Note: This is set after "Between Brothers" and before "New Alliances."

The Fur On Your Tongue

His scent changed. Nothing new to that; everyone's smell matured as they did, after all. As an adolescent Tygra had a sharper scent, a clean smell like smoke from a distant fire. Now—

Tygra stretched out beneath her, shoulders tensed, head tipped back. Cheetara ran her nose up the length of his thick throat, lingering at the underside of his chin. A laugh rumbled through him.

"What is it?"

He reached to cup her face. His hand was large enough to cradle her cheek, his fingers the breadth of her nape while he was at it. Cheetara caught his wrist and pinned it, and his hand and arm with it, to the grass. His wrist flexed—biceps hardened, the muscle so heavy there rounding—then he went boneless again in the grass.

"You've let your guard down," she noted.

Tygra smiled. His eyes were lidded, the curve of his jaw easy. "You've caught me."

"It wasn't hard," she said. She bent so their noses nearly touched. Between her knees, his chest was wide; it trembled as she dropped so very neatly upon him. Cheetara nuzzled the long ridge of his nose. "You didn't put up much of a fight."

"I didn't realize we were fighting," he murmured. The hand she hadn't pinned crept up the back of her thigh to cup the muscle where it was thickest.

Cheetara smiled, very slightly. She felt it pinching at her mouth. "So much for that vaunted tiger pride. I thought you hated losing."

He leaned up into the circle of her shoulders. His lips on her neck were warm, the suggestion of teeth only that. Moonlight in the glade beyond and shadows thick between the trees— Her eyes closed; she allowed them. Cheetara turned her face down to Tygra's, turned up.

Earlier they had clawed, bit, ravaged each other and themselves in the undergrowth; the frenzy, Jaga had called it. Shameful, to lose control like that. Civilized cats did not rut as if in heat, even if in heat, and Cheetara had no such excuse. But her hands on his arms, his big shoulders bowed to her, the pungent and nearly wild smell of him so rich in her nose, her mouth— She had wanted, so dearly, to touch him. She had wanted, so powerfully, to have him. So she had.

Mating made Tygra sleepy, pulled a languor out of him that made him slow, made of his kisses soft, lingering things that hurt as the bucking of her hips against him had not hurt. It was an ache, not a sting, like an overworked muscle. Often, in the early months of her postulancy, she had retired at the end of the day with such aches. But it was not overwork that made her throat tighten, her tongue swell; strain did not hurt her lips where Tygra gave his mouth up to her.

Cheetara mouthed at his offered lips and drew in breath. Wild grasses crushed beneath them were sweet; rain, far in the distance, gave the night a clean, wet smell that stuck in her chest. And Tygra—

Cheetara sat back. For a moment Tygra was still beneath her, his chest bare and working. Then he touched her elbow, very gently. Shyly, she thought, thinking of Tygra as he had stumbled on his tongue when she first came up to him. Tygra, hiding after he had left a flower beside her.

Again, he said, "What is it?" He said this quietly: another gift.

The fragile thing inside her was a knot. She smiled at Tygra and tipped her head, playing coy. "You're not afraid I'm going to run away, are you?"

His fingers were still on her arm. The shadows cast by the trees swallowed his face, but she smelled his uncertainty, a sour drop in the usually enticing thickness of his scent. He was afraid.

Cheetara covered the hand on her arm with her own hand.

"I'm not going to run away."

Tygra cleared his throat. He turned his face, down though he was spread out before her with nowhere else to look but up.

"I know you aren't," he said. Perhaps he even meant for it to be cavalier.

Cheetara leaned over him. Her mane fell in a tangled cloud of gold and spots, cutting them both off from the moon and the trees and the far-off threat of rain. When Tygra looked up to her in that curtained space, his jaw was set, his eyes hard. Defiance, to hide that he was still afraid. Still shy.

"Why didn't you ever say anything?"

She asked him this calmly. She thought she asked it calmly. The clerics had taught her patience; they had taught her peace, within and without. There was so little peace in Tygra. She did not know how much of it remained within her.

His fingers curled; they worked at her elbow. She did not feel his breath, but heard it—that hard rasp in, that shivering gust out. His thumb pressed into the soft underside of her arm. She clasped his wrist, squeezing it to say, Tell me.

Sweet grasses burst beneath them. Rain in the air. The scent of their own rough mating, sharp around and between them both. His eyes closed against the evidence of it, the surety of Cheetara above him.

He smiled, a cool smile. "What if you didn't have anything to say to me?"

"You were afraid," said Cheetara.

He did not open his eyes. "I was the prince," he said. "I still am, but—"

Cheetara touched his jaw. She minded her claws, kept them nearer herself than his skin. For all that muscle and all that strength, he was still so fragile. Like her, too.

"Why didn't you say anything?" His eyes opened.

She ran her thumb over a flyaway tuft of fur high on his cheek. "You were the prince," she said. "It wasn't my place to want you."

"I loved you," said Tygra.

She threw him a sharp look and he smiled then, warmer than before but only for a moment.

"I still do," he said. He leaned into the touch of her hand on his face. His look hardened again. "But I wouldn't take you, just because I was prince."

Duty, to hide his shyness again; but it was true, too. Cheetara had borne her own duties, had stilled her own tongue out of regard for her place and for his place and for the order that defined them both whether it was as she would have desired it or not.

She petted his cheek again, now with the back of her hand. A soft rumble sounded in his chest and then smothered. Civilized cats did not purr.

"I always noticed you," she told him. She traced the side of his nose and flicked the tip. "You have a very distinctive smell."

Tygra smiled; it stayed, this time. "I always knew it was you, no matter how many robes you put on."

Cheetara stroked his jaw and leaned down to kiss him gently on his cheek, where that bit of fur stuck out. "I'm not wearing any robes now."

His smile then was decidedly—silly. Goofy, she thought; and the thought was heavy with such love she could not bear it, could not bear the memory of Tygra running from her, could not bear how he had turned from her again and again no matter how just his reasons or hers, could not bear that he was beneath her now, that he was there and he was hers and she could take of him what she would.

Cheetara licked that flyaway tuft of fur into place. Tygra stiffened beneath her; his hand drew back from her arm. His fur rasped against her tongue. The breath that broke against her cheek stuttered. Cheetara caught his hand, still in the air.

"You," said Tygra; then, helpless, he said no more.

For the cubs, it meant nothing to groom each other, but for an adult cat— For Cheetara, for Tygra—

"I didn't make a mistake," Cheetara said to him; she said it firmly, and she punctuated it by licking the bridge of his nose in one long and deliberate stroke. "I won't take it back or run away."

"Cheetara," said Tygra. His hands engulfed her shoulders. He rose up to her.

She licked his cheek again, again, the black stripe above his right eye, the stripe above his left. "I love you," she said fiercely, and Tygra kissed her warm and full on the mouth. He kissed her, and when he drew back, he paused a moment, there with their breath mingling between them. His tongue brushed the wet tip of her nose. Cheetara shivered at the nearness of him.

"I know," said Tygra, wondering, and holding Cheetara so very close, he allowed her to press him back into the sweet grass and take him.