried out suddenly, craning my head away to avoid seeing the blood. I could feel it, though, searing pain, and the warmth beginning to run down my leg. It took me a minute to regain my composure before I could face the wound, finally looking down to see it was bleeding moderately, as expected. My hand was trembling as I applied the strange, black substance from his throat, and almost instantly the pain would numb. It still continued to bleed, but even as it oozed, I couldn't feel a thing.

"It's numb," I'd inform him, and he nodded knowingly, as if he'd expected it.

"Strange that it only numbs wounds, though. My mouth's never been numbed by it." I wondered aloud.

"Perhaps it reacts with blood", King would guess, which made as much sense to me as any of it could. He leaned down and licked the wound, sucking on it for a while as I sat there looking around at the greenery in our immediate area. It wasn't bad, now that it was numb. After a few minutes, though, he hocked loudly, dredging up the slime from his throat and spitting it onto my wound, which would stop the bleeding and cause it to begin to seal. I had never seen it in person, he'd only ever bitten my neck before now. I watched as that mucusy spit seeped into my wound and it began to heal, clotting, scabbing, and forming a strange seal on the surface of the wound that resembled a pale, grey-red scab. Normally, I would've been unconscious at this point, so getting to see what my body had been doing was fascinating.

"Now, for the stomach." King said, opening his maw. I reached...hesitantly into him, as he was salivating quite a bit now. There was a little part of me that was worried he'd get excited by how he'd just gotten a bit of blood and he'd just bite my arm clean off my body. I reached down though, into the gurgling and bubbling throat of my partner, until I found his stomach sphincter. One quick move, I was going to probe his stomach. I pressed at the opening until I felt it relax, then thrust forward. He hissed out his nose, and my hand was barely able to hook his stomach before it was regurgitated. slathered in that throat slime and black mold, my hand coated in that greenish-grey sludge, pieces of that solid mold in the curl of my fingers. It was much grosser to look at in the daylight, like vomited up chalk and stomach acid. King looked at it as he gagged and coughed, asking "is that what it was like last night, too?"

"Yeah. Looks worse in the daylight, but I guess nothin' pulled outta someone's stomach is gonna look great. Let's get this over with, though."

King agreed, and I presented my thigh again. He was immediate with it, stabbing a second wound close to where the first one had already scabbed. My eyes welled up with tears, though I didn't cry out that time. It bled, just as the last one did, but this time I would slather it in the slime from his stomach, as well as press several of the pieces of solid fungus into the wound. It was a sickly thing to behold, and I felt my own insides turning with nausea as I watched myself wedge the solid fungus into the open puncture in my thighs.

Much to my surprise, though, and even to King's, something different happened, something more immediate than the last. Rather than scabbing over, the wound closed. It closed fully. After a wiping away of blood, we would both inspect the spot to find that there was no sense of puncture at all. It was as if I had never been stabbed at all, the skin taut and the meat underneath clearly still solid, painless. King stared at it as intently as I did, the both of us eventually looking to each other at almost the same time.

"Regenerative properties" he finally said.

"Yeah, I guess so." I replied.

"Perhaps we should try it with something a bit more intense, to see how much it can restore."

"Like what?" I asked, already hating where this was going.

"I am going to go find a feral and test it myself. I will feed off of you, and then you will stay here and rest. Before that, though, I need to you to extract a bit more of the solid pieces from my stomach."

He opened his mouth and I cooperated. Though he hacked and his body lurched, he handled it a bit better this time. I was able to collect quite a bit of substance from his stomach, handing it over to him before he laid me down and we went about the rituals as usual. I was bitten open, drained, and carried to the cabin bed to rest. By this point, despite the momentary agony and the proceeding fatigue, I had grown to practically see it as a chore at this point, as a wifely duty to my wild husband. King left to go out on his own and I laid in bed, sleeping for hours, waking up in the afternoon and staring at the ceiling wondering what I was going to do while I waited for him to return.

I found his book, his old tome, and I took rest on my belly on the bed, flipping through the pages for something to use as a base to begin translating. As I read it, eventually I took note that there weren't that many symbols--somewhere between twenty and thirty, to be exact. I wondered, as I flipped pages, if the characters indeed correlated to the English alphabet. I was just looking for something, at this point, that I recognized to use as a means of starting a translation. The tome was rather large, and had many many words in it with very few pictures, so it was hard for me to even figure out where to start.

I spent a good few hours looking at it before I grew fatigued, setting the tome aside for a while and deciding to go for a walk alone. The sun had set, it was night out, and King wasn't home. It didn't concern me, I knew he was fine. It had taken me days to catch a deer, and I fully expected it to take him a while as well. Though I wondered, as I wandered, what his goals were in his experiments. I suppose it was something incredible, the regenerative fungus in his stomach, but he was the only creature which contained, that we currently knew of, at least. I doubted I could harbor it in my own body, since I was still fully alive. As it stood, all we could do was pull it from his own body and use it in small doses, unless we found a successful way in which to grow it outside his stomach. But, what did he even want to do with it? He hardly seemed the type to be selfless and want to use it for the good of someone else.

It eventually was time for bed, and King wasn't home. I got ready just the same, and eventually was fast asleep curled up in the covers, alone. It took me very little effort to fall asleep, and it took equally as little effort to wake me, hours later, when I heard his voice call "Nico" from outside. I rubbed my eyes and took my time rising from the bed, eventually being summoned with a second "Nico!" as I sleepily exited the cabin to see King standing in the yard, just in front of the porch, with two animals in his hands. In his right hand was a dead raccoon, missing two of it's legs, and in his left hand was a fox, very much alive and fully intact, from what I could see. I rubbed my eyes again and asked "King, what's going on?"

"It can regenerate, so long as there is bone on which to grow. It cannot regenerate if the limb is removed entirely. Come, see."

I took a few steps past the door frame and looked suspiciously to King, who was breathing surprisingly heavy. I could see his chest swelling and sinking, his shoulders rising and falling with his excitement.

"King, what did you do?" I asked as I stepped out into the night. He would throw the raccoon at me, the corpse thumping against the porch floor as I looked down at it. The fox in his other hand was screaming. He had it by the scruff of the neck as it thrashed about, and I looked down at the raccoon to see both of it's front legs had been removed entirely, the stumps bloody.

"When the flesh is removed, the fungus can be used to restore the flesh, even muscle. But if the limb is removed entirely, it will not work. I want to understand, though, what else it can do. I feel that it has more potential to it. I feel certain."

I stepped over the raccoon and down the stairs, approaching King slowly as I spoke to him.

"King, please. Let the fox go. It's scared."

"It will be fine. Watch. Watch how incredible this is."

"King, let him--"

"WATCH."

He yelled at me, and I would take a step back as he held the fox up, it's poor body struggling in the moonlight. King closed the distance between as he held the fox up to show me. He would spit into his free hand, the fungus having been chewed into a paste in his mouth. He then grabbed one of the fox's thrashing limbs in his mouth, and bit down. The animal screamed out, and as King bit down he would yank his head sideways and rend the muscle and flesh clear off the arm, from it's elbow down to it's wrist. The poor beast began to bleed terribly, as it cried, as it cried horribly and the skin and muscle hung like curtain off it's bare bones. The blood was spurting, and King would shout "WATCH" to me as he licked up some of the past onto his tongue, lifting it to the bleeding limb and lapping at the base, where the bleeding was most intense.

His tongue dragged downward, to the wrist, and within seconds, I could see something changing. Tendons and muscle were crawling from the wounds like worms reaching up and down the limb, connecting in the middle as they began to weave together. Veins followed, connecting and then darkening to a deep red as they filled with healthy, lively blood. The creature was still thrashing about, and I understood why. I knew what terror he was feeling. On top of the muscle grew skin, like sand appearing on the shore as the water is pulled into a storm. It sprouted fur, and within not even a minute the beast's limb looked as if it had never been harmed.

"SEE? SEE THIS?" King was yelling now, in a way I had never heard him before. He shook the fox like it was an object, and the beast continued to squeal and struggle as I yelled back at him.

"I SEE, KING. I SEE IT. Let it go!" I insisted, but King would take a step closer to me now and yell over top of me. He wasn't even five feet away from me now.

"NO. WATCH. Watch the limitations in action!"

"NO. NO I understand! Don't hurt i--"

"SHUT YOUR MOUTH" King snarled at me, snatching the fox's other limb up in his mouth and biting down on it. This time I heard crunching, horrible crunching, as he snapped the bones clean off and ripped the limb from the beast's body, consuming it before my eyes. The fox's eyes were peeled back in panic, it's mouth frothy and wet as it hyperventilated and screamed, it's stump gushing blood before King would slap his wet palm against the stump, slathering it in the remaining mold paste. The wound would close, indeed, but it remained a stump. The fox did not relax at all, unexpectedly, and King would shake it in my face now as he barked "WHY? WHY DOES IT REQUIRE BONE?"

At this point, I snapped, stepping toward King and shoving him with both my hands. He would stagger back a bit before his hand would lunge at me, smacking my forehead as he grabbed my head entirely in his hand, holding me still as he bellowed at me.

"YOU spear fish EVERY DAY. You kill! You kill freely for your own benefit! You kill them yourself or your SNIVELING KIND purchases them dead, killed by the hands of another! Life is violence, Nico! Life is nothing without death, without blood! You weep for this creature but did you weep for the fish you impaled this morning? Was that different, because it did not scream? Hypocrite!"

"It's different because you're being fucking SADISTIC" I would yell back at him, about to speak again before he would yell over me once more.

"I am only trying to LEARN! Whelp that you are, you're satisfied with nothing in your head! You're satisfied with love and the ability to catch your own fish and you think all your problems are solved! You know nothing of the world or who you are, or what power you have! I want to LEARN what I am!"

His hand would thrust suddenly, shoving me backwards off my balance as I fell into the porch stairs. He threw the fox at me, and I would grab hold of it as it hit me, holding it close to me as it continued to struggle and scream. I didn't know what to say in return. What separated fox from fish? What about the screaming made me hurt for him in the way I hadn't hurt for the creatures I myself had gored the morning before?

"You think constantly with your heart, Nico. You whimper and cry and fear the world. You are afraid of hurting something, but that is what the world is. The world is hurting others."

"Not always" I said back without an ounce of strength in me.

"You know it is. You know you would be dead if we had not killed in these woods. You know you could not subsist on berries and roots, and even then, something would starve for your own selfish consumption. We are all killers."

"But..."

"But! I have something inside me that brings LIFE. I have something inside of me that restores what was gone! What if that could be harnessed? We may learn to control it and we may be able to be able to do something incredible. Perhaps that's what I needed, all along, was you."

"What?"

"If I didn't have you, if you had never summoned me, if your perversions and hedonistic desires didn't compel you to explore my body, I would have never learned there was something deep inside me that could restore life itself. We must've been fated to meet, Nico."

"King, I--"

"And that! That is why we will marry. We will marry because the universe has aligned us for a purpose. We are fated, this is proof of it, and this is why I love you."

"You love me?" I asked.

"I do. I love you. I wouldn't even be alive if it weren't for you, and if it weren't for you I wouldn't know what was inside me. I would be collecting dust in the woods, alone, abandoned. You have given me everything I could have ever asked for, my entire life is thanks to you. How could I not love you?"

I had taken a step back, and he took a step forward to close the distance. I didn't retreat again, though, but I couldn't hold the fox anymore. I let him go and he sprinted away, staggering, clueless how to maneuver now missing a leg. King's hands reached forward and grabbed me by the shoulders, yanking me into a hug, a deep hug, such a strong hug. I returned the hug. We stayed that way for a while, and as he finally broke the hug he would drop to his knee, holding my hands in his.

"I do not have a ring yet, Nico. I know that is important for your kind, and I will get it for you, but I love you, Nico. I love you dearly. I want you to marry me."

"King..."

"Marry my, please. Please, Nico. I love you."

I paused. His hands squeezed mine.

"I love you too, King. I'll do it. I'll marry you."