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Escape. He'd escaped.

The forest was as he knew it. No, it wasn't: it was as he knew forests to be. Kelvin had known forests for most of his life, since he left the city he'd trained in. Since he finally got his feet onto moss, finally learned the real world.

Nature was the world as it truly was, not as people adapted it to themselves.

Kelvin had thought to himself that he'd escaped "the asylum". He'd finally entered a world that made sense: a world where, when things happened that hurt or inconvenienced him, they carried no extra meaning, and didn't need to make sense. A world without the human need for meaning, without meaning of its own, only what it generated in him.

It was like a garbled reflection on water. Like water, he couldn't help but react to what happened in his life, and see spirits and choices in how the trees grew or the weather turned. Kelvin humbly accepted that fault in himself. Besides, it was never really people inconveniencing him anymore. Just wolves, coywolves, possums.

Now, of course, he was in a new forest.

Kelvin had escaped the real Asylum.

The unreal one.

That he'd been carted to from his cabin.

In the night, some nights ago.

He'd been monitoring the monitor, checking the wind turbine, just ambling around his nightly rituals, and a hand had closed over his face. It was drugged, that hand, because it had felt very good.

He was panicking. His sense of time was racked. That wouldn't help.

Kelvin knelt in the new forest's moss.

Everything was the wrong shape, the wrong colour, in this forest. However, it was the same structure he knew. Most of the vegetation was pink, with spiralling bracken-like coils emerging from the indigo ground. Here and there were long spaces of blue 'moss', little knobbly orbs on stalks.

The 'trees' were thick, soft, and almost infrequent, sheer trunks jutting upward and the first branches often sticking out of the base along the floor.

Ignoring the odd colours of the forest, Kelvin knelt, and he breathed in through his nose, as deep as he could. Through his mouth, he breathed out. Kelvin repeated this five times, and found himself becoming less frightened and dizzy. His memories began to coalesce into what they were supposed to be.

Yes, this forest he was in was very like his own. The forest's contours and trees were similar to the Capwood, but for the strange colours and textures. The shape of the branches was different, sure, curling up into themselves like young fern leaves, but a tree was a tree was a tree, and they were all in the exact same position as home.

The weather was almost as windy as the Capwood, but it was humid and hot.

'Luckily', in the course of his treatment in the Asylum, Kelvin had been divested of his coat and trousers. Here, he was in simple, loose-fitting shorts, and a beige shirt, barefoot.

His home in the Capwood was a deciduous, temperate forest. It - she? - had been spotted with thick trees and carpeted in a hip-high web of ferns, and herbaceous things, many thorned and poisonous as you went further North. Here in the indigo-soiled night, there was turquoise ivy where there wasn't green and orange moss. Everything must have been mildly bioluminescent, because at night, you shouldn't have been able to tell what colour anything was.

The world was becoming clearer to him as Kelvin breathed and focused. This was some other world, he decided. In the first round of treatment, the ranger had thought that the Asylum's 'staff' had drugged him, at first. What with their strange anatomy and the way his abduction had seemed so simple, it was natural to conclude he was insane. No, though, he was sane and lucid - he really was in another world, here. The chilling welcome he'd received to that asylum had some truth to it: 'you're on a journey, in a new place'.

'You need to learn how this world works to become welcome inside it.'

The other things they'd told him gave him more pause... they had never told him it wasn't Earth. They never told him.

Kelvin clutched his head, and closed his eyes, and let himself feel the fear. To resist it was to prolong it, he knew. This unplugged his heart and let the fear and panic slip away. Kelvin wasn't safe by any measure, now, but he was away from that place. Sure, they may not have been trying to drive him mad, but that was what was going to happen if he'd stayed.

Kelvin had wished once, over coffee, aloud, that he could be in another world than this one. He remembered that clearly, now, but it was only when the Asylum - doctors? nurses? - talked about it with him that he remembered. He'd wished for escape because his sister called him and asked for money.

The Capwood had done a good job protecting him over those many years, but it hadn't been enough to deter her.

Now, here he was, in some other world's Capwood, unaware and lost. Hansel without a Gretel.

The things he'd seen in the Asylum, compounded with the strange colour and shape of the forest around him, implied that the rules were different, here. Magic, or something. Biology was his enemy now. Kelvin couldn't be sure what was to be eaten, plant, fungus, or animal... or if those labels even applied. When he poked one of the weird fern-corals with his toe, it made a little sound.

However, he was free. As his panic ebbed away, what Kelvin called the "confident ranger-brain" switched on. He didn't always know what was up, or what to do, but he always worked it out. Hope started again.

The man had run so far from the Asylum that he was relatively sure he wouldn't be found by any search parties. It was hot and mossy enough that he hadn't needed those clothes. This place probably didn't have cell phone signal, not in the way Earth did, but he didn't even have his phone with him.

Kelvin could work out what to eat when he needed to. Now, he just needed to deal with his aching feet, and his filthy, sweat-soaked self.

The human stood up, and resumed his little journey. He found a pond - and it was definitely water, this. He leaned over and examined his reflection. He had no dark circles under his eyes, or bruises, or any surgical marks. This was unexpected. He was surprised, as always, to find his face becoming craggier as the buzzed slate-blonde hair grew thick and soft. The underwear the Asylum had provided was adequate, but he wasn't about to run into anyone he knew, here.

He wished he could remember what the Asylum staff looked like in more detail.

No, no more of that. Kelvin couldn't afford to panic, and panic was how people died in forests. He couldn't make a fire, or the smoke would attract people, but he didn't need to with the heat. He could make a shelter when he found a suitable place to do so. First...

...he heard running water. The thought of submerging himself in fresh water made him drunk, and he walked towards the sound. His feet were nearly silent - he never touched the 'ferns'.

This new place was pleasurable to be in. The total isolation wasn't frightening, so much as the unfamiliarity. He'd spent a good, long while avoiding people. He knew the hills and streams of the Capwood like he knew his own home, as it was.

No more calls for money until he got to Earth, thank god.

His feet sank into unclear ground. Sludge. This forest was riparian, then, and the river's tide had come out. At some point, the water would come back, and flood the forest floor. Sure enough, what plants he saw seemed to either start as clinging moss above a certain level or as reddish slime below there.

The trees were broad and branched regularly, and could be climbed when he needed to rest.

Kelvin came to a raised pool, up a small hill. There was a thin waterfall slipping down from a small cliff on the other side of the pool. It was peaceful, so he stepped in. The lost man couldn't quite tell if the pool was artificial or natural. The sweat of the last few hours' exertion, the mud of the water-forest, washed off quickly.

Gathering his feelings, he stayed under the water for a bit. The contact on his skin was good. He wasn't lonely, not exactly. He was a little too scared of people right then to be lonely. The contact with cool water was still good.

"Okay," he said to himself, before realising that vocalising his inner monologue was how he got himself into this mess. Well, it was the excuse some lunatic had used to kidnap him. Some magical lunatic.

'Things that seem safe in your world are dangerous here,' the whatever-it-was had said. He'd been blindfolded during that part. They never told him what he treatments were called.

Kelvin hugged himself, and listened to the water, and to the many sounds of life around him. Perhaps it wasn't even insect life, or anything like a bird. Perhaps the plants made those noises, here.

He could come to like this, with more security.

The ranger stepped to his feet in the hip-deep water, and looked down into his reflection again. It was clearer here, somehow. Kelvin hadn't been here long, and they'd allowed him to shave, but he still felt like his face was older than it had been before. More 'distinguished', his ex used to say.

He was only 36, for god's sake.

Kelvin ran his callused fingers through that greying hair, then cupped and ran water through it, taking out leaves and one very small twig. The sky behind him was a sort of night-blue, but a wispy, drained version.

Something was scary, here, but something was good, too. The Capwood's peace, but enhanced. Enforced, almost.

Ripples passed over his shins, and the ranger looked off to the side - there was a beetle the size of a dog where he'd entered. The sparkling red insect lapped up water like a lion with its palps, eyeing him. He didn't think it was suspicion more than attention.

After they had a moment regarding one another, the beetle turned and walked away. It had (rightly) guessed he meant no harm.

Well, posed no harm. The size of the thing, it could have destroyed him. Stupid man in the middle of the mystic woods, naked, with predators around.

Shaking his head, he walked back over to the sludge, and hopped up onto a tree. Yep, still young enough to do that. Still strong enough to climb trees.

For a moment, he wondered how to get back home. He'd miss his mortgage payment if he was here another day.

Not that important, he thought. Kelvin clambered up the thick-limbed 'tree', gripping its near-sheer skin with his feet. It ventured vaguely upwards, this tree, but the majority of its effort had gone into its branches going from side to side, giving an easy frame to climb. The foliage was just - only just - the wrong colour and shape for any tree he knew, and it blotted out the light from above.

Light that was dimming even further, now.

Without his clothes, he was unlikely to be found here, if he was silent. As he hadn't made a fire, he hadn't given away his position. As he hadn't made a shelter on the ground, he hadn't opened himself to flooding. King of the jungle was Kelvin. King of the jungle who'd starve in the next couple days.

Still, no matter. No calls for money. Not even a phone.

He stretched out in animal pleasure, spread and clenched his toes, and prepared to sleep.

Something moved above him in the tree's higher branches.

His eyes opened and hyper-focused on the offending limb immediately. A bird?

No, too much of the tree's branches were moving in the upper canopy for it to be a small or a light animal. Something big was above him, and was inside the branches. Kelvin hadn't slept for a day or two. His instincts still helped him, but his ability to filter and make sense of them was impaired.

The man pressed himself to the tree's trunk, and silently, he clambered up the centre. No analogue of ivy grew along this tree, and the wind was on his side. He got to the next level up, and... the rustling, more like silk on cotton than legs on leaves, had stopped.

Crouched, his hands holding onto galls swelling from the tree's surface, Kelvin glanced around himself.

Something may have left its nest?

He crept back down the way, perhaps unwisely now that he'd left his scent all over the upper branches, and squatted back down to sleep, knees up, arms folded.

The shuffling noise again, and his eyes opened, and focused on - a figure. There was someone in front of him. He stilled.

The light had dimmed significantly, but he could make out this man-shaped creature very well. It sat cross-legged in mid-air, suspended on something. It was lean and sinuous, curved just enough to be healthy, not like Kelvin's snug muscle.

It was male.

His skin was grey, sleek enough for an egg or centipede. It seemed at first like he was armoured, but tightly, and it flexed like skin.

This creature was essentially nude, or it was some lycra-style material - he could see fingers and toes...

...and four arms - the lower pair of them seemed to devolve into silvery worms at the elbow, and the figure was suspended off them, as they led up into the canopy. His upper shoulders each had a crown of five soft-looking spikes, which clenched and spread like Kelvin's toes had.

Dangerous, potentially, but human enough.

Kelvin looked at its face - its nose and mouth, where a beard might grow on a man, were covered in cobalt blue skin. His eyes were black and big and wet. No hair, and he couldn't tell if he wore a cowl, or was just bald.

"Well," the thing said, in a man's voice. The voice was delicious. "Hello, there."

"Hello, yourself," Kelvin mumbled, and gave a very small smile. "I'm just off to sleep. Long day."

"Mm," the gymnast-thing replied, and it lowered itself down on those trapeze-tentacles to crouch right in front of Kelvin. "So, at home, so far from your own - what's it called that side, Capwood?"

Kelvin tensed.

"Yeah," he said. "What do you know about it?"

"Food's not as good as it is here in Inkwood," the creature replied. He straddled the branch, then wrapped his legs around it. Wrapped them as far as they would go, anyway. Its flexibility was admirable. Now that it was in front of Kelvin, he could see where the elbows turned into the big worms. Only six limbs... no, it wasn't nearly as complex as the things in the Asylum.

'I don't know about Earth,' they had told him so many times, in the exact same words every time, 'but you need to calm down.'

Kelvin hugged himself a little at the memory.

"You got chucked in the big house, didn't you, puppy?" Its wet eyes were all heart. Almost comically.

Wait, 'puppy'?

"I got out," he said, behind gritted teeth.

"Good," the thing said, "Or we might not have met. I'm Thorell."

"Kelvin," the human replied. "Um, can I...?"

"Can you what, pup?" Thorell scooted a little closer. The naked human responded by hugging his knees in modesty. "You can do anything."

"Could you let me get ... I wouldn't say 'anything', you'll get my hopes up," he laughed, teeth showing. "I don't even know what I can eat here. Or where I am."

"You're in my house," Thorell said, though it was clear he was being facetious. "In the Inkwood. I'll tell you what to eat when you've been to sleep."

"You're gonna let me sleep...?" Kelvin asked, peering forward into Thorell's strangely gentle face. The Asylum folks hadn't allowed him proper sleep.

"You can do anything, pup."

Thorell's eyes were bright black, and his tongue, Kelvin now saw, was scarlet.

"You can sleep."

The ranger stared at him, and he didn't know it, but his sclera darkened.

"You can sleep any amount you want."

He felt like he was being hugged, behind his eyes.

"You can sleep all night. You can rest. I'll keep everything nasty away from you. It can get cold when the water gets in, but you can be warm here in my house with me," Thorell said, and that cobalt-blue mouth stretched into a wide and reassuring smile.

Kelvin's mouth stretched into a wide and reassuring smile.

His ankles slid down the sides of the branch, until he, too, was straddling it.

"Please," he said, and he felt himself get lost. He leaned forward towards Thorell's eyes, his face. He looked so smooth, not like Kelvin's interminable stubble. Thorell turned his head one way, and Kelvin followed. Then it went that way, and Kelvin followed again.

"Aw, baby," Thorell said. It seemed to press some button deep within Kelvin that hadn't been touched since childhood. "You are too easy."

They kissed.

It wasn't at all sudden.

Kelvin's eyes closed. The taste was strange, but human enough. Salt and flesh and emotion filled his mind. He felt his legs raise up of their own accord, and things rustled and wrapped around them... those worms, Thorell's lower arms. The ends had come down from above and wrapped around his feet.

"Yeah," Thorell murmured. He kissed the human boy into a nice sleepy place, and continued: "yeah, baby. There you go."

Like loving bines, the tentacles - not especially wet, but very soft and very smooth - brushed and meandered up Kelvin's legs, then his sides.

Kelvin didn't see, but they flashed out a cobalt blue slime to his skin. These droplets coloured him for a second, then disappeared as though they'd been lights shone on him. And each time they did, he slid further into that sleepy place.

"You're not going anywhere like this."

The creature - only as tall as Kelvin himself - stood up, but kept pecking at Kelvin's lips, kept his little love-whispers going. Kelvin fell into his warm, soft arms, and felt his legs being bound in a folded position behind him. He was coiled round thigh to shin, and being lifted, suspended, on these arms.

"Anywhere at all," Thorell said, face right up in Kelvin's. "My poor lost little boy. People tell him what's real and what's not, when he knows the truth already."

Kelvin shuddered, and felt the memories again, felt that denial he'd faced at the Asylum, felt... blue. He saw blue, and felt blue, and a slow, happy spiral formed in his brain into which those memories slid.

"Lost little boy of my very own." Fingers slid into his hair, and Kelvin didn't know when his eyes had closed, or when he'd got so pliant, but this all felt so good. He needed to know more. Feel more. "Aren't you?"

"Yes," he said, and felt good for having said so.

"At least for right now." Was it a test? No, be honest.

"Yes, Thorell," he said. An anxious question bubbled to the surface. "How long do you want me...?"

"I want you forever, silly," Thorell said. "And I've got you forever, dear heart. You need my help to survive, don't you?"

Kelvin grunted. He didn't want to admit it, but he was going to.

"Yes, Thorell," he said. "Shouldn't," he added, pouting. He'd never been this petulant, even as a child, but forests and survival were his life's work. He was a forest ranger, and here he was, in a forest he couldn't... range.

"Should. It means you're going to survive," Thorell said, and his tendrils began to wrap and twine themselves between Kelvin's thick fingers. They pulsed with more and more blue, and Kelvin felt a wall in his heart falter.

He could now put his finger on what he was getting from Thorell: understanding.

"...you'll learn everything you should know," his saviour said. "You learned how to defend yourself and feed yourself, back in your younger years. It's good that you did. But those ideas don't help you now." Fingers brushed over his cheeks. "There's no money in the forest, silly."

Kelvin grinned like - well, like a lunatic.

"Thank you, Thorell," he said, proud of how polite he was being.

"Shh," the thing said. "My little one. You've wanted to get away for a long time."

"She wants the house," Kelvin said, suddenly feeling waves of sadness, of fear, of -

• love, safety, relief. The need slipped away. She wasn't here. She'd never get him here.

"What house...? Kelvin, if you're upset, I deserve to know," Thorell said. "Look me in the eyes when I'm talking to you."

Kelvin opened his eyes, and let the tears that had built up fall.

They were cobalt blue.

"What house?" Thorell said.

Kelvin looked in Thorell's face, and saw him smile, and he smiled back.

"I asked you a question, silly."

"What?"

"What house?"

"There was a house?" Kelvin furrowed his eyebrows. "When?"

"Just a while ago," Thorell said, "a long, long while ago, you said 'she' wanted it..."

"That's... not right..." his place was here. His home was here. What would she want, now?

Who was 'she'? Decades of fear and mistrust slipped from Kelvin's mind like a shopping list.

Somehow, he felt an unbelievable freedom, an undefinable jubilation. It almost gave him anxiety, but Thorell's eyes held him well.

The bine-coils of Thorell twined tighter round his mid-air form, and grew warm. This close, and especially on his fingers, he could feel each individual segment of them, like lengthy antennae.

Thorell wrapped his hands around Kelvin's feet, shifting the loops of himself up to Kelvin's ankles.

"Okay, then," Thorell said, and this time his voice was unfairly clear. Kelvin felt his mind come completely back under his own control. "Choice time. Look me in the eyes, and you'll never go home, again."

Kelvin stared for just a second, but blinked his eyes shut. His house - what house?

Capwood.

But Capwood wasn't an escape, was it?

There were tourists. Poachers. Loggers.

And here, there was no-one but Kelvin and Thorell and whatever danger and excitement Thorell could keep from him.

Kelvin had been so proud he knew everything about living in the woods safely and securely. He could learn that again...

...and there was an implication, mild though it was, that he could forget...

There was a snapped branch, and Kelvin opened his eyes to check what it was, and felt Thorell's gaze enfold him. The pleasure of it was immediate, but it still grew slowly, and he felt his mouth split into an honest smile.

"Oh, lamb," Thorell said. "Right decision. Keep going, now." He shifted Kelvin's feet with his oddly slippery hands, spreading his captive's legs and crawling up on top of him. Those ropey coils of his seemed very strong...

Thorell stretched out on Kelvin, sleek grey belly to soft, hairy one. They stayed fixed on one another's eyes for some time, and that ethereal blue ichor squeezed itself out of the tentacles binding him like water from a sponge, bringing more pleasure, more warmth, more goodness.

Slime all over him, now, slime all inside.

The bonds started to slither off of him, lowering and flowing upwards like fluid streams. His feet lowered to the tree's surface, carpeted in purple 'lichen', and he sunk his toes into it like sand.

Kelvin stared forward, unknown to everything but Thorell. The grey and blue man held his chin in both hands, and continued to let the void in his eyes erode and suck out the ranger's thoughts.

"No-one gets to hurt you," Thorell said, over and over. "No-one gets to trick you. It's only you and I, here, my man. No-one gets to hurt you. No-one gets to trick you."

He poked his nose onto Kelvin's, gently, and stared some more, soothed him just that tiny bit more...

...and finally, broke eye contact, prey secured.

Thorell began investigating the man by lifting up his new friend's limp arms, gaze flowing from arm to side to hip. He mapped, with his eyes, every difference and similarity between every patch of skin... the tan lines, the stretch marks, the hairs.

Where hair started and ended, the pattern of it, Thorell ran his fingers along the boundary, as if painting.

The creature moved off of his position on top of the ranger, and stood on the branch. His wormy arms adjusted the far younger man to be upright as well.

Slowly, inexorably, those living manacles slithered off of Kelvin's warm body, leaving him a naked statue, mindlessly pleased and staring forward.

Thorell took Kelvin's hand.

"I'll guide you," he said. "I know everything here."

"Thank you, Thorell." Kelvin's eyes narrowed, as each word made him feel even better. At the edges of his eyes, tears of happiness formed... unnatural, blue tears filled with the stress-emotion he was losing. He registered the protection, certainly, but before he'd slid into this happy feeling, before he'd looked and promised never to return home, he hadn't ever admitted he needed protecting. That regret was now being drained away.

"You don't need to be strong, here. I'm here for that... but you can be strong if you want to." Thorell peered into Kelvin's now empty, coal-black eyes - devoid of sclera, free of irises, with no glint or reflection of light upon them. The ranger shook his head slightly. "Even stronger than I. You want that?"

"No," Kelvin said, shaking his head harder. Thorell grinned broadly at him, and the tip of a tentacle slid down his back, between his glutes, and curled up in the warmth of his inner thigh. "You should be stronger than I am, Thorell."

"Mm... and you could be wise," Thorell added. He was almost cautious-looking, now. "Even wiser than I."

"No," Kelvin laughed, as this was all so silly. "You know best."

"You're too kind." Satisfied, the creature nodded, and tugged Kelvin by the hand along the branch.

It was carpeted in that sort-of-lichen. The tree's skin, this far along the branch, was a deep black. The black felt like smooth soil under his feet, and the lichen like gentle sand.

The branch seemed to go on forever... and up. He was climbing, and Thorell was watching him so carefully, so attentively, that Kelvin really did feel small again. It was an odd feeling - he didn't feel his capacity for independent thought leaving him, or he wouldn't have noticed the moss or made judgements on the feelings he felt... no, he just felt like he'd be all right, now. All good. All safe.

Kelvin wasn't bound by Thorell anymore, but as the pair moved into the branches of another tree - or - no, this tree shared the branch with the first... Jesus. Either way, the branches above them weren't connected in this network, and Thorell had to drag his tendrils out of the canopy of the last one.

They hung in the air like wire, held in a series of wide loops... before they relaxed, dribbled down, and retracted to their source, in Thorell's lower pair of arms. They weren't so astronomically long, now.

Kelvin didn't bother to think, he just saw and felt and smelled. Everything was new, and everything was good. He was interested, "but you don't need to focus. You just got to do as you're told, okay?"

"Okay." It felt so, so good to say it. It felt so, so good to be where he was.

They came to the trunk of this new tree, and the long sleepwalk became a sleep-clamber. The bark of this tree was lighter, less of the deep indigo of before. It was also a little hard, a little cold. Forward and up was a great tangle of branches that could have been a nest, or new growth. It seemed to have living foliage around the outside, so it was probably both. Somehow, that made sense, for Inkwood.

Kelvin woke up, by the time they were inside that boscage.

The inner walls of the knot of branches had been painted a pale green in uneven slashes. The paint was oddly chalky-looking, and it made light.

He saw Thorell more clearly, though for a second, he was more concerned with how much thicker and softer the moss was in this little treehouse. It felt wonderful.

"So," Thorell said. "Yourself and free again. Feeling any better?"

"Um," Kelvin started, as he needed to reply somehow. Thorell's tentacles were casually wound around his own torso and forearms, now, like the skeleton of a poncho.

Kelvin approached his host. The absurdity of everything, especially how naked he was, came on him all at once, and he laughed.

"I feel safer, definitely. Still a bit lost, though. Are you gonna tell me anything more about where I am, or is... is this where you eat me?"

"This is where I eat you," Thorell said, and kissed him.

Elegant black fingers traced over Kelvin's sides, and took hold of his hips, which he hadn't realised were so cold. Thorell's blood ran hotter than Kelvin's.

"No, but seriously," Thorell said between kisses, "I'll tell you what's poisonous later on."

"And where I can shit?"

"And where you can shit. I'm not an animal."

"We're all animals."

"Nope," Thorell said, blue mouth spreading into a smug grin.

"Right," Kelvin said, placing a finger on that grin. His voice lowered, and he growled, "You're not an animal."

"That's..." Thorell hesitated, and Kelvin's hand gently wrapped itself around his lower face, covering his mouth.

The five spines on Thorell's shoulders splayed out, like fingers.

"You don't ever work by instinct. You smell me," Kelvin said, "and you don't feel a damn thing, right? You're not an animal. You're civilised, yeah. Perfectly unsafe out here, in the wilderness."

The ranger couldn't see any ears to whisper into, so he settled for pressing his nose into Thorell's neck, now those spines had let him in. He sunk his teeth into his new friend, and sucked.

The noise was not inhuman.

Newly confident, Kelvin moved back to put them nose to nose. There was a bit of pressure on his hand as Thorell pushed forward. He could feel the man-bug's face heating up more and more under his hand.

"You don't look like an animal," he continued. "You don't look like a frightened, vulnerable animal, all alone... God, your eyes are so wide, Thorell."

The creature closed them in a pleasurable wince for just one second, then peeked them open.

"If you could just see those eyes, you..."

They were pitch black.

"You... Th... Thorell, uhm...."

His friend's tentacles finished weaving around and binding his legs.

"I..." Kelvin's hand lowered to his side, as his will to keep talking, thinking, doing anything started to seep from him. Blue tears brimmed pleasantly on either side of his blackening eyes, somehow giving pleasure instead of taking pain, now.

A funny thing happened, at the same time: he suddenly felt less ashamed. He felt less embarrassed. The underlying worry of acceptability, and the sexual strangeness of nudity, was fading, like at a sauna.

"Please," he murmured helplessly, "yes."

Thorell kissed Kelvin's cheek, and got a kiss back.

"Already so desperate to please me," the creature murmured. "Good. You wanna be that way forever, right?"

"Right," Kelvin said.

Thorell's feet closed over his hips the way his hands had before, then shifted to wrap over each other behind his back.

Kelvin's cock, happy and free, settled into the creature's cleft. His friend didn't need any help holding himself up onto Kelvin.

The ranger dutifully folded his hands behind his back, and let his grey and blue friend kiss him once more.

"Then I'll teach you that part of the world, too," Thorell said. "Sometime soon, you'll know everything you need."

Kelvin's eyes followed Thorell's downward, and he saw his own cock's hardness, and the creature's groin - and this, really, was the most inhuman thing about him, besides the shoulder-spines and the tendrils. In place of a cock, there were two slanted openings, which were darker and softer than before. What had seemed like a thin codpiece was really a genital plate, from which he (presumably) secreted sperm.

The smell of sex was, again, not terribly inhuman. The human woke more and more from the pleasant trance as a new need filled him, and he pressed his palm to the plate, gently, feeling the slight cold of the moisture around its two openings. He brushed his index finger down one and his thumb down the other, and his friend made a high noise, like a faraway tern.

"Do. Um, Thorell gulped, and Kelvin felt those warm toes cling to his hips. "Do you need me?"

"'course," Kelvin said, with another little laugh. He wrapped a thick arm around the creature's upper back and pulled him close. "Of course I need you." He gripped his friend's hips, and looked back up, into Thorell's face.

Watching intently, he began to press his thumbs into the two openings, looking at every reaction from his partner to gauge the rhythm necessary - and, of course, where was most sensitive in the two little circles.

"Kelvin," Thorell said, panting. "Kelvin, it's... um. It's not just... I. Erm."

"You don't have to teach me everything," Kelvin muttered, kissing Thorell's cheek and massaging those spermatheca in opposite rhythms. "I can learn on the job."

The human felt hot moisture on his hands, and glanced down... yes, it was semen. It was probably going to keep leaking out like this for some considerable time, drips and sheens.

Kelvin could handle that.

The newly-acquired ranger pushed his friend's back flat onto the trunk of the tree. Thorell's tendrils wove into the tangled walls of the boscage to secure himself upright.

Kelvin bit and worrieed at Thorell's sides on his way down to taste that weird cum.

It was an interesting exercise working out how to pleasure these two teardrop-shaped holes, the spermatheca. The plate over Thorell's crotch was shaped like a shield, and they graced opposite sides of the centre, like these meatuses were heraldic. They were laid out like inverted commas. It was endearing, in a way.

The man swirled his tongue into one on his left, soaking his face as the semen flowed faster, then turned to the other, to the point his face was covered in the stuff. Kelvin tried for opposite rhythms with his thumb in one and tongue in the other, and swapped, and this inceased Thorell's volume.

Kelvin learned that gentle, tender touch was what Thorell needed. He moved less when touched and licked with care because he pulled himself taut against the trunk as he did so.

Then, something unexpected happened. That shield surrounding the spermatheca folded down into a thin sheath, between his legs.

Kelvin beheld teal-and-white flesh around the holes. It was visibly pushing out, that mass, and it began to look more like a two-holed cockhead than a pair of cloacae. He pressed his lips to this warm mass, and felt it push back. So he kissed it, and soon, Thorell's two-holed glans slid humbly onto his tongue, before stopping.

Then, there was another push, another bit of movement towards him, and he could see that it was emerging in wormlike segments. It was a penis, after all - just hidden most of the time. Convenient.

His slowly-revealed cock was ribbed thing, emerging like a curious animal. It was the same pale teal colour as the glans, all over. Thorell's scent was more inhuman, now, but still oddly meaty... and then, the blue-green cock flexed down into his tongue.

It was moving.

It was alive.

Well, obviously it was alive, but it was motile. Jesus.

Kelvin slipped his lips over it, gentle as he dared, and felt the muscles inside the thing tense and push against him. Thorell moved from side to side inside his cheeks, cooperating very slowly. Kelvin was led into an obscene, swaying dance pleasuring his master.

More of Thorell's cock emerged, segment after keeled segment, to about the length of Kelvin's own cock. Maybe a little thicker, though. Kelvin's eyes stayed shut as naturally as if he were fast asleep. He lost himself in the rhythm of it... then lost himself more, when Thorell wrapped his strong gymnast legs around his head and pushed him down to swallow the entire thing.

Surrounding Kelvin reduced his world to just the scent and darkness around him, and the undulating motions of that weird cock, and the steady stream of live-giving fluid from it.

Thorell sighed, and moaned, and enjoyed himself in a way he hadn't for a couple of centuries.

Kelvin found himself doing this kind of thing very occasionally, perhaps forever.