Work Text:
I loving your voice, being soft and sweet like wind blowing through crackings in stone walls.
I loving your smallness, but also you being quick and strong!
I loving your tail, being much muscled and also billowy like a medusa’s bell.
I loving your teeth, being sharp and plentiful, and most beautiful tasting of fresh blood.
I loving that you leaving the best meat to me, even when you wanting it bad.
Sometimes you looking at me like that too. Being hungry. Wanting.
I wanting you too.
So much it making my insides ache. I loving writhing with you, biting at you.
But not worrying, I not eating you. Never eating you.
You being my husband, and I loving you too much.
I loving you too much.
The Marathine words the Kalliphorne spoke felt strange and round and heavy in her mouth. She had taken a long time to think of her loving song, but she was proud of the result. Her eyes shone bright and fierce as she finished singing it to her husband.
He gave a soft trilling sound, a sound of pleasure and warm happiness. “You speaking the Legged Ones’ language so well, my lovely one,” he said to her in their own language, curling up close to her in their nest of blankets. “Your words being much cleverer than that weak legged poet’s, too.”
The Kalliphorne hissed contentedly, twining her tail with her husband’s. “Thanking you. He tasting better than he sounding, at least.”
Her husband laughed, a beautiful shrill rasping that set her spines rising. She nuzzled his neck, inhaling the scent of rich salty murk and warm tangy pheromones. Good enough to eat. “You tasting good too.”
She pressed her teeth to his neck, and he relaxed into the threat of prickling death with such trust that it made the Kalliphorne’s whole body sing. She could close her jaws and end his life. She could.
But she wouldn’t.
Her words had been truer than true: she loved him too much for that. Instead, she licked his throat and then drew her mouth away. The threat gone, her husband gave a whistliing keen and writhed against her, wanting, oh wanting so much.
“I--” said the Kalliphorne’s husband in Marathine, struggling painfully to form the strange sounds. “I… loving… you.”
The Kalliphorne twined with him; slick, muscled skin against slick, muscled skin. As malformed as his words were, they were beautiful. As beautiful as poetry.
And the cry of ecstasy he gave when their bodies aligned and connected was love song enough in return.