The Cetra and the Lion, chapter 3
#3 of The Cetra and the Lion
The saga continues!
Sometimes, at night, Nanaki stirs, and I wake to feel an insistent hardness pressing against my back. He is gentlemanly; he never makes a move. When it grows too much to bear, he slinks quietly away into the darkness outside our den. If I listen close, I can hear him attending to himself with gentle, tender licks.
I feel strangely honored, that he finds me, a captive from another species, attractive.
As the days bleed into weeks I slowly start to change. I can feel myself start to fill out--my belly is still modest, almost unnoticeable, but it's just starting to grow nonetheless. My breasts ache during the night, and I can feel them start to swell as well. I can feel my face, my hips also beginning to change.
The differences are slight, but they're still happening. My body is readying itself for motherhood.
And that is not the only change. At times I wake with a fire in my loins, an unquenchable need that lingers for hours. It comes in the daytime, too, and Nanaki learns not to follow me if I wander into the forested part of the enclosure for comparative privacy. I rub myself, swirling my clit and biting my tongue as I sink my fingers into my own muff, and the fire only sometimes feels quenched.
More and more, I find myself thinking of Nanaki during these moments.
It is one night, when I wake to Nanaki's firmness pressing against me while my loins still burn with needful fire, that I cast aside my old doubts. Slowly, carefully, I roll over to face him.
Nanaki is awake, as I knew he would be. "Aerith?" he whispers. His voice sounds strained. His arousal must be quite distracting. "What are you...?"
"I..." I breathe, and gulp. The desire in my voice is so heavy you can hear it. "I don't know if it's the hormones or--or what. I know that it can sometimes affect pregnant women, but I never knew it could be this bad..."
"The females of my species often grew insatiable while pregnant, or so I hear," Nanaki said. "Perhaps that is it."
"M-maybe." I swallow. "Nanaki, I... please, I need it. Please."
He breathes, a sound so edged with desire it almost seems unreal. "Are you sure?" he whispers, almost as if he can't believe it. I can feel his penis throbbing against my bare tummy. A tiny bit of pre is trickling down me.
"Yes," I say, and wrap my arms over his shoulder. I touch my head to his. "Yes, Nanaki, please."
And he takes me there in the den, slowly and sweetly, and I arch and moan about his cock, and we hold close after, knotted and tied together, his chest rumbling with satisfaction as I stroke his fur, and I reflect that we really are what Hojo says we are: mates. And from here on out, we lay together regularly; not to breed, but because we want to.
And there's a sort of triumph, in that.
My belly is modest, for I still have a ways to go; I'm barely at the end of my first trimester. If you didn't know I was pregnant, you'd think that I had just eaten a particularly large meal.
But if you did, the growth was unmistakable.
Nanaki and I sometimes find a sunny (or, well, 'sunny,' considering that the enclosure is an elaborate fantasy by Shinra) corner of grass. I sit, cradling my belly and rubbing my hands over it, as he rests his paws and head in my lap.
"I wonder what they'll be," I say. It's a conversation that we have often. Nanaki suspects that they will be hybrids, possessing traits from us both. I believe that they are cubs of his species. Sometimes one or both of us entertains that our children will look like me, Cetra indistinguishable from humanity, but those suppositions never last long.
Sometimes after those sessions we lay down in the grass and clover and nap in each other's presence, smiling and happy. But sometimes I let Nanaki fuck me. He's an incredible lover--gentle and tender like a dear soul, yet fiery and animalistic when he gets going. I've learned to love the dulcet burn of his barbs on my walls, and my cunt salivates for his knot. I love the sweet gentility and the raw bestial energy both; it's incredible, to be rutted and plowed from behind by my sweet Nanaki, his voice burring with a triumphant growl, only to then have him caress me, gently teasing me with tender licks as my pussy throbs with bliss, squeezing fruitfully around his knot.
I am taken from the enclosure once every few days for a battery of tests. They're small and mostly non-invasive, mainly just to ensure that I'm still healthy and that my body is nourishing my babies.
"The stories claiming that the Cetra were the ideal mothers didn't lie," Hojo asserts, smiling at me from behind his thin glasses. "In ancient times, your people would respond to wilderness disasters by sending priestesses to breed the animal populations back from the brink." He leaned back as if amused by the thought. "I've often wondered how the Cetra managed to survive being impregnated by nonhuman creatures... but you've proven remarkably resilient. Malleable, even. You took his seed like it was nothing and your body is expertly nurturing his young." He gestures as a black-and-grey photo that he claims shows my womb. I don't bother glancing at it as if I understand. "This most recent test finally confirms what we wondered," he says. "You have replicated Red's offspring almost perfectly. A small but healthy knot of cubs. I had wondered if we might see a true crossbreed--a new species," he says, almost sounding wistful, "but this is fine too. I hope you enjoy breeding, my dear, because that's what you're going to be doing here for a long, long time. You seem built for it, after all."
I want to slap him. Strangle him. Nanaki and I, we have a bond. How dare this creep, this ghoul talk as though our lovemaking is nothing more than a means to an end--a way for my body to conveniently produce the test subjects he needs?
Of course, raising a hand to him won't hurt me. They wouldn't dare risk the cargo I'm carrying. They'd just take it out on Nanaki, and I couldn't stand that. So I turn my back to him in disgust. He only laughs and orders me out.
That evening, snug and secure in our den, I tell Nanaki what Hojo told me. He looks at my belly in wonder. "Cubs," he says, whispering as if he almost can't believe it. "Cubs."
"That's right," I say, stroking his mane idly with one hand. The other is resting atop my still-modest tummy. I think to the cubs growing in there. In the picture Hojo showed me, they were little more than indistinct grey blobs. But I think of them with their tiny paws and their small, tufted tails. I think of little muzzles mewling at their mother, nuzzling up to my chest for nourishment.
Is it strange, that such a thought leaves me... warm? Motherly? Is it strange that my offspring are animals and I like the thought?
Not animals, I chide myself. Neither them nor their father. Just because they're not human doesn't make them animals. After all, you're not human either.
It's true. The fact that I'm carrying Red's offspring is proof enough of that. No human woman could ever be impregnated by the likes of him.
So I sit there in my den, Red purring and eying my belly with wonder, and I think to the fact that my children and their father are furry, quadrupedal, tailed, leonine, wolfish.
And I realize that I'm okay with that.
I continue swelling dutifully.
It is nighttime, now, and the enclosure has darkened, the air a soft violet in a simulation of the night sky I may well never truly see again. I am laying in the grass outside our den, cupping one of my slowly-growing and ever-tender breasts while the other has snaked around my belly to find my own snatch.
"Ahh... ahhhhn," I sigh, bliss strumming through me as I fondle and knead my own tit in time with the light, shallow thrustings from my own finger. I have long since gotten over how often I pleasure myself, or how frequently Nanaki and I have sex--it's not as if Shinra gives us anything else to do, and this enclosure, once so seemingly vast and expansive, has become a tiny prison. It has only been a few months and I already know every corner.
Arousal rocks through me as I attend to myself. My eyes are half-lidded, taking in the dusky light. Almost teasingly, I rub the tip of my thumb on my flushed and aroused clit and am rewarded with a thunderfall of immense bliss that races through me like a runaway train. My voice trails out of me, ragged, and my body begs me to continue--
But I don't. After all, this isn't the main event. Just preparations.
Rising on legs of jelly, I turn and meander my way back into the den. My gait is not quite yet a full waddle, but I am nowhere near as assured or graceful as I was before Nanaki knocked me up. It's strange--considering that the cubs have been growing continuously in me, you'd think I'd have grown used to their weight by now, but sometimes I stand and find myself almost toppling thanks to my newly shifted sense of balance.
The den is dark and inviting, and I can see my lion's eyes glinting in the shadows. The rest of him is an outline, little more than dark shapes--but I imagine I see the tapering slope of his penis, the tiny bead of pre at the tip. He was to have prepared himself earlier.
I turn and drop to my hands and knees. The sensation is unlike how it was when he impregnated me: my womb is weighing me down, causing me to sink lower and brace myself harder against the floor.
"I'm yours, Nanaki," I whisper, my voice filling the den.
"I know you are," he replies, his voice like a low-burning fire, so deep and warm and inviting. I hear him pad over to me; he mounts me moments later, the action coming easy to both of us now, almost second nature. His paws find their familiar place on my shoulders and I barely have to prepare myself. There's little need for him to go searching for my pussy now. He's well acquainted with it.
He sinks in and I melt. Both of us had gotten ourselves prepared and aroused, so we are ready for a fun session. He quickly speeds up, going at a rough, breakneck pace, his cock pistoning in and out of me, back and forth again--over and over.
"Breed me, my lion," I whisper. He growls in the affirmative and takes me even harder.
I keen and part of me wonders what the Aerith of even half a year ago would think of this, seeing her own self, a belly swollen with furry young as she is willingly mounted and fucked by a creature that walked out of legend.
She wouldn't understand, I muse.
His barbs drag the inside of my tunnel and I begin to sob with pleasure, the bite is so sweet and so incredible, it's almost addicting. "Faster," I beg him. "Faster, my mate."
Nanaki goes faster.
I think of Zack, my beautiful soldier who gave me so much happiness and then vanished forever. I had never even considered bearing his children at the time, but now, with Nanaki's cubs nestled warm in my belly, I realize what a silly hangup it was. Hojo was right--I'm a natural-born mother, built for making offspring. If only he and I had taken that step...
Nanaki is thrusting faster in me now and his growl is peaking. I can feel him throbbing in me. "Knot me," I beg, and he delivers, howling to the heavens as he hilts in me and floods me with cum and swells in me, tying us together. The sensation is enough to send me over the edge and I sink against the floor of our den, shaky with orgasm.
Thinking of motherhood leads me to recollect my mother, Elmyra. I hope that she survived the collapse of Sector 7. I imagine what she would say if she saw me now: her adopted daughter, already plumping up with young.
She took in a young Cetra who had nowhere else to go. She'd be accepting of me, and of my cubs.
I hope to see you again, mother, I think ruefully.
I can feel Nanaki shifting, his knot still tight in me. "What's wrong?" he says with concern.
Blinking, I realize how misty the world seems. I'm crying. "It's not you," I say, and explain how much I miss my mom.
He listens attentively. "I forget that you have people to return to," he says when I'm done. "That woman, your friends in AVALANCHE. I hope... I hope you can escape."
"As do I," I whisper. I sometimes wonder what happened to Cloud and the other freedom fighters. Hojo has left cryptic hints during my checkups that they encountered someone with a name like 'Phiros' and have been pursuing him. Sometimes, at night, I dream of the Lifestream. I dream of it turning a sickly, diseased green, and of a cruel-eyed man staring at me from across the river of souls.
"I don't know where AVALANCHE is," I say. "But I have faith that they'll come rescue us someday."
"Us?" Nanaki asks wryly.
"Us," I emphasize. "Even if I get the opportunity, I'm not leaving here without you." The thought of Nanaki, all alone again with Hojo--a furious Hojo--is almost more than I can bear. He's too proud, too noble, too pure a soul to risk in such a way. "And if AVALANCHE doesn't come, we'll figure something out. But Nanaki, I'm not going to leave you alone again. If I escape, it's with you..." And I trail down my hand to my belly. "And them."
Nanaki is quiet in the way that I have come to learn means he is processing emotions. Then he leans in and gently licks me. I half giggle, half moan at the sensation. He dra-a-a-a-a-gs his tongue up and down, regularly lapping at my back, my arms, my thighs, even my breasts. I am left adrift in bliss as he shows thanks in his own way.
As I drift into slumber (Nanaki's knot still comfortably inside me; we are sleeping this way more and more, lately) I reflect that though the way he shows it is different, Nanaki really isn't that much different than a partner--a lover.
And why can't he be? I ask myself frankly. It seems pointless to avoid taking that plunge, considering how often we sleep together and how I'm bearing his children (and, if Hojo has his way, will likely continue to do so). Yet, I've avoided that mental leap.
But now I realize that I care about Nanaki--not just because he is a fellow test subject, or because he is the last of his kind, or even because he is the father of my children. But because we are partners, and have been for a while.
And I rock myself to blissful sleep, a smile on my face, as my partner knots me and licks me and fills me with children.
The monitors and nodes and diodes are cool and biting against my flesh. I sit there on a sparse, paper-covered cot, my belly--I am now halfway along and already quite sizable--forcing my legs apart. I caress it with both hands, idly strumming my fingers across it to soothe me.
In front of me, Hojo sits, eying the monitors. The further I progress, the more closely he monitors the health of me and my babies.
"You're doing well so far," he says, turning to me with a smile. If you didn't know what he was and what he wanted, he might have been mistaken for any awkward but well-meaning medical doctor. "You and your young both."
I nod, my mouth tight. I try to interact with him as little as possible. Part of me wonders what the point even is; it's not like I've ever shown any danger signs in any of these checkups.
"You know," Hojo says, ignoring my attempts to disengage with him, "you Cetra really are natural-born breeders."
I stiffen up and try not to hide it. He doesn't deserve the satisfaction of seeing me upset. But he notices, of course. He's quite perceptive.
"So touchy," he says with a cruel laugh, one of the few inflections he gives me. "Why insulted, Cetra?"
That's what he calls me, almost exclusively--like how Nanaki is 'Red'. I've realized it's a way for him to avoid the stodginess of using our numerical assignments without honoring the names we actually go by.
He eyes me, looking for a response, and continues. "Why so insulted?" he repeats. "Just look at you." He waves a loose gesture at me that somehow takes in the totality of my being: not just my ever-growing belly, of course, but also my slowly widening hips and thighs, my modestly swelling breasts, even my smooth face. No one could look at me now and think I was anything but a mother-to-be. "Such a malleable, flexible, fertile womb. That such a thing could exist in this world."
Hojo pulls a pen from his lab coat and starts fiddling with it. "But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Dragons, serpents, giant birds... a number of fabulous creatures exist in this world. We call them 'monsters' and rightly so, given how dangerous they are." His mouth barely twitches into a smile, but I can see the cruel amusement in his eyes. "That beast of yours... a long-lived mishmash of different species that plays at language and culture and is undoubtedly dangerous if he wants to be. Yes, he deserves the moniker too. Monster."
He's provoking me. I can feel it. And the worst thing is, it's working. I can feel my face paling, and my hands, still clutching my belly, are tense with anger.
This bastard of a man works for a company that massacred thousands. He abducted me, ordered me bred without my say, has mocked and belittled both me and Nanaki, and now he has the audacity to stand here and mock the one person in the world who I can rely on? Whose children I am literally carrying, on Hojo's orders, nonetheless?
I hate him. I hate him.
He sees my anger and pushes on. I don't know why. To gauge an increased heart rate? Or just to spite me? "How does it feel, Cetra," he says, a barest current of mockery swimming along under his voice, "to be reduced to this? To take monster cock day after day? To convince yourself that he cares about you? That he's anything but what he is?" And then he nods at my belly. "How does it feel to be nothing more than a vessel for monster children? When you squeeze those creatures out and feel their muzzles tugging at you for drink, are you going to pretend like they're people? Like they're not monsters?"
His voice hangs in the air like I knife and I realize at this moment that I could lunge forward, gravid or no, and grab that pen out of his hands and drive it into his eye, his jugular, his heart and I wouldn't feel a thing and the only thing stopping me is knowing that they'd make Nanaki suffer or worse.
So instead I look this grinning nightmare of a man in the eyes and say, as flat as I can, "the only monster here is you."
When I wake up in the dead of night it is to dedicated movement inside of me.
It's not the first twinge of movement I've felt. There have been whispers here, little spats of activity there. But this is the first time it seems so consistent, so omnipresent, that it really sinks in:
There's life in me. There's babies in me.
I rest like that for minutes, rubbing my hands over my smooth, taut skin, feeling the movements of my young swirling in me like eddies in a brook. They're so small, yet already so energetic, so feisty. I can't even imagine what they're going to be like once they're born. Will they be spunky? Pugnacious? Will their personalities take more after me, or their father?
So many questions, yet I can't wait to hold them in my arms.
And then reality strikes like a serpent and I suddenly begin wracking with sobs.
The movement and the noise wakes Nanaki, who presses against me urgently. "What's wrong, Aerith?" he asks, his voice laced with concern. There's not even the barest hint of drowsiness to it.
"Our--o-our--our y-young," I stammer out.
"What about them?" he asks. I can hear the worry in his voice being carefully beaten down--he's afraid something has happened to them, but needs to present a strong front, for his mate.
"They're going to t-take them," I say, and I turn and sob into the soft fur on his chest. "They're going to take my babies away!"
It's something we've both known; hell, we've both discussed its inevitability. But only now, with their vibrance so tactile in my womb, does it truly sink in:
They're my babies, and they're going to be taken from me.
There's nothing Nanaki can say to ease this hurt. This pain is almost too much to bear. I hold against him, sobbing inconsolably, knotting my fingers in his fur. His paw rests on the small of my back and holds me close, a small gesture of comfort. "I know," he says, his voice laden with regret and understanding. "I know. I know."
"It's not--f-f-fair!" I say, burying deeper against him. "My birth mom, Elmyra, Zack, my friends in AVALANCHE--everyone in my life who I care about always gets t-taken from me! Nanaki, why?" I continue sobbing against him, the tears running like rivers down my cheeks. One of my arms snakes around my belly as if that alone will be a sufficient barrier to stop Shinra from taking my babies.
But it won't. It won't be.
"I'm a flower girl!" I protest--to who, I don't know. "All I want is a simple and happy life, I don't want much, so--so why! Why are they always taken from me! Why!"
"...Aerith, I..." Nanaki says, his voice uncharacteristically hesitant. "I can't stop them from taking our young. But as--as long as you're here, with me, I won't let them separate us. I swear it." I hear him swallow, and then his voice hardens, becomes resolute. "As long as I live, you'll never be alone again."
My sobs catch, and I hiccup pathetically--but I turn my watery eyes up to him, and I see him gazing back, one eye golden like ripe wheat, the other scarred and slightly greyed from Hojo's abuse. And I think how selfish I must seem, crying out about my loss to a creature who lost his mother, his father, his adopted parent, and his homeland all to Shinra's predatory curiosity, and I realize that he means what he says.
Before I know what I'm doing I surge up and my lips meet his muzzle in a move that neither of us are anticipating. I can feel his shock, but he parts his lips and lets me explore him as best I can. The kiss is sloppy, unfamiliar, and hampered by our distinctly unique anatomy--but when it is done I pull away, my tears dried, and I see him panting, locking gazes with me.
"You won't be alone either," I return. "I swear it."