Actions

Work Header

Paradigm Shift

Work Text:

At first, Cooro asked Husky about it. Not that he thought that Husky had any more experience than he did, really, but just...well...to be sure. To compare notes, right? Husky had gone red, then white, then red again, and there had probably been words somewhere in what he babbled (other than "WHAT...YOU...WHY...AAAAAGH!"), but Cooro didn't quite catch them before Husky stormed off, face the color of a ripe apple.

Cooro figured that that meant that Husky didn't know any more about sex than he did.

So, Cooro asked Senri the next time they went out gathering wood alone together. Senri had looked at him for a long, long minute, and turned...well...not apple-colored, but at least sort of pink. Cooro had asked again, hopefully, and Senri had coughed and nodded.

"Really?" Cooro asked, eagerly. "Great! What was it like?"

Senri looked thoughtful for a long minute, gathering a few more branches from the ground and laying them in the stack in his arms. "Like...candy."

Cooro blinked. "Uh. Candy?"

Senri nodded, firmly. "Candy." He hefted a branch and then discarded it. "Sticky. Messy. But good." He thought another moment, then added, "Best with friends."

"Friends...." Cooro thought hard about that. He'd never heard anything about being friends with a girl you wanted be together with. He'd heard of being friends with girls, sure, but he'd always thought that it was...kind of one or the other. Either you were friends, or you wanted to kiss her. The idea that you could do both was...kind of strange. "So...in your tribe that's how it's done? With friends?"

Senri shrugged and nodded.

Cooro kicked at a stone, sending it bouncing off a big tree trunk. This didn't sound good. After all, he was friends with Nana, but...well...he didn't really want to kiss, let alone do anything else, with Nana. He couldn't really explain why, he just...didn't. And the four of them moved around so much that it'd probably be hard to make another girl friend. I'm never going to be able to do this, Cooro thought glumly, and it was a really depressing thought, at that. He sighed. "So...how long did you know her?"

Senri stopped and looked back at him, head cocking slowly. "Her?"

"Yeah." Cooro flared his wings and leapt up to catch a felled branch out of a tangle of live ones above him. "The girl you...you know, did it with? Her."

Senri shook his head and turned back to the trail. "Him."

Cooro blinked. Then blinked again. Then hit the ground a bit hard as he missed a wingbeat. "...him?"

"Mmmhmm," Senri said, heading down the trail and scanning the forest floor again.

Cooro stood there, staring off into space. Him. A...a boy. Two boys! Cooro hadn't even considered that. He wasn't even sure how that would work.

But...if you could do that with boys, too....

Cooro thought of bright blue eyes and hair like shiny silver fish scales and pale skin that always looked so soft and smelled like clean water and hands that were small and deft but strong and callused and--

"Cooro?" Senri called, from down the path.

Ooooor...grey-brown hair with little shiny beads and a strong body that always looked so different from Cooro's own but different in a good way and calm grey eyes and a deep, quiet voice and all that muscle and--yeah.

Well, Cooro thought, grinning as he ran to catch up. That changes everything.

Because really...a crow had to fly where the shiny things were. Even if that meant not flying far at all.