Chapter Text
The sun didn’t even set that time of year, but all six members of the Northern Party rose bright and early in the morning of November 7th, 1911.
Anthony J. Crowley took care of breakfast that day, although that wasn’t typically his job — he was a Royal Navy surgeon, after all. But everyone else was busy as they finished preparing for the last sledging trip of the season: Commander Shadwell was supervising; his three petty officers (Warlock Dowling, Eve Young, Newton Pulsifer) were finishing loading up their sleds; and Anathema Device, civilian geologist and meteorologist, was outside the hut jotting down a few last measurements before they left for the week.
Their meal consisted of porridge, bacon, and crab-eater seal steak. Crowley could have served penguin steak instead, but he’d been growing more and more uneasy with the idea of eating penguin meat as of late. In addition to being a surgeon, he was also a passionate zoologist, and it just so happened that the Northern Party had been living on the south end of an Adélie penguin rookery for most of that year.
Ridley Beach, Cape Adare, Antarctica had been teeming with flightless birds when Captain Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, had dropped them off with all the necessary supplies and provisions at the end of February. The Adélies had all left by late March, only to return in mid October for their new breeding season. Crowley had spent the last few weeks observing them closely, and was considering writing a book about them once he returned to Britain.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come along?” Device asked as she blew on her porridge.
“Like I said, I think it’s better for the science if I stay here. Wouldn’t want to miss anything important now that the penguins have begun laying their eggs.”
Science was only one of the reasons why Crowley wanted to spend some time by himself.
Heat was the other, much more urgent one.
He hadn’t been able to have one since May of the previous year, a month before the Terra Nova had departed from Cardiff. He’d been dutifully taking his Aestibus pills the whole time; the Navy-issued heat suppressants were extremely effective, but he was coming up on his sixth skipped cycle and he could just feel it thrumming under his skin. He was glad that the other party members, all of them alphas, couldn’t smell it, because he wasn’t attracted to any of them, and simply wanted to be left well alone so he could take care of himself.
Even if he were interested, he still wouldn’t ask for their help with his heat. The rules were clear: no such fraternising was allowed within a small team living in close quarters for extended periods of time. That was not the sort of rule Crowley was inclined to break, because he liked his job and was determined to keep it.
He waved the others goodbye as they pulled the sleds off the beach, then went back into the hut to clean up after breakfast. Picking up his tepid mug of tea, he reached into his pocket out of habit before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to take his Aestibus for a while. He quickly went to his desk and stuffed the pill box inside his pencil pouch so he wouldn’t accidentally take one later and ruin this godsend of an opportunity.
Crowley sat on his bed, feeling slightly on edge. How long would it take? The suppressants would remain in effect until tomorrow, at the very least, but after that… it could be another day, perhaps two.
This would be his first time going through heat without the comforts of his own home. As much as he needed it, he was also dreading the rather grim prospect of enduring it in a poorly made wooden hut that was 20 feet to a side, always cold in spite of it currently being the austral summer season, and woefully lacking in terms of nesting materials.
At least he’d had enough presence of mind (and spare room in his luggage) to bring a few toys on this expedition to one of the most remote places on earth.
Crowley sighed and got to work.
After washing the dishes, he went outside with two large buckets to fetch some clean ice. He set a pot on the permanently lit coal stove and tipped the ice into it, then pushed the dining table aside and swept the floor as he waited for the ice to melt. The others had left far too many footprints behind when walking in and out of the hut without taking their boots off, much more concerned with their sledging supplies than with overall cleanliness.
Once the ice had melted, he split the water between the buckets and used it to mop the floor, rinsing most of the dirt in one of them as he tried to keep the water in the other one relatively clean. He did have to get on his knees with a hard-bristled brush to scrub the grimier spots, and the water in both buckets at the end was so murky that he decided to mop again. He emptied the buckets outside, rinsed them with some clean water, and went to fetch some more ice.
By the time he got the floor properly clean, Crowley was feeling peckish. Too tired and impatient to cook an elaborate lunch, he made pemmican soup with enough curry powder to make the mixture of tallow and dried meat tolerable. He sat wearily at the dining table, which was still pushed to the side, and ate his soup while ruminating on how to deal with food during his impending heat.
He always got so ravenous when he didn’t have access to an alpha willing to knot his mouth and stuff his gullet with warm spend (which was most of the time, since alphas tended to favour pumping his other holes full of come — biological imperative and so on). And now there were no alphas around at all… well, needs must. He’d have to cook as much as he could in advance, and make do with dark chocolate and dried fruit as his only sweet treats. To be quite honest, he was already regretting being so generous with his tin of Doncaster butterscotch during drunken nights on the ship.
Why had he volunteered for this expedition, again?
Oh, right: for the thrill of exploring a desolate continent and discovering things no human being had ever seen before.
And the science, of course — he was a zoologist, after all.
His meal concluded, he went outside to continue his spheniscid observations. The penguins were fucking like rabbits, as they always did, even on the nests that already contained the first egg. Crowley still wasn’t all that certain about how they managed it without shattering their incubating offspring in their amorous activities.
Then, about halfway up the mile-long pebbly beach, he spotted a very curious sight.
Two male penguins were fucking (he could tell they were both male by their larger size).1
That part was not out of the ordinary; he’d seen it plenty of times before. What was odd about it was the fact that a few other males seemed to be watching.
Crowley observed the group, deeply intrigued by the novel behaviour. Once the penguin on top was finished, he hopped off and a second one quickly took his place before proceeding as usual. The new penguin stood on the other one’s back, struggling slightly to keep his balance as he bowed his head so they could rub their beaks together. He wagged his tail madly for a bit, then lowered his hips so their cloacas could rub together as well (male penguins, like most birds, lacked external genitalia). After spilling, the top penguin got off so a third one could have his turn.
Crowley couldn’t help but be slightly bewildered. The books all said that, like many other birds, Adélie penguins were monogamous and mated for life. At the same time, the species had only been discovered in the 1830s, and nobody had even studied them for an entire breeding cycle before. Oh, he was definitely going to write that book now — it would fly off the shelves as soon as people found out it included accounts of previously undiscovered salacious animal behaviour.2
Crowley also couldn’t help but feel slightly jealous of the wanton penguin. He wished he had a few alphas lining up to fuck him, because his first heat in a while was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.
He jotted down the key details in his notebook as he kept watching the oddly polite bacchanal. By the time the bottom penguin got back on his feet, Crowley had seen a total of twelve males deposit their sperm onto his cloaca. He couldn’t help but wonder how many more had mounted him before he’d happened upon the scene.
He returned to the hut after that. The floor was still a bit damp, so he busied himself with cooking. He began by making three batches of bara surgeirch (Welsh oatmeal griddle bread) with his paternal grandmother’s recipe; they turned out decent enough, considering he’d been forced to use reconstituted powdered milk instead of buttermilk. Nibbling on a wedge, he considered what else to prepare that evening.
Crowley wished the hut had an icebox, but apparently nobody had judged it a necessity when the outside world was perpetually frozen. They did have an icehouse a few dozen yards away, but he didn’t think that any unsealed food would survive the plethora of skua gulls that haunted the rookery, picking at the scrap heap behind the hut when they weren’t looking for penguin eggs to snatch right out of their nests.
In the end, Crowley decided to make a pot of lentil stew. He had learned from his other grandmother that it could last fairly long at room temperature, as long as you didn’t touch it after it cooled down, and you brought it to a boil before eating it again. ‘Never stir the lentils while cold,’ his granny would say. ‘They’ll turn acidic if you do that.’ He wasn’t sure about how the science worked on that front, only that he’d never gotten ill from her food growing up.3
The Northern Party had run out of onions months ago, but they still had plenty of bacon, as well as canned potatoes and carrots. He left the pot simmering on the stove, stirring occasionally as the lentils slowly fell apart and turned into a hearty, comforting stew over the next couple of hours.
He spent that time gathering as many nesting supplies as he could find. He inspected every single blanket and bedsheet inside the hut, keeping the ones that didn’t smell too much like the other members of the Northern Party. He pulled out every single article of clothing from the crates under his bed, setting all his handknit garments aside — those had always been his favourite, especially when he was in heat and the weather was cold outside.
Crowley piled up all the items on Device’s bed, not because it was the closest to his, but on account of the fact that her scent was the least pungent out of all the alphas in the Northern Party. It was a passable heap, all things considered, even if it suffered from an acute deficiency of pillows. Far from ideal, but it would tide him over well enough.
By the time he ate supper, the wooden floor was dry and he could set about the task of building his nest. He dragged his mattress to the empty space in the middle of the hut, transferred the nesting materials onto it, and then pulled Device’s mattress right next to it on the floor.
The sheets and blankets weren’t big enough to encompass both mattresses together, so he had to get a bit creative in the way he overlapped them and tucked them in around the edges if he wanted to stop his precarious nest from turning into a disorderly mess far too soon. He then placed crates full of Device’s rock samples all around it to further prevent the mattresses from sliding around.
Crowley wasn’t convinced this contrived architecture would work all that well, which is why he was going to try it out that night. If it turned out to be a failed experiment, he’d simply drag the mattresses back to their metal frames in the morning and try his second best idea, which involved his bed in the corner as well as his and Device’s desks.
He tended to the coal stove, preparing the fire to last the night, before heading back to his nest. He looked at it for a moment, dragged one of the crates away to make it easier to step in and out, and finished arranging the rest of the items, including his one lone pillow. Then, he shed most of his clothes and slithered under the covers, making sure to surround himself with the borrowed blankets so he could imbue them with his scent as much as possible before his heat got started.
Crowley unfastened his drawers and slipped a finger into his cunt. It wasn’t any wetter than usual, which was to be expected after only a day and a half since his last dose of Aestibus. He sniffed his finger like one might do a good cigar, then tasted it like it was fine wine. As convenient as it was to keep his heat under control, he wasn’t terribly fond of how much the pills dampened his decadent bouquet.
He dipped his finger again and suckled on it as he savoured himself, chasing the trail of freshly cracked peppercorns, perfectly ripe apples, and deeply charred oak. He smiled when he felt a small gush between his legs — right on schedule.
He decided to leave his cunt well alone for the time being (God knew it would be getting plenty of attention soon enough) so he could tend to his acorn. That was the term he preferred for his clitoris; he’d come up with it one night when studying for his sexual anatomy class in medical school, when he’d learned that the word glāns meant ‘acorn’ in Latin (the glans being not only the head of the penis, but also the visible portion of the clitoris). Well, and truth be told, Crowley thought it would be amusing to call it by that name, given that the sinuous effigy of his scent rested on a solid oak base note.
He extricated himself from his drawers, then collected some of the slick between his labia and dragged it up to his parched acorn as he thought about the number twelve.
Twelve was such a versatile number, as evidenced by the fact that so many professions counted things in dozens. For example, if he were to get fucked by twelve alphas, they could take him one at a time (forming an orderly queue), or in pairs (skewering both ends of him like he was roasting on a spit), or in trios (plugging whichever hole was still free), or in quartets (rubbing his acorn until they made him sing), or in hexads (pinching his nipples and scratching his back), or even all twelve at once (roving his body with more hands that he could possibly hope to count as every part of him got stuffed full of cock and come).
Fuck. It seemed like he wouldn’t be able to leave his cunt well alone after all.
Still rubbing circles around his acorn, Crowley reached for the toy that was small enough to handle when he wasn’t in heat. It was a piece he’d commissioned from an erotic artist in London, a vaguely phallic shape carved out of veined oakwood, polished to his exact specifications, and varnished with a special lacquer that was still as safe and shiny today as it had been upon purchase years earlier.
His favourite feature were the holes at the base of the toy, made to the measure of his fingers in order to ensure he’d be able to wield it easily even in his most lust-addled states. That was the sort of detail only an erotic artist who was also an omega could have ever designed, and one of the many reasons the expensive toy had been worth every penny.
Crowley got on his knees under the blankets, reached between his legs, and shoved the wooden cock into his sopping wet cunt, imagining that it belonged to the first alpha out of a dozen lining up behind him as they eagerly awaited their turn.
“Fuck—” he moaned. “Fuck, Alpha, may I touch my acorn as you take my oaken cunt?”
If you ask nicely, the fictitious alpha rumbled in his ear.
“Please, Alpha,” Crowley begged as he slammed the toy into himself. “Please, I’ll let you fuck me as hard as you want—”
I already am, omega. How exactly would I benefit from such an arrangement?
“Don’t you— don’t you want my cunt to clench around your cock? I get so tight when I touch myself that way, Alpha. I swear it’ll feel even better for you than it does for me.”
Hmmm… I might allow it, if only because you seem to be a bit too loose in the rump…4
“Fuck— yes, Alpha, I’m a loose bitch yearning to make himself tighter for you— please, Alpha, may I?”
You may, you insatiable whore.
“Oh, thank you, Alpha, thank you…” Crowley whined.
Now that he’d been given permission to touch himself, he spread his knees further apart and pressed his face against the mattress so he could reach a second hand under his body. He rubbed his acorn furiously as he kept ramming the wooden length into his cunt with as much speed and force as he could muster.
“Alpha— please—” he implored with tears in his eyes. “Go faster, hit harder, please knot me until I’m full of your come—”
I shall breed your whorish hole, omega, while the others do nothing but watch.
“Ffffuuuuuck!” Crowley wailed as he tensed and tightened around the hard cock in his cunt. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” he whimpered on beat with the throbbing of his swollen acorn as slick dripped down his thighs.
Still riding the tail end of his orgasm, Crowley collapsed into a boneless heap as he cried against the woolen blanket below him.
“Thank you, Alpha. Thank you, thank you, thank you…” he mumbled, his voice getting quieter as his climax faded away.
He rolled onto his back and gently pulled the wooden toy out of himself, then brought it up to his lips and licked it clean through a fevered, famished haze. Fuck, his slick already tasted so much stronger than when he had first dipped a finger into his cunt earlier.
He set the toy aside and reached between his thighs. He’d gushed a surprising amount, but he supposed it made sense: he was almost in heat, and hadn’t had a chance to fuck himself properly in months, not to mention the fact that he hadn’t been fucked by anyone else at all since that alpha on the ship. Their name was Seren (‘star’ in Welsh) and, well, Crowley had seen a few constellations that night.
He dragged his hands over his inner thighs before undoing his tight braid and raking long fingers through red waves. God, it felt good to let his hair loose, and even better to perfume it without worrying about what sort of unwanted urges it might stir in other people.
Crowley soon fell asleep in the fragrant cradle of his own spicy, sweet, smoky scent.
Footnotes:
1. This is not the case in our world; male and female Adélies are pretty much the same size. return to text
2. This is not, as far as I know, something Adélie penguins actually do. But, you know, since we’re taking liberties with human biology and behaviour, why not do the same with animals, as a treat? The original polar siren AU is much more accurate, and draws heavily from scientific observations made by Crowley’s real-life counterpart, George Murray Levick. He wrote a famous book about his time living among them (Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits, 1914), as well as a more-or-less secret paper with the stuff that was deemed too scandalous for general publication at the time. return to text
3. Shoutout to my grandma for inspiring all this lentil stew stuff. return to text
4. ‘Loose in the rump’ is a very old descriptor for wanton women [Green, Jonathon. “Loose in the Rump, Adj.” In Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Accessed July 11, 2025. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/7hppszq#lrmqx5q] return to text