"This is the word that is Piccolo's name," Dende said, drawing out a particular set of characters on the pages of Gohan's notebook and moving his hand away so that the boy could see it over Dende's shoulder.

The Guardian had been teaching Gohan the basics of his home language for a few weeks now and was surprised by how quickly the boy had managed to wrap his head around nearly everything presented to him. Of course, Dende's sweetheart was brilliant, so this development should not have come as such a surprise. The Guardian smiled to himself and snuggled into the boy behind him.

They had moved on to the written alphabet rather than the spoken language today- Gohan had insisted that if Piccolo learn to read and write the language of Earth, his favorite student ought to make an effort to learn the language of Namek- but these were a few advanced words that the Dende thought Gohan might like to know early on.

"Huh," Gohan said, wrapping his arms around Dende and peering down at Piccolo's written name. "Ancient Namekian looks kind of like the doodles Goten makes in the margins of his paper when he gets bored from studying but mom won't let him leave the desk."

Dende grinned. "For all we know, it could be. Perhaps Goten has a hidden talent for alien languages."

Gohan laughed. "Maybe. But somehow, I doubt that. But, you know, languages do tend to be written in pictures, so that would be a good way to remember something like this." He snagged a pencil from the arrangement of books and school supplies spread out on the bed and began to add more lines to Piccolo's name. Soon, it looked like a crude representation of one of the caped protagonists from the comic books Gohan liked to bring up to the Lookout. "It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Mister Piccolo!"

Dende nodded. "Indeed. He is faster than an accelerating projectile and more potent than a large vehicle. And he is, um," he searched for the words, "able to clear large structures in a single jump." The Guardian furrowed his eyebrows and wondered why that did not sound quite right.

"I can tell that you were trying to translate your memories of however it was you puzzled out the words into what they meant in Namekian, not the original language you read them in. But it was close enough." Gohan peered down at Dende. "You still can't actually speak this language without pulling the words from someone else's mind, can you?"

The Guardian looked up at Gohan. "Come again?"

"Maybe "can't" is the wrong word," Gohan mused. "Maybe "don't" is more accurate. But what I mean is, when you talk to me and you don't know a word, you look into my head to pick out the words with the meanings that correlate with what it is you want to say, right?"

"I do know how to speak the Common Speech well enough on my own, but yes, if it is to you, Mister Popo, Krillin, or Piccolo, I might look into your mind because you know what I am doing and would not feel violated by it. Why do you ask?"

Gohan patted Dende's bald head. "No real reason. It's just amazing to think about what it is you've got stored away up here."

Dende blushed. He had been thinking the same thing about his sweetheart moments before.

Gohan gently kneaded his fingers into Dende's scalp. "Say, do you ever wax this thing?"

"No, I do not." Dende said, frowning in confusion. "Should I? Do you like waxed heads?"

Gohan shrugged. "I dunno. I just know that Master Roshi and Krillin both wax their heads, and I think Chiaotzu and Tien might? I wonder how Tien keeps it out of his eye if he does, or if he has some special kind that acts like a moisturizer for that third eye."

Dende could see the wheels turning in Gohan's head and so held his tongue.

"What'll Tien do when he gets old and needs glasses? Will he just wear a normal pair and then a monocle on his forehead, or maybe some kind of three-lensed contraption?" Gohan reached his head down to use his lips and tongue to tickle Dende's shoulder and neck between sentences. "Does Tien's hair grow around his third eye, you think?"

"I should think so," Dende said, chuckling as Gohan kissed him. "He has eyelashes. Surely he must even have an eyebrow just for that third eye. Perhaps this is why he chooses to stay hairless- because in the front of his head, he is bald except for his one eyebrow above his eye and believes it to look unseemly." Dende would never really know how to judge what was and was not ridiculous in terms of human appearances and standards, but he remembered how very alien Gohan had first appeared to him with his full head of thick black hair. Perhaps Tien's appearance in the eyes of the societies of Earth was comparable in terms of shock value.

"Maybe," Gohan said, running his hands along Dende's sides. "And maybe Tien Shinhan is actually a redhead or something and his third eyebrow doesn't match the other two." He breathed in Dende's scent and sighed. "I never really knew Tien and Chiaotzu all that well. They're very reclusive. Maybe Yamcha would know the story?"

The two of them gazed at the ceiling of the canopy of the four-poster bed, and shrugged in tandem when they had pondered their fill of the topic. Gohan's hands became friendlier and focused their attention back on the Guardian.

Dende wrote out another character on the paper. "This is my name."

Gohan nodded against the Guardian's ear and nipped at it. "I suppose you couldn't write mine since Namek doesn't have rice and your people don't eat meals of any kind, right?"

"Well," Dende considered it, "no. We do not. But we do have a word for food in the context of predators and their prey. It looks like this." He scrawled out the Namekian characters for "dead meat".

"Oh, cool!" Gohan said, sending a hand to caress Dende's bare ankle and wander up his robe and to his knee. "Does it just mean "food", or what?"

Dende grimaced. "In a manner of speaking, I suppose." He wracked his brain for a better, more accurate word to use but was having trouble with the nuances of the concept. Rice was highly specific and all of the related words the Guardian could think of were too vague to make sense.

"It's not something morbid, is it?" Gohan asked. "I really don't want to one day introduce myself to Piccolo as practice and say something like, "Hello! I am Dead Meat!" And then not know why he is laughing at me." Gohan kissed one of Dende's ears and whispered into it. "It's not "dead meat", is it?"

"...Perhaps that is enough discussion about this topic for today!" Dende closed the notebook and put it on top of the pile of other textbooks Gohan had been using for his schoolwork earlier.

"Alright, alright." The boy smiled and untangled himself from Dende long enough to gather up all of his educational debris and put it in the bag leaning against the bedframe. The Guardian lent him a hand. "Thanks," Gohan said. Then, he climbed back onto the bed next to Dende and pulled him into his arms. "So it really was "dead meat", huh?"

"The night sky is very beautiful to behold," Dende said instead, flushing a deeper shade of purple and determined not to admit to Gohan that he absolutely had written his name as that very thing. "I am sure Piccolo is going to be enjoying the stars from wherever he is meditating on the surface."

Gohan's chuckle started deep in his chest. Dende leaned into the source of the noise and listened to how it mixed with the boy's pulse. "I'm sure," he said, his voice a low croon, and lifted Dende's chin for a kiss. "I'm very sure."

Dende smiled and kissed Gohan again. Gohan replied with a deeper kiss and quickly pulled Dende closer.

The Guardian put his hands on Gohan's chest in mild bewilderment at his aggressiveness, but happily let the boy part their lips further and further apart.

Gohan used his tongue to trace the planes of Dende's back teeth- but was definitely not thinking about how different they were from the set that Dende himself was familiarizing himself with. No, Gohan was too busy tracing the Guardian's body from underneath his robe and searching the white fabric for an opening.

Dende did not need to be psychic to figure out that Gohan's attention was not at all on how fascinatingly different the two of them were, but how they might be the same.

The Guardian chuckled as he broke his face away from Gohan's. "To think, it was you who accused me of being too forwa-"

Gohan cut him off with another long kiss, and then another.

Dende humored him a few minutes more before he again tried to tease Gohan with words and see if he could make the boy blush and laugh. "And are you still so sure that I am not your lo-"

Gohan silenced Dende with kisses once again and pulled him over so that the Guardian straddled Gohan's lap with his knees. The boy had become progressively more insistent on giving him this kind of attention since the day he had blown his nose in Dende's collar. Usually, though, these sessions did not grow so intimate so quickly.

Dende shrugged to himself and ran his fingers through Gohan's hair- his sweetheart liked getting affection as much as giving it during these bursts, and Dende thought his hair was fascinating. After all, Dende would never have any on his own head, much like Tien Shinhan never would, either. This kind of touch was usually par for the course.

Today, though, it made Gohan very excitable. He swelled into Dende and let his hands wander to the Guardian's thighs before pulling Dende's legs out from under him so that he fell into Gohan's lap.

Dende grabbed Gohan's head and neck in surprise. A noise rumbled forth from the back of Gohan's throat and he kissed Dende harder and faster.

The boy was serious.

Dende should probably stop playing, too.

The Guardian did his best to recall the charts of erogenous zones he had seen in several of the books he had read on the topic of intimacy, but Gohan's impatient advances made it difficult. Dende could not remember which ones were specific to which sex.

Well, trial and error would work just fine. Most of them were the same, anyway.

Dende unbuttoned the top of Gohan's collar and pushed one hand across his collarbones and around to the back of Gohan's neck. The fingers of his other hand drifted down over the exposed part of the boy's chest.

Gohan sighed between kisses and his grip lamented how modest Dende's robe was. He squeezed the Guardian's waist through it and tried to trace out his abdomen and chest beneath it, too.

Dende, meanwhile, had opened Gohan's shirt to the middle of his stomach and mimicked the boy's actions on his bare skin. Then, Gohan tugged at the robe again and Dende finally realized that he was trying to ask the Guardian a question.

"You can touch me, too, of course, if that is what you want," Dende said, separating himself from Gohan's mouth and pressing his nose to his warm neck. The Guardian could hear the blood accelerating in its journey through Gohan's body and smell his excitement.

Gohan found the hem of Dende's robe and forced it up around the Guardian's waist. When Dende's belt stopped his climb, Gohan growled and forced Dende out from the crook of his neck for another kiss while he unwrapped it.

Dende rubbed Gohan's chest gently and blindly until he found a nipple, and then focused his attention there. Gohan stiffened both in posture and then, as Dende continued to kiss him and play with him, between his legs.

Normally, Gohan did not let this part go on for very long. He would stop at the first signs of his arousal and pry himself away from his sweetheart's loving hands. Today, though, that was proving to be especially difficult for him.

Gohan finally stilled his fingers on Dende's exposed waist and broke their kiss by a centimeter. "Maybe, um, maybe we should stop," he whispered. His face was flushed and his hands were still squeezing Dende's waist and grinding their hips together.

Dende looked knowingly at Gohan. "Is that really what you want?"

Gohan panted and stroked Dende's sides with his thumb, but did not say anything.

Dende gave him a minute. "You know," he started, "I liked the food we ate at your house. I do not think I will ever crave it, but it was interesting."

Gohan pressed their foreheads together. "I told you. This is not quite the same kind of thing."

Dende tried his best to decode whatever sensation Gohan was feeling and differentiate it from what little he understood of hunger. He was unsuccessful.

"Maybe not to you," Dende said, and kissed him. "And, you know," the Guardian narrowed his eyes, "I like the taste of steamed rice."

Gohan turned a deeper shade of pink. The rice jokes always worked.

"You want me to know that you love me, yes?"

"Yes, absolutely," Gohan answered, punctuating his statement with another kiss. Dende's adoring noises of surprise convinced him to make it last.

Then, Dende pulled apart from his sweetheart and held Gohan just far enough away to render him unable to interrupt again. "Do I know that you love me?"

Gohan moved one hand to hold Dende's. "Huh? Why would…?" His face lined itself with concern. "You do, don't you?"

The Guardian teased his sweetheart by softly kissing him and moving away each time Gohan tried to do the same in return. "Do I?" Dende echoed, sending the words into Gohan's mouth to occupy his warm tongue in place of Dende's own.

"Why are you asking me this, Dende?" Gohan stroked the Guardian's cheek and tried to prompt him to hold his face where it was.

Dende defiantly took Gohan's hand and guided it back to mirror its twin's position on the Guardian's waist. "Because I wish to know your answer," Dende said, stealing another kiss while denying Gohan's own attempts to take the same from him.

The boy's whispers grew concerned, and his eyes searched Dende's face from beneath furrowed brows. "Am I doing something wrong?"

"No, not at all. I only wish to know what you think. And this is a yes or no question that I am asking, and I am still awaiting your answer."

When Gohan's confused face began to obscure itself in shadows of self-doubt, Dende was sorely tempted to stop playing this game with his sweetheart's head and kiss him until they were both dizzy, but that would solve very little. Instead, the Guardian pressed their foreheads together and ran his hands down the back of Gohan's neck and the front of his exposed torso.

The Guardian thought about the past eight months and all the little, tiny things Gohan would do for Dende- how Gohan would bring books for the two to read together, how he would stay late, late into the night when he was not supposed to, how he would carry Dende in his arms whenever they went somewhere just because he wanted to, his sudden, short, extraneous visits on the days he was not scheduled to come and how he would give Dende a strong kiss and nothing else before he immediately had to leave, the orchards and springs he would specifically search out and take Dende to see, the way he smiled at his sweetheart when he thought nobody- not even Dende- was watching him, and how sweetly his hands were tracing circles on Dende's waist even now, and how badly Dende knew Gohan wanted to forego all of this and show exactly how he felt this very instant.

"So," the Guardian asked his sweetheart again as he moved his face away, "do I know that you love me?"

Gohan's shy smile made him adorable. He nodded and leaned in towards Dende with closed eyes. "Yes."

Dende used his lips to toy with Gohan's own, but still pulled himself just out of their reach as the boy tried to complete his end of the kiss. When Gohan's next attempt to share his affection failed, too, he grew visibly upset.

"What's still bothering you?" The boy asked Dende.

The Guardian smiled and spoke against his sweetheart's lips. "I am not the one who is bothered," he said, and slipped his tongue into Gohan's mouth long enough to tempt the boy to try to do the same, but not long enough for him to succeed.

Gohan continued his pursuit anyway and managed to gently bite down on Dende's lower lip. The Guardian pulled it away and then flattened both of his lips over his closed mouth. Gohan's response was to kiss on top of Dende's sealed mouth and press his nose to the Guardian's purpled cheek when that accomplished nothing.

"What is it?" Gohan whispered. "Why don't you want me to kiss you anymore?"

Dende enticed Gohan again with a sudden intrusion from his tongue into the boy's mouth and another quick denial of Gohan's excited one.

"Hey," Dende's sweetheart said as his affection was again thrown to the wayside, "this isn't fair."

In answer, Dende repeated his act of one-sided intimacy and cut off Gohan's attempts to reciprocate once more.

"Please talk to me," Gohan finally pleaded. He looked almost heartbroken, and Dende decided that was enough to get his point across.

"You give me all of your love that I could think to ask for, and more," Dende said. "Yet you do not let me give you enough of mine to satisfy you. I try and give it to you, and you consistently insist on pushing me away." He entered Gohan's mouth again and then immediately left the boy wanting. "Even if some of these things shall never please me, I can tell it would very much please you, and so, I feel denied. I am not allowed to even try to learn how to love you past this part yet even though I have known for some time that it is something you crave almost to the point of tears every moment we are around one another. It is obvious in everything you do."

Gohan ran the pads of his fingers over Dende's skin and looked anywhere but at his sweetheart.

Then, the Guardian moved his hands to Gohan's shoulders and tilted his head to look into the boy's dark eyes. "A yes, or a no. Do not tell me what you think that I would want. You have done that long enough. Tell me what you want. Studying, or martial arts."

Gohan kneaded Dende's sides. "Martial arts," he mumbled.

"Ah, excellent! Something new for me to try." The Guardian pressed his lips to Gohan's reddened face and traced over his chest again. Dende accepted Gohan's returning kiss and opened his mouth wider for his sweetheart to explore more thoroughly while he reignited his desire.

The boy slowly moved his hands back beneath Dende's robe so that he could push his fingers further up and across Dende's back and abdomen.

Dende unbuttoned more of Gohan's shirt and Gohan himself ripped the tail ends out of his pants.

"You do not like clothing?" Dende gasped out between heated kisses.

Gohan wordlessly shimmied Dende's robe higher up on his body. When it caught on the Guardian's arms, he worried it with his clenched fists. It tore.

Gohan looked down. "Oh."

Dende laughed at him. "I believe that is a no," he said. Gohan had a horrible track record when it came to apparel care, and was keeping true to form.

Gohan sheepishly tried to close the robe back together with his hands, and accidentally tore it from the shoulder seams, as well. Dende had noticed that he grew stronger the more excited he became- Gohan was not very accustomed to arousal and was thus not totally aware of what it could cause him to do.

"Do not worry yourself about that," Dende said, sliding the ruined clothes off of his center and arms and then resuming his original track across Gohan's torso.

Gohan regained his momentum for kisses and his hands sped up their own journey across Dende's body to keep an even pace with the Guardian's.

Gohan seemed especially fond of Dende's waist, chest, abdomen, and upper leg. Soon, though, he moved his lips from Dende's to caress the Guardian's collar and shoulders, too.

It tickled. Dende grabbed Gohan's shoulder blade and nipple as he laughed, and the boy groaned.

Dende was not sure if that was a positive or negative sign, so he gently stroked both areas in apology and moved Gohan's face back up to kiss him on the mouth.

Gohan held Dende's mouth and clumsily guided the Guardian's hands to his belt. Dende took the hint and shifted himself across the stiffness in the boy's lap to unbuckle it, which made Gohan hiss. The Guardian scooted off of him in concern.

Gohan leaned over to kiss Dende again, harder, while he unzipped his pants himself- or, Gohan tried to unzip them, but he tore through the whole inseam and down through the crotch of the khaki by accident.

Gohan also made more noise as he grazed the lump in his lap, too.

Concerned, Dende lit his hands with a healing light, but Gohan shook his head and pushed his pants down off of himself. Then, he threw them out of his way.

Dende knew what was underneath Gohan's stretched underwear. Rather, he had seen illustrations of it and read about its functions. There were even a handful of creatures on Namek that reproduced sexually, so the intellectual concepts of sexual organs and mating were not wholly alien to Dende.

However, engaging in sexual activity, especially when it was meant only to breed pleasure, was.

But it was only logical that Dende at least try the peculiar coupling custom with Gohan. After all, the boy was his special person.

Dende reached out for his love and brushed the skin underneath Gohan's waistband. The boy swallowed and shyly captured Dende's hand in his own warm ones.

"I don't know if you, um, really know what, uh, what to... to do," Gohan whispered. "And, um, I guess I don't know what to do with you either, after getting this far, so, um, if I do something weird, I'm really so-"

Dende shut him up with a kiss.

It was true that Dende was a Namek and could not exactly fulfil the conventional role of either a female or a male, but he had already prepared himself for Gohan's naïveté and taken special care to look up ways to stimulate him without using intrinsic sexual organs. Dende gently cast his free fingers over the sensitive, covered area in Gohan's lap. Gohan's end of their kiss became sloppy as he opened his jaw to let out a soft cry of surprise.

Dende continued and listened carefully to Gohan's moans- he thought it was bizarre for a creature to be wired to produce ones of pleasure and not exclusively pain.

Gohan snaked his arms around Dende and kissed him again with an open mouth- it was raw, forceful, and unpracticed, and Dende suspected this combination was the product of Gohan's youthful inexperience crossed with his sweet and sincere personality.

The mound in Gohan's underwear grew larger and firmer, and the boy himself became more aggressive- Dende felt teeth on his lips rather than just tongue and bruises forming where Gohan's fingers were.

"Please not so rough," The Guardian asked, suddenly very thankful that his skin was designed to withstand more than a human's could.

The boy's grip slackened and he moved his face to Dende's neck. The Guardian continued to handle Gohan's lap with gentle strokes and listened to the soft, insistent gasps Gohan made between kisses.

Eventually, though, Gohan's loose hold turned mean again and his teeth came back out to sink themselves into Dende's neck each time there was a lull in the Guardian's steady, exploratory strokes. The boy's mood was also becoming distinctly more agitated.

"What are you trying to tell me?" Dende asked.

"Don't tease me anymore," Gohan breathed. Dende could not say if it was a plea or a command.

But, teasing? It had not been Dende's intention to frustrate the person he loved. "What do you mean?"

Gohan's patience had apparently been worn thin indeed- he looked down, ripped his underwear in half, and then tore either side off of his legs in two clean, quick motions. His aura melted back into one of demureness once he realized what he had just done.

Gohan retreated back to Dende's neck, and the Guardian could feel his sweetheart's embarrassment warming against his skin. "Try holding me with, uh, with your whole hand, and... and touching, um, h-harder..."

Dende looked down at Gohan's exposed body and tentatively gripped around what he had been blindly ghosting earlier. It felt weird- like some kind of hose made of soft skin? It was not unlike a fleshy, curved cucumber with a lump on the end. The Guardian considered telling Gohan his observation to see if he would laugh, but decided to wait- that might make the boy feel even more self-conscious than he already was.

Intimacy for Dummies said to create friction in order to generate pleasure, much like Gohan had instructed. So, Dende squeezed, and then he pulled.

Gohan's hands were on Dende's faster than the Guardian could follow. "Ah! Not... not that hard," Gohan told him, wincing. "And, um, I think your thumb sh-should be, um," Dende was a little afraid that if Gohan's heartbeat got any louder and faster, Korin would send a noise complaint.

Dende snuggled into Gohan's side and wrapped one of the boy's arms around the back of his trunk to hold the two close. With a soft croon, Gohan rubbed Dende's ribs and hip as his fingers made contact while Dende craned his own head upwards, pulled his shy sweetheart down by the back of the neck, and brought their mouths together.

Then, the Guardian layered Gohan's free hand over his own and guided them both around the stiffened, eager form emerging from Gohan's base.

"Show me this way," Dende said, breaking the kiss.

The boy looked to and from Dende's eyes and their hands.

"Teach me how you want me to make you happy," the Guardian reiterated.

Gohan pressed his forehead against Dende's- which communicated to the Guardian a rush of nervousness, affection, and gibberish- and bashfully guided Dende's hand up and down himself. They were unsynchronized, at first, but soon Dende understood the correct pressure and pattern of movement Gohan was after and followed the boy's lead. Gohan gradually sped up the movements and started to kiss Dende again as he commanded the two of them grow more forceful with their hands.

Eventually, Gohan took Dende's thumb and rubbed it across the top of himself. "There," he moaned, and Dende took the opportunity to run his unoccupied fingers through the boy's hair and engage his neck with kisses the same way he had done the day Gohan had brought the comic book about the cats.

The Guardian continued handling Gohan both with and without the boy's instruction until he suddenly twitched and bid Dende kiss him on the lips again, hard. The boy tried to say something, too, but it devolved into whines in the back of his throat as he urgently claimed the inside of Dende's mouth with his tongue and fervently squeezed the Guardian's body against his own.

Then Gohan seized up, raised his head, and cried out, and Dende felt something wet leak onto his fingers.

Gohan slowly relaxed and grew pliable in Dende's hand.

"Is that all you wanted?" Dende finally asked softly, still running his other hand through Gohan's hair.

Gohan gently coaxed the Guardian's wet fingers off of him and intertwined them with his own, moisture and all, and Dende was suddenly faced with his lover's dark eyes. They were gentle and warm, and so was the next kiss that Gohan gave.

"Love you," is all Gohan could really say about it, and he pulled Dende down to lay with him on the sheets. "I love you."

Dende moved Gohan's body closer and pressed their foreheads together so that Dende could tell him the same thing, only without words, as Gohan drifted off to sleep.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Author's Notes:

I've never written an NSFW before and believe it or not I started this story thinking, "Oh! It will be good practice because it will start me off very tamely and demure but I can still just jump right in!"

LOL JK because here we are, at chapter 10, and FINALLY I got around to having a chapter where these two sort of bang. I also considered doing another chapter where they go to a party BEFORE this chapter but after thinking about it further I was like, "it might be better from a storytelling point of view if I have those kinds of things happen AFTER their first encounter because plans and things that I have for the story", but to you guys it may seem weird by nature of the end of last chapter to have this very next chapter feature them getting... A little closer. If so, say so.

Thank you so much to all of you who read and review!