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He’s immersed within the in between fog of dreamless sleep and reluctant wakefulness when he shifts with the muscle memory of a steady lover – Damien’s bleary mind implicitly understands to reach for the weight adjacent to him in bed, to seek the comfort of another’s arms in slumber like he has done a hundred nights before. But as his fingertips find the leathery bump of smooth scales, his heart is struck, not for the first time, of the sweet strangeness of his knowledge with this bed, of these lovers.
He is past the weeks of tentative orbit around their dance of three, has experienced the anxiety of wading through newfound love before to anticipate the trajectory of its learning curve. Still, the foreignness of his familiarity with the body curled against him presses into his drowsy consciousness. It is no longer the trill of an inhuman voice, or the etchings of the scales that plate the extra pair of hands that suck the heat from his skin in ectothermic greed that send his addled mind rushing for comprehension anymore – that found recognition, itself, is now the precipice of which his thoughts topple over in tumultuous exhilaration as they fall over its lip. There is a soft, forbidden delight in it, his humanity aligned with monstrosity a sheer heresy that is no more than their simple truth, and it sends tremors through his body with its strength and enormity.
Damien continues to move on instinct as he gasps quietly, a sigh through the heavy air that fills his lungs when words fail to provide the justice of their subjects. He tries not to jolt as his heart races and his breath hitches against Arum’s body, even as it is enough to wake the keen sense of a beast from his own fitful slumber. A violet eye, with slitted pupil, opens only for a moment, glinting in the night light shining through the windowpane.
“Honeysuckle,” Arum mumbles, the harder syllables lost in the slur between dream and thought. His four arms move to embrace Damien, familiar in their intent to allay fear – to soothe worry that cannot prevail in the heavy silence of this scene – as they selfishly pull him closer. Damien surrenders, stopping only to extend a hand to the figure lying on his other side. He keeps an arm and leg along Rilla’s own as she snores sweetly, dead to the world, that constant, heavy anchor he can recite from memory like sacred text on his rapturous tongue, keeping him in the gravity of these two heavenly bodies.
Even as she twitches in her sleep, a symptom of rare true rest he has grown to know so well, Damien is almost scared that the hammering of his heart will startle her. Still, he breathes, calmly elated as he basks between the tickle of Rilla’s hair fanning against his bicep and the pebbly sinew of reptilian scales, settling and growing still.
He says nothing as his face finds the space where Arum’s shoulder and neck meet, and Arum perches his chin atop his head in habit, tired eyes drawing shut as they sink into the bed together. Damien mouth finds the spot between the joint of his jaw and tympanum, his kiss no more than a luxurious, languid trace of lips. The metallic, clicking purr he elicits from Arum’s throat is lost to his penchant to tease in the insistent pull of sleep, in the contentment of this love. It rumbles in his chest, vibrating up every nerve like the the subsonic roar of an earthquake beneath his feet, but he is not knocked a kilter. It is a gentle steadiness, one he treasures in the frantic movement of a world he is relearning through every shared embrace, every experimental kiss. It is a grounding balance of a love that he can only parse through the realization that he is still, he is still.
They return to their sleep, and they are still – and the morning they greet will be perfect reminder of it.