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"I must ask you to respect my vows," you said when he asked you. "I am impressed at the efforts you've made to reject the privilege into which you were hatched, but you still need to pay attention to the clearly-expressed limits that—"
"Please," Cronus said then, and it was the word, not his fingertips against your lips, that stopped you. "I'm not asking you to get naked for me, chief. You can keep everything on if you want to. No way that counts as breakin' a vow, right? I just need somebody I can trust."
Your resolve crumbled. Few enough of your peers show you any trust or respect. And you, in turn, are the only one to treat Cronus's species identity issues with the gravity they deserve.
And that's led you to this point: you've strapped a harness around your hips, and in it is a stiff silicon model of human male genitalia. Cronus is kneeling in front of you, his lips wrapped around it, sucking on it with his jaw stretched wide. The image completely fails to arouse you, but you can see how deeply he needs this, and you pride yourself on your compassion. His cheeks are flushed and his fins flutter.
He pulls back and looks up at you. His lips are swollen. "Okay," he says, and he squirms at your feet; the power differential is inexcusable, and you remind yourself that you are only helping him work through his issues. You certainly aren't really holding yourself above him in any way that matters. "You wanna come down here for the main attraction?" he says hopefully.
"I agreed to," you remind him. You sink to your knees as he stretches out on his back—you discussed this at length, the fact that you would require him to assume a position where you could still read his face, since the point of the exercise was that you were assisting him with his needs and you would need to be able to see how well you were managing.
He spreads his legs, his eyes wide as he stares at you. He is nude, and while you have no interest in concupiscent relations you can recognize that he is aesthetically pleasing, that he takes care of his body even if it isn't the one he would prefer. His chest rises and falls quickly and his bulge is thickly swollen. "Come on and do it," he says.
You reach for the prepared supplies. "I must ask you one more time. Are you sure you want to go through with this? I have no intention of shaming unnatural sexual practices but it seems likely that the physical discomfort alone—"
"I want it," Cronus interrupts you. "It's so important to me, you got no idea, bro. —Sorry. Didn't mean to use a human-centric form of address there."
He remembers that you've corrected him on that before. You can hardly doubt his sincerity. "All right," you say.
You pull on a latex glove and lubricate your fingers. Cronus's breath hitches when you touch the sphincter of his waste chute, and you time the press of insertion to coincide with his exhale. He is appallingly tight around your finger, a clutching ring of muscle and then cool, yielding softness inside. You have no idea how he expects to accommodate the...the prosthetic he provided for you.
"I would like to remind you before we proceed any further that it would be extremely triggering to be manipulated into assisting you with a course of self-injury," you tell him.
Cronus manages a smile, slightly strained. "You're not hurting me, chief," he says. "You're doing great. Don't stop."
You take a deep breath to steel your nerves. "If you insist."
"I am absolutely insisting," he says. He braces his heels, rocking his hips to move against your hand. The change in his muscle tension makes it seem slightly less absurd that he expects to be penetrated with something so much thicker. "Just give me a minute to get used to this much and then I'll be ready for more."
You wonder whether he's just repeating theory to you, or whether he has already experimented on his own. You try not to think too closely about that possibility—what it would entail, what it would look like. It seems like an invasion of privacy. You keep your mind firmly on the task at hand, repeating the bizarrely simple stroke of human copulation, massaging the tense muscle to help him relax.
"More," Cronus says after a minute or so of your attention. "Gimme another one."
You nod. He's clearly aroused by this, his bulge shivering and twitching, his nook dripping additional lubrication down onto your fingers. "Here."
He groans as you slide a second finger in beside the first, his fins flaring out and darkening to violet in the thin membranes between the tines. "Yeah," he says, "yeah, fuck, that's what I need. Do me just like that. Wreck me, champ."
At some point you want to talk to him about sexual dominance language and the harmful patterns it perpetuates when used unthinkingly. Even if you are supporting his delusions of humanity, surely he can do better than to replicate the problematics of the culture he admires. Doesn't he realize how uncomfortable it is for you to be put in a position of power like that?
Right now, you admit, he's probably not thinking about anything more evolved than the needs of his bulge. It seems to be a common enough problem among concupiscently normative trolls. But he is your friend and you have agreed to help him through this issue.
You can feel him relaxing around your fingers now, growing accustomed to the unnatural stretch. When he nods sharply and says, "Okay, yeah, I'm good, let's go," you're expecting it.
"All right," you say, and withdraw your fingers carefully. Cronus palms his bulge and watches your hands intently as you apply lubricant to the prosthetic. The longing in his expression is entirely too much, and you wish you hadn't insisted on having him face-up for the proceedings.
Fortunately the process of actually applying the prosthetic is plenty of distraction. The position is absurdly unintuitive and you have trouble believing that humans were as likely to do this as Cronus seems to think. Still, by bending him nearly double—his knees up to his chest—and spreading your own legs uncomfortably wide to lower your pelvis far enough, you manage to get into position and press the bulbous head of the prosthetic into him.
"Oh god, oh god, oh fuck, oh god," he chants, his head thrown back, and you don't dare move until his next word is "yes," as he reaches for you with his free hand to try to pull you closer. You thrust with your hips, pressing the prosthetic deeper, and he sobs.
He strokes his bulge with the same kind of determinedly straightforward motion that you use as you piston the prosthetic inside him, as if his bulge really is as stiff and unyielding as a human's. It can't be adequate, can it? You'd honestly be surprised if it's comfortable; the repeated pressure of the prosthetic's base rubbing against your bulge sheath certainly isn't. But his breathing is ragged, his eyes screwed shut in a look of pure desperation, and his willingness to abase himself moves you.
You will stand watch for him. You will take care of him in this moment of need, and you will guard his weakness as if it were your own shame. Muscles ache and twinge in your hips and thighs, the movement unfamiliar; it leaves you breathless.
"Please, oh, please," Cronus says. When you look down you can see his nook clenching around nothing, dripping more fluid. Empty, while you penetrate him unnaturally instead. Your bloodpusher aches for him. "Gonna," he says, "I wanna—"
"It's all right," you tell him. "I've got you."
The helpless keening noise he makes alarms you, and for an instant you think you've done something terribly wrong—but his back is arching in a perfect bow and he's convulsing, hard, spilling his genetic material in a thick, sticky flood. The air reeks of it, copper and brine, by the time he finally finishes. The convulsions of his muscles have pushed the prosthetic entirely out of him, you realize. Your thighs are soaked. Gloves seem completely inadequate for cleaning this up.
But Cronus opens his eyes and smiles at you, weak and shaky. Tears glisten on his lashes. "That was so great," he says. "Just, really, wow, chief." He sniffles, squeezes his eyes shut, and you can see the twin tracks of lavender tears streaking down from the corners of his eyes.
"What's wrong?" you say, freezing up. "This was supposed to be for your benefit. If you've found it this distressing after going after it so intently—"
"I ain't upset, I really ain't," he says. "It's just intense, is all. Sometimes it's hard to feel this much, even if it's good. Come here and hold me, and it'll be fine."
You pull the harness unbuckled first and kick it off, because the thing feels ridiculous and you certainly don't need it anymore. Then you lie down carefully beside him and slide an arm under his shoulders. He's still crying, but he's still smiling, too, as he buries his face in your shoulder and holds onto you.
"It's all right," you tell him again, hoping it's true. You stroke his hair back from his horns and watch him slowly relax. "It's all right. I've got you."