Work Text:
Caine is cleaning his guns for the third time this week.
Jupiter tips her head over the back of the couch, watching the flex of Caine’s fingers as he pulls his mauler apart, the curve of his wrist as he lays each segment precisely on the table. God, those hands of his, so strong when they were catching her in mid-air, so tender when he puts them on her body, as reverent as he is now as he lifts a soft cloth and works each piece of the mauler over with long, slow strokes.
It’s weird to get turned on by your boyfriend cleaning his space guns, right?
Afterwards, Jupiter knows, he’ll put them back together and return them to their various hiding spaces: beneath the couch and in a jacket pocket in the wardrobe and, as she discovered last week, on the top shelf of the freezer.
(“Why is there a gun in the freezer?” she said. Her voice was calm, like it was typical to find a weapon tucked between the frozen peas and raspberry sorbet.
“Because nobody would look for a gun in the freezer,” Caine said.)
It’s only when Caine starts cleaning the same little blaster he cleaned an hour ago that Jupiter gets it.
“Oh my god, are you bored?” she says, and Caine stills. “You are! You’re bored.”
Caine rubs the back of his neck. “Not bored, Your Majesty. Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know what to do with myself. I’ve never had this much free time. Or any free time, really.”
“They didn’t give you time off in the Legion?”
“A day here and there, in between missions, but nothing formalised like you have on Earth. No weekends.” He says the word like Jupiter might say ‘rainbow-pooping unicorn’. An unbelievable thing.
“What did you do with your days off?”
Caine coughs and says something that sounds like, “Zoë bears.” He’s looking delightfully embarrassed suddenly, the tips of his ears turning pink in the way Jupiter finds adorable.
“What was that?”
“Zooie bars, Your Majesty.”
“Do I want to know what a Zooie bar is?”
“It’s a bar that humans who like splices frequent,” Caine says slowly, and it takes Jupiter a moment to get it.
“A space splice fetish bar,” she says. “Sure, why not.”
“It’s kind of a Legion tradition. When you only have one day off, you pretty much just want to get laid in the most efficient manner possible. Most people look down on splices, so…”
“You go to the place where people like you,” Jupiter says. “And treat you right, I hope?”
“Zooies have very specific expectations about what we’re like. Stereotypes, you might call them.”
“They think you’re actually going to be a wolf? Like, all growly and stuff?”
“Growling, yes. Scenting. Biting is very big with Zooies, and sex from behind, on all fours.”
“I thought the only sex position was woman on top?”
Caine looks at her a moment, and then he ducks his head as he smiles.
“When you’ve finished what you’re doing,” Jupiter says, “why don’t you come over here and relax with me?”
“I’d like that, Your Majesty.”
Jupiter blows him a kiss and goes back to her novel about an Earth woman who discovers she’s secretly a galactic princess. All the space science is wrong, of course, and there’s no splices, but she finds it kind of comforting to think somebody else has gone through what she did, even fictionally.
Twenty minutes later, Caine has finished his weapon-cleaning and weapon-hiding, and he comes over to stand before Jupiter with his hands clasped behind his back. He’s wearing his boxer-briefs again. They’ve become his default at-home attire ever since Jupiter enthusiastically told him how much she likes how he looks in them, then backed it up by trying to remove them with her teeth.
(The operative word being ‘trying’ — turns out it’s harder than it looks. But Caine appreciated the effort regardless.)
“May I get Your Majesty anything? Another glass of water? A blanket? Cosy socks?”
“I’m good,” Jupiter says. She pats the couch beside her, and Caine sits down obediently. “What do you want to do together? We could watch a movie? Or you could read a book, too?”
Caine hesitates, and then he says, “I’d just like to be with Your Majesty.”
“Sure,” Jupiter says. “Whatever you prefer.”
Caine lies down on the couch, bending his knees so his feet don’t fall off the end. He looks up at her tentatively and, when she nods, puts his head on her lap.
Jupiter strokes his hair tenderly. “Is this what you want? Just to lie here with me?”
Caine nods.
“Okay.”
Jupiter returns to her book. She keeps absently petting Caine, the tip of his ear, the length of his throat, then moves down the soft spot between his wings. When she casually wraps her hand around the back of his neck, Caine startles, then all but melts against her.
Jupiter looks down. Caine’s eyes are closed, his breathing slow and deep.
“You like that?” Jupiter says.
Caine’s voice is soft. “It feels kind of like a collar.”
“When did they make you wear a collar?”
“They collar us in the creche, so we always know we belong to somebody, and they treat us well so we’ll associate that good treatment with knowing our place. The most terrifying day of your life is the day they cut off your collar and ship you to whoever they’ve sold you to. All you can think about it finding a pack and a place to belong again. It’s how they make lycantant units so dedicated.”
Caine reaches up, pressing his hand over Jupiter’s.
“Of course, it was different for me. The other pups at the creche rejected me, and my splicer sold me off early just to get me out of there. But I still have that need inside me. Maybe it’s woven into my DNA, I don’t know.”
“You still want to belong to somebody?”
Caine nods. The gesture is so small Jupiter can’t see it, but she feels the movement against her palm.
“Do you want to belong to me?”
“Yes,” Caine whispers.
“You realise I’m talking metaphorically, right?”
There’s a pause that Jupiter doesn’t quite like, but Caine knows how she feels about people as commodities. “Yes,” he says again.
“Do you want me to say it?”
Another tiny nod.
Jupiter curves her hand more firmly around the back of Caine’s neck. It’s surprisingly difficult to get the words out, like they’re weighted on her tongue. “You’re mine,” she says quietly.
Caine makes a soft, contented sound in the base of his throat. It almost sounds like a purr.
An hour later, Jupiter looks down at the six feet of miracles and muscles stretched across the couch and onto her lap, and feels a heady rush of affection for him. She leans down, brushing her lips lightly over his temple.
Caine turns his head towards her as inevitably as a flower turns towards the sun.
“Your Majesty,” he says, deep and slow. There’s a serenity about him that Jupiter’s never seen before, and she realises some things she’s been thinking of as simply a part of Caine, like the tiny crease between his eyebrows and the tension in his shoulders, aren’t necessarily permanent features.
“You know that if you belong to me, then I belong to you, right?”
Caine is already shaking his head. “Your Majesty cannot belong to anyone.”
“Right, but it’s, like, symbolic.”
Caine frowns, and Jupiter could kick herself for ruining his mood so fast. He looks like he’s about to explain why Jupiter cannot be his in patient and painstaking detail, so she leaps in with a quick: “How about this? You belong to me, and in return, the only person I want to belong to me is you.”
“Your Majesty would do that?”
“Of course,” Jupiter says.
Caine squeezes her knee tightly.
Over the following few weeks, it’s not uncommon for Caine to lay down beside Jupiter and put his head in her lap when they have some free time. Jupiter gets very good at reading books with her right hand, her left wrapped firmly around the back of Caine’s neck.
After one particularly long session, she switches to paperbacks.
They take the long way home from the farmers’ market next Saturday, or at least that’s what Jupiter tells Caine, but she has to check her phone twice for directions, so he’s probably not surprised when she comes to a stop in front of a nondescript building.
Caine squints up at the sign. “What is this place?”
“It’s a shop that sells handcuffs. And other things.”
“Toys that are not for children.”
“Right,” Jupiter says, and pauses. Then she pauses some more.
Caine cocks his head at her.
“You can say no. I want you to say no if you have any doubts,” Jupiter says, suddenly having a lot of doubts herself. What if she read the situation all wrong?
“Your Majesty?”
Jupiter exhales and says, “Do you want a collar?”
She’s nearly bowled over as several hundred pounds of lycantant launches himself at her. Caine pulls her tight against his body, holding her on her tip-toes, and buries his face in the curve of her throat. She can see his wings fluttering beneath his sweater, trying to get free so they can wrap around her, too.
“Caine,” she whispers, and he stills them.
The rest, she’s not entirely sure what to do with. She strokes his side and says, tentatively, “So that’s a yes?”
“Yes,” Caine mumbles against her skin. “Yes. Yes.”
He doesn’t seem inclined to let her go right now, so Jupiter relaxes into him, curving her arms around his waist and turning her head so her nose isn’t squished into his sweater. They are outside a sex shop, after all. Jupiter’s sure this isn’t the weirdest thing the locals have seen this month, or possibly even this hour.
Soon after, Caine pulls back enough to gaze down at Jupiter. He doesn’t seem to have anything more to say about the situation, but that’s okay; she can see it all in his face. She leans up into him, and he lowers his head for her kiss.
“Shall we go pick one out?” Jupiter says.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Caine says. He stoops to pick up the shopping bags he dropped, and Jupiter chases two escaped oranges down the sidewalk.
On the threshold of the store, Caine hesitates. “Actually…”
“We don’t have to,” Jupiter says quickly.
A faint smile crosses Caine’s lips. “I was just going to ask if Your Majesty would choose one for me.”
“You don’t want to see it first?”
Caine shakes his head.
“Okay.” She squeezes his arm and says, “Back soon, sweetheart.”
Actually, Jupiter is gone for a very long time. It turns out she has a bunch of questions, and the staff are really helpful, though she can’t quite bring herself to purchase anything else. Caine gives her a curious look when she returns.
Jupiter smiles and takes his hand for the walk home.
They put the groceries away together. Jupiter goes down to the laundry room to pull their clothes out of the dryer, and when she comes back, Caine is propping his favourite Nigella cookbook on the counter. The scent of cooking meat fills the air.
“What are you making?” Jupiter says.
“Pappardelle with Lamb Ragu.”
Caine has shown a surprising aptitude for cooking, and he seems to enjoy following recipes, too.
(“You just like having a pretty, dark-haired woman tell you what to do,” Jupiter said once.
Caine’s eyes twinkled, but his voice was solemn as he said, “That’s not true. I also like the knives.”)
By the time Jupiter’s finished folding the laundry and putting it away, Caine’s ragu is simmering away. They make the bed together, throwing the sheets over the mattress and tucking them in on either side, then pull the quilt on top. Jupiter sprawls out atop of the newly-made bed.
“There’s nothing like fresh-from-the-dryer sheets,” she says happily. She flings an arm in Caine’s direction and adds, “Come enjoy them with me.”
When Caine doesn’t respond, Jupiter turns to look at him. He’s staring at the the teal-coloured box Jupiter left on his bedside table.
“You can open it, if you like,” she says.
The collar is as beautiful as it is simple. A silver buckle is attached to one end.
Caine strokes the suede with the tip of his finger. “It’s so soft,” he whispers.
“What was the collar that you wore in the creche like?”
“Nothing like this.” Caine goes to his knees before Jupiter, holding the collar out to her with two hands, and says, “Please, Your Majesty.”
Jupiter hesitates, and then she wraps the collar around his neck and buckles it firmly.
“Is that okay?”
Caine closes his eyes, breathing deeply. He nods as his wings ruffle behind him.
They end up with Jupiter sitting upright on the bed and Caine lying between her legs, his arms around her back and his head resting between her breasts. Jupiter angles her book on a pillow beside her, turning the pages with one hand. The other is curled around his waist, beneath his feathers.
Caine is still for so long that Jupiter assumes he’s fallen asleep, but when she finishes the last page and closes the cover, his head tilts upwards.
“What are you thinking about, when you’re lying there?” she says.
“Nothing,” Caine says, inhaling, exhaling. “That’s why I like it. I don’t need to worry about anything, because Your Majesty will let me know if there’s anything I need worry about. I can just be.”
Jupiter rubs her fingertips at the base of Caine’s spine, kissing him softly.
Caine kneels again for Jupiter to remove the collar, then looks surprised when she hands it to him.
“It’s yours,” she says. “You can give it to me any time you want me to put it on you, okay?”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Caine says. He crosses the room and puts it in the top drawer of the dresser, the one that contains his most important things, like his primary mauler and his space gloves.
Caine is quiet as he finishes making dinner. Jupiter sets the table, and the two of them sit down to eat.
“This is delicious,” she says, a few minutes later. “You’ve become such a good cook.”
Caine’s smile is small and content.